Scripture: Ephesians 4:1-16
I want to begin this morning with an apology…to those who may be among us this morning who are visiting with us or who are relatively new to the life of this community. This is a kind of an “in house” sermon that may assume a certain familiarity with Sojourners as a community and that speaks to certain issues and concerns that are specific to Sojourners. I hope it will also speak to some broader spiritual concerns and that what I say will be at least somewhat relevant and understandable even to people who don’t know much about Sojourners, but I recognize that it does have the flavor of being a kind of in group discussion and I apologize for that.
We are in the middle of a capital campaign. We haven’t been too noisy about this so far, although there has been a bit of media publicity, and some opportunities for small group meetings to talk about it, and Krissy and Irving have spoken to us the last couple of weeks and now Bob today, and some people have been working diligently at certain aspects of this, and some people have already made their pledges, so we are already in the middle of a capital campaign. It’s already well along. But today begins the more public, maybe noisier phase of the campaign where those who haven’t already made their pledge will be contacted (either today or within the next few days) so that we can complete this phase of the campaign. There is more yet to come. We will be approaching former and out-of-town members, friends and relations, Sojourners supporters around Charlottesville and taking a stab at some funding through foundations or other major funding sources, but the core of the capital campaign is this week and it’s likely that the results that are announced next week will be most of what we will be able to raise. So this is “capital campaign Sunday” if you will.
And I am supposed to say a few words. I am supposed to preach about the capital campaign. That’s what the capital campaign manual says. On the Sunday when the mass of the calls are made, we are supposed to lift up the campaign in worship, recognize and commission those who will make the calls, and the minister is supposed to preach on the topic. Now of course just because the manual says I am to preach on the capital campaign doesn’t mean I have to do it. We have actually been taking the manual seriously. Most of us have not done a capital campaign before, don’t pretend to know how best to go about it, and recognize it would be helpful to make use of what others have learned, so we have tried to follow much of what’s in the manual and listen to what our consultant Rob Peters has to say. On the other hand, Sojourners are not particularly known for doing things by the book, or even for responding very well to being told by the book how to do things. Sojourners are ornery enough to instinctively want to refuse to go by the book, and I am a Sojourner. I could easily choose just to do the ceremony at the end of the service and not preach on anything at all related to the capital campaign.
But I’m not gonna. It does seem to me that I should not in my preaching today pretend that a capital campaign is not going on. It does seem to me that this is an important enough event in our congregational life that some words are called for, some preaching type words. I came to that much of a conclusion fairly easily. As to what those words would be specifically, that part has not been so easy.
I am not wanting to exhort everyone to give large gifts to the church. I have a pretty strong feeling that by and large we are all pretty much on the same page with regard to all this. We have a large amount of money to raise, some of it needed to pay the mortgage and keep the promises we made when we accepted the loan, some of it needed to make the facility accessible the way it really ought to be, and to make other renovations possible. We all know that we will need the generosity of everyone and we know that what generous giving means will vary widely among us both because of different financial circumstances and because we all have our own attitudes and issues about money that make decisions like this many-layered and certainly not casual, and so we know that this is a matter not just to think about but truly to pray about. However it is that we do our praying, we have either done it already or we are about to do it and we are trusting, implicitly trusting everyone else to do it—that is, to pray about it and, taking everything into account, to give as generously as each of us is able, whatever that means for any individual or household. I am not asking everyone to do that. I am not encouraging everyone to do that. I am trying to put into words what I believe our covenant with each other is, a covenant that is already there, already in effect. I have a high degree of confidence that that covenant is understood and is at work among us. I did decide that that ought to be said out loud, just to try to articulate what that page is that I think we are all pretty much on. Having done that, let me go in a bit of a different direction.
I went to one of the small group meetings that was offered in connection with the campaign just to discuss our feelings about it and air any questions we might have. In the group that I went to it was suggested that this whole process of purchasing our own building and the capital campaign that was made necessary because of it is a lot like a rite of passage. It is a transition not just from one place to another but represents a transition into a more mature stage of our life as a congregation. We are growing up. And all these kinds of ceremonial things that we are engaging in surrounding the building purchase—first service after our decision to move for good, this service lifting up the capital campaign, other services yet to come—all this together is a rite of passage, a series of ceremonies symbolic of our movement from one stage of existence to another, more grown-up stage of existence. Of course in once sense a capital campaign is about as down to earth and practical as you can get. It’s about dollars and cents. Can we afford what we have set out to do, or can’t we? But there’s this symbolic side too, and it’s important too. And I want to talk about that side too.
I think there is also a wide understanding among us at some level, a kind of instinctive understanding that there is more involved in this whole process of purchasing a building than having a space of our own, more to it than gaining meeting space or storage space, more to it than being able to worship when we want, more to it than being able to have our own decorations and not have to set up every Sunday. All that is real and not unimportant. But there is a less tangible, less easily described aspect to all this, what I would think of as a spiritual aspect, though that may be too fancy a word.
We got iced out of our last service at JABA. I will quickly tell you now a story I had intended to tell on that day. When I was involved in the search process and was considering, and being considered by, three churches—one had already called me, another was not at the point of calling anyone but seemed like a good possibility, and the third was Sojourners, which as it turns out was about to extend a call—Ava asked me which of the three churches I would prefer, if I were to have my choice: the one with a historic downtown city church building (admittedly in need of some repair), the one with a charming and again historic building adjacent to a college campus, or the one with no building at all. I said Sojourners, the one with no building at all, not for just that reason of course, but partly for that reason. Ava, by her own account, rolled her eyes or some equivalent of that, probably imagining a storefront arrangement of some kind, or maybe a gymnasium, whatever. She hadn’t seen JABA at that point. I had and I not only knew that it was an attractive place that I didn’t have any problem with, but the fact that it was not a conventional church building actually appealed to me. It was part of the whole package of Sojourners, emphasizing the people and the mission rather than the building, willing to ask questions as to what a church should be (does a church really need a building to be a church?), having a kind of a fresh approach to doing church, willing to be experimental, open to considering all sorts of options about how to do things. This was all part of who Sojourners was and being a church without a building was part of the package.
Sojourners was a young church still trying to decide what it wanted to be when it grew up, or maybe even if it wanted to grow up. That was attractive and energizing to me. It would be good, I thought, to be part of a church that was not all caught up in the institutional part of being a church and that was willing to start from scratch and ask fresh questions as to what being church is all about and not having a building not only fit in well with that atmosphere but in fact contributed to it and made it possible.
At the beginning, I not only was willing to come to a church without a building. I liked the idea. And so all this time I have been thinking about our eventual move into a building, which seemed likely if not inevitable, all this time I have been working toward that time that has now finally come, I have also been aware that that would mean the loss of our childhood as a church. It would signal a kind of growing up and would possibly mean that we would be less free-spirited, less experimental, more encumbered, more institutional.
I don’t want to sound fatalistic about all this. I don’t see all this as inevitable. But it is a challenge and I think needs to be recognized as a challenge. Can Sojourners still think of itself more as a movement than an organization, even though we are facing the necessity of becoming at least a little more organized? Can we keep a firm sense that the church is not a building, the church is not a steeple, the church is not a dwelling place, but is the people, and is mission, and is justice, even though we are now identified with a building? Now that we look more like a traditional church from the outside, does that mean we will naturally drift in to be more of a conventional church on the inside, or can we keep the freshness of our questions about what it means to be church? Those are all challenges that I hope we will not dismiss, thinking that it will be easy to hold on to the positive parts of our childhood.
At the same time there is a much more positive way to look at this rite of passage we are going through, and the words that come to me today are these. We may want to continue to be experimental in our approach to all sorts of things, but we—Sojourners United Church of Christ—have come to the point where we are no longer an experiment. Up to a certain point we have been this start-up group of people—or maybe upstart group of people. People came together with some interest in forming a UCC congregation and some ideas about what a church ought to look like. It might work. It might not. It might last. It might not. If it were to grow into something, great. If not, too bad. It was an experiment that didn’t work out. Not a failed experiment because it served a positive purpose and was worth doing, so not a failed experiment, just one that didn’t last. Not everything in the world needs to be permanent, and sometimes we try things for a while and then move on.
Sojourners is no longer in that stage. Sojourners is no longer an experiment. For some time now already we have been moving away from that tentative kind of existence and now this rite of passage that we are going through symbolizes and celebrates that change. We are not going away. We intend to be a community of worship and reverence and honest seeking after God and a place of welcome and inclusiveness and determined seeking after justice not just for now or for as long as we’re around (and who knows how long that might be) but for the long haul. We commit ourselves to that. And doing that, we commit ourselves to each other.
In simple terms, that is the way I see this capital campaign. It is of course a practical effort to raise money in order to pay our debts and make some building improvements possible. It is also a symbol of our coming of age, a symbol of a process that has been going on for some time, but that is now coming together in these events surrounding our move into this space. Next week we will complete this process so far as focusing our worship on this transition in our community life, and then we will move on. Move on to those things we are to be about in the long haul. Today I celebrate this community, give thanks that we have come to this time and place of passage, and look forward to the journey that lies ahead, trusting that it will be filled with challenges, and with joy, and with love, and with God. Amen.
Jim Bundy
February 20, 2005