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.'
[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.
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