“WWJDCG?”

June 12, 2005

Scripture Reading:  Matthew 9:35 ff.

Rev. Dr. Carol L. Kerr 

Blue Point Congregational Church

 

Have you ever sent he bumper sticker “WWJD”  it means “What would Jesus Do?”  The intention behind the bumper sticker is to think about what Jesus would do and then do it yourself.  WWJDCG?  -  What would Jesus Do We are a small church.  Good question.  We seem very small this Sunday because it is the first where we don’t have Church School.  Being small we worry about our size.  The refrain is, “Wouldn’t it be nice to get some more members.”  Our smallness worries us.  It makes us insecure about our finances.  We wonder who can fill the slots on our committees.  All the work seems to be landing on the same people.   The passage in our lectionary for today is about evangelism.  That is a word the church uses meaning church growth.  (Not to be confused with evangelicals – which is a similar word but is different.)   The lectionary passage today specifically is about how Jesus told his disciples to evangelize, to go out and get more people on board.   If we are worried about being too small, it seems like we should do what Jesus did about church growth.  After all, we are Christians aren’t we?  So, here it is.  Straight from the horse’s mouth, today’s lectionary Matthew 9:35.  It sounds lovely really lovely – from a distance, say about 40,000 feet in the air.

Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness.  When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.  Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few;  therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness.  These are the names of the twelve apostles:  first, Simon, also known as Peter, and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee, and his brother John; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus; Simon the Cananaean, and Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed him.

These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions:  “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.  As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’  Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons….”

From a distance this sounds really good.  I particularly like the part that there are only 12 of them to start with.  They are worse off than we are.  They had even smaller number of people.    If they can do it we can do it.  From 40,000 feet in the air I imagine the twelve in their togas being blessed by Jesus and running over the hills of Palestine, effortlessly touching the lives of  hundreds with the message of Jesus. 

I can imagine Jesus blessing the disciples as they head out.  I can imagine Jesus blessing us too holding his big hands out over our heads and saying a prayer for us.  A chill went down the backbones of the disciples.  It sounds great.  Going out to reap the plentiful harvest sounds great, a chill goes down my backbone imagining it.  Let me do that for us now.  Close your eyes….”Bless us Lord, to go and harvest the lost, claim the unloved, bring the good news of your kingdom to all the earth.”  O.K. open your eyes.  Look at each other and see if you can tell the difference.  Take a deep breath  to test whether anything has changed.  Do you feel wiser, stronger, more capable.  Nope.  Just blessed, sort of.  Just tingly and curious and well ready – not for anything in particular, just generally ready for whatever is next.  What is next?

WWJDCG?  What would Jesus do about Church Growth.   If Jesus did it, we should do what Jesus did.   Lets now get a closer look to see what we are suppose to do.   The passage starts out harmlessly enough.  It says Jesus looks at the crowds and had compassion on them.  We can do that too.  We can summon up some compassion.  We can do that, even if this morning you did happen to stay up too late last night watching a movie.  How do Northern New Englanders show compassion come to think of it?  Some characters in Garrison Keillor’s monolog about the town, Lake Woebegone MN,  decided to see if there was anything better than the Lutheran Church.  They visited another nearby protestant denomination, the Methodist Church.  They were greeted at the door, “We’re so glad you’re here!  We love you!  Can we give you a hug?!”  The Lutherans replied, “No you may not.”  I can’t decide are we more like the Lutherans or the Methodists?   Anyhow, compassion isn’t too bad, we can figure that one out on a good day. 

Then Jesus tell his disciples to “Go to the lost sheep of Israel and proclaim the good news.  ‘The Kingdom of heaven has come near.’”  O.K.  That blessing feeling is beginning ot fade a bit.  Just how are we suppose to do that exactly?  Who are the lost sheep in Scarborough?  Is it the house to our right, or to our left.  Certainly that woman running what looked like an eight minute mile as I drove in here didn’t look too lost to me.  Are we suppose to get a group together and go door to door, knock and simply say, “The Kingdom of God is at hand?”  This is something the Mormons do, or the Seventh Day Adventists do.  In fact, I hate it when they come to my door.  They seem intrusive.    People from our denomination never do this kind of thing.  Our approach is more subtle.  What we do is introduce ourselves to a new neighbor.  We try to be as friendly as possible.  We never mention church outright, that would be intrusive.  But, we hope if they happen to be protestant, and they happen to be looking for a church, we hope they might see us drive into the parking lot of BBC here and maybe follow us next Sunday.  That is our style of evangelism.  Unfortunately that style is nowhere to be found in the Bible.   But, are we really suppose to do what Jesus told his apostles to do?  Are we suppose to say to this new person in town, “Hello.  Where did you move from?  By the way, the kingdom of God is at hand.”

However, that is the easy part.  WWJDCG gets harder.  Jesus wants the 12 disciples to start healing diseases.  So we are suppose to go and find someone sick, lay our hands on them and heal them.  This is beginning to be outrageous.  We can’t go out to perfect strangers, lay our hands on them and heal them!  Now, we are totally out of our comfort zone.  Maybe we can volunteer at the reception desk at the hospital.  That is as far as we are going to go healing people.  

WWJDCG  gets worse still.  He then wants us to ask if anyone has died lately, an aunt, a spouse, go and raise them from the dead.  This is would really impress the folks.  This would be the icing on the cake.   Maybe we could just make new bumper stickers and hand it to the bereaved as one minister put it at a funeral, “Remember good-bye isn’t ‘so long.’ – Raising the dead at Blue Point Congregational Church.”  

From a distance WWJDCG is a great idea but when you get up close to it, well, we would never do any of these things.  Maybe, we hope, it is because we are not in fact the 12 disciples.  After all, hanging around with the real thing, Jesus, would have done a lot for them and surely would have given them great powers, and courage.  We just have, me, Pastor Carol, kind of middle class housewife/clergy type.  I remember memorizing the names of the twelve disciples in Sunday school.  I thought back then, surely these were great men on a great mission.  This is another 40,000  feet in the air impression of the Bible.  When you take each name one a time several of them we really know little if anything about them at all.  Andrew was an evangelist for a few minutes then we know nothing about him after that.  There is Philip and Bartholomew who didn’t say much of anything.  Then there is James son of Alphaeus, who doesn’t seem to have done anything we know about either.  Then there is Thaddeus whoever he is was.  Simon of Cananaean, who is that?  

Unfortunately, the ones we don’t know much about sound better than the ones we do know something about.  There is Peter who denied Jesus three times.  There is doubting Thomas.  There is Matthew a hated tax collector, undoubtedly corrupt.  Last but no least there is Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed Jesus to the Romans at his crucifixion.  

In short, we can’t get off the WWJDCG hook that way.  The 12 apostles he sent out to the great harvest were not such a great bunch. 

Jesus said, “go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.  As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’  Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons….”  From 40,000 feet in the air it sounds like such a great plan.  But, from sea level here at the Blue Point Church it seems impossible.  It reminds of skiing.   My son, Gavin, loves doing the terrain parks where all the jumps and ski tricks called “freestyle” skiing happens.  He noticed that a lot of people hang out at the top of the course with their snowboards and skis talking about what great tricks they are going to do.  He noticed that they talk about them all the time, but they never go and do them.  “Hey man, I am going to do a “switch corkscrew 10/80”’  (Translated this means the skier is planning on jumping backwards, flying horizontal in the air, and rotating 3 times before he lands.)  “Really?  You are going to do a switch corkscrew 10/80?”  “Yeah man.  Right after lunch I’m going to do one.”   

So much for WWJDCG plan.  “Nice sermon Pastor.  Great ideas.  I got to go now.  See you at Christmas.”    Maybe these people were so different back then and it was such a far off time that it wasn’t written for us at all.  Maybe we are off the hook that way.  But, this is the Bible we are talking about.  If there is anything that is true it is here.  We are baptized Christians and believe that Jesus is Lord.  This passage has to have something to do with us.  Perhaps it has everything to do with us.   Furthermore, if we discount it, or escape it we must answer these nagging questions about ourselves:  Do we really care about lost people?  Isn’t the Kingdom of god at hand?  Or do we really think the kingdom of God is at arms length?  Do we sincerely believe that knowing Christ is the best way to live and the only way to die?  Don’t we believe that there are many people who are alienated and in desperate need of reconciliation.  Doesn’t God have to do with healing and life way more than hospitals and aspirin?   If we don’t have faith in these things, what kind of faith do we have.  And, this is the clincher, if we do have faith in these things, don’t we have some sort of obligation, responsibility, mission to tell the world what we have found in Jesus Christ and share it with them? 

I am learning music theory because I am beginning to learn jazz music on my guitar.  I am learning about chords.  There are these chords that are called dissonant chords and there are resolved chords.  Resolved chords sound like this…..  They feel settled all is well, we don’t crave for more.  Dissonant chords sound like this.  They leave us up in the air.  We want to settle the sound down.  We want to resolve it.  But, I am going to leave you on a dissonant chord here.  I am not going to give you the answers to these questions.  You, I, we need to struggle with the questions and find some sort of answer to them in ourselves.  I will leave you with the tension, how can we evangelize and spread the good news of our faith?  How can we in here become relevant to the world out there? 

A couple of thoughts to help you on your way.  My first point is that if we are not actively working on our own faith development these questions will be impossible for us to answer.   We want our children to go to Sunday school in order to learn about Jesus and the Bible.  We want our children’s program to be big.  But as Clarence Jordan reminds us, “You can’t raise live chicks under dead hens!”  Most churches typically have only 10 percent of the adults participating in some form of ongoing spiritual practice, development, or education.  I think we should aim for 80% of our congregation to be involved in some significant and ongoing faith development whatever that might look like.  We simply can’t proclaim the good news of Christ to anybody if we are not immersed and growing in the good news ourselves.

My second point is  we all are ministers.  Ministry is not a product to be consumed by parishioners. Ministry is a way of life that we together learn and live and are invited to share.  We all are ministers.  It is an adventure we undertake together. 

Anthony Robinson in his book Transforming Congregational Culture says church health is often calibrated by how many slots the church has filled on the committees.  If the committees are filled it is assumed that the church is in good shape.  Rather, I suggest that the health of the church be based on how many are involved in Christian ministry.  One congregation has developed ministry “teams.”  Some are focused on church worship, planning etc.  Others are focused beyond the congregation, building homes for the poor and justice advocacy for migrants.  The people are not asked to run the church but to be involved in ministry, serving the needs of others, sharing faith, bringing change and transformation in human beings. 

This means, what kind of ministry people should be involved in depends on what their gifts are.  How do you find out what your gifts are.  One way, is by going online to Authentic Happiness (www.authentichappiness.org).  It is in your bulletins.  There you will be able to take a Strengths Inventory questionnaire.  Everyone has things they love to do and are good at doing.  We need to identify these things in each one of us.  Then each one of us think of one way they can use that strength for ministry. 

Why am I stuck on this?  Having a ministry based on the gifts of our members is a powerful approach.  It is no longer working from a paradigm of scarcity, “We are just a small group.”  “Everyong has a limited amount they can give.”  “One body, one slot on the committee.”  Rather it is working from a paradigm of abundance.   “We have so many gifts that we can offer.”   Using our gifts we will never be burnt out.  The extensive research that they have done around the Signature Strengths that people have shows that when people use their signature strengths they feel the following:

1)      A sense of “This is the real me.”  And “I am essentially who I am using these.”

2)      It is exciting to use them for the person.

3)      There is a very rapid learning curve when they are using them.

4)      There is a yearning to find new ways to use it.

5)      There is no feeling of having to be enlisted grudgingly.  Rather there is a feeling of “Try and stop me from using them.”

6)      The person using their signature strengths is invigorated rather than exhausted.

7)      There is joy, zest, enthusiasm even ecstasy while using them.

 

Ministry through the use of our gifts is about great abundance.  WWJDCG?  What Would You Do about Church Growth?  WWYDCG?

Impossible?  Let me end with a story about Mount Carmel Community Church which I found in Mark Mittelberg’s book, Building a Contagious Church .  Mount Carmel Community Church is in Glennville, California a town with a population of 130 people!  Here’s the picture:  two restaurants, one elementary school, a post office and a church.  When rev. Knox joined them in 1984 they had a weekly attendance of 15.  That’s fifteen people, not families, or pledging units.  The church ahd a poor reputation due to disputes that had spilled over into the community.  The minister began casting a vision for reaching the unchurched.  “Our target audience,” said Knox,” is every person in the five-hundred-square-mile area of Kerna dn Tulare county – all five hundred of them!” 

The members of the Mount Carmel Church began to build relationships with the nonchurched people in their community.  They knew they had to win back these people’s trust and respect.  They started praying for these neighbors as well  as for their church and its efforts to reach those who didn't now Christ. 

When the church was ready, they launched a few outreach events.  After mustering all of their talent and abilities, they found they could do four events a year – Christmas, Easter, fourth of July and Vacation Bible School.  Over 90% of the people serve at these events and 25% of the budget is used at these events. 

The results?  Today Mount Carmel has 80-100 attendance.  Over 300 people in the area came to a recent Christmas program.  On  personal level Pastor Knox reports:

Roger and Ann attended a seeker event at the urging of their daughter (a young church member) and others in the church who had befriended them.  But then that year Rochelle, their daughter, died in a terrible accident at age 16.  The church ministered to them in their grief.

The family began to tear apart, due in part to Roger’s heart attacks and his chronic alcoholism that spring from not knowing how to deal with the grief.  Krish, the next daughter, continued to come to church and to request prayer for her daddy and for her family.

Miraculously God has touched their family, and Roger has prayed to receive the forgiveness and leadership of Christ.  Today they a re faithful members of the church.

WWJDCG?  Jesus told his disciples , “go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.  As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’  Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons….”  I am sure that this church of only 15 people read this same passage and had the same reaction we do to it.  Impossible.  Can’t be done.  Yet, they tried anyway.  They answered for themselves the questions of their faith.  :  Do we really care about lost people?  Isn’t the Kingdom of god at hand?  Or do we really think the kingdom of God is at arms length?  Do we sincerely believe that knowing Christ is the best way to live and the only way to die?  In the end they did it using their gifts and their imaginations.  They spread the news that the Kingdom of God is at hand.  They healed the sick of heart, and probably some sick of body too.  They gave hope of eternal life.  We can do it too.