Taking God Out of the Box
From the moment that I stepped foot into this church, I have preached on the importance of having a vision of what God wants us to do as individuals, but perhaps just importantly, what God wants us to do together as a church. The first series that I did on God=s vision for our church B ASeeing the Vision of the Almighty" B was one to which you responded wonderfully. We have made great strides forward in our ministry, and in our purpose as a church.
However, we are not finished; indeed, the work of the church is never finished. While we have been responsive to the initial vision that God has placed before us. Now it is time to reevaluate that vision, allow it to be transformed by God’s sanctifying grace, and reclaim the vision as God renews and transforms it in light of the present needs of our church, our people and our ministry to others.
The vision that initially captured our imaginations as a congregation was one, I believe, of survival. Two years ago, when I came, our attendance was suffering during our worship service, and people were staying home. We needed better attendance, and due to the vision that God placed before us as a congregation, our numbers have grown. Today, two years later, we have more people on a bad attendance day than was our attendance average several years ago.
Two years ago, we needed to raise more tithes and offerings to sustain the needs of our ministry as a church, and you have responded to that need magnanimously. Our funding, while still not what it needs to be, has improved greatly as you have responded to God=s vision of what it means to be a church ministering to our community. For the first time in a long time we have been able to pay 100% of our church=s wider mission not only last year, but it looks like this year as well. Indeed, because of the vision that God has laid before us, we have exceeded those expectations and become a global mission church, one of only three in this District, and we now support Dee Dee Hefner, a missionary to McCurdy School in New Mexico, and a person in ministry at the newly established Russian Seminary of the United Methodist Church in Moscow.
Two years ago, we needed to define, enliven and empower the ministries of our different committees and concerns within the church if we were to continue to reach out to the community of Brush in ministry and service, and we did just exactly that. Responding to the vision that God placed before us, we, through the grace of God, were able to do remarkable things, and the ministry of our church, and indeed, our ministry to the community of Brush has prospered from it.
The initial vision that God placed before us was a vision of survival and you rose to the challenge. We did survive and the ministry of our church has been deepened and intensified as a result. However, as I said earlier, we are not finished. If a church grows complacent in its ministry, if it becomes satisfied with its response to God=s challenges, then it begins to lose its vision for it misses the way that God begins to change the vision of where its ministry ought to be going. Two years ago, God=s vision emphasized the immediacy of our ministry, what we needed to accomplish that week, month or year if we were to have another year of ministry. However, today that is not the case. Instead of looking simply to tomorrow, today we need to begin looking five, ten, fifteen or even twenty years down the road. What does the ministry of our church need to be today if we are to minister to people throughout our world, and indeed, in the community of Brush twenty years from now?
If we are to answer that question, we must be very honest about the nature of our ministry as well as our congregation and physical plant today. That means that we need to look around and identify the makeup of our congregation, not in terms of membership, but in terms to those who are sitting in these pews Sunday after Sunday. The stark reality is this. We are an aging congregation that is worshiping in a rapidly aging building. While the age of our congregation has its advantages B members of an aging congregation tend to be more involved with their service, prayers and gifts B that is good only for the moment unless we have a younger congregation that we are nurturing for the future. Is this nurture taking place? Are younger people Awaiting in the wings@ to become the future leaders of our church? If not, what do we as a congregation need to do to invite the younger people of our society into our family of faith? What do we need to do, in other words, to assure that our church has a future, that it will live another thirty or forty years?
One thing is for sure. We cannot continue to do what we were doing forty years ago if we are to nurture the future leaders of our church in the spirituality of a new millennium. While this is a beautiful sanctuary, and while this building is a very well built building, we must realize that it is beginning to show its age. The design of yesterday does not necessarily proclaim the gospel to the congregation of tomorrow, nor are the worship services of a generation ago always adequate in proclaiming Christ to the leaders of tomorrow’s church. The God of yesterday is indeed the God of tomorrow. God does not change in that way. However, people do change. People today are not the same as they were thirty years ago, and that which appeals to people thirty years ago does not appeal to people who will be the leaders in our church ten, twenty or thirty years from now. People change, and if we are to proclaim the good news to this new generation, we must realize that while the God we proclaim may not change, the way that we proclaim that God to tomorrow’s leaders must change.
What does this change look like? First, we need to recommit ourselves to effecting a Christian Education program that appeals to the people of our faith family as well as the community of Brush in a holistic fashion. What does this mean? It means that we begin to minister to the needs of the whole person in ways that all people can take advantage of it. Our classes need to meet at nontraditional times as well as on Sunday mornings. Our educational efforts need to be concerned not simply with the so-called "spiritual needs" of those in our care, but we must realize that caring for a person spiritually means caring for their physical, mental and social health as well. To do this, we must look at new ways of teaching that are not only directed to these ends, but that also draw upon the techniques and tools that will stimulate the imaginations and challenge the thoughts of people living in a new millennium. We need an educational program, in other words, that will draw people B children, youth and adults B into our church on a daily basis, not just a weekly basis. It will be one that will help them understand that God is the Lord of not only their souls, but their bodies as well as the different relationships they enter into on a daily basis.
Second, if we are to nurture the leaders of the future church in the ways of faith, then we must move beyond our own interests as a congregation by allowing ourselves to be inconvenienced, unsettled, or annoyed by the new life that takes place when the people of a new millennium make our church their spiritual family and home of faith. We must be inconvenienced by the weddings of those who may not yet be members of our family of faith in the hope that our commitment to this inconvenience will wed these new families to our congregation bringing younger people into our congregation. We need to be unsettled by the questions of young people who are continually searching for ways to make the faith of their parents the faith of their generation. We need to thrill when we become annoyed because children challenge our world of stability with new ways of doing things and seeing the world around us. If we are to be a church of tomorrow, then the vision that God has laid before us must propel us beyond the close-mindedness of status quo religion and challenge us to engage, embrace and love the people of a new millennium. For within this new generation lie the hope of our future and the assurance that our church will be here even we are gone.
And finally, if we are to be a church of tomorrow, we must realize that tomorrow’s ministry is a collaborative ministry that seeks to combine the gospel with the work of all types of service groups within our community. We have already begun this process by being the grantees of a Head Start program. By creatively engaging the pedagogical efforts of Head Start to prepare a disadvantaged generation to compete with and engage society in a meaningful way, we can effect a kingdom that reigns with God’s love for tomorrow’s world. But beyond that, if we are truly attentive to the voice of God that works from the context of this rather unique relationship between church and state, we can envision a way that both our church and the government can work together to make tomorrow’s world a world where Christ is not simply a word, but is truly a reality. Let me explain.
I don’t know if you realize it or not, but our Head Start program has grown into one of the more successful programs in region eight, and here is the interesting thing about that. It is one of only two Head Start programs where the grantee is a church, the other one is the Akron UMC Head Start program in Akron. But here is an even more interesting fact. We are the only church in this region to actually house this program in our church. That means that with considerable sacrifice on your part as a congregation, we have been able to work out a unique synthesis between the efforts of the federal government and the ministry of this church. It is this sort of far reaching vision that we must have if we are to be a part of tomorrow’s church.
However, we have reached a unique place in this relationship. Because of its success, and because the Federal Head Start Program is placing an emphasis upon full year, all day programs B something that needs to be initiated by 2005 B we are being forced to look beyond our relationship as it exists today, and consider what it will look like in the next five years. If we are to meet the demands of our Head Start program, then we must begin to look beyond our existing physical plant to the possibility of remodeling our church to include a new educational wing. This wing would free up the educational space of our existing structure while at the same time building a new building that can be used by our Head Start program as well as engaging other programs in our area by providing them with a home that they may otherwise not have. In other words, by committing ourselves to continued creative relationships with Head Start, we can begin to forge a new ministry that ministers not only to the needs of the disadvantaged children of our community, but to the needs of all families throughout Brush as well. Scouting programs in Brush need a place to meet. Instead of just a scouting program, why not a Brush UMC Scouting program? The vision of this new space would allow us to do this bringing us another way of engaging families and their children in Brush. Instead of just 4-H programs, why not 4-H programs that meet at Brush UMC? By providing space for these programs, we tell our children as well as our youth that we care about their well being and if we care about the well being of their activities in scouting and 4-H, we will have the opportunity to care for their souls as well. Instead of simply a before and after school program, why not a Brush UMC before and after school program that lets the families of our area know that we care about them and their well being. If we care for and nurture the well being of families in our community, then we can care for and nurture the spiritual well being of families as well. Instead of schools reluctantly engaging in parenting programs, why not start the Brush UMC parenting program that energetically and enthusiastically teaches parents to be teachers, but not just any old teacher, a Christian teacher who knows how to raise their children in the ways of Christ? These programs and many others that I have not mentioned all do one very important thing. They tell the Brush community that we care about them, and when we tell them that, we also tell them that Christ cares about them and welcomes them into the fellowship of the church, his body.
What I have outlined is the vision that I believe God has placed before us as a congregation. It identifies the direction that we as a congregation should consider if we are to move from a survival mode and engage an active and aggressive ministry that will assure that our church has a future. This vision is a big one, and it may indeed be one that is uncomfortable for it moves us beyond the common place to the exception, but that is the way of God. J.B. Philips in a book entitled Your God Is Too Small speaks of this propensity on the part of God. We tend to define God in ways that approve of what we are presently doing and that which is comfortable. If we do this, however, Philips says that we may be guilty of trying to put God in a box that is to small. When our box is one defined by only our concerns and our comfort, it is too small. In this case, the only sure thing is that by responding to God’s vision for our life and the life of our congregation, we will have to destroy the box in which we have tried to force God. We must allow God to be God no matter how uncomfortable it may make us.
The message of Philip’s little book is similar to the one given to us in the Epistle to the Ephesians that I read earlier in the service. Following the Apostle Paul, the author of Ephesians separates human beings into two groups: Jews and Gentiles. In the time before the coming of the Christ, these two groups were irrevocably separated. Now, following the coming of Christ, they have been brought together as one people in the reign of God. What this means, as well as the vision that it portrays, is what the author of Ephesians is attempting to describe to the church at Ephesus. In Ephesians 2:15-16, we read these words:
He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.
God, the God who has given the author of Ephesians this vision of unity, must not be forced into boxes created by past traditions and ideals. God cannot be fitted in a box that is comprised strictly of Jewish people, nor may God be understood solely as the God of Gentiles. Instead, a new vision of God and God’s work must be accepted that destroys both of these boxes into which people have tried to force God, the Father of our Lord, Jesus as the Christ. The new vision destroys the boxes of the past so that God is liberated to become a God of and for the future.
The same task that confronted the author of Ephesians and the Ephesus church confronts us today. As members, friends and participants in the ministry of Brush United Methodist Church, we must allow God to free godself from the boxes of our past so that we can be liberated to become a church that ministers to the people of a new millennium. This implies at least three things: First, we must be willing to change. Second, we must believe that the tasks that God has set before us are obtainable. And finally, we must put aside our differences, roll up our sleeves, embrace the greatness of God, and go to work. God will honor our efforts!
Since coming to this church, I have lived in the process of God’s miraculous grace as I have watched God work through you to make the vision that God has placed before us into a reality. You have responded to God’s challenges and God has rewarded us with growth and renewed faithfulness. But the work of the church is never completed. It is time to allow God to renew and transform that initial vision God instilled in us so that it addresses not only our immediate needs, but the needs of future congregations as well. We must begin the work of building a church for tomorrow’s world. We must commit ourselves to a vision that leads us into a successful ministry to the people of a new millennium. This is not an impossible task, but if we are to arise to the occasion, we must not place our God in a box that is much too small because it was created in the past. We must allow God to destroy those boxes thereby liberating us to the future. We must not seek to control God, but allow God to control our ministry by placing before us a vision of what our church needs to be if we are to survive five, ten or even fifteen years from now.
"So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God" (Ephesians 2:19-22). If we are attentive to the vision that God places before us, if we commit ourselves to the ministry required to make this vision a reality, the household of God that we have already constructed will indeed become a holy temple in the Lord. It will not, however, be exclusively our temple just as God’s reign is no longer exclusively the reign of Jews or Gentiles. Rather, it will be a holy temple in which God dwells as he ministers to, redeems and renews the people of a new millennium, those in whom our future lies. And my it be so. Amen.