(21) Reopening The Church

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Reopening The Church, originally shared on June 8, 2020. It was the twenty-first video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   When I was serving my first parish, in Compton, we had provided our worship space for a revival, led by a American Samoan church in our neighborhood.

   I had not had much experience with revivals, and I wanted to be a good host, so I attended. I was invited to sit with the pastors and elders of the congregation.

   Whatever season it took place, it was a warm night and our air-conditioning system was straining to make the people in the packed worship space comfortable. We had left the double doors at the entryways open to provide a little more circulation.

   On the first night, at the end of the service, the revivalist invited me to come forward and “open the doors of the church.”

   I was confused and gestured toward the entryway as I leaned in to him and said quietly, “The doors to the church are open.”

   He said, also quietly, “No, invite people to join the church.”

   In all the history of revival, I’m guessing that what followed was the most tepid invitation to Christianity ever attempted.

   Billy Graham, the mid-20^th century evangelist who was somewhat controversial but widely respected, ended segregated crusades in early 1950’s, was the one who bailed The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. out of jail during the Birmingham demonstration, after one crusade was criticized for having set Christianity back 100 years. Is reported to have said, “Then I have failed, for my intention was to set Christianity back 2,000 years!”

   The Christian Church came into being with a bang! Pyrotechnics! Mystery! Simultaneous translation! The doors to the church weren’t just opened. They were blown off their hinges.

*Acts 2:1-12

   That was the birthday of the Christian Church. It was born as a wildly inclusive community. What would it take to make the Church today such a community in such a way that is more than an abstraction?

   We live in times that have given us a great opportunity to reflect on what kind of Church we want to be.

   We have been given an opportunity to reopen in a way that reflects the diversity of the Early Church, the first Christians, united in the Holy Spirit, the ongoing personal presence of God for good in the world?”

   We an opportunity to reopen to being a church that defines racial injustice as a core value because we are all brothers and sisters in Christ, to being a model for the larger culture, to committing ourselves to having those uncomfortable conversations, again and again, until we begin to understand each other.

   We have been given an opportunity to rethink what we emphasize as the Church. I once read, and often quoted, “The church is not a museum for saints, it’s a hospital for sinners.” Then I read a better way, “The church is not a hospital for sinners waiting for the poor wretches to come in, it’s more like the paramedics to go to where people are hurting and start them on the road to healing.” We may see the end of being an attractional Church, and move toward being a Missional church.

   We have an opportunity to reopen to the possibility of opening-up, to being open to new people. My hero, Lyle Schaller, a church development advisor, often commented that every church wants to grow, but very few are really willing to pay the price, to give up our cherished status for the sake of Christ.

   King Duncan, one of the ten or so preachers who have been most influential in my own preaching (along with, Anthony Compolo, Leonard Sweet, Fred Craddock, and Pastors Vernon Anderson, Will Hertzfeld, Cliff Swanson, MLK, Jr., Narrative Preaching, and Robert Goeser) once told a story about how, as a younger pastor, he was listening to the radio one Sunday morning as he got ready to go to church.

   He had tuned into the worship service of a new congregation on the edge of town that he had heard had been attracting a lot of new Christians. The pastor had just started with the announcements.

   “Before we begin our worship service, I have a few announcements,” he said. “First, if anyone has to go to the bathroom, go now. When you go in the middle of the service, it’s distracting, especially if you raise your hand to ask.

   “Second, if you see someone you know, don’t yell at them to get their attention during worship. Others want to hear the service.

   “Third, if there’s a point you don’t understand, or you want to make a comment during the sermon, wait until after the service. It delays the service.

   “And fourth, if you decide you don’t like your seat after worship has begun, please don’t move to another location. It disrupts the service…”

   As he listened, King Duncan said, he was cracking-up. “What kind of hillbilly church is this? I would never have to explain things like this to the people of my congregation. They know the rules”

   And then he thought, “Of course my congregation knows the rules. They’ve been there forever. Which one of us is doing a better job of reaching people with the Gospel? People who don’t know the rules?

   We have an opportunity to re-open as a Church, to be changed by new people, to be patient as they learn what it means to be the Christian church, with the humility, a gift of the Holy Spirit, as simply fellow Christians.

   One of my favorite books on church development is a little book called, How to Knock Over A 7-11 and Other Ministry Training. 

   It tells the story of a group of people who go to a smallish town of 9,000 people in Colorado to start a church.

   The strategy was for each of the group to be a specialist in one aspect of church ministry, so that a large church staff was present from the founding of the church. The staff would each get a part-time job to support them until the church grew and they could make their church specialty their full-time job.

   That wasn’t working. And, the staff was getting more and more frustrated.

   One night, they were having a strategy meeting and it got so heated that the lead pastor had to yell at the staff, “You people are so disorganized, you couldn’t knock over a 7-11,” and stormed out of the room and up onto the rooftop patio.

   He said, I wish I could say that I went up on thee roof to pray, but I just went up there to cool-off.

   When he had, as he came down and approached the room where he staff was meeting, he heard them laughing and saying things like, OK Jim, you get the get-away car, Julie, you get the guns, I’ll watch for the police…, and they had bonded over their plan.

   Everyone had also cooled down and they decided to take a new approach. They decided to be a servant church first; a professional nonprofit church organization second.

   The asked around to see what was needed and learned that the community really needed a handyman business. So they started one. They learned how-to skills on YouTube and kept their prices low. Then, they found that a restaurant was needed, so they started one and hired local people needing a job. If you didn’t have the money for a meal you could trade work for it. They started a low-cost car repair place for single moms and people who just needed transportation so that they could get to work. Then they started a summer outdoor movie theater and kept admission and snack prices low so that a family could afford to go.

   After several years of getting known in the community as people who genuinely came to serve, they opened their worship ministry. They have thousands of members in a town of 9,000 because they came to serve the community first.

*Matthew 5:14-16

   Flip. We become a new church, a new creation, if we are open to letting the Holy Spirit transform the Church and make of it a new Creation, as it has first transformed God’s people. 

   We have seen a lot of information about the death of George Floyd, but not much about his life. Christianity Today magazine ran an article quoting his fellow ministry workers in Houston, where Mr. Floyd’s memorial service and funeral is happening today and tomorrow. He was a leader in a ministry in the historically black Third Ward, “particularly in the Cuney Homes housing project known as “the Bricks”. He led an outreach particularly to young black men that included Bible studies, help with doctors appointments, worship services, 3-on-3 basketball tournaments, bar-b-ques, and community baptisms.

   We see this image of service and proclamation most clearly at the cross: sacrificial love for all humanity. We are created in God’s image and made a new Creation in Jesus Christ, and a new community in the Holy Spirit: One God.

   We are not yet one, except in Christ, and we are not all the same. But, if we reopen the Church in the power of the Holy Spirit, we can be changed for the better, and we can see in our status as children of God something more important than our differences.

   Each of us has a contribution to make toward building up the Body of Christ, the Church. Each of us has something to give that is crucially necessary to re-open the Church. Let your light so shine!

   Let the streams of living water, the power and person of the Holy Spirit shape you from within to reach others as their servants in the name of Jesus Christ.