"My Church" Part 2: Practical Applications

In our last post we discussed the phrase "My Church".  We talked about the proper definition:  "The community in which God's mission for me is revealed and lived out."  We also talked about other definitions that creep in to our detriment:  "Place where I'm comfortable, where people agree with me, where I've always been" or "place that I own and have control of because of my special contributions".  Today we're going to look at practical ways to avoid the bad definitions of "my church" and encourage the good.

The first and easiest step to avoid bad definitions of church ownership is to stop thinking of church in a physical sense.  The more you define church as a "place where" the more you get bound up in buildings and property and physical elements.  Physical things are always owned in our society, usually exclusively.  You own the rights to your property, the air space above it, the mineral rights beneath it...top to bottom it's yours.  If you think of church like more property you will inevitably come to think that you possess it.  You'll also feel threatened and frustrated when someone else evidences any sign of ownership...like moving that flower vase you set out or leaving crumbs on your floor.

Church is a living web of relationships between God and his people to which we're all connected.  A spider web can't stand if there's only one string.  It'll just blow away in the wind.  Each strand is distinct from the next but all the strands rely upon each other to make a cohesive whole.  My relationship with God supports your relationship with God and vice versa.  Church forms the center connecting point of that web, the place where we're closest together.  It's comprised of all of us without being owned by any of us.  Relationships can't be possessed in the same way that physical things can.

The church does have physical elements, of course.  But those physical things are there to serve the relationships, not vice versa.  This is where the "old school" perception of church gets backwards.  Once upon a time people assumed we were all there to serve the church, particularly the building.  Keeping up appearances and getting the color of the carpet right were BIG DEALS.  In reality the building only exists because it's hard to gather and worship when you're getting snowed on.  The carpet's there to keep our feet cushy.  Tables and pictures and kitchen utensils are meant to be moved based on the needs of the ministry.  None of them matter as entities unto themselves.  Their use determines their value.  "Owning" them (in the sense of freezing them in place) destroys them.

Another handy tip to avoid the bad connotations of ownership:  Ask how many times you hear "YES" in your church. Churches that are owned in the bad way hear the constant refrain of "NO".  No, we can't do that.  No, don't touch those.  No, we do it this way here.  No, things will fall apart if we try.  No, nobody cares about that.  No, we need to do this instead.  Churches that live out mission resound with "YES".  Yes, let's try it!  Yes, that could be valuable.  Yes, go ahead and move those around.  Yes, your voice matters to us.  Yes, you have something to contribute!

Churches that do this well don't even need to hear that many "Yes" answers.  People just go ahead and do!  Decisions aren't regulated by a bureaucracy or a small cadre of insiders whose approval you need (and seldom get).  Decisions are made at the ground level by the people actually doing the work.  Everybody else learns, celebrates, and follows.  The church gets bigger every time a different person leads us in a new direction.  People experiencing the good kind of ownership are not only free, but eager, to take us on those journeys.

Beware of phrases like "good member".  Beware of the instinct to introduce yourself by sharing how long you've been a member.  In fact have a healthy suspicion of the concept of membership in general.  Dividing people is a covert way to establish (bad) ownership.  Watch how you create "us" and "them" groups in your church.  Tenure, gender, age, ethnicity, background, economic status, profession, political persuasion, beliefs...any criterion you use to separate out others makes you the owner by default.

Pay attention to your response when you disagree with something that people say or do, when you get annoyed or offended.  The bad, fearful sense of ownership makes you insist upon your own way and sends you scrambling to justify all the reasons you should get it.  "I've been here longer, invested more, understood God's teachings the right way!"  The good sense of ownership simply acknowledges that you're walking on a different portion of the web than somebody else seems to be.  But unless your string is anchored to a point on the other side of center the web's going to fall apart.  Besides, there's plenty of room in the middle to gather together anyway.

Gauge how you feel when something changes.  Huge changes require discussion and thought.  But a different hymn every once in a while, switching liturgies every now and then, the tables moving in the fellowship hall, a fork placed in the "wrong" drawer, or somebody else sitting in "your" pew?  Those won't rattle you unless you're assuming that the church is yours and not anybody else's.

During the synod assembly I attended a workshop on stewardship.  We explored the definition of the word "steward".  Originally the steward took care of the kingdom in the king's name without owning the kingdom himself.  Nowadays nobody wants to be a steward because everybody thinks they're a king.  The modern world allows us to draw our life circles so small that we've lost our sense of interdependence and thus the need to communicate with anyone outside of our personal kingdom.  God's Kingdom is infinite, eternal, and beyond the control of any of us.  Nobody can contain or own it.  The church is supposed to be the reflection of that Kingdom on earth.  It ceases to be that the moment it's owned by anyone, trading in its eternal significance for cheap control, agreement, ease, and compromise with sin and culture.  That's not a good trade.

In the end, the most faithful measure of the quality of your ownership is the feeling you get when you hear the phrase "my church".  Does your heart fill with love, gratitude, and excitement when you utter those words or does it evoke fear and territorial instincts?  One way will leave you feeling that other people are always messing up your church.  The other understands that your church can't be messed up, that each new pathway only leads you to a more comprehensive expression of God's love. 

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org) 

What Does "This is My Church" Mean?

This week I want to address faith issues common to (affecting, afflicting?) every level of the church, things embedded so deeply in our instinct or unconscious that we forget to examine them.

The first of these issues:  I hear people say, "[Church X] is my church" all the time.  Most of them insert the name of their local parish but it's also used to describe Lutheran, Christian, what have you.  I wonder what we mean when we say, "The Genesee Lutheran Parish is my church" or "The ELCA is my church body"?

It seems to me there are two senses to "my church", the common and the theologically correct.  As you may guess, these don't line up well together.

Most people view the words "my church" through cultural lenses.  Church is "theirs" because they've gone to the church forever or because they're comfortable there or because the church espouses a philosophy they agree with.  "My church" means "church matches up with me".

The theological shortcoming here is obvious.  Church is meant to shape and transform us.  To deny this is to assume we're perfect, the Big Biblical No-No.  We are meant to transform our church as well, but transformation isn't inherent in these particular "my church" stances.  If church is "mine" just because I've gone here forever it no longer feels as much mine when something changes.  If church is "mine" because I'm comfortable here I become detached and angry when pushed beyond my comfort zone.  If church is "mine" because I agree with its philosophy I feel disenfranchised when that philosophy evolves.  In this framework the church becomes less "ours" every time something moves.  Over time we become less concerned with discovery, vibrancy, spiritual growth and more concerned with power, prerogatives, keeping things the way they are.  Not failing becomes more important than succeeding.  Not dying becomes more important than living.  Fear replaces courage and we get triggered into fight or flight mode every time something doesn't go our way.

Sometimes this dynamic gets wrapped up with "ownership" in the economic sense.  Our society tells us that we have power over that which we own, paid for at the time of purchase, exclusive to us over and above anybody else.  If I buy a truck I get to choose where and how to drive it.  You don't get to because you didn't pay for it.  It's not your truck!  Nor can it be your truck as long as it is mine.  I might let you borrow it if I'm not using it at the moment.  I might sell it to you slightly used someday.  But we can't co-own or else the whole idea of paying for it in the first place becomes silly.  How many people drop 50 grand on a new pickup then walk over to their neighbor's house and say, "I want your name on the title and you don't have to pay anything"?

Few of us are crass enough to think we own a church outright (or at least we wouldn't admit it in public).  It is God's house, after all.  But the phrase "my church" is often a clue that people think their contributions--money, time, energy--have purchased a place on the title alongside God's.  It's not written on paper.  It's maintained by keeping tight control over decision-making processes, preemptively vetoing anything that goes against the grain (a.k.a. "tradition"), threatening to walk out and cease support--thus bringing the church down--if things go awry.  It's a clever, and perfectly understandable, way to keep things the same...comfortable...agreeable.

Every time you hear the phrase "That person is a 'Good Member'" your ears should prick up.  The most likely translation is, "That person is part of the group that thinks they have ownership of the church based on their various contributions."  Just like the truck title, there no room for others no matter what their contributions.  This item has been bought and paid for.

Between the not moving, not growing, not exploring, not tolerating anything different, treating God like a commodity, narrowing real membership to a select and unimpeachable few, and horribly mangling the definition of "good", this definition of "my church" gets ugly really fast.  You'd think people would be up in arms about it.  That doesn't happen as often as it should.  This kind of ownership has the side benefit of few things going wrong, few people arguing, few uncomfortable moments, and the assurance that somebody will always support the church and keep it running so it'll never die.  To a society pressed for time and money that favors a peaceful church experience that doesn't require more than an hour a week, the trade-off is worth it.

Judging by outward appearance and convenience, the churches owned in the worst ways seem to be functioning the best.

The correct theological definition of "my church" takes more time, thought, explanation.  The first hurdle is overcoming cultural bias.  How do you explain to somebody in 21st century America that it's good to invest your money, time, energy, and life into something that you do not then control?  In a society obsessed with biggest return for least investment and risk, how do you convince folks to devote everything to a community that only functions well when it's in a constant state of trial, discovery, failure, and renewal?  How do you keep a straight face when telling someone that the sign of a great church is that you don't always agree with it, that you are forced to go beyond any boundary you thought you had in service to people who will give you no tangible reward...even people whose views you might despise?

Here's what "my church" is supposed to mean.  "My church" means "the community in which God's mission for me is revealed and lived out".

Notice that this is just as personal and intimate as the other definition...more so, in fact.  The "for me" is still in there.  My mission will look different than everybody else's.  I bring something distinct, important, irreplaceable to this gathering, for God shows something unique through me.  It isn't a church where I do some thing.  The mission, the call, and the interactions which stem from them are peculiar to me.  The experience isn't interchangeable.  Thus I call the church "mine".

Through church I hear God's Word given for me.  In church I receive God's body and blood shed for me.  From fellow participants I receive encouragement to live out the life God has prepared for me.  Among them I get to reflect on the triumphs and challenges I experience along the way.  The personalized "me" is all over the joint!

But that personal, intimate connection between God, me, and my neighbor doesn't convey any of the control of the prior definition.  Nor does it carry the same baggage.  Power isn't conveyed by length of tenure or size of monetary contribution.  My own comfort and agreement aren't prerequisites to the experience.  Half the time they get in the way as God calls me beyond myself and my old limits.  Most importantly, my sense of ownership and connection don't prevent anyone else from having the same ownership and connection in their own way.  My church is also your church, always and totally.

I expect that God's mission for you will look different than mine and will lead this community to different places than mine will.  I commit to affirming you in your mission even as you strengthen me in mine.  Together we make the church bigger, expanding its borders into new individual frontiers while maintaining the fullness of the communal connection.  Growth and change don't trigger fights and flights, rather new reasons to celebrate.  If I have to sing a new hymn or take out the garbage an extra time a week to make that happen, hey...that's just more of God's mission, right?

Every church, every level of church, should stop for a moment and re-examine the assumptions under which they're operating when they make the claim, "This is my church".  It doesn't take long for outsiders and people in need to figure out which definition of ownership you're operating under.  It shows up in the welcome, in the variety of interactions, in expressions of celebration and grief, in the practices of leadership, and even in that sixth-sense, spiritual feeling you get when you walk among a people.  You may think you're hiding ownership skeletons in your closet.  In reality you might as well hang them right up above the altar on the cross in place of Jesus, because people perceive them just that clearly.  The only folks who can't see them are the ones who have long since become used to them and accepted them in place of the true work of the Spirit.

Once upon a time folks might have accepted that kind of church, eager to put on appearances and be perceived as one of the good people.  The cardinal rule nowadays is simple: nobody respects disingenuous motives and nobody wants to expend that much energy playing pretend...at least not about spirituality.  When people talk about the "dying church" they're not talking about the death of the Spirit, nor of God's work.  They're talking about the long, slow death of the "owned" church, the kind of foolishness and blindness that nobody sees a reason to put up with anymore.

I don't know about you, but I find that a good thing.  It's a warning to those who would preserve their own power but it's also a promise that God's true mission will prevail no matter what else we try to substitute for it.

Next Up:  Practical applications for church life!

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)

Monday Morning Sermon: Miracles of Transformation

Our sermon text for the 2nd Sunday after Epiphany was the first 11 verses of John, Chapter 2:

On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, 2 and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. 3 When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, “They have no more wine.”

4 “Woman, why do you involve me?” Jesus replied. “My hour has not yet come.”

5 His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

6 Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons. 7 Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water”; so they filled them to the brim. 8 Then he told them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.” They did so, 9 and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew.

Then he called the bridegroom aside 10 and said, “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.”

11 What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

On Sunday we talked about how important this text is for our church at this particular time, with our Annual Meeting/Potluck coming up next Sunday following worship.  If you know anything about the Gospel of John (as opposed to his friends Matthew, Mark, and Luke) you'll know that what actually happens is less than half the story.  John is all about what events symbolize and mean.  An otherwise simple story about a wedding being saved by the miracle of water to win carries plenty of significance for us today.

You know John is starting out big when the event happens "on the third day".  On the third day of what, exactly?  He doesn't say specifically--likely the week--but it hardly matters.  You just need to remember that other thing that happened on the third day:  Jesus rising again to announce our salvation and a new beginning.  Jesus' first miracle--this wedding event--is the sign of a new creation, a new time, the beginning of the world changing.

We, too, stand at that time as a church.  We've spent the last few years gathering energy and confidence, getting to know each other, exploring the Spirit.  We've done well, I think.  But it's time to start looking forward instead of just backwards or inwards.  We have this energy, creativity, this wonderful, percolating community.  What are we to do?  This is our third day.

If we shy away from that journey in favor of staying safe--slinking away from the wedding, so to speak--we'll not be able to preserve what we've discovered.  Turned inwards, that energy dissipates.  It becomes more about us as individuals--our generation of church members or whatever--than it does about the space between us and the ideas and service that happen in that place.  In scientific terms, the potential energy of of church needs to become kinetic energy, expended in service to God and community.

But note that Jesus' first miracle didn't begin with a bang.  It began with an, "Awwwww...we're out of wine." Every change happens this way.  We perceive a need, a lack, and we have a choice how to act.  Like the Israelites in their wilderness journey we can complain or we can move.

The natural response to the shortcoming at the Cana wedding would have been grumbling.  Wine prices are too high, nobody can get enough anymore.  The steward should have planned better.  The bridegroom is too cheap.  The bride invited too many people.  We deal with life's imperfections by finding someone to blame for them and then moving on.

Instead Mary and the servants called upon God and laid out their issue.  He said, "Trust me and fill up those jars."  Then he made it better.  We are called to see shortcomings in our life--individual or communal--as an opportunity and/or challenge.  Otherwise we never see God's miracles even when they occur.  They're drown out by the chorus of moans.  (17 kids, most of which aren't associated with our church, show up for an impromptu youth event, for instance, and we complain about the snow tracked onto the entryway carpet. And so on.)  Shortcomings aren't a cause for complaint, they're a sign we need to move.

And notice that the move in John's gospel here is forward, not backwards.  The jars in which Jesus worked his miracle were meant for a specific purpose:  the ritual of transformation.  That was set in stone...literally!  (The jars were stone, you see.  Ha ha?  Never mind.)  Jesus did his thing and all of a sudden they became the world's biggest wine decanters.  How in the world did they even pour the stuff anyway?  Did they have to get wooden buckets?  Something else to complain about, I suppose...

Our human instinct tells us to look backwards for answers.  Whenever creativity is called for in a church setting the first answers our of our mouths always involve, "Well, we used to..."  That's great, actually!  We used to do many wonderful things!  But the implication of this kind of answer is that our former community had nothing to do with the people participating in it, its time, its culture, the surrounding circumstances.  The whole reason things used to be good was this awesome trick we used to employ, some program or method which made everything perfect just because it existed.

Obviously this was not the case.  Those "used to" ideas really were great...probably the best ideas possible at the time.  It's not like newfangled ideas are automatically better.  They're just different.  And they're different because all of those other factors--people, relationships, culture, needs, circumstances--are also different.  Programs and ideas don't work because they're magical or even right.  They work because they fit with the environment in which they operate.  Something that was absolutely proper--ideal, even--30 or 10 or 5 years ago may not be right anymore.  That's why we're called to look forward in our vision, considering our goals and who we're serving today instead of looking backwards at all the successes we used to have in a completely different environment.

There was nothing wrong with those stone jars, nor with the ritual of purification.  It was just time to put them to a new use.

What's more, this new thing turned the expectations of the world upside-down.  Note the steward saying, "Everybody serves the good wine first, then the inferior when the palate is dulled, but you've done it backwards!"  This was probably not a real practice.  Likely it's in the story to make this very point.  If you just go by your own expectations or those of your society you will not be led to the same place that trust in God will lead you.  In fact sometimes trust in God means doing the opposite of what "makes sense".

Naturally all of this evokes fear and nervousness in us.  And for good reason!  These miracles are not without cost.  If the transformation into WINE--foreshadowing Jesus' own blood poured out on the cross and through communion--isn't enough for you, note his response to Mary's request:  "My hour has not yet come."  When John says, "my hour" he means his death, his crucifixion.  Note the famous prayer in John 17 which begins, "Father, the hour has come..."  The very next thing that happened to him was his arrest.

The emphasis in his statement here falls on the "yet".  He knows his hour is coming.  He knows these steps forward lead into sacrifice and cost greater than anyone could imagine.  That's what moving forward means and that's why we fear it.  But he also knows that this is God's calling.  To refuse the miracle in order to keep himself feeling safe and secure would be unthinkable, a retreat into a slow, inertial death in order to avoid the sacrifice that leads to new life.  So Jesus follows God, pays the cost, takes the chance, performs the miracle.

Plenty of churches end up like those Olympic show horses, running just fine until they get to the bar they have to jump.  Then they balk, shy away, and their rider goes flying.  Sometimes we'd rather get God off our back (and out of our church) than change.  This will not do.  Yes, steps forward involve cost and sacrifice...sometimes great sacrifice.  But they're not optional if we're to fulfill our calling.  We, too, pay the cost, take the chance, follow God, and live out the miracle.

We do this because we know how the story ends.  This particular story in John ends with the wedding going on, not just with a few cups of wine but with somewhere around 150 gallons of the best wine imaginable!  THAT is a party!  God gives us more than we ever anticipated.  We also know that Jesus' own story didn't end in death but in life everlasting and the redemption of the world.  That's the ironic thing about the show horse refusing to jump.  The other side of the bar holds wonders so great as to make this side look like a wilderness desert.  Being human, we're always tempted to hold onto the desert we know instead of finding the lush valley we can only see through trust.  But that's a temptation we must resist.

It's time to run.  It's time to jump.  It's time to journey onward to our next incarnation of the promised land in Genesee.  The annual meeting begins after worship next Sunday.  There will be a potluck and plenty of news and excitement.  Please come and begin to explore your part in the next big thing at the Genesee Lutheran Parish.  See you there!

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)