The Church of Your Dreams

Have you had occasion to be in a group where the focus of conversation was: tell me your wildest dream? This so-called “ice-breaker” tactic to evoke conversation often occurs within groups looking to focus on “change.” What would we have to do to: get different results; expand our market; keep our employees; fire-up or staff, etc. It’s a strategy to free people from “censoring” their own thoughts. It promotes a nonjudgmental framework and encourages a safe, dynamic conversation.

Our urban pastors’ group met this past week. Our focus is to find new ways to be and do church within in a metropolitan region, not just inside a city. So we’re looking at how we need to change the way we lead congregations, adjust our preaching and deepen the relationships among the members in these 12 congregations. It’s a tall order. I’m not sure how good we are at this design process, but we’re learning a lot and we’re having some fun.

Part of our difficulty is wrapping our heads, as well as our hearts and emotions, around what church is. Sometimes churches, or congregations, take on the trappings of institutions. We have constitutions, bylaws, boards, budgets, incomes and expenses, staff, contracts for services.

At other times, churches look like voluntary organizations. We choose a mission statement. We identify a vision and articulate core values to guide our way toward achieving the vision. We have members, programs and services, and patrons or clients.

Lately, it’s become fashionable for churches to look like mini-malls. Those churches see themselves as competitors in the bazaar. They have target markets and boutiques to attract a variety of consumers – most former regulars at churches that have closed or resist making changes. They have niche products geared to an array of customers. They offer multiple levels of affiliation available to an array of shoppers.

Of all the things that institutions, organizations and stores don’t do well, two stand out. These are, reinventing themselves, and going out of business, or dying.

Now the latter isn’t hard. Institutions, businesses and stores die all the time; churches too. Often it’s sad and painful. Usually it’s avoidable, or at least it was at one time if folks there had been open to doing the primary mission instead of maintenance of the status quo. That just takes a little stretching, like doing old things in new ways, doing new things in old ways, and even doing new things in new ways.

It’s not completely impossible for institutions, organizations and even churches to reinvent themselves. Anybody here live through the polio epidemic? How did we fund the research to find a cure for polio? Right, the March of Dimes. Did they go out of business when Dr. Salk invented his vaccine? No, they reinvented themselves and refocused their fund-raising and research efforts on finding cures for a broad range of birth defects.

That was doing a new thing in an old way. Now they’re into internet giving. That’s doing an old thing in a new way. My guess is stretching like that has made them more open to doing a new thing in a new way. They may already be doing that and I just haven’t heard about it yet.

Here in Indiana, Ivy Tech, a postsecondary vocational school, has morphed, finally, into a rather comprehensive community college system. They now offer dual credit enrollment for high school drop-outs, retrain laid off workers, and obtain contracts from businesses to upgrade employees’ knowledge and skills, as well as humanities courses with transferable credit to many of the state’s baccalaureate degree granting institutions.

Our group of 12 pastors is working hard to think outside the box. In the beginning, we seemed more eager to think wildly outside somebody else’s box rather than our own. I told a pastor serving within one of the city’s “old” first-ring suburbs he should reach out to all the Spanish-speakers who live nearby. I offered that another ought to “swap” locations with his congregation’s cemetery. The graveyard’s location is more prime than is the site of the worship center, and, I ventured, the view of the occupants of the former would remain, essentially, unchanged! Not to be outdone, a colleague suggested we should sell our building, move into a strip mall on a busier street, and use our “new” and significant assets to fund mission instead of scrapping to pay bills each month.

At our meeting this past Thursday and Friday, I think we experienced a break through. Now I know you’ll think I’m nuts, but we had the breath through because we broke down some of our doctrinally theological language. We really do talk about that kind of stuff, because we take our vocation from God and our calls from the congregations we serve very seriously.

We were talking about Luther’s definition of church. He said it boiled down to this: where the Gospel is preached boldly (his word was purely) and the sacraments administered rightly. In part, it’s those two adverbs, boldly and rightly, that led to our insight.

But before we unpacked them, and what they mean for living the definition, I spoke up. I said those features, preaching Gospel and administering sacraments may be necessary, but they are not sufficient. Of course, all eyes were on me because you don’t sound like your dissing Luther in that group without paying a price.

I had to explain quickly what I meant. If we let Luther’s phrase become a slogan instead of a distinctive characteristic of our identity as humans who are Christian, there’s a danger we’ll cease to be a body and become an organization.

When that happens, then the Gospel becomes a product we peddle, and the sacraments become a service we sell. If that weren’t bad enough, we peddle what we got and sell what we have, primarily, to and for ourselves.

That’s where those adverbs, boldly and rightly, come in. To preach the Gospel, boldly, is to preach it the way Jesus did; to those who need to here it, in the places where they are. Of course that means we preach it here, but only so it can be lived, heard and shared out there. To administer the sacraments rightly, means to share them the way Jesus and his first followers did, offering baptism and communion to everyone so they can unlearn sin and learn holiness. Of course that means we do sacraments here, but only so their effects can be lived, seen and shared out there.

In short, we become disciples in here, with Gospel and sacraments, so we can become apostles out there, with Gospel and sacraments.

We are the Body of Christ, who is in the world. That means we do some organizational things like establish constitutions and bylaws. We also do some institutional things like buy and maintain property. We do some voluntary association things like pledge our time and money so we can offer programs and services with and for our neighbors and ourselves. We may even do some marketing things like purchase ads in newspapers, print brochures, mail newsletters, and set up a blog site. And, believe, me, we try to do all those activities boldly and rightly as well. See, the institutional, organizational and commercial things we do, are put in the service of the church’s mission to call, gather and equip us (as disciples), so we can be witnesses (as apostles) of God for us, in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.

There really is no other reason to be here you know. Even if you want to say, you’ve only heard the Gospel preached timidly, here. If you need to say, you’ve only experienced the sacraments imperfectly, here. You have to have heard enough to believe and seen enough to trust that you don’t need to be here to still be in the running to have a seat at either Jesus’ right or left, when Jesus brings us all into his glory. Jesus has already become your ransom. You are free. If you can hold onto that, you are likely, sufficiently discipled.

The conversations you’ll have out there, that allow you to take your rightful role as bold preacher and fitting sacrament-izer will likely begin much the way James and John approached Jesus. Someone will come to you, selfishly, and ask you to get them a God-sized favor, grant them a God-sized wish, and give them the God-sized gift they want. Here are three things you can do.

Your first task is to recognize the bondage they’re in, because you’ve been, at least, that selfish. Your second task is to offer to bring them into relationship with a people who can help them begin to unlearn sin and learn holiness. Your third task is to assure them that everyone they meet here has not yet completed the second task. Each of us is, all of us are, still on the discipling way desperately trying to unlearn sin and waiting on God to keep learning us into holiness.

I’m trusting, too, that you’ll tell them, that you’ve found this place and the people who shape it, including yourself, are more open to mission than we are opting for maintenance. If you tell them the whole truth, you’ll say we’ve been reinventing ourselves since at least the mid-30’s when we stopped praising God in Danish and began worshiping God in English. You can tell them that, here, conflict is an opportunity for us to cherish the living faith of the dead, not hang onto the dead faith of the living. You can tell them that we’re both proud and fond of our past, even as we’re faithful to our future.

You can testify to them that you know we are and do church here, because, in your new freedom, you find God is still eager to make you anew, still present enough to get you through, and always powerful enough to bring you over into the ways of God’s will and work.

I’m hoping you can also tell them that everyone in here is a servant to each. You won’t have to tell them that we’re also all slaves of all those out there. They’ll already know that because you, having been ransomed by a living, loving Christ from the death sentence you used to live under, have made your mind completely available to them and your heart thoroughly open to them.

They might begin to wonder if, indeed, this is not a church beyond their wildest dreams!