Scripture: Philippians 3:4-16
I have church on my mind this morning, probably because we have this congregational meeting coming up after church where we will be dealing with important organizational matters and receiving reports that have to do with the total life of the church. I’m not going to preach about that. I’ll leave the organizational matters for later, but it has put me in a frame of mind to be thinking about the church. So this sermon is partially occasioned by that. But also…
I happened to be reading something this week, just sort of casually, but I came across a sentence that caught my attention and made me stop and reflect. The sentence said something to the effect of, “The church can no longer be content just to do what it is good at.” Now I suspect that for most people that sentence would not seem particularly noteworthy. But it was for me, and if you’ll bear with me, I want to take a few minutes to tell you why.
For the better part of the years I have spent in the ministry, I served churches that were struggling in many ways. They had relatively small membership. Although there are lots of UCC churches in and around Chicago, we were in urban neighborhoods where the United Church of Christ was a distinct minority and not well understood, and where for that and other reasons the prospects for any significant growth in the congregation were pretty dim. And the financial picture was beyond dim, downright grim. There were no substantial endowments supporting the ministries of the church. Always in the back of peoples’ minds, and fairly often in the front, was the question of how long the church would be able to go on. The threat of running out of money or members, or running out of having enough energy and good health to carry on, was always quite real, not just a theoretical possibility. What the church was able to do, even to think about doing, seemed quite limited, and its future very much in doubt.
In this context, it was easy for people to feel not very joyful and not very hopeful. In this context it was a real temptation for people to wring their hands about all the things that were not possible and to focus on that rather than on what was possible. In some cases people were also afflicted by memories of how things used to be, which only served to highlight the things that were no longer possible that once had been reality. If there is such a thing as congregational self-esteem, it suffered. Messages from the wider culture as to what success ought to look like tended to make people feel like they were deficient in some way. They were clearly not successful. Messages from the wider church, from leaders and people encouraging church growth and renewal, were not much better, in fact quite often were even worse. The message people were getting, seemingly from every which way, was that they were failing, failing both in the sense of diminishing, as in failing health, and also failing in the sense of just not measuring up to some outside standard of what churches are supposed to be.
The alternative to all this as I saw it was for us, me and the people of these congregations, to focus less, much less, on what we were not able to do and much more on what we were able to do. It just seemed like common sense and good practice. Just as individuals should build on their strengths and not focus on all the things they can’t do—if you’re not good at athletics or math or music, you don’t berate yourself and feel like a failure because of it, you focus yourself on other things that are more in keeping with who you are. You do what you can, not what you can’t. Just as that seems like common sense in individual terms, so it seemed to me the best course for congregations.
And I tried to bring that message whenever I could and support it wherever I found it. I thought it was valid then. I think it is valid now. I would take the same approach if I had it to do all over again. And, I might say, I don’t think this applies just to the kinds of situations I have been describing, where congregations were struggling along on the edge of survival. I think it applies to situations where things are going well too. Whoever we are, whatever our situation, we build on our strengths, use the gifts we have; we don’t worry ourselves to death over the gifts we lack. Another way of saying that would be to say that we try to be who we are in the best way possible; we don’t try to become someone else.
But so then I come across this statement in some casual reading that says point blank that churches should not be content, cannot afford any longer (I can’t remember exactly how it was phrased) to just do the things they are good at. That seems like an attitude that is the exact opposite of the attitude I spent so many years trying to foster in the congregations I have served. And so it did cause me to stumble a bit over those words. Does the author really mean that? Doesn’t he know how some churches unhelpfully beat themselves up because they are not meeting some image of the church they got from who knows where? Doesn’t he believe, as I do, that churches need to discern what their particular gifts are, just as much as individuals do? And so on. I was resisting the statement.
But after thinking about it for a while, I realized that he probably did know all about what I was thinking, and was saying what he had to say anyway. And after thinking about it for a little while longer, I realized I probably agreed with what he was getting at, even though I still believed what I’ve tried to describe to you and even though what he said seemed to be in direct contradiction to that. I realized that this may be one of those cases, which it seems I am running across quite often these days, where two apparently contradictory things can both be valid.
It remains true, it seems to me, that the process of discerning what your strengths or gifts may be and building on those is an important one for both individuals and groups, including congregations—and much to be preferred over being regretful about all the rest—things that are not among your gifts or within your resources. On the other hand, at the same time, it is also true that if we do focus on what we think are our gifts or our strengths, have a healthy sense of who we are, and are content to be who we are not trying to be someone else, if we have all those good qualities to the exclusion of anything else, we will probably not be open to growth, not growth in the sense of numbers but spiritual growth, if you will.
This is also a matter mostly of common sense, certainly nothing very complicated. One way of expressing this kind of an attitude is to talk about the need for us occasionally and as much as we can to move out of our comfort zone, because that is where growth takes place. Without that, we may well end up not just doing what we are best at but repeating what we are used to, which is a much less attractive, and much less healthy, quality. So there is this other, seemingly contradictory, approach that talks about moving out of our comfort zones and asks us to ask ourselves not just where our gifts may lie but what our growing edges may be. And Paul had some language for it too. He said, “I want to know Christ…not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal, but I press on to make it may own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own, but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal…”
Regardless of all those things I said in the first half of the sermon, which as I say I still believe, it seems to me that this image of Paul’s is also a good one for people of faith. It’s always a good thing for us to ask ourselves where our growing edges are in all matters, but certainly including those areas we think of as spiritual. For Christians, for instance, to be entirely comfortable in their beliefs is not a sign of a vital faith. Equally, for seekers to be comfortable in their doubts about religion or the questions they ask does not lead to growth or to anything in particular. It’s always a good thing for us to be asking ourselves where the growing edges are in our inner lives or in our spiritual practice.
Likewise with congregations, which as I say is more what’s on my mind today. Specifically at Sojourners it is probably worthwhile for us to consider the statement that I referred to as giving me pause that said congregations should avoid being content with what they do well. We at Sojourners are probably by our nature a bit on the edge of the Christian mainstream. Many of us live in a kind of uneasy relationship either with what we may think of as traditional Christian beliefs or with the Christian church as we have experienced it. I include myself in that, even though I have lived my whole adult life in the church, made my living there, and invested myself in the life of the church. Many of us, myself included, are glad to have found a place that is in many ways on the edge of the Christian mainstream, because we ourselves have felt ourselves for many reasons, for whatever reason, to be on the edge of Christianity and therefore find Sojourners to feel like home.
A large part of Christianity, for instance, what seems like the dominant part, has been exclusive in practice, if not in theory. On the one hand it has been exclusive because it has excluded whole groups of people, segregated itself by race and class, refused to extend welcome to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people, and people of differing abilities—has been exclusive in that sense. It has also been exclusive in the sense of believing itself to be the exclusive possessor of religious truth and/or the only road to salvation. There may be little pieces of truth in other religions or some nice teachings, because after all other religions sometimes have teachings that are similar to those in Christianity, so they’re ok, but in the end Christian beliefs are superior and offer the way to get closest to God and the only way to guarantee the salvation of your soul. To say that we at Sojourners live on the edge of that kind of Christianity may be an understatement. We would rather be entirely separate from that kind of Christianity, but we are on the edge in the sense of straining toward some different kind of Christianity that has not yet been achieved but that may be struggling to emerge.
I think and hope that we Christians, many of us, are in the process of birth pangs, straining toward a new more inclusive view of things where we can hold our own truths sincerely and deeply without denying or denigrating the truths, beliefs, experiences of other religions and faith traditions and of course where we are able to welcome and include all people in the faith community and where that welcome is no longer a source of debate and division. We are on the edge of a future that we are praying for, a future that is not here yet, but that is emerging, albeit slowly and sometimes painfully, and we are part of that emerging, part of the birth pangs of a new kind of Christianity. There is a movement among Christians these days that actually refers to itself as the emerging church, and that includes a broad spectrum of Christians from many backgrounds. We are gladly part of that emerging Christian church, not some eccentric accident that sprang up here in Charlottesville.
But it is possible to be too content, even with life on the edge. It is possible to lose the edge of being on the edge. One way to avoid that is to recognize the truth of that little sentence that troubled me a bit when I first read it, but that I came to realize is important. That no church these days, perhaps ever but let’s just stick to our current situation, that no church should be content just continuing to do the things it does well. Not even churches that are already living on the edge of the mainstream. We need to be in an uneasy relationship not just with mainstream Christianity, but also with ourselves, always with ourselves. We do well to consider where our gifts are, but also where our growing edges are. That will not be on the agenda for our congregational meeting today, but it does need to be part of our thinking and praying as a congregation. May God continue to accompany us along our journey. Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 28, 2007