“STATE OF THE CHURCH”
A church’s annual meeting marks a new beginning, of sorts. Officers and board and committee members are elected. Reports are given. A budget is passed. We take the church’s pulse, so to speak. So this morning I thought I’d give a kind of “state of the church” sermon. While I gather my predecessor here, Dave Norling, used to do such a thing regularly, I have never done so. I was prompted to consider it by the book we read in Central Council this year, Tony Robinson’s Changing the Conversation: A Third Way for Congregations. Tony suggests that pastors regularly give a report on how, in their eyes, the church is doing. So, on this first Sunday of Lent, as we seek to turn again toward the Holy One, let’s reflect on the state of things here at Federated.
To begin, and to be fair, I suppose from one angle we could say we’re not doing as well as we might. Membership and attendance have fallen in the last few years. Our budget for 2010 has had to be reduced by about 5% from last year. One way of looking at things is to note those trends and say that we’re declining.
That’s certainly one perspective. And we’d be hiding our heads in the sand if we didn’t at least acknowledge those facts. When attendance and giving fall off, it may be a sign that we’re off-center, and that we need to change some things.
Let’s try to flesh this out a little, though, and give it some context. We need to remind ourselves that Federated doesn’t live in a vacuum, but that we are, instead, part of larger cultural trends. As far as attendance goes, David Greenhaw, President of Eden Theological Seminary, a UCC seminary in St. Louis, says that mainline churches are going through something unprecedented. It’s well known that our churches have declined in membership over the last fifty years. But Greenhaw says that the last five to seven years have seen a noticeably more precipitous fall-off. Membership and attendance have plummeted across the board.
There’s a context to the financial fall-off, as well. The greatest economic dip since the Depression has meant not only that businesses and families have been affected, but that non-profits and churches have taken a hit, as well. The latest issue of a journal I get reports that the average church cut its budget by 7% from 2008 to 2009 (The Christian Century, Feb. 9, 2010, p. 14). My guess is that problem will only be exacerbated from 2009 to 2010—which means that, with our 5% decline, we are a little better off than the average church as far as budget losses go.
So yes, if we’re honest, we’ll acknowledge the losses of the last few years. But if we fail to notice that what’s happening here is part of much larger trends, and if we simply allow ourselves to get mired in those numbers, then we’ve done both God and ourselves a terrible disservice. Just as Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, so also for us one of the temptations is to focus on the negative, and only part of the picture at that, and to be dragged down by it.
So let’s tell the story from a different angle. “How do I love thee?” asked the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “Let me count the ways.” And the ways here are legion. I love the music. It’s not many places that offer the kind of music that’s sung and heard here every Sunday at three different services and with seven different choirs. We have gifted choirs and inspired leaders. We are inspired—literally “in-spirited”—every single Sunday.
I love these two phenomenal facilities. When I first entered the sanctuary, I remember the feeling of warmth and light that overtook me. There’s a simple beauty about this place. And the acoustics are remarkable. I had an equally awed feeling entering the FLC for the first time. Imagine having such a fantastic place to eat and meet and play basketball and sit by the fire and worship.
I love our Children’s Ministries program, with imaginative, engaging classes and youth groups, an incredibly pervasive love, and staff and shepherds and guides who adore the children and the work they do.
I love our lay leaders, as committed as any I have ever seen. They know what church is about, and they give themselves to its life with gusto and joy.
I love our initiative and creative energy. In the past year alone, we’ve engaged in some important church tasks. We’ve begun a new worship service, Alive360; we’ve restructured our staff with an eye to centering ourselves properly; we’ve started a reorganization of lay leadership so that people spend less time managing the church and more time engaging in their ministries; and we’ve encouraged far more adult faith formation with increasing book study and small group opportunities. We’ve met the top five goals of our visioning process, “Voices and Visions for a New Day,” and we’re continuing to look ahead.
Not only that, but I love our mission program that is so full of passion and commitment. With our close relationship to St. Paul’s Church, with Group’s work camp and countless possibilities for serving in person, there is ample opportunity for people to give back what we ourselves have received from God. There’s a feeling, in many quarters of this church, of being “sent”—the root meaning of “mission”—to care.
I could go on and on, as could so many of you, about what I love about Federated Church. I’m also aware, though, that we have some growing edges here. Yes, as we said earlier, there are larger cultural forces working against our fullest vitality. But we can’t let those forces dictate our mood and our energy and our mission. There may be forces that drag us down. But they don’t have the last word. God does. So let me lay out a few of what I see as the most pressing issues facing Federated.
First—and this is by no means particular to Federated—it’s tempting—there’s that word again!—to think of church as a kind of club, a place where we have “membership,” rather than to think of ourselves as disciples of Jesus Christ. Tony Robinson points this out in his book. We’re not here, as we would be with a health club membership, so we can get services delivered to us. We’re here to follow Jesus. It may seem like a simple point, but it’s a crucial one. Our primary purpose for being here is not to feel better, though it’s nice when that’s one of the side effects. Our purpose for being here should be to encounter the living God, and to take that experience out into the world with us. The more we get out of our own way and make others the focus, the more true we will be to the purposes of the church. We’re first of all disciples, not members.
A second temptation for us is to imagine that there’s some sort of simple fix for the decline of mainline churches. There isn’t. It’s not a matter of practicing the right technique or getting the ideal staff in place. It’s a matter, instead, of growing new hearts and minds—for all of us. Tony Robinson talks about the difference between technical problems and adaptive challenges. Fixing a broken roof is a technical problem: if you bring in the right expert and apply the appropriate technique, the problem is fixed. An adaptive challenge, on the other hand, is a much more thorough-going problem. It’s not something an expert can fix, and it’s not something that can be quickly remedied. At Federated, we face an adaptive challenge: the whole organism—you, me, everyone—has to adapt in order for there to be a fix. For us to thrive, there will be a need for everyone to focus on the center of faith: transformation. There really is no simple fix. To really be faithful to the call of God, we all have to be about deepening faith and changing lives. For most of us, that will likely mean giving ourselves anew, or for the first time, to the disciplines of faith—that we commit to worship and study and stewardship and acts of kindness and prayer.
A third temptation, as we go forward, is to imagine that either of two poles, tradition or innovation, is the one toward which to head. It would be easy and tempting to think that it’s one or the other of those two in which our hope resides. Not true. All healthy churches, say Roy Oswald and Barry Johnson of the Alban Institute, maintain a healthy balance between the two. They root themselves both in the strengths of their past, honoring what has given them vitality, and in an openness to new ways of worshiping and relating. To hang onto the things we’ve always done would be to die. On the other hand, to flit from one new idea to another would be to succumb to rootlessness and a lack of any sense of who we are. The whole of our history embraces this polarity: the very tradition of the UCC is to experiment and adapt and grow. We live on the “solid rock” of an ageless Word. But as our great Pilgrim forebear, John Robinson, said when he began his new life on this great new continent in the seventeenth century, “There is yet more light and truth to break forth from” that great holy Word of God. Tradition and innovation.
A fourth temptation is to imagine that if we just manage our money right, we’ll be OK. I’ll be the first to affirm the need to administer our money responsibly. Toni Cirino and our Board of Finance and Stewardship have insured that every year for the last five years we have presented and lived by a balanced budget. The $1.4 million debt we had several years ago has been whittled down to about $344,000—a great accomplishment. Our money management is superb, and that’s important. But that’s not what makes a church. We’re not here to turn a profit. Success for us is not measured in red and black bottom lines. Success here is about something far more ephemeral and far more crucial.
Since I arrived here a little over five years ago, the primary conversation at this church has been about money. Some of that, of course, is necessary. But when that becomes the main point of discussion, then we have fallen prey to a vice: we have assumed that getting our financial house in order would make us a fine church. No, being a fine church is about a woman struck with cancer and coming to a sense of God’s presence right in the middle of her suffering. Being a fine church has to do with a youth realizing that real satisfaction is to be had not in the Xbox or the iPhone, but in the grand love of God and a visit to a nursing home. Being a fine church has to do with a middle-aged man coming to a sense of his responsibility to care for his aging mother. Being a fine church has to do with realizing, as Jesus does in the story of his temptation, that life’s great rewards have nothing to do with the things and the power and the false faith the devil offers him. What a fine church does is embark again and again on a journey away from all the false fears and temptations that seduce us and move, instead, toward the living God in whom alone we find our true home.
The fact is: nobody gives to a budget. They give—you give, I give—to a mission. We give to something larger than ourselves. We give where we see hope embodied. We give to institutions that enrich our lives. We give to places that offer us joy and solace and freedom and love, and that radiate those great qualities to the world.
The great German pastor and theologian of the last century, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, once said, “The church is the church only when it exists for others” (quoted in Michael Jinkins, Called to Be Human: Letters to My Children on Living a Christian Life, p. 46). Our purpose here should never be to make our budget balance. It should be to trust God. It should be to enhance lives. It should be to deepen our care for the world. It should be to worship God and love our neighbors. It’s that simple. And it’s that challenging.
This week, I did several things that reminded me again of the purpose of the church. I went to visit a woman who’s dying in a nursing home; I sat with her for maybe ten minutes, and prayed with her and stroked her forehead and kissed her as I left. And I sat with a man whose sixteen-year-old dog had just died; he told me what a great dog she had been, and we cried and hugged each other. I led a wonderful fifth-grade communion class with Mark Simone, and we talked with some great kids. And I went to see a new baby just born into this congregation, where I beheld, in those tiny little fingers and the softly curling hair, a brilliant glory that immeasurably brightened my life. And in all of that, I remembered my vocation and the vocation of the church. We have been given life for only a few short years. We never know when that precious time is going to come to an end. And if we value that gift, we will live it fully. We will celebrate and rejoice. We will love like there’s no tomorrow. We will remember that God is still speaking, and we’ll open ourselves to the Spirit of God whose way is amazing grace. That’s it. That’s our call and that’s our privilege. May we be on the way.