A Growing Church

It has been almost thirty years, but I can picture those big French Reformed Church buildings, made of stones as stubborn and sturdy as their Huguenot builders, yet now slumped on their foundations and looking inward with wide, vacant eyes. In every town, it was the same: On Sunday mornings, the empty balconies that framed the proud central pulpit looked down on a dozen or so elderly men and women who were huddled for warmth around a gas stove in the center aisle. The pastor didn’t bother to climb into the pulpit anymore; its tall canopy and high steps were too grand for the small number of worshippers huddled together in their winter coats and practical shoes. Birds made their nests in the balconies now, and the paint on the walls was buckling and ripping open the drywall like old wrapping paper. The organ no longer worked, and so the elderly congregation croaked out the old Goudimel psalms unaccompanied--sad, like an old record that was playing on slow speed. The pastor stood with a smile pasted on his face in the midst of his flock, bravely proclaiming resurrection. At home, though, he spent his time wondering if it would help attendance if they moved the services to Fridays, before the weekends when busy French families found other occupations. And the pastor’s wife spent her time wondering if the government allocations from a fifth child would buy them a new stove for the drafty kitchen of the ancient, crumbling manse.

Way back in 1982, I raised my nose from my theology books and peered out at this foreign religious world that seemed to be collapsing in front of my eyes. I had come, full of youthful enthusiasm, to study, and then to serve, the descendents of the courageous Huguenots who had held firm in their faith through centuries of persecution. The Reformed Protestants were still widely recognized and admired in their secular country for their strong moral stance, for their work for justice and peace, for their care of the poor and outcast … but strangely, their churches were dying, and icy gusts of hopelessness blew through the chinks in the church windows and swirled constantly around our heads during worship.

“How do these French pastors do it?” I wondered, a product of flush, program-sized American parishes, remembering the full parking lots back home.  “Social justice and outreach work are nothing without faith and prayer and worship, without the beauty of the Episcopal liturgy” I opined. “Where did the French Reformed Church go wrong, to be dying like this? They must be doing something wrong,” I muttered to Jesus, more and more desperately. Instinctively, in an attempt at self-preservation, like Peter in our Gospel reading, I turned away from this dismal and disintegrating world, unwilling to stay on board a sinking ship when life and hope and love beckoned in the sunshine outside the church walls. A husband and babies and life, not death, were what I wanted. So I quit even going to church, and I didn’t hear Jesus when he hung his head and sighed at my self-righteousness: “Get behind me, Satan.”

Having run from the struggling French church, here I am back home, a priest in my own country. My priesthood is proof that Jesus has a sense of humor and a never-ending stock of mercy. Thirty years after telling Jesus that suffering, death, and rejection do not belong in the Church, I am the pastor looking up at cracked ceilings and negative budgets, doing the disheartening math of ever-declining attendance and ever-increasing age, wondering if it would help to move the services to Fridays, and serving in an American religious world that is quickly catching up to the one that I abandoned in France.

We come to church looking for Life, do we not? Eternal Life—now and in heaven—that is what Jesus promises us, is it not? There’s enough death and failure in our lives, already, without finding it at church, too. Our jobs suck away our energy or our morale. Our family relationships are complicated. The news that bombards us now 24 hours a day from TV’s and computers and smart phones frightens us with violence and overwhelming social problems and natural disasters and financial meltdown. In church, we want happy music to lift our hearts, clever words to inspire us, sacraments that are filled with the Holy. We want a giving church, not a needy one; a life-giving church, not a dying one … and yet, and yet, we follow a Savior who brings life by dying.

“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” Jesus plainly proclaims. While we might cringe at the force of his hyperbole, we know deep down that what he is saying is true. At St. Thomas, we are filled with individuals who know about giving. We know the powerful joy that fills the giver of gifts, whether we are buying a present for a loved one or for a needy child on the Zachary Taylor angel tree; whether we are using our musical gifts or our artistic gifts or our leadership gifts to give pleasure to others or to God; whether we are spending our time with a lonely shut-in or doing an errand to help a friend. Therapists will tell us that helping others makes us feel better about ourselves. Experience shows us that giving love is just as life-producing as receiving it. Giving brings life and happiness, because in giving we join with our Creator, the Giver of life itself. We all recognize the truth of St. Francis’ famous prayer that concludes: “O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”    

Should we be surprised that it is the same for our Christian communities, as it is for our individual souls? There was a blog spreading like wildfire among clergy last week on the Internet called “A Growing Church is a Dying Church.” Even with all that we know about the power of giving, its description of the giving, growing church is not a comfortable one. Let me paraphrase the author’s description of what a growing church might look like these days:

A growing church will not have the old, inactive members in the pews again, the ones with whom you remember such good times. A growing church won’t guarantee that the parking lot will need expanding. There will be a few new faces in the pews but not many. The new people will want to make changes, too. They will have new ideas that make members uncomfortable. A growing church will feel like a different place all of a sudden. You might have longer vestry meetings that include prayer and Bible Study. A growing church might move furniture around and play with new liturgy. It might do a kind of music that you don’t much care for. The priest will tell you that you need to come to church more often and might ignore your phone calls because she’s too busy praying or studying Scripture. Putting more money toward mission and outreach might cause a negative budget. You will be asked to give away precious time and money. Your weekends might be filled with exhausting volunteer projects that serve people who will never worship with you. The “ugliest and meanest freaks in town will be invited onto church property at odd hours, and they will beg for handouts, track muddy snow into the building, leave their cigarette butts in the parking lot, and spill their coffee on the carpet.” They might even put trash into your recycling bins. (OK, I added that one!) [1]  

A growing church these days might feel like a dying church. Like those churches in France that sent me scurrying away for cover, it’s going to look as if it is asking for more than it gives. A growing church will not say, “Give yourselves to us because we are successful.” It will say, “Give yourselves to us so that we can pour ourselves out into the hurting world.”A growing church is going to ask us to love more than we can love; to hope in the face of hopelessness; and to believe that a Lord who is hanging on a Cross will live again and will return for us in some limitless future time.

          Big churches and small churches, conservative churches and liberal churches, they can all be growing, life-giving churches. But a church who chooses to follow Peter in rebuking Jesus’ strange and upside-down version of life and growth, living instead by the values of the power-hungry, consumer-driven world, will eventually succumb to death, although that church may look successful now. Church shopping and church hopping for success or ease or perfection is not the same as following Jesus. To be ashamed of dying is to be ashamed of the One who died for us. To be ashamed of dying is to deny the power of Resurrection.

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[1] J. Barrett Lee, “A Growing Church is a Dying Church.” http://streetpastor.wordpress.com/2012/09/04/a-growing-church-is-a-dying-church.