the church geek

Today it is a great honor for us to invite four of our 8th and 9th grade kids to be confirmed. Later on in our service they will affirm the baptismal vows for themselves that their parents and their congregations took on their behalf when they were baptized as infants.

As they come to join us as active members it is an occasion to celebrate. When kids profess their faith and become members of the church it gives us all a sense of pride and joy. Wherever life’s journey may take them, we long and hope for our kids to deepen in their faith and to become active members of the church.

Their coming to be members also gives us a sense of hope for the future of our church. It is our desire for the church we know and love to remain a vibrant place of faith and fellowship for many generations to come.

Whenever we see kids come and join, even if they are not our own kids, those hopes for our children and for our church are renewed and confirmed within us.

It seems that hope and concern for the future of the church is on many of our minds these days. Our denomination is losing not thousands, but tens of thousands of members each year. The PC(USA) is not the only one; if you turn to the Methodists or the Episcopalians or any of the others, you’ll hear the same thing.

I’ve heard rumors lately that even the large and successful conservative evangelical mega-churches like Willow Creek and Saddleback are beginning to worry about the future of their churches also. Their numbers are dwindling. They are seeing less and less success in their own ministries.

Part of the problem we face comes from the sources we typically rely on for our church growth. Most churches - in our own denomination and Knox is no exception - rely on two sources of members for growth and stability:

The first source is our own kids. It’s wonderful when our kids come to be confirmed, but we also all know, maybe from our experience with our own kids, that many of them do not stay. They don’t make the church a part of their life…present company excluded…I hope.

I’m sure you’ve heard the old joke about the Pastor who had a flock of pigeons on his roof he was desperate to get rid off? When he asked another Pastor what he should do he was told, “Confirm them, I guarantee you’ll never see them again.” That joke is only funny because there is some truth to it.

Even if they choose to stay involved. We often don’t see the long term benefit, because most of them go off to school, they move to some exotic place like Chicago or Minneapolis, and then they join the church there.

The second source for growth is folks who come pre-programmed with some form of church experience. In order to get these folks we develop new programs, or we hope the new pastor will somehow bring them in, or we try to make sure we are warm and friendly when visitors show up.

And when these new folks arrive at our door having somehow discovered us, they usually come with some form of faith and church experience. These types of folks might be:

• A husband or wife from another Christian tradition who has married a spouse who is Presbyterian.
• A single person who has moved into the area and is intentionally looking for a church home.
• Someone who has a disagreement with the church they currently attend.
• A young couple who grew up in the church and is looking for a church to raise their own kids in.

The point is this: For the growth and upkeep of our churches we almost always rely on “established” sources for our members; we either look to our kids who’ve been exposed to the faith since they were young or we look to folks who will show up on our doorstep already having been involved in a church somewhere else.

In contrast, the early church described in the book of Acts did not have the luxury of relying on growth by either of these two means. That first generation of believers couldn’t wait around for their kids to grow up, to be confirmed, and to become a part of the church.

They also couldn’t make themselves attractive to people who already had church experience or who married into a family of believers, or who grew up in the church and began to realize what they were missing after they had their own children.

In those days it was all brand new territory. Growth happened through conversion. The church only grew as it presented the gospel in word and deed, as it testified to the resurrection of Christ, as it told of the new life that Christ brings, and as God, through the work of the Holy Spirit, kicked open the doors for the spread of his word.

In its early days the church, was a sect or a splinter group of sorts within Judaism. The first believers to follow Jesus were Jewish believers who claimed Jesus was the Messiah. Those early believers were Jews who came to believe that Jesus had risen from the grave.

One of the primary themes in the book of Acts is the expansion of the church beyond that Jewish world and its movement into the gentile world. This expansion of the faith was not easy. Many fought it because it required them to look beyond themselves to a new group of folks who weren’t like them in anyway.

In today’s story from Acts, Peter was in a bit of hot water. He stood before a stern group of Jewish believers in Jerusalem who wanted to know why he had eaten with folks who were uncircumcised, or Gentiles, as they were called.

Peter stood before them and explained the course of events that lead to the conversion of these Gentiles. He told them about how God got his attention through a vision, speaking to him three times before he finally got the point. In that vision, God stressed to Peter that the Jewish dietary laws were keeping him from sharing the gospel with the Gentiles. If the faith was going to expand beyond their small sect of Judaism, the dietary laws they held as so important would have to go.

God then told Peter to go and no longer make a distinction between “us and them,” between “Jew” and “Gentile.” Peter obeyed the Spirit’s command and entered the home of Cornelius. As he did, he discovered the Holy Spirit was at work in “them,” and he led that whole Gentile household to repentance and faith in God.

As Peter stood before those leaders, the church was at a turning point: It could have insisted on remaining a Jewish movement, continuing to only find converts from within Judaism. It could have failed to move out into the mission field the Holy Spirit was opening in the Gentile world.

But, it did not do that. Instead, the early church gave up seeing the world through an “us vs. them” lens. And, because it did so, you and I are gathered here today. We are a legacy of that early church’s decision to open its doors beyond Judaism and to enter the mission field of the Gentile world.

Various Christian leaders – some within our own denomination - are saying with some urgency that the institutional church is facing a similar turning point today. They say, if you want to know what the institutional church might look like someday in this country, go to Europe and look at all the old church buildings that are now bars, nightclubs, and museums.

They tell us this hard reality: If we continue to rely on confirming our own children and on re-circulating the same dwindling crowd of churched folks between our churches, there will not be much of a church left for our children or for our grandchildren to be a part of.

The problem the church in America faces is that our world is rapidly becoming a ‘post-Christian” world. This means that:
• More and more people are growing up without any involvement in a church.
• Folks don’t know any of the basic Bible stories or characters.
• People don’t know the lingo we so easily throw around; words like sin, salvation, repentance, and fellowship.
• Perhaps most importantly: When folks explore the spiritual life, they almost never think to turn to a church.

I’m sure you’ve heard that if you try to stick a frog in a kettle of boiling water it will jump right out because it knows the water is hot. But if you put that same frog in a kettle of cold water and then heat it up to boiling, the frog gets cooked because it has no idea the water temperature is increasing.

Today, the church is kind of like that frog in the cold kettle of water that is being heated. There’s a lot of change going on in the world around us, but we don’t really see it because:

• We are all running around in the same circles, living and associating with churched folks who are just like us.
• We are all talking the same language, listening to the same Christian music, reading the same Christian books.
• We are all working so hard to keep our churches running, to maintain our buildings, and to keep our church programs in good shape.

For the early church to move out into the gentile world in mission and ministry, Peter and the others had to give up the “us vs. them,” the “Jews vs. Gentiles,” lens through which they viewed the world. It is the much the same for us. If we are going to move out into our “post-christian” world in mission, in ministry, and in outreach we also have to give up the “us vs. them” lens through which we view our own world.

You see, as church folks we’ve been busy working to keep the church up and running as a safe place for “us.” That work has kept us from being about the church’s true calling of reaching out in mission and in ministry to the world around us. That work has kept us from going out to get to know and to serve “them.”

Jan Edmiston, a Presbyterian minister who keeps a blog I often follow, talks about a long-time church member of her church in the Washington DC area who recently asked her about some new folks who were coming to join the church. He asked, “Where do these people live, where do they come from?” Jan says:

“His point was that “they don’t look like ‘us’ and they don’t act like ‘us.’” But actually they all came from the immediate neighborhood. That member had simply spent so much time within the walls of the church building that he hadn’t noticed that the neighborhood had changed.” ((From Jan’s April 30th, 2007 blog post “Assignment: Get out There.”))

Dan Kimball is the author of a provocative new book called “They Like Jesus but Not the Church.” As a minister in California, Dan began to realize he saw the world through an “us vs. them” lens. One day he discovered he had no clue what an un-churched, non-Christian person, looked like, talked like, or acted like.

He realized that he needed to get rid of his “us vs. them” lens. So he decided to no longer sit in his office to write his sermons. He took his computer and his books and his bible, and he began to write in various coffee shops around the city. As he did this he had the chance to talk with and to establish relationships with lots of the regulars. His conversations led him to find out lots and lots of folks were turned off by the church for some reason or another. Yet they still held lots of affection and admiration for Jesus. Dan writes:

People who need to hear the gospel most likely aren’t going to their church. On Sundays, they are sleeping in, shopping at the flea market, going out to breakfast – they’re anywhere but at a church meeting. I don’t know why we think that if we have good preaching or add a worship band or have coffee and candles that they will come. Those things are all good, but people outside the church aren’t looking for a church with those things. They aren’t looking for the church at all. ((pg. 238 of They Like Jesus But Not the Church))

Almost every new book I’ve read on church transformation says the exact same thing in just a different way. They say:

The church has got to break down the barrier between itself and the community. It needs to drop the distinction it makes between “us and them.” It has got to get out into the community, to get to know who its neighbors are and find ways to serve them. It has to take the transforming power of the gospel beyond its church walls so that the world around it can be renewed.

Yes, it’s true, our confirmation kids are one sign of hope for the church, but they are not THE hope for the church. That hope will come when the church decides to drop whatever “us vs. them” mentality it happens to hold. It will come when the church chooses to look out and reach beyond itself opening its arms in mission, in outreach, and in ministry to the world around it.

That is our best hope and the best way to ensure there will be a church here not only for these confirmation kids and their families who follow but for future generations to come. In the Name of our Triune God, the one who was and is and is to come, Amen.