Lectionary Scripture – First Corinthians 3:1-9 NRSV
And so, brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready, for you are still of the flesh. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human inclinations? For when one says, "I belong to Paul," and another, "I belong to Apollos," are you not merely human?
What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labor of each. For we are God's servants, working together; you are God's field, God's building.
"Solid food, please."
Sadly however, we are far too often caught up in the differences and distinctions between us and try to determine whose way is right and whose way is wrong. We’re asked then to stop and think more deeply about these differences and do so in a way that reflects on how our own individual relationship with God has changed over time. We’re asked to think about how it has changed, grown, and matured over time. We requested to open our eyes and see how God did not judge against us but simply loved us. We are then encouraged to consider the limitations and dimness of our own human perception that keep us from widening the embrace and patience of our love. We’re next asked to consider all the additional things that God wants us to have as a result of love capable of embracing greater diversity. We must therefore ask how we’re allowing God to give growth and how we’re celebrating differences in others. Deliberation on these things does necessitate however that we ask how we’re preventing the generosity of God that would give new growth and opportunity.
A few years ago when serving as a pastor, I met with a small group of fellow ministers in my congregation; essentially they were my leadership team. The question of growth weighed deeply upon our minds given our many years of declining numbers. An eventual end to the congregation was not far off, perhaps another ten years. As the leadership team for the congregation, we undertook an eighteen month journey of study and discernment. During that time and journey, God blessed us with abundant insights as we followed along a process outlined by Alice Mann and Gil Rendle in their book Holy Conversations. From that process and the resulting insights, we envisioned growth and blessings far beyond anything our minds considered possible at the outset of our discernment work. A wonderful new world awaited us, rich in new diversity from lives touched by new forms of ministry we would offer in our local communities. Through these ministries, lives would heal and find new skills for living ably and meaningfully in today’s troubling times. The major challenge however would be embracing a wholly different way of life as a church – i.e. essentially becoming a church without walls or without a building so our resources could more directly support healing ministries.
After a subsequent eighteen months of conversation with the congregation, an alternate idea found favor. It called for hiring a youth minister and that growth in numbers would come through youth ministry. As I was not a youth minister and my position as pastor represented the only discretionary resource for staffing, it became my responsibility to vacate my position and transfer to another congregation. I did this because in all fairness, I had to acknowledge that perhaps I was wrong regarding the growth God wanted to give. Certainly, I did not want to hinder growth the congregation itself discerned God wanting to give. A few years have passed since those decisions were made; the only thing obvious now is that growth hasn’t occurred. Some in the congregation would say that its end is even closer than ever before.
The situation reminds me of Paul’s counsel to the Corinthians which by standards then as well as today was a pretty messed up a congregation. There were those claiming to be one person’s followers and those claiming to be another person’s followers. Each group claimed their own particular brand, source, and degree of authority. And in each congregation, mine or the Corinthians, there was those persons whose goal was simply for their agenda come out on top. Generally in the face of these forms of competition, no one wins and God cannot give growth. Sadly, it’s all too common in long-established congregations these days, and most new faith adherents choose not to participate in such faith communities. Over time, it has resulted in great disillusionment wherein society and culture have become dismissive of the church and even hostile toward it. Thankfully, scholars and sociologists are helping us understand this, but the news is not good as it’s quite likely most of the nation’s three hundred thousand congregations will close shop over the next twenty years.
Thankfully again for those scholars and sociologists studying church decline, they have discovered where God is giving growth. It’s what they have come to call the Emergent Church. It’s a broad and wonderfully diverse movement that began with about 1 million adherents in the early 1990s. Today it numbers about 20 million and is projected to reach 40 million in the next 10 years. The Emergent Church is reaping the growth God wants to give. Existing primarily as small purpose driven missional groups untethered to religious denominations and authority in order to preserve their autonomy and sense of calling from God, these forms of organic church or simple church are reaching into people's lives in our communities through ministries that are phenomenal, powerful, and full of blessing and healing and potential.
Whether these forms of being the church are a faith-based group of mechanics doing car repairs for the poor, or a 26 member group of Hispanic families meeting in a two-bedroom apartment whose mission and ministry is keeping kids out of the gangs, or a minister holding church at a local tavern during halftime of the football game, these ministries represent what church is becoming and how the church is growing. Long and short of it my friends, we can continue to struggle against one another and say we are going to follow or not follow or how something is to be done or not done and face a pitiless end for which only God can have compassion. Or, we can embrace the ever-growing and ever-increasing spiritual diversity of the world and receive the blessings God wishes to abundantly bestow upon us.
It will mean being much different then who or what we are today. With that will come fears of the unknown and perhaps a seeming loss of the security we have found in the past and how we have traditionally been the church. For some that challenge will be too great and too uncomfortable to even consider, like the actor Charlton Heston at an NRA rally they may defiantly claim that only from their cold dead hands will tradition be pried away from them. For others however, particularly those of the younger generations for whom this form of organic and simple church speaks most, the relationship that they will have allowed to mature between them and God will be one that takes humanity forward in leaps and bounds towards the time of God’s Peaceable Kingdom here on earth.
To the young adult generations of today’s Emergent Church, I would counsel patience. Though tradition and organized religion may appear intransigent at times, eventually the fossilized and nonlife-giving parts of them will be surpassed, overcome, and transformed for this is what happens when relevancy is lost. Sooner or later fossilized things are shelved and become history, but the life-giving portions of tradition and organizational life will always stand ready to serve and grow and mature. Whatever irrelevant things and their generational guards keeps from you now and fail to embrace and resource for your sense of calling today -- all of those will one day pass on and the resources that have been held so tightly from you will come into your orbit and be at your disposal. With those resources you will be free at last to help, free at last to heal, and free at last to reconcile and move this world toward peace, justice, non-violence, non-manipulation, security, and opportunity that will be everlasting and of great blessing to your children, your grandchildren, and their grandchildren.
It will require however that you not lose hope and that you not allow yourself to be lulled into places and spaces of helplessness or thinking you have no voice or that you have no opportunity to change the world in the way you feel called to do. You do have a voice, you do have influence, and you do have the ability to make decisions and affect things for good. And hopefully when the time comes that your generation has passed on, your legacy will be that you left the world a far more promising stewardship for the care of the earth and care of humanity than any generation that preceded you. The times are challenging and tasks seemingly insurmountable when considering the overpopulated world we live in and what we do that makes it more environmentally toxic each passing day. Remember, God wants to give you growth in every dimension of understanding that word can entail. Let no one keep you from it simply because they think the survival of some institution or organization takes precedence. For example, nothing takes precedence over the disease, greed, organizational or political dysfunction and malnutrition that allow 16,000 children die each day.
To deal with all this, as one theologian put it this week, there needs to be a reckoning in our lives, a calling back to the most fundamental foundational thing there is. And what is that? Well, it’s not the relationship you have with your denomination or local faith community. It is simply the relationship you have with God; that I have with God; and the relationship that we have with one another. Whether we claim to be a follower of Jesus, or a follower of Mohammed, or follower of Buddha, or any other great prophet or teacher of faith, we look to the most basic foundational thing of our lives and existence which is experiencing and touching that which is greater than ourselves. Some of us call that God. Some of us call it nature. Some of us think of it as life itself. According to Bishop John Spong, author of Why Christianity Must Change or Die, he found meaning in the words of the theologian Paul Tillich who referenced God as being itself. Whatever or whoever God may be, the greatest manifestation is you and me and those for whom we love and care and the quality of life and well-being we create together and for one another. If we could truly come to an understanding of that rather than always competing in some form or another to achieve dominance over one another, then our world would find its way to healing, peace, and justice in a very short order.
As I sat at my desk this week writing these words and looking out the second-story window of my home office, I witnessed storm clouds and then blustery wind, and then rain, and then a break in the clouds occurred. Ever so faintly a rainbow began to form. At first I could hardly detect it, just some slight hues of pink and then blue with white sandwiched between them. It was a rainbow quite different from any I’d seen before. Blocking my view of that rainbow were leafless tree branches and evergreens. Eventually however the rainbow became quite clear, distinct, and brilliant but the colors remained the same. Rather odd I thought given there were no other colors. But from out of my faith and the scriptures, I began to recall what a rainbow symbolizes. In short, it’s a symbol of promise that forevermore God will seek after our welfare and well-being even when we are unable to do that for ourselves.
Let us open ourselves therefore to the solid food and solid growth God has for us. Let us no longer satisfy ourselves with milk and contesting and competing with one another and thereby lose sight of where God is at work among God’s children. There’s growth possible of some twenty million new faith adherents over the next ten years, growth that God wants to give. Let us open ourselves. Let us open our ears, open our hearts, open our minds and hear what God is saying, “Look, I am here over in this place or out over there in that place. I am here among these people and there among those people. I need you to be me here and over there. I need you to bring healing, end suffering, and give my peace – that peace which passes all understanding."