Dear friends in Christ,

     Two weeks ago, I shared the section from Anna B. Olsons’ book Claiming Resurrection in the Dying Church entitles “Go!” But where?  This last section of the book introduces us to “A New Country.” My summaries again are in italics.

     After “Getting Up.” getting moving and discovering our gifts and new people along the way, we find ourselves in a new county.  The new country in which we find ourselves is closer to death and also to what lies beyond. As we move, we close the door on what has gone before…we edge closer to the end of what we have held most dear, fought for, defended at great cost… All these offerings—all these small deaths along the way—give us practice and courage …We walk in the faith that resurrection lies beyond death…that the road will open when we get there.

     This section is more spiritual than practical. It’s about what it actually feels like to get out of the boat and walk toward Jesus on the strength of invitation and faith alone… about what it looks like to be a church…who offer ourselves for death and resurrection. …The 3 practices in this section are about the ups and downs of living deeply into neighborhood-building gifts. 

1. Look Outside the Tent: invites you to give up on doing it yourself. Olson tells the story of Moses yelling at God that this leadership thing is too much for him. Read Numbers 11:4-17 & 24-30. (see also Mark 9:38-41) Notice where Eldad and Medad are in the scheme of things. The Spirit is in “unauthorized” places. This story… answers the question of what is God up to while we are freaking out and trying to get organized. Spilling Spirit all over the darn place, that’s what. The 21^st century church assumes leadership comes from within and offers things for others to consume. We want to take credit for our efforts. This is the next death to which we are called: letting go of needing what happens next to be ours…that for our churches to have life, people will have to come to us. Time to look outside the tent. No matter how broadly you define the church’s tent, everything you have tried so far…has been an inside-the-tent job. What if the Spirit is busy outside the tent…What if we ask those outside what they need and offer what we have to what the Spirit is doing outside our tent? Invite them to use your tent. Be their ally. Show up. Care about what they care about.
2. Expect Trespass: reminds you not to expect this neighbor business to be simple. If we expect living with our neighbors always to conform to our expectations, we will miss wisdom, transcendence and resurrection. The longer our congregations have gone without incorporating new people, the more sensitive we become to small incursions into “our” space.  Forgive!
3. When Faith and Hope Fail, Try Love: re-remembering the call to be neighbor even when it’s not going so well. Who is my neighbor? Neighbor comes from the Greek root that just means “close by.” However, we seek to wiggle out of any commitment to the people around us who don’t seem like promising relationship material. Consider Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan. He took the general instruction (“love your neighbor”) and turned itinto something more specific. Be a neighbor. Care what happens to people… who your people don’t historically get along with. Roll up our sleeves and cross the street. We have to get out there.  What if everyone behaves badly? There are times in the process of being neighbors when it is easy to lose hope…even possibly faith. Then all that is left is love. Read 1 Cor. 13:13. There will be moments when you wonder if your neighbors are worth the trouble and moments…your neighbors have decided your congregation are definitely not worth the trouble. There will be things that you will not understand. At those moments, try approaching the layers of misunderstanding heart-first, not head-first.

     Walking forward with you in faith,

Pastor Susan

Here are the previous 2 articles from Claiming Resurrection in the Dying Church.

Article #1

     Here is a summary of “Section One: Get Up” from the book Claiming Resurrection in the Dying Church: Freedom beyond Survival by Anna B. Olson. My summary statement will be in italics.

Make Room: “Where will the future happen in your church?… Making room for the 

     future is a powerful act of faith. It assumes that God is not finished… “ 

Olson makes the point that we must love the future more than the past to have a future.  This can be painful.

“The future seems indifferent to the value of all we have been and tried to be, even to the gifts that we have offered with all our hearts….  Storing things that have passed beyond uselessness is and outward and visible sign of our love affair with the past…For many lifelong church members, the fear of throwing away accumulated stuff goes hand in hand with the fear of being discarded them-selves… it seems perilously close to trashing the love they contributed to the church—the trashing of “their” eras in favor of the era of some generation that doesn’t even seem to want or love the church…The distinction between throwing out stuff and throwing out people needs to be voiced loudly, explicitly and often.”

Loving God’s future is modeled after biblical love, not sentimental love.

“Biblical love is about offering, about sacrifice, about a willingness to see that which is our—even that which is us—disappear into something so large we are not able to comprehend it…Loving the future is a way to love God, to whom the future and all things in it belong.”

Map the Terrain: “Many churches have lost track of where we are. We get tangled 

up in who we are, and what we are doing, and worse yet, how we are doing. When we peek out it looks like a foreign land out there. Don’t hunker down…Be where you are…fully. Be with the people who are there with you….Too often we begin conversation about getting the neighbors to church with only the foggiest idea of who they are…. If your church started its life serving a predominantly or exclusively white community, … Be assured, …that any non-Anglo neighbors you have now will likely perceive your historically white church as ethnically specific—in other words not for them.”

The most important direction to look is OUT.  We need to look out at our changed and changing community, walk the streets, talk to new people, and get to know our neighbors.

Turn Out Your Pockets: “Abundance is a trendy word in church-speak these days

…For dying churches, reality is about scarcity.  We recognize ourselves as dying because there is not enough of something we need to keep going—usually people, energy, money, or building resources…. We tend to hang on tighter and tighter to what we have left—to the things that stand between us and the end of church as we know it…It’s time to give it all up to God’s purpose and see what your meager resources can do. Risk the joy of seeing what wasn’t enough for you become more than enough for Jesus.”

Turning out pockets means constantly finding more things we are called to give, enjoying how God uses them, and thereby cultivate more courage to give what we are holding back.

Article #2

     You won’t be surprised that I like this next section of the book Claiming Resurrection in the Dying Church.  It is entitled, “Go!”  You’ve noticed that I’ve been chomping on the bit to go somewhere with this church since I got here.  So… let’s see what this section teaches us about going…somewhere. My summaries again are in italics.

   Anna Olson writes: “You’ve gotten up…made some room…taken a look outside, turned out your pockets. It’s time to go…. It’s time to engage with the neighbors you’ve discovered; to enter their worlds on their terms as best you can; to try doing some things with the materials at hand; to risk saying yes to the people who come your way, even if you’re not at all sure they are the ones you were waiting for.”

   Our beloved Bible is a book of people on the move.” From Abraham to lands unknown, to Moses from Egypt (almost) to the Promised Land to exile and back, to Jesus itinerant ministry to Paul from the Damascus road to the known world. “Before we were Christians, we were the people of the Way. The gospel is a path not a place.”

   Jesus, angels and the prophets said repeatedly, “‘Do not be afraid.’…of looking stupid…not to know the answers…of small or even big messes. Or be afraid… but do these things anyway. Ask good questions. Explore new territory. Put yourself out there…On the road to death with Jesus, we have little to lose and everything to gain.”

   “Three practices…will get you out there. ‘Make Pilgrimage’…toward your neighbors in a respectful and life-giving way rather than waiting for them to move toward you…. At no point in Jesus’ ministry did he wait for people to come to him or suggest that the disciples set up camp in one pretty building, create quality programs…and wait for people to arrive. …Pilgrimage is different from study. It is possible to know…about your neighbor without actually knowing your neighbor or…their experience. Pilgrimage seeks to open my eyes and ears, generating good question and helping me to hear the answers….Where is the joy in your community? How do people celebrate?…Where is there sorrow? Outside the churches, who are the spiritual leaders? Pray with them.”

   “‘Try Things,’ specifically, things that you aren’t sure will work…or might be outright catastrophes. …Here are some questions that might help you come up

 with things to try:

• What evidence of spirituality did you see among your neighbors? Might you do something that would respond to what you saw? …
• What do your neighbors see when they look at your church? What signals are you sending?
• Is there something you could build, plant, paint, label of change that might send a signal of readiness for new life and new people?”

   “‘Say Yes’ when your neighbors actually come to you…recognize those mo-ments as gifts from God and make the most of small openings that can lead to holy relationships.  If we become just one more institution bent on meeting the bottom line and driven by customer satisfaction, we are dead already. Entering deeper relationship with the local community and surroundings requires reimagining and rediscovering our value and our life as places of and in com-munity.”  Lending, renting, and giving out space in our buildings according to neighbors’ requests gets us in touch with their needs. Don’t let worries about keys management, wear and tear, etc. stop you from saying “yes” to these requests. “The bottom line is this: When God sends us new people, our answer needs to be yes. These are our chances, much as we might like those chances to look a little different.  These are our opportunities to be part of the lives of the people we seek to engage.”