The Spirit of a Fruitful Church

Benita Barnsley was never quite sure why she volunteered year after year to do the Greenwood Opry. She wasn’t the only one either. There were plenty of people in the town of Greenwood, Texas who thought the old institution should go. It had served its time.

Even though this wasn’t Virginia, though, tradition dies hard, even in Texas. So every year about this time Benita and the others would get together to organize the annual performance.

Now I’m assuming you know what an Opry is. This is not Luciano Pavorotti and the Three Tenors and Marilyn Kellan I’m talking about here. It’s not opera but opry as in Grand Ol’ Opry where all the country music stars sing. And in Texas there are lots of these oprys in little towns. Suzanne and I even performed in one when we lived out there. It’s just a time of getting together and showing off the local talent, usually broadcast over the local radio station. Some of these oprys have shows every week or every month.

Greenwood was too small for a regularly-scheduled opry so they staged theirs as a once-a-year event with the proceeds going to the Greenwood City Park Garden Fund. They’ve been doing this since World War Two and the group that organizes is called the Greenwood Opry and Lovely Landscape Institute – a volunteer group better known by its acronym – GOLLI.

GOLLI was made up of people, like Benita, who were very experienced at producing the Opry – which means they had been doing it forever. They had also watched that City Park grow from a bare patch of Texas dirt to a garden full of roses and exotic cacti – so full that any further donations were probably pointless without the addition of somebody like a Hedy Leutner or a Kim Owens, but they didn’t know how to change and so the show went on.

At least, that’s how Benita saw things. She was considered a new member in the group since she had only joined thirty-five years ago, and as such she was ineligible to hold any senior office in GOLLI, though she was expected to sing “Coal Miner’s Daughter” in her best Loretta Lynn voice. They chose this song because it came out about the same time Benita joined the club. That’s the way they chose who sang what – by when you entered the club. So most of the other members were singing classics by Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb.

Yes, it was a ridiculous system. Poor Florida Tarback, who founded the group was still singing “Smoke on the Water,” an old Hank Wilson song about victory over Japan in the war. And you know she’s never really been the same since her throat surgery back in ’84.

So the meeting began with Benita looking out the dusty window of the City Hall meeting room where GOLLI always met to discuss their plans. She was just wondering if she’d make it home in time to watch Jon and Kate and Eight when Lucinda Johnson asked the opening question: “So, what shall we do this year?”

It was one of those questions that you really can’t answer but one way. Like when you ask the groom at the wedding, “Will you take this woman to be your wife?” If he says anything other than, “I will,” the whole thing is going south.

Florida Tarback gave the ritual answer. “Well, I brought the song sheets and I’ll pass them out. I’m sorry about all the yellow tape holding yours together, Benita, but I’m sure you know it well enough by now to get through the sections that are covered up. Dixie Philips has agreed to play the piano for us once again…” And on she went. It was going to be just like every other Opry for the past umpteen years.

Then it happened. Benita didn’t know where the inspiration came from, but all of a sudden she had an idea. It was a miracle that it ever made it out of her mouth. It was just a strange convergence of events. Benita felt inspired at the very moment that Florida dropped her copy of The Yellow Rose of Texas and stopped talking long enough to pick it up. That’s when Benita blurted out, “How about the Clodhoppers?”

I don’t know how to describe to you how unexpected it was. Dixie Philips nearly lost her teeth. Florida hit her head on the table coming up from retrieving the song sheet. Everyone else just stared, gobsmacked, until someone managed to say, “The Clodhoppers?”

“Yeah, you know…the clogging group that meets in the community center.”

It was a spark. A spark like the tongues of flame that ignited over the disciples’ heads at Pentecost so long before. Everybody considered for the first time inviting cloggers to the Greenwood Opry. They all started talking at once and the ideas were flying tick and fast. Somebody remembered that Harold Newcomer told a great Texas tall tale. Someone else volunteered to play the fiddle. Florida Tarback offered to sing a Celine Dion song.

It was amazing. Then someone raised the point that not many of the people they were inviting were actual members of GOLLI. There was nary a pause. It just didn’t matter.

That year the Greenwood Opry was the best it had been since 1947. It was a huge success. Lots of money was raised for the Garden Fund – money they didn’t really even need. But Benita had a plan for that, too. She was going to suggest that the overage go to help the hospice that had just opened in town. Now that would cause the group to have to change its name, but golly, stranger things have happened.

It’s a stretch to say that the coming of the Holy Spirit is like that meeting of the minds in Texas, but that’s how my mind works sometimes. There’s something about Pentecost that reminds us that we can become too comfortable, too insulated, too content with old certainties and that maybe the thing God is calling us to is an element of risk in trusting that the Spirit is moving us out into the world to discover what new things God has in store for us there. Sometimes the change is welcome, sometimes it’s scary, but the Holy Spirit is not content to leave us where we are.

The Pentecost story may seem very familiar to you. As we read in Acts it takes place during the Jewish festival of the Pentecost, or Shavuot – a harvest festival that took place 50 days after the celebration of Passover. For Christians it is now observed 50 days after Easter Sunday. For the Jews it was a high holy day and people of many different places would gather in Jerusalem for this festival. All those folks that we heard about in the reading – the Parthians, the Medes, the Mesopotamians, the Elamites, the crystal lights, the baysiders, the seasiders, the people from Tangier – they’re all there.

The disciples are gathered together in a room where they have been waiting. Jesus has ascended into the heavens and they have been gathering to pray. You might think of them as a huddled mass yearning to be free. Then the Holy Spirit busts into the place and all heaven breaks loose.

As you hear this story you also ought to be thinking about another biblical story. I think it’s intentional that these stories are connected. The other story is the Tower of Babel in Genesis chapter 11. That story takes place at a time at the dawn of human civilization when all the people of the world still spoke the same language.

These early people of earth decide to make themselves a great tower into the sky. The people were trying to make a name for themselves by building this tower to the heavens. They are front and center in this story. The people make the bricks and the mortar and people make the decision to build. But they fail miserably. They do build an impressive tower, but they don’t reach the heavens. We know that because when God comes to see what’s going on, God has to come down to see them. The name they had built for themselves was insignificant in comparison to God.

The Bible tells us the reason that the people built the tower. They built it because they were afraid of being “scattered abroad upon the face of the earth” [Gen. 11:4b]. They were scared of what was going to happen to their community. They wanted to preserve it against the threat of falling apart. Like the planner of the opry, they didn’t want to see a sure thing dissolve into something unknown.

God has no such worries, though. God sees what they are up to and decides to confuse their language by creating new ones. Then God does the very thing they fear the most – God scatters them “abroad…over the face of all the earth” [Gen. 11:8a] with the result being the sea of languages we have today. After all that human action, God’s action in this story is to spread people all over the place.

Now look at that story next to the Pentecost story. There’s a difference and a similarity. The big difference is that it is not human initiative that brings about the action at Pentecost. All the disciples do in the story is to gather together, though they had been preparing themselves through prayer. From that point on, the action happens to them as they are filled with the Holy Spirit and are given the ability to speak in other tongues. The actor in the birth of the Church – the inspiration for the action to follow – is God through the Holy Spirit. That’s the big difference from Babel. God’s the one getting the ball rolling.

The result, though, is the same. The tower-builders were scattered and now so are the disciples. They had developed a strong community in Jerusalem, but now they are scattered to the four winds – to all of the places mentioned in the text – to Mesopotamia, Egypt, Libya, Rome...Tangier. It was in the world at large that they were called to do the work of Christ.

In Babel the human work was undertaken for fear of scattering. In Jerusalem at Pentecost the divine work was undertaken in order to scatter. The disciples could no longer afford to be an insulated community. The work of the Church required them to risk moving out into new avenues of growth and mission. They not only existed in the world but for it.

It’s not easy. We like our comfort zones – places where we feel safe and warm. We grow to love what is familiar and we don’t dare risk change for fear that what we hold dear will fade away. Sometimes we hold on to things even when they are threatening to kill us.

The Spirit will not leave us there, though. I believe that if we are attentive to the restlessness in our souls we will know that there is something holy that still threatens to invade our comfort with energy and fire and new life. When that happens, God help us if we don’t respond. That fire of the Holy Spirit can burn us.

The writer Kim Chernin describes initiation in a way that seems akin to this movement:

“Initiation is not a predictable process. It moves forward fitfully, through moments of clear seeing, dramatic episodes of feeling, subtle intuitions, vague contemplative states. Dreams arrive, bringing guidance we frequently cannot accept. Years pass, during which we know that we are involved in something that cannot easily be named. We wake to a sense of confusion, know that we are in dangerous conflict, cannot define the nature of what troubles us. All change is like this. It circles around, leads us a merry chase, starts us out it seems all over again from where we were in the first place. And then suddenly, when we least expect it, something opens a door, discovers a threshold, shoves us across.”[i]

I actually don’t think the option before is to change or to stay where we are. There will always be Benita Barnsleys in the world who will feel the wind and the fire and who will remind us of the continuing power of the Holy Spirit. There will always be that inner compulsion within us that circles around like the Spirit hovering over the waters of creation and then opens a door and shoves across. It’s when we ignore the song of change that we experience that inner death that we give a thousand names – depression, despair, burnout.

I don’t mean to diminish the value of comfort zones. We all need places of safety and security from which to move. Churches need them, too. But if we insulate ourselves from the world and from change to the point that we fail to participate in it, then we just may suffocate.

The Holy Spirit wants us to breathe. To be open. To cross the threshold. God energizes human activity through the Holy Spirit and sends us out to invite others to join us in creating new communities where Christ lives and love grows. The Holy Spirit is calling to this church and to you personally to take the step of risk to discover God in new ways. How will we respond? How will you respond? How will you live, if you don’t breathe? Thanks be to God.

Acts 2:1-21(NRSV)

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs-- in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power."

All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?"

But others sneered and said, "They are filled with new wine."

But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, "Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o'clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: 'In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.'

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[i] From Reinventing Eve, quoted on the blog “The Painted Prayerbook” by Jan Richardson, http://paintedprayerbook.com/2008/05/05/pentecost-fire-and-breath/.

Five Practices: The Risk of Loving

A few weeks ago I showed a video to our United Methodism class that we were having on Wednesday nights. After looking at the history and beliefs of United Methodists for seven weeks I wanted to get some reactions to a new advertising campaign being conducted by our United Methodist Communications friends in Nashville. The campaign is called “Rethink Church” and you may have seen some of the initial advertising.

The video I showed was a two-and-a-half minute promotional piece produced for local churches to review. It has a chorus of voices singing in the background as we see a series of video and still pictures of people doing energetic things like building a well, making sandwiches for distribution, rebuilding houses after the Louisiana hurricanes, and talking as they play basketball. The people in the pictures are diverse – Asian people, African-American people, Latinos and Anglos. There is joy in many of the faces and a sense of wonder about the whole thing.

Over top of the visuals there is a booming announcer voice asking a series of questions. “What if church wasn’t just a building, but thousands of doors, each opening to a different concept or experience of church? What if Church was less about Sunday and more about the other days of the week? What if Church was a verb?”[i]

I’m curious to see how you will respond to the ad. I’m also curious to see how the world will respond to it. I have an image of somebody seeing this ad and coming to our church on Sunday morning and saying, “Hey, where’s the guy building the well? I want to help with that!” It’s a challenge for us to live up to this image of the church and not be stuck with a charge of false advertising.

We had a mixed reaction to the ad in our small group. Some folks thought it was exactly the sort of message that people who are not in our churches now need to hear in order to get them to think about church in different ways. Others thought it downplayed what was unique about Christians – namely that we believe in Jesus and that’s why we do all these things. And others wondered if it made us look a lot more diverse and at ease with each other across races and classes than we actually are.

I like the piece, though. I think it has energy and vibrancy and it makes me think about what I want church to be like. I want to believe that the church will take me out into the world, not protect me from it. I want church to be a launch pad, not a vacation home where I escape from the world.

Today we are talking about risk-taking mission and service as an essential practice for churches that want to bear fruit for God. This is the area that keeps us from being insulated from the world. If we are really going to live out our calling as Christians we will not just welcome people in through radical hospitality but we will also challenge ourselves go out into the world. We will not just offer excellent, passionate worship opportunities in here on Sunday morning but we will also continue our worship through the things that we do outside these walls on other days of the week. We will not just develop our faith through intentional study and meeting in small groups but we will live out that faith as we interact with others in the world.

I remember a time in my life when risk-taking mission and service changed my life. It was the summer before my junior year in high school. I went for a week to a program called Youth Active in Christian Service or YACS. That year it was being held in the Shenandoah Valley and the leader was a preacher named Tim Whitaker who was serving churches in a place I had never heard of before – some place called Franktown, Virginia.

The idea of the week was simple. The hundred or so youth who were there would be split up into small teams and we would go out each day to work in a place of service and then every night we’d come back to share our experiences and to worship and to go swim and to have fun.

My assignment was to go to a workshop for intellectually challenged adults in Waynesboro, a place that was a lot like the ARC workshop in Exmore. I remember how nervous I was on the first day. What was I going to say? What would they expect me to do? I was 16 years old and still kind of socially awkward. What did I have to offer to these people?

We got there around 9 AM and by 10 AM I had entered a whole new world. I experienced love and energy and joy and connection – all the things that I wanted church to be. So when I came back home to Orange I looked for a similar program.

I found it in an adult socialization program for people with intellectual challenges. For my last two years of high school I spent my Thursday nights with my best friend, Billy Mack. We’d head off down the road north of town to a little building in the country. Just before dinner time the vans and cars would start pulling in and people would start unloading. There’d be about 20 of us by the time we all got in and a few of us would head off to the store to buy dinner while the rest of us set up for the night. Billy and I would set up the tables.

The people who were in the program were adults who lived very different lives than I did. These were folks who came because they wanted to learn how to live more independently. So they went shopping and learned to cook and learned to read and learned to interact with other adults so that one day they might be able…perhaps…to get a place of their own, and with some assistance, to become a part of a community that often did not accept them or made them feel invisible.

I think my folks were a little bit suspicious of what went on out there in that building and I know they were a little mystified by my eagerness to go there every single Thursday night. But I went because I was compelled to go there. I went because I had made a commitment to be there. I went because I had a red T-shirt with white letters on it that said, “Thursday Night Fever,” and I had that shirt specially made for this event.

I was there because I sensed that what was happening at that little building on Thursday nights was important. O.K., that’s not all true. I was also there because the director of the program had a really gorgeous daughter, but mostly because I knew that it was important, though I could never quite find the words to say why. But being with Charles and Graham and Christine took me out of my world and out of my self – something that is not easy to do when you are 16. These folks, who in so many ways lived on the outside of the society in my small town, turned those Thursday night dinners into an open space where everybody was welcome…including me. It was a stretch for me to be there. Initially it felt risky. But in the end it felt like home.

In the book we are studying during this season, Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, Bishop Robert Schnase says that “Risk-Taking Mission and Service involves work that stretches people, causing them to do something for the good of others that they would never have considered doing if it were not for their relationship with Christ and their desire to serve him.”[ii] That desire to find Christ as we serve others is something that is built into our biblical texts. Today we heard the story of the parable of the Last Judgment where Jesus tells the people that when they served others – when they entered into relationship with the poor, the lonely, the hungry, and the imprisoned – then they saw his face. Though they didn’t even realize it, they were seeing Jesus face to face.

Shane Claiborne has been looking for something to help him meet Jesus. Shane is one of the founders of a group called The Simple Way, a close-knit group of people based in Philadelphia who have decided to try and model their lives on the life of Jesus – to try and do what Jesus did in this strange, modern world that we live in.

Shane grew up in East Tennessee where he was part of lots of Christian youth activities. He says he went to a particular festival every summer and every summer he answered the altar call for those who wanted to be saved. “I must have gotten born again six or eight times,” he said, “and it was great every time. (I highly recommend it.)”[iii]

He said he became suspicious, however, when he realized that he was mainly a consumer of religion. He was a great consumer. He said he bought up everything on offer in Christian book stores. The fish magnets, the T-shirts, the bumper stickers, the CDs of Christian music – everything produced by what he calls the “Christian industrial complex.” But the stuff didn’t satisfy him. What he was looking for was a place to give his life. “I had become a ‘believer,’ but I had no idea what it means to become a follower. People had taught me what Christians believe, but no one had told me how Christians live.”[iv]

Then he went to college near Philadelphia and someone told him about Mother Theresa and something she had said one time about not being able to understand the poor until you had some experience of poverty. So he and group of friends started going out to be with the homeless on the streets of Philly. Not just to feed them but to be with them. Eventually they began spending whole nights sleeping on the streets, getting to know the dangerous, crazy, sometimes beautiful lives that homeless poor lead.

Now Claiborne and the people of The Simple Way are trying to find creative ways to live out their faith. They welcome people to live in an intentional community in the inner-city. They have created community gardens to help bring fresh food to their neighborhood. They participate in monthly neighborhood work days – cleaning up brush in front of abandoned buildings. They are trying to raise one million dollars to buy all the porn shops in their neighborhood. They write liturgy and worship. And, O yes, they sent Shane and another community member to Rwanda to try and learn from the genocide there and to consider what Christians can do to prevent them in the future and to bring reconciliation in the present. Why do they do this? Because their mission is: “To love God. To love people. To follow Jesus. We’re giving that our best shot.”[v]

To love God. To love people. To follow Jesus. It’s a pretty out-there mission statement. But for churches that take risk-taking mission and service seriously it seems like a very natural thing to say.

Sometimes, when churches are looking for sample mission statements, they turn to Micah chapter 6 and the passage we read today. Here is a follower of God wondering aloud what God is looking for.

“What shall I bring to enter God’s presence? What would be acceptable? Shall I enter with burnt offerings, with calves one year old? Shall I wear a T-shirt proclaiming my love for Jesus? Will God be pleased with rams by the thousand, with ten thousand streams of oil? Would God dig the way I turned off the TV when a show I shouldn’t watch came on? Shall I offer my eldest son for my wrong-doing, the child of my own body for my sin?”

I may have embellished this just a little bit. But you probably guessed that none of these things is sufficient to enter into God’s presence. “You have already been told what is right and what Yahweh wants of you. Only this, to do what is right, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God.” To do what is right. To love kindness and to walk humbly with your God.

Christians who have had their worlds changed by risk-taking mission and service know how close they feel to this charge when they have stretched themselves to new places. Churches who offer regular opportunities for people to experience risk-taking mission know how powerfully it changes their congregations.

Franktown has been blessed by the transformations that risk-taking mission and service bring. Just in the past week we have had people in our community involved in amazing things. Three of our members, Kristen, Charles & Alex Dennis just got back from Russia where they were visiting children supported by members of our congregation at the orphanage in Chentsy. Yesterday our youth and others from around the district were participating in a clean-up day at Camp Occohannock. Last week was Food Bank week and we had people helping on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday unloading, packing and distributing boxes to hundreds of our neighbors. Today we are concluding the Hispanic mothers baby shower. All of these are great outgrowths of our commitment to service.

The challenge for us is to continue to grow. To continue to ask whether the service we are undertaking is meeting the needs of our community and whether we are doing what we need to do be faithful in following Jesus. Mission happens here and it happens around the world. It’s not a question of one or the other. It’s about being attentive to what God is doing.

That’s the challenge for the church. The challenge for you as an individual is – how are you engaged in meeting people outside your comfort zone? Do you have activities that regularly stretch you in your service to God? Do you have opportunities to meet and get to know people in need? Have you spent time in the classroom of the poor?

It’s risky business – this loving thing. But there is life in this love. Thanks be to God.

Micah 6:1-8 (NJB)

Now listen to what Yahweh says: 'Stand up, state your case to the mountains and let the hills hear what you have to say!'

Listen, mountains, to the case as Yahweh puts it, give ear, you foundations of the earth, for Yahweh has a case against his people and he will argue it with Israel. 'My people, what have I done to you, how have I made you tired of me? Answer me! For I brought you up from Egypt, I ransomed you from the place of slave-labor and sent Moses, Aaron and Miriam to lead you. My people, please remember: what was Balak king of Moab's plan and how did Balaam son of Beor answer him? . . . from Shittim to Gilgal, for you to know Yahweh's saving justice.

'With what shall I enter Yahweh's presence and bow down before God All-high? Shall I enter with burnt offerings, with calves one year old? Will he be pleased with rams by the thousand, with ten thousand streams of oil? Shall I offer my eldest son for my wrong-doing, the child of my own body for my sin?

'You have already been told what is right and what Yahweh wants of you. Only this, to do what is right, to love loyalty and to walk humbly with your God.'

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[i] You can see the ad and related material at www.rethinkchurch.org.

[ii] Robert Schanse, Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, [Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007], p. 88.

[iii] Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, [Zondervan: Grand Rapids, MI, 2006], p. 38.

[iv] Ibid., pp. 38-39.

[v] The Simple Way website: http://www.thesimpleway.org/index2.html.