Sermon: “Rebirth – A Key to Growth”
Colossians 1: 1-14
July 11, 2003
Kendall Brown Kendall's Notebook Page 30
My text this morning is Paul’s letter to the Colossians. This letter is one of many epistles written by the great first century church starter to his fledgling congregations around the Mediterranean world. As a guiding text, I keep verse six before me as I write and present these thoughts. “All over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it.”
There has been much in the air about growth these days, in particular church growth. Four out of five of the last annual ministers’ retreats, which I attended, both in Missouri and here in Indiana, have been led by some of today’s leading lights in the church growth industry. I plugged the words “Church Growth” into my Googles’ Search last night, and quickly came up with 2,560,00 sites dedicated to this subject. I cannot plan on living long enough to visit every one of them.
Our Annual Meeting of the IN/KY Conference was dedicated to this topic a month ago. I regret that Cheryl and I were the only two from Christ Church to attend this year, for the meeting was a gold mine of wisdom, direction and ideas for the churches. It was and is a resource that could be tapped for months into the future by those who were present. Our Conference is just one of many conferences across the church that will be dedicating meeting time this year and next to this subject. This fall, a nationwide advertising campaign for UCC congregations will be hitting the public through television ads sponsored by our national church. This campaign has already been used in some test markets with some positive results. The campaign should be coming to the Tri State area later this year or early next year. The fall meeting of our Association will be a place where training will be offered around the use of this campaign and how to plug into it as a local congregation. I hope that a few more of you than just your pastor and a delegate will be attending this fall.
That is enough about things to do, for no church growth has ever gotten off the ground without starting in the right place. The right place is in prayer and study. I don’t want to write another things–to-do piece on church growth this morning. Plenty of that is lying around for you on the web and other places like the growth bookshelf being maintained for you just outside the sanctuary door and in the hallway in the adult educational wing – some of those 2.5 million sites are very good sites and I recommend you check them out. But, today, I will stay in a prayerful and reflective mode in this message.
Let us go back to Paul again and his verse, “All over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it.” As much as we remember Paul as a grower and nurturer of churches, Paul’s primary focus was not church growth. Church growth was the spin-off, the secondary result of his first concern, which was spreading the Gospel and nurturing the growth of the good news of Jesus Christ.
That is where we need to put our focus. There is a huge need all around. Just last week, a VBS teacher shared with me an observation that she had right here in this sanctuary during VBS. She observed a child sitting next to his Mom during our opening devotions. Throughout the devotions the child was asking questions, and questions upon question. The teacher heard the child ask, “What is that?” pointing to the hymnbook. After a quick whispered answer from the parent, the child was heard to say with excitement and curiosity, “They sing here.” “Why do they sing here?” A few more questions were asked like, “What is that big thing up front?” pointing to our cross.
I look forward to getting the attendance and address information from the VBS staff soon. Hopefully, we can find a way to invite this child and family, and perhaps others like them, to come and hear the good news with us. This is a church growth moment for Christ Church. It behooves us to reflect on it and to bring Paul’s thinking into our reflection. What excites us is the opportunity to share the Gospel, the story of Jesus, and the many other stories in the Bible with this child. What we should pray about is this child, whose spirit is hungry, maybe even starving, and for the love of Christ to fill the inner emptiness, for the story of the Gospel to become a part of the child’s story.
We have got to get out of the numbers game and into the Gospel sharing business – I refuse to call Gospel sharing a game. We are playing games, and I think that God is not overly fond of game playing, if we only see the child as a means to an end, with the end being to use the child to get the parents to add to our numbers.
Some of the ministers that I admire the most are ministers of Christian Education. Among them are Pat Vollertsen in St. Louis and Ellie Sanders at Bethlehem, UCC here in Evansville and Ruby Schroeder our area consultant here in Evansville also. I knew a few like them in New England. It grieves me that there are only a few really good Christian Educators around. At one time or another, I have heard every good Christian Educator say the same thing. They all say how their pet peeve is people in the church always talking about how we have to do something for children and youth because children and youth are the church of tomorrow. We hear that line in church a lot. Some educators set me straight. The Educators have a different slant. For them, we share the Gospel with our children because our children are the church today! The educators take seriously Jesus’ teaching, “Be not anxious about tomorrow for today’s own troubles are sufficient enough.” Today’s task is ministering to our children and sharing the Gospel with our children today and rejoicing in that and offering thanksgiving to God for that wondrous and uplifting opportunity. Don’t use today’s children as simply a means to a desired end tomorrow.
The child is the end. If we focus on the task that God has given us to love children and to recognize that the great gift of love that we have to offer is the Gospel, that is enough. We need to get our aim in focus and our focus on sharing the good news.
The Conference’s keynote speaker in Indianapolis this year was Martin Copenhaver. Martin is the senior pastor of the Wellesley Congregational Church, UCC, Wellesley Hills, MA. Some time was spent at conference establishing that it was OK for Martin to be here because he has some lifetime Indiana connections through blood relatives who live in Indiana. That exchange made me feel really welcome because I don’t share the weight of that sort of credential! On every level of the church, there remains many lessons to learn about hospitality.
In spite of the fact that he is from Massachusetts, Martin has become one of the sought after nationwide speakers and seminar leaders in the area of church renewal today. A central piece in his message was the importance of education for churches seeking to be revitalized. Christian Education in its simplest definition is sharing the good news of Jesus Christ. There are endless ways to do that. There are endless places where we have been failing to do that.
We make endless assumptions every day, many of which are totally false and consequently only lead us down the wrong paths. One of the biggest false assumptions that we make is that every stranger who walks through the door of our church might be a stranger to us but is probably not a stranger to Christianity and all the ways of the church with which we are familiar and have been employing as a part of our lives everyday. Recognizing that strangers may indeed be strangers to our world of church is an important piece of our hospitality to offer to the stranger and an important first step for us in becoming better sharers of the Gospel.
Here are a few examples. For many years now, I have found myself facing a non-church crowd at most weddings at which I officiate. Even when the bride or the groom is a church member, the sanctuary is sometimes filled with a couple hundred friends and family who are not of the church. What does that mean? I can’t tell you how many times I have gotten to the Lord’s Prayer in the ceremony, began the Prayer with the words, “Please join me,” and then ended up reciting the prayer all by myself. I have had the same experience with the 23rd Psalm at funerals. I have never had a funeral and not used the 23rd. And I have had a lot of funerals. It is the only passage of Scripture that I can say that about. For many years, I invited the congregation to repeat the 23rd Psalm along with me and up until about seven or eight years ago, I could count on most of the congregation at least knowing the Psalm well enough to verbally follow me. No more, I gave up on asking others to join me as more and more I found myself reciting the Psalm alone even after the invitation to join me.
For some people it would seem like a strange thing to do. But an act of intentional hospitality to the strangers among us on Sunday mornings, might be printing the Lord’s Prayer either in the bulletin each week or having some laminated cards with that prayer and other familiar and repeated litanies printed and placed in the pews. Our assumptions can keep us from being as attentive to sharing the good news as we could be.
Martin Copenhaver told a little different story but in the same vein. He told about a young woman who joined the church. She even excitedly attended the membership classes and got to know one of the associate ministers quite well. All of a sudden she disappeared. She had a very serious operation and then went home for several weeks to recuperate with her parents’ care. When she got back to her own home the associate minister finally got in touch with her. He told her that he wished she had let the church know when she was in the hospital. The young member’s response was, “Why on earth would I do that.” This new member did not have a clue about what pastoral care is and that a part of pastoral care is that one of the ministers would have called on her in the hospital. As a result of this incident, the Wellsley Church staff have added another component - one about Pastoral Care - to their membership classes.
Paul’s letter to the Colossians talks about growth. But the growth that Paul celebrates and offers thanksgiving to God for is the growth of the Gospel. Today, we don’t hear a lot about growing the Gospel in our churches, but we hear a lot about growing the church as if that can happen without growing the gospel and without growing ourselves in the spirit of the Lord.
Sometimes we talk today as if church growth were the be all and end all of everything. The solution to every problem. Our nirvana if you will. Our salvation. Paul started quite a number of churches as recorded in Acts and his own writings. He himself wasn’t out to grow churches. He was out to grow the Gospel and the springing up of churches was the natural outcome. Some of those congregations are still alive today. I grew up in old New England Congregational churches many of which are 300 to 350 years old today, and still going.
Think about those old churches where Paul was the founding patriarch. Think about those old churches that the first European settlers established on our own shores 300 or more years ago. In California there are some old Spanish missions that are over 400 years old and are still continuing as mission churches today.
The secret to longevity for 1000’s of older churches has not been church growth. If that were the case, by now some of these older churches would have as their membership the whole wide world. They would have just grown and grown and grown. But that is not what the story of the Christian Church is as it has happened. That is not the Gospel or the good news that these ancient testimonies of faith and congregational longevity have to share. And it is certainly good news that a congregation can live longer, much longer, than its members. It is certainly good news that a church can stay open and in business generation after generation.
Growing and growth have not been the secret to church survival. These churches are still in business because repeatedly throughout their histories they have gone through a cycle of dying and being reborn. We are a faith community with the resurrection at its core. We are not a group of people with the seventeenth century’s rationalism’s theory of progress at our core, which would be the philosophical foundation for thinking only in terms of church growth. We are a people with the experience of resurrection at our center of our personal faith and of our communal life. The cart needs to go behind the horse. For Christian communities, the horse, that hauls the cart of growth, is being reborn. Being reborn first.
I sense, sometimes, that all of this is not only strange but also just plain scary for some of my congregation here at Christ Church. Perhaps there is a good reason for that. There are 5800 congregations in the UCC. Among those congregations, Christ Church is but a teen ager, and a young one at that in comparison to the church age of most of the rest of our churches. You are only fifty years old. This church is young enough not to have experienced a full swing of the death/resurrection cycle. Twenty years ago in Massachusetts, I was serving a congregation where we annually recognized and honored our members who had been member then for 60 and 65 years. Those members parents, were also members of that same church and they were persons who fought in the Civil War. In fact Clara Barton was born in that town and one of my older member’s (who was named Clara Butterfield after Clara Barton) mother chummed around with the legendary Civil War battlefield nurse and founder of the American Red Cross as a child.
That kind of daily awareness of history and of having been around for awhile serves as a buttress and softens the blows delivered by the winds of change and the currents of time. Having been around awhile, gives a congregation a different perspective. A part of that perspective is memories of times gone by when the church was born again and memories of past experiences of the church being alive, dying in some way, and being born anew. It is not continual growth that has kept our older churches around for centuries. The secret has been in the resurrection cycle of dying and being born again.
Sometimes we look to the mega churches that dot the landscape as if they have it all. But one thing of which I am sure is that mega-churches do not have, any more than Christ Church has, a guarantee that 100 years from now they will still be around. What will make that kind of survival possible for both types of churches will be going through being reborn at some point in our histories. Today’s fast growth does not a tomorrow make, as an older congregation that has been through 3 or 4 centuries, including several rounds of growth and decline, can attest. Our older churches have been around long enough to remember the cycles before. In the late sixteen hundreds, the Puritan churches that had been established in the first years of that century by the first European settlers were in a state of wretched decline and decay. The early seventeen hundreds saw the Great American Awakening when John Edwards among others led a fiery revival among American churches bringing many into a time of renewal and tremendous influence in the colonies. Although preachers in Boston pulpits inspired the Boston Tea Party, promoted the cause of no taxation without representation as a Biblical mandate, and fueled the minutemen, by the time of the American Revolution, many of our churches had lost the fire of the Great Awakening and with it the presence of parishioners in their pews. In its 300 years of history, my parish in Massachusetts only had one lawsuit successfully brought against it. A former pastor in the 1790’s sued the church and won back salary which the church was unable to pay during the lean years of the Revolution. The minister was finally paid, with some of the payment offered in the form of wooded acreage, land worth millions today.
The 1800’s brought the second great awakening, which again renewed many churches, but this time the revival was fueled less with the fiery theology of Jonathan Edwards and more with the rising fundamentalism of the day. The twentieth century saw another revival. Following World War Two, American churches across the land experienced great growth for a couple decades. We can see signs of this growth in many places. The very existence of Christ Church is one of those signs. And another sign is our sister church, St Mark’s on the west side. Another footprint from this period of growth are the many educational wings added on to thousands of UCC and Protestant Churches to house bulging Sunday Schools in those days. Practically every church that I have any memory of has an educational wing with a cornerstone dated sometime between 1955 and 1965. But it was only another decade before those churches were struggling to fill those Sunday School rooms and seeking new missions to occupy all of the empty space.
We can look back in history and see what early periods of decay and rebirth looked like in our churches. Today, the church awaits a new rebirthing. We do not know what the future will look like for our churches. Only God knows that.
But like Paul we can see through the glass darkly and get some images of the light to come. I am convinced that tomorrow’s church will still have the same basic tasks that were set before the church of yesterday.
Paul wrote it well to the Colossians. He defines four basic jobs for Christians in today’s text. Four callings that continue to be before us as Christians today:
Live a life worthy of the Lord and pleasing to him,
To bear fruit in good works,
And to grow in the knowledge of God.
And giving thanks to the Father. Verses 10 and 12
1 To be a people of personal uprightness in all our relations
2 To be solid in our commitment to mission
3 To be dedicated to study
4 And to Worship with praise and.
These are the things that as Paul wrote qualify us to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light.
Be not anxious about tomorrow.
And let today’s own worries and joys be sufficient for today.