Fun and Thought

                                                  This guy is about to have a bad day!  

Churches measure many things.  One is seating capacity.  Our sanctuary seats 400.  But let's talking about sending capacity.  Not only how many rear ends we can get in a pew but how many people we can get into the world telling and showing the reign of Jesus Christ.  We definitely want people to come to church.  We also want church members to go to people.  Not one or the other but both and.  

I like this very short, very simple, very helpful video that is a part of this topic.  Please watch it.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arxfLK_sd68

Holy Spirit & Julie Andrews

Bring up the Holy Spirit and we can get into hocus pocus pretty quickly.  Not that the Holy Spirit doesn't have some of that.  But there's a lot of the Holy Spirit that is supernatural in a mundane sort of way.  For example, three big chapters on the Holy Spirit are in I Corinthians 12-14.  Note that the famous chapter on love, chapter 13, is in the middle of that.  So rather than hocus pocus we have living in self-giving love as being full of the Holy Spirit.  

As Americans we don't realize it, the way fish don't realize they are in water, until we are in other cultures, or they are commenting on ours, that we are highly individual based in our outlook.  When it comes to the Holy Spirit the first way we think of it is how does he fill me?  In the Bible, however, while filling me is legitimate, an equivalent or greater concern is how the Holy Spirit fills us.  Ie, the group, the congregation.  

I got to thinking about how Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music story entered an unruly and stern family.  Let's throw in that the bathrooms were dirty and the children said self-pitying things all the time.  Or the children said uncharitable things about others.  She, of course, would love and discipline and model and sing.  The family members might not like her saying, "No," to them or saying, "No more of that," to them.  They might not like being sent to their rooms because they continued.  But eventually Julie Andrews got the sloppiness out, the encouraging in, and love flowing.  

The Holy Spirit in a congregation is the same way.  He might help the session send someone to their room.  That doesn't sound very spiritual, does it?  But it is.  He might help one member say to another member, "We don't talk that way in this church family."  He might help us prize encouragement.  He might help us hug and smile at everyone in the church family.  He might help us be brave or to sing.  He might be a lot like Julie Andrews in the Von Trapp family.  

Institution's Sake??

I am a servant of Jesus.  I care more about people's relationship with him than with the church.  I've heard people talk about their relationship with the church and never mention Jesus.  As a pastor I have cared about people sitting in the pews and let up on people who aren't following Christ becoming followers.  Too many of us have been a part of churches that transferred sheep amongst themselves rather than making new sheep.  So I am squeamish about simply trying to preserve the institution.  It can be like preserving the body and not caring about health.  If, however, you care about health, you'll preserve the body.  Right?

I will try to overcome my squeamishness and wonder if we shouldn't focus on making members.  Public radio has pledge drives.  Other organizations have member drives.  A base of members makes possible the mission.

I ponder so many of our good outreach and mission projects.  We're not giving away the farm at all.  But we give a lot of efforts to that which will not garner us sustaining members.  A thrift shop, a clothes pantry, a hefty program for helping feed the hungry by gleaning ... all very good.  All take our time and money and energy.  Some may join us because we care about others.  Hurray!  May it be so.  Yet a 100 member congregation spends a lot of itself doing a pantry for the poor, and not that they shouldn't, but those poor are not recruited as members.  If they were, they probably are so different socio-economically that they wouldn't join.  Meanwhile, the 100 member church shrinks to 90 to 80 to ... and then there's no more food pantry period.

Somewhere along the line we have to ask supremely, "Are we making more disciples?"  Too many of us aren't.  Me included.  And more mundanely and more in the sense of (yucky?) institutional preservation we have to ask, "What are we doing to get new members??"

We're doing this committee, that event, this renovation, this teaching series, this pot luck ... and none of them with the ask, "How can we leverage this for getting new members?"  Or none with the ask, "How does spending ourselves on this occupy us so that we don't have to do the perhaps harder task of finding new members?"

Good luck to us all.  Me included.