(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for The Rise, originally shared on June 11, 2020. It was the twenty-second video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Many businesses are re-opening this week
even as states all over the country, particularly in the southern half, are
reporting spikes in new COVID-19 cases, now about two weeks from the Memorial
Day holiday. Some churches are also trying to discern whether or not to
re-open.
We know what churches will have to do to try
and keep people safe at in-person worship.
I would like to suggest that we also
consider what the Church should be as we reopen. What kind of church should we
be as we consider the new realities.
After I retired, almost two years ago, we were
ecclesiastical nomads for about 6-months. We went to a different church every
Sunday. The greatest number was Lutheran, but we went to churches of a wide
variety of other denominations as well.
One of the things I noticed at pretty much
every church I visited was that it was clear to me why someone would want to join
most of those churches. An educational ministry, a choir, a band, a worship
service, an organization, a pastor. But, I did not see why anyone would come to
Christ at those churches.
What is the purpose of our Churches, what
message do we communicate, intentionally or otherwise, and what do we offer the
community?
How does the Church reach people with the
good news of reconciliation with God at the cross?
One way is to consider how the faithful
followers of Jesus Christ, the Church, grew from a few despised and frightened
individuals, to a growing counter-cultural movement, and the official religion
of the Roman Empire in just a few centuries. What did they do?
How do Churches that are now re-opening
during what we hope are the final days of the Coronavirus pandemic rise, adapt
and minister?
What do we do, in what we pray are the early
days of renewed national soul-searching regarding race relations and the
injustices experienced by the African-American community in particular, do to
rise, adapt and minister?
One way is to consider what the inclusive
community of the early church did when it was known to be a servant Church before it was
known to be an institutional Church.
In Christian sociologist Rodney Stark’s
book, The Rise of Christianity, he describes studies of the growth and development
of the Church in its early centuries from the records of the time.
He expected that the Church as a whole would
have had had a choppy record, depending on the degree of persecution by the
Roman Empire. He found instead that the church grew by a steady rate during those
first few centuries.
He discovered that the church grew because the
actions produced by its faith gained the respect of the citizens of the Empire
everywhere it was planted.
In those day, if an unwanted child was born into
a family, usually a girl, it would be taken into the woods and left there.
People believed that if the gods wanted it to die it would die, and if the gods
wanted it to live it would live. Conscience clear.
Christians would go into the woods and
collect those babies and bring them into their own homes and raise them. When
there were too many, Christians founded the first orphanages.
When plagues struck, in urban areas in
particular, anyone with any money at all would flee to their country houses to
ride it out.
Christians stayed and nursed their own back
to health, as well as anyone who was sick, at great risk to themselves.
When there were too many, Christians founded
the first hospitals.
Christianity’s high regard for women and the
subsequent treatment of women was attractive
to women as well as to men.
*Acts
9:36-42,43
That’s some kind of afterthought! What
information does that tell us about Peter and the early Church?
The book of Acts (short for Acts of the Apostles) tells us of the first
years of the Christian church. It is the greatest church growth manual ever
written.
Look
at the day of Pentecost, the birthday of the Church. Holy fire appeared not on
candles, but on the heads of the first Christians! It was incendiary. The tower
of Babel was reversed.
If we live as this Church, born and impowered by the Holy Spirit, we
will be an inclusive church. It's natural. If we're not inclusive, something is
wrong.
Can we now ask how much of our identity
comes from God, and how much is just something we have constructed to make
ourselves feel comfortable?
Who are we, and how do we become more of a
movement of the Holy Spirit and less of a cultural and political institution?
How do we address the issues of racial injustice? It won’t be a program
to receive more black people. That's recruitment not evangelism. To open the
church we must practice pro-social distancing. That is, distancing ourselves from
the way our society is now.
There
has to be room for people to enter. We
have to loosen the very ties that bind us together today in order to allow more
people to come in. We have to broaden the definition, spoken and unspoken,
conscious or unconscious, of who we are as the Body of Christ.
We can’t just
check the boxes of a one-size-fits-all program. There will be more listening
than talking, more asking than giving answers, and more action than
contemplation.
I read a story about an Indian evangelist
who had had a great deal of success reaching university students. When he was
asked what was his program, he replied, “I just love them until they ask me
why.”
That is not the same as following a
political or ideological agenda, of being a social service agency that
sometimes uses religions language as a motif. It means embracing the gift of a
living relationship with the living God in a way that is expressed in love of
God and neighbor, of knowing the love of God in Jesus Christ and sharing it
with the people we know.
Dorcas was loved because she loved in the
name of God. What is our reputation in the community? What good works and acts
of charity are we known for?
What if Jesus were to say to the Church,
“Get up! Rise! Rise up! What should we do? What would we do?
Love people until they ask why. Open our
hearts and our churches to receive the gifts and power of the Holy Spirit to be
a servant church as we first have seen the grace of the servant God.
When I was in the Marine Corps, I was
stationed in a place where we one day received a new sergant. He had previously
been a drill instructor and came to us after being found guilty of 27 counts of
maltreatment of recruits. When the lights went on at 5:30 a.m., he would walk
from bed to bed with his palm held up and say, “Rise!”
There
was something in the way he intoned that single word that cut through the
deepest sleep, and we awakened. On his second trip around the room if, for any
reason, someone was still asleep, he would place is palm up and, with a little
more intensity say, “Rise!”
If that person still didn’t get up, he would
lift the end of the bed frame and spin it upside down.
By this time, most people would be awake.
Maybe that’s where we are in our society.
Maybe these events are God’s wake-up call.
This time may be God’s call for The Rise.
No comments:
Post a Comment