ImperfectChurches.org

The month of August has been a bit of a blur. On August 2 & 3 we celebrated 15 years of ministry at Salem Covenant Church in Washington, Connecticut. It was a great weekend filled with a lot of emotion and appreciation. Then on Tuesday the moving trucks came and packed our house. On Wednesday we drove two cars, two kids, and a dog to Attleboro. On Thursday we closed on our house. On Friday the trucks arrived with all of our belongings. Then on Sunday I preached my first sermon in Attleboro. It has been a whirlwind. However, we are settling in and we are confident that this is the place God wants us to be during this season of our lives. Transitions are difficult, but there is something good about a new beginning. I am currently preaching a sermon series on new beginnings. It feels particularly appropriate for me and my new church.

A little over two weeks ago I wrote a letter to Salem Covenant Church announcing that I had accepted a call to be the new senior pastor of the Evangelical Covenant Church in Attleboro, MA. The decision to accept this call was the most heart wrenching decision I have ever made. I was the pastor of Salem Covenant Church for fifteen years. I have many friends and many significant relationships in this church. It is hard to leave all of this. It has also been hard to face the people I have needed to face after making this announcement. These are people I have loved and been loved by. I have walked through the deepest valleys with them and we have climbed many mountains as well. It has been fifteen years of great relationships, deep connections, and wonderful ministry. No, it has not been perfect. There have been challenges along with the blessings, but I think we were able to enjoy the blessings more because of our awareness and acknowledgment of our imperfectness as a church and my imperfectness as a pastor.

I am now moving from one imperfect church to another. I do not expect my new church to be any more perfect than my current one. My hope, however, is that we too will be able to experience these blessings, and that the people in Attleboro, MA and Washington, CT will be able to thrive in their relationships with God. This is the most important relationship in our lives, and God needs to be the center of our worship and ministries. Pastors are important, but nowhere near as important as prayer, ministry, and worship. I feel like I am a good fit for the church I am going to and I feel a clear sense of God’s call to this new ministry. I am grateful that these two things are in place. I do not think I could have made this decision otherwise. It is a transition filled with all kinds of emotions ranging from deep levels of grief to bold levels of excitement.

Too many churches in North America think that their best days of life and ministry are behind them. Many of these churches are stuck in nostalgia and stagnation. We are also feeling the pangs of life challenges outside the church in our culture. However, I believe these challenges present opportunities for our churches. People today recognize that they need God and each other now more than ever. Our churches now need to get to a place where they recognize our need for reaching out to people with just as much fervency as there is need in our society. I believe the best days for the ministry of our churches is in front of us — not behind us. There may be some unique challenges for us, but my sense is that we can meet them if we are focused and faithful in our discipleship and church membership.

2 Peter 3:8 says, “Do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.” One of the things we all need in our spiritual lives is mystery. If we ignore the mystery of God we lose our relationships with him. What this text says to me is that we are not in control and that we need to learn how to trust God and God’s timing.

This past Sunday I preached on 1 Peter 2:2-10, where it says, “like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.” Sometimes I wonder about how we have managed to turn this “spiritual house” into a broken institution. At the same time I tend to think that we can catch a glimpse of this “spiritual house” beneath the institutional layers that have developed upon it. On the other hand we, as God’s people, need to be responsible for as many of the problems as we can in the institutional church. The institutional church is not perfect. We are living stones. We make mistakes. There are divisions. There is sin and brokenness. There is hypocrisy, and there are abuses.

One of the first things the Roman Catholic Pope said, upon his visit to the United States is that he was ashamed of the abuses that took place by priests in the Roman Catholic Church, and that his hope was to put an end to this kind of thing in the priesthood. I think this Papal visit will go down in history as his attempt to confess and confront pedophilia in the priesthood. The victims of this abuse represent a deep wound for the institutional church. All churches and denominations have problems, some like these are more major than others. But deep down I think we all know that if the church were more like it ought to be, locally and globally, then the power and positive influence of the church would be endless. If we were more involved with allowing ourselves to be built into “a spiritual house” rather than a “broken institution,” then who knows how effective the church could be with regard to the mission of Christ.

1 Peter 2:10 says, “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” Christian faith is suppose to be both personal (we receive mercy) and communal (we are his people). This is how we allow ourselves to be built into a spiritual house. We do so by receiving mercy and by building relationships among God’s people. We need to do everything in our power to keep sin, abuse, hypocrisies and other forms of human brokenness from getting in the way of what God is trying to accomplish through the building of his church in this world. We need to receive his mercy and be his people as fully and faithfully as we possibly can. We need to live out our Christian lives in both personal and communal ways. We need integrity in our spiritual lives and in our churches.

    Author and humorist Barbara Johnson once wrote a book called “Easter People in a Good Friday World.”

It was strange for many people to have Easter so early this year. The signs of spring are just now revealing themselves in Connecticut and Easter Sunday was three weeks ago. One of the things this may help us to remember is that Easter is a season not just a day. It may also help us to remember that every Sunday should have Easter hope as a part of the worship celebration. We are people of the resurrection and the significance of the resurrection should impact our entire lives, not just one Sunday each year. We are Easter people living in a Good Friday world. The way things are is not the way things ought to be in our world, and yet as Easter people we are called to embrace faith, hope, and love as a part of our lives and ministries to others. We are suppose to share light in the midst of the darkness. This is what Christian ministry is all about.

Amos 6:8 says, “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.”

The Hebrew people spent forty years in the wilderness before they entered into the promised land. Forty years ago Martin Luther King was shot and killed. As a nation we usually honor his birth, but toady we remember his death. The great thing about Martin Luther King is that he lived a life filled with meaning and purpose and he died a death that was filled with meaning and purpose. His dream did not die when he died. In many ways his dream became a part of the fabric of our nation after he died. We still have a long way to go. There is still a gap between the way things are and the way things should be in our race relations in America and around our world. We need to close this gap and we need to find new ways to help Dr. King’s dream to become reality. We need to “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.”

Why do we call  the day we remember Jesus’ death good?  It is not because of what others did to Jesus.  It is because of what Jesus did for us.  In 1 Peter 2:24 it says, “Jesus bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds we have been healed.”  During Lent I preached a sermon series on spiritual disciplines.  One of the spiritual practices we talked about was centering prayer.  This is where you take a word or a phrase and quiet your heart around it.  You set time aside to listen to God by focusing on this key word or phrase.  Last night at our Maundy Thursday service I asked the people in my church to center themselves around the phrase “By his wounds we have been healed.”   This verse always speaks to me.  I hope and pray that it will speak to you.  May you be blessed on this Good Friday and may the power of his ressurection become a bigger a part of your life in this Easter season.  

At Salem Covenant Church we just developed a new church website.  I did not realize how important this was until two famalies visited our church after seeing our website.  I realized then that this is how most people today will try to find out information about a church.  I am guessing that most people will go to their computers before the phone book or a news paper.  So I am excited about the fact that we have a new site.  I am also excited about the way we set it up.  We used the four steps of discipleship in our church to arrange our site.  We have a simple process for discipleship that includes four steps.  The steps are: seek, surrender, study, and serve.  Discipleship obviously includes a large number of other activities including worship, prayer, and evangelism.  However, these four steps are the way we discover these other activities.  Our belief is that if you seek, surrender, study, and serve you will grow as a follower of Christ and you will become the person God wants you to be.  Come and visit our new church website at www.salemcovenantchurch.com. 

I was asked to speak about challenging the church monster in a large Covenant church. It was a church of 2,000 people in an urban setting. They had a leadership conference with over 100 people in attendance. I was not sure if the church monster material would be applicable in this setting. What I found remarkable is that they have the same issues as smaller churches, but on a larger scale. They too were concerned with the amount of time and energy they were spending on administration and decision making. They wanted to find ways to use more of their time and energy for mission and ministry. The church monster is eating them up in a very similar way as it does in small churches. There were remarkable similarities between this church and all the other churches I have worked with. It seems like all churches need to figure out ways to keep their systems simple and their decision making straightforward. We need to have fewer meetings and more ministry, less conflict and more community. It does not matter if you church has 20, 200, or 2,000 people.  We need to become effectively less organized.