Dear friends in Christ,

     If you haven’t already, please read the 3 summaries I posted from the book Claiming Resurrection in the Dying Church.  You can find them below this article.  

This Sunday we will be doing some DREAMING and discerning for the future of our church during worship.  I hope anyone reading this (including non-members) will attend and participate in this dreaming with the Holy Spirit on Pentecost Sunday.  We will be worshiping in the Fellowship Hall.  

     If you don’t like to think of the church as dying, here is a summary of an article by Shannon Hopkins that claims the church is not dying but transforming into very different forms.  My summaries are in italics.

     Picture this: An old church is now a cafe. From 9 to 5, it serves coffee, cakes and sandwiches in the historic hallowed space, with light streaming through the stained glass. Young people with piercings serve chai and lattes to customers of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds. Then, on a Sunday evening, with the smell of coffee still in the air, people gather around tables to talk about justice, economics and to question the role faith plays in their lives.

     …church is changing. Yet many of our structures, systems and ways of doing church still hang on a model from another era. Modern life is different. Work, dating, community life, technology are different … shouldn’t church be?

     This is a question I’ve been asking for nearly 30 years. After Easter worship, my friend Kim said, while her experience in church had been nice in some ways, she had felt like a fish out of water… I had friends who were longing for conversations about meaning and purpose–but church was the last place they would look for such discussions.

     Over the last 20 years, I’ve worked to create communities that offer space for deep relationships and deep questions while at the same time serving people less fortunate than ourselves. I’ve tried a lot of experiments, building the road as I’ve walked it.

     In turbulent times, we look for the safe harbor, the thing that doesn’t change, to help us stay grounded. For the church…the gospel…is the thing, not the form of church.

     As new forms of mission and ministry are taking shape, this is a moment of hope as well as pain. Just like the messy but beautiful process of giving birth, the re-imagining of the landscape of the church is an intricate dance of pain and promise.

     There’s always a risk when we step into the new. We have to let go of something to make room for fresh things. Isn’t this a hallmark of the Lord’s leading? There is an invitation to trust. …

     Just look around and you will find kitchen table entrepreneurs putting idle church kitchens into service, using food to address loneliness and

food insecurity. Churches are also leveraging their land to meet the needs of their neighbors with efforts such as affordable housing, senior communities.

     These new models are…showing the world a dynamic church, transforming the lives of people and the community around them. To me, that looks like the gospel in action.

     If you are in a church longing to see something new, how do you know where to start?

• Don’t look back. When I travel, I’m often struck by the way that people in other countries seem to be looking ahead, looking forward. I find that in the U.S. and Europe we tend to look back to the “good old days.” This is not a time to look back but rather a time to look ahead and embrace the future.
• Lament. You do need to grieve what is being lost. The ability to grieve well is a signature gift of those with Christian faith. After all, we believe in a gospel of death and resurrection.
• Experiment. When you try new things, hold them lightly. If you want to do something with food, host a farmers’ market or a pop-up restaurant, but do it once or twice before making further plans and see what you learn. If you know a lot of people working from home, try a work-from-church day. As you set off to do some experiments, it is helpful to embrace a theology of enough and to approach it as a learning exercise.
• Serve. It is important to adopt an attitude of service and to make justice a priority. This starts by really seeing others, loving others and understanding the challenges they face. Launch a listening tour in which you ask questions, listen deeply and find out from your neighbors what they need most. Then start right there! It will lead you to bigger systemic issues, and you’ll be able to approach that complex work grounded in the experiences of those most directly affected.
• Be open to surprise. We know that the ways of God are not our ways. After all, God came to us as an infant and not as someone in power. Be ready to be surprised — and to surprise your community — by doing something new. The church is turning up and creating impact in ways that are unexpected.

     I use the acronym BLESS to teach these five steps: Don’t Look Back, Lament,Experiment, Serve, Surprise.

     The world hasn’t been expecting the church to radically change… To be honest, a lot of people see the church as an in-group seeking to push its own agenda. But that isn’t our story…We can repurpose our sacred buildings so they can shimmer with hope and justice for all.         

Walking forward in faith.

Pastor Susan

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.”