It has been my tradition, to take one Sunday a year, typically in June, or right around then, to give a state of the church message. To talk about where we have been, what some of our accomplishments have been in the past year, perhaps where we were not as successful as we had hoped, and what opportunities and challenges we’re, things to focus on and occasionally some challenges to the congregation of things we could, or maybe should, be doing. I do it around this time of year because it represents for me, the completion of an appointment year and an anniversary of my time here. Now we didn’t do this last year, because as I said in my preview video sent out in our Friday worship email, I really had no idea what the next week, or month, might bring, let alone trying to forecast what the next year would bring. In some ways that’s still true, although we are coming closer to normality. Additionally, while we had made some good goals for 2020, most of them got put on hold because of the onset of Covid. And that has also sort of put me, and many other clergy in an unusual situation, in that I am now completing the end of my second year being here with you, I don’t really have two years of experience with you all. I have 8 or so months or sitting with you, and visiting with you and working with you, of doing hospital visits and funerals, and the other things that happen in the normal life of a church. And then many more months of doing things very differently than most of us have ever done before. There are some disadvantages in that reality, but there are probably some good opportunities for us to do things differently as we move forward.
And that’s probably a good place to start, because while some people can’t wait to get back to normal, or the way things used to be, we shouldn’t be so quick to just go back to doing what we have done before. This is a great time to evaluate everything and make sure it’s what we want or need to keep doing. So for example, going to online worship is not just a temporary thing. Online worship represents a huge opportunity for us to reach new people in new ways, and many people will feel much safer seeing what our worship is like from the comfort of their own homes than coming here for the first time. And so we are going to keep streaming worship. But that will require us to think differently about worship and what it means to have people here and also people online, some of whom don’t even live in Los Alamos. How do we build community there? How do we deepen relationship and faithfulness in both places? And it’s not even that we can think that our primary purpose is here and that what we do online is just for convenience for some people, because that’s not the way the world works anymore.
As we realized that closures were not just going to be for a
few weeks, churches had to start thinking in different ways, and one of the
churches that presented at a workshop I did online said the question they were
dealing with in thinking about online children’s and youth ministry was not what
to do now, but why didn’t they do this before? Why weren’t they reaching out
online to an online generation to provide resources and classes to kids who
couldn’t make it to church because they were out of town, or sick, or their
parents just didn’t want to go that day. But now they can do all those things,
and we have to keep asking those questions and thinking of ways of being church
in new ways. It’s not about returning to the status quo, or thinking either or,
but of both/and of even thinking of new things to do. As one person said to me,
there has been some conversation over the years of reevaluating worship times.
And if we’re not going to do that now, then it’s never going to happen because
now is the easiest it’s ever going to be. And just to be clear this is not to
say radical changes are or will happen, but that they can. This is an
opportunity to have conversations and to think in different ways, and if we
don’t take it, not only will we regret it, but we may not ever have the
opportunity to make these changes easily again. Which I guess leads to a
question I do get and that is if we are going to go back to two services again,
and the easy answer is yes, but we need to build up our attendance for each
service before we do that to make sure we do have a core group here in the
sanctuary to make those services viable.
But the other piece is that part of that thinking also has
to connect us even more to who we are and who we are called to be. 2021 is the
70th anniversary of this congregation, and so we need to understand who we have
been in the past and what mustard seeds the saints who have gone before us have
planted for us. To see the harvest that they have left for us that we are now
bringing in. As God says in that passage from Joshua, you are living in towns
that you didn’t build and in houses you didn’t construct and gathering fruit
from trees you didn’t plant. And the same is true in churches. We have to
appreciate and give thanks to them and celebrate that. And as a consequence of
that, we have to also prepare to plant to seeds, to build new structures for
generations yet to come, to do things that many or even all of us will never
see the results of. That too is who we are called to be and what we are called
to do as church. And that requires, sometimes, a fundamental rethinking of what
we do and why we do it and who it’s all for.
And that starts first with a recognition that church is very
different now than it was 25 years ago, let alone 70 years ago. Things that
worked then don’t work anymore. There was definitely a thinking in the past, as
we heard in the movie Field of Dreams, that if you build it they will come.
That is not true anymore. If we are waiting for everyone to flock through our
doors to see how great we are, we will fail miserably. That is not the reality
of the world. Many of you probably saw that a month or so ago that Gallup
released a report showing that the country most the most non-religious in the
history of their polling in people saying they were not affiliated with a
denomination or attending church, the rise of the so-called nones. Although
this is not at all unusual in the history of the church in America. The 50s and
60s are the anomaly in church attendance, not the normal. But, what wasn’t
really reported was part of that same study was that these people were not
non-believers. In fact, more than 80% of them believed in God or a supreme
power of some sort, it’s just that they didn’t see the church as a way to
express or explore that belief. So it’s not that they have rejected God, what
they have done is reject the church, and honestly the church is more to blame
for that than anything or anyone else. Because all too often we have set the
expectation first that people have to come to us and second that they have to
become like us. We are certainly not going to make any changes for them, or
accommodate them, they have to change to fit what we do, or we’re not
interested, among many other problems. Jesus did not say “Build a church and
open your doors and proclaim the good news.” Instead what did he say? He said
“Go forth.” Go out, and that’s one of the things we have to learn to do better.
We have to learn to tell our story better, and I’ll get to that in a moment,
and we have to learn and remember our primary purpose, which is to make new
disciples.
This is one thing that the 12-step programs get right, and
that we have lost. Alcoholics anonymous says, their purpose is “Carrying its message to the alcoholic who
still suffers.” Narcotics anonymous says, “Our primary purpose is to carry the
message to addict who still suffers.” That means that the most important person
at a meeting is not the person with 27 years clean and sober, which Linda just
celebrated, but the person who is coming to their first meeting. It’s not that
the others are unimportant, which is what we often think in trying to make
everything a dichotomy, but they say “I’ve been where you are and I know the
difference and so I want to help you in your recovery.” I can provide you with
the experience, strength and hope and show you a new way to live. Unfortunately
most churches flip that around and say that the most important person is the
one who has been there, and newcomers, while welcome, better become like us,
which leads to many outcomes, none of them good. I also think that comes from
the attitude that I’ve talked about before of the difference between membership
and ownership.
Many of you will remember an old American Express commercial
that said “membership has its privileges.” That is you pay your membership fee
and you get things in return. You don’t have to give anything back, but you
expect things, often because your money is used to pay other people to do
things for you. Compare that to ownership. Owners are responsible for
everything and do the work, and also want to go out and get new people coming.
And so how should we view us being in church as members or as owners? I hope
you say owners, and it’s a choice. It’s a mind set and a change, but it’s one I
think we should be working on changing, just like Joshua challenges us to, more
importantly like Christ challenges us when he tells us that to be his disciples
we have to pick up our cross and follow him? And how often? Daily. He doesn’t
say, sit back and watch someone else do it. He doesn’t say, “Well you’ve done
it for a long time, now it’s time for someone else.” He doesn’t even say,
“You’re not as strong as you once were, and you’re getting old, so you get to
set yours down now because you’re done.” I can assure you there are things to
do at the church, around the church, and most importantly in our community that
can be done by everyone. And if you can’t think of anything, ask me, and I’ll
help you find something. But that also works into our new reality.
Younger generations, for the most part, are not joiners, as
in pledging membership, but they do want to, and in some cases are desperate
to, be connected to something bigger than themselves, to be connected with
others in meaningful relationship, and they want to be doing something that
makes a difference. Something that is changing personal lives and something
that’s changing the world. A popular Methodist blogger, who is millennial, said
don’t tell me about how I can change your church or make your church better.
Tell me how you are making the world better and how I can participate in that.
And so one of the goals that the One Board set to do in
2020, that sort of get set aside a little, was that we were going to get better
at telling our story of our outreach through missions, after all one of our
core values is that we are involved in service and mission. And we wanted to be
better communicating that with the community and in the church itself.
Hopefully you have seen and heard a lot of that in our stewardship messages,
but stories of our activities have also been in the Daily Post, in the
conference news and even in an article by the Methodist news service. That
includes paying for 25 children in Rio Arriba County to participate in the
Dolly Parton Library and receive a free book every month. It included
purchasing water tanks for people on the Navajo reservation who don’t have
access to running water. It included buying chickens for families in
Mozambique. It included our monthly food pantry. It included thanking the staff
at the hospital and providing snacks. It included assisting people in paying
their electric bills here in Los Alamos, to name just a few. And now that we
are reopening we hope that it will involve a lot more hands on work as well.
That is how we are changing people lives and bringing the good news of Christ.
As St. Francis of Assisi is reported to have said, proclaim the gospel and use
words if necessary. How we live in the world says much more about who we are
and what we believe in and do than anything we say, although proclamation is
important, that’s why we end worship with the proclamation to go be the church.
Another core value is that we are growing spiritually, and I
know that Phillip Ortega, our new director of faith development, is going to be
fantastic in doing that especially in creating a discipleship pathway which not
only helps us connect those who are new into the community but allows all of us
to be growing and all rowing in the same direction, and Phillip is going to be
giving the message in two weeks, so I’m going to leave more to be said there.
But it’s your gifts that make his hiring possible, and I am happy to report
that our financial giving levels continued to be strong last year. We did
receive an initial PPP loan for both the church and the Ark which definitely
helped, and we have also received funding in the second round as well, which we
are currently using. The other major financial piece last year was that we
included a special campaign in the 2019 stewardship drive that we would match
additional funds pledged to debt relief up to $25,000, and we did that,
reducing our mortgage payment by more than an additional $50,000. Our balance
currently sits around $320,000 and as I said this is our 70th anniversary and I
would challenge us to become more focused so that we would have the remaining
balance paid off by the time we celebrate our 75th anniversary, which I
certainly hope to be here for. If we were to do that, not only would it
eliminate that as an obligation, but it would free up nearly $40,000 in our
spending plan to use for ministry in other ways. Imagine what we could do with
that. We are going to be having conversations about a new capital campaign in
the coming years, and perhaps that could be a part of it, or a separate piece.
Our trustees have also done a great job in using the resources you have
entrusted to us to undertake some pretty big projects, and some that are
currently being worked on or in planning. The one other financial piece that we
need to do more work on it around our endowment and in particular with planned
giving, because by including this church in your estate plans you can continue
to support this congregation for years to come even after you have gone on to
hear God say “well done my good and faithful servant.” You could be the ones
who build houses and plant trees that future generations are using.
Another of our strategic goals, working into some of our
core values, was around increasing our fellowship activities not just in the
congregation but also in ways to connect with the community. Those obviously
got put on hold, and some of them still won’t probably happen this year, but we
will be working on them in the near future, which includes plans for community
events for the 4th of July and Easter, to name just two. That was part of the impetus
in creating a new logo or new branding for the church, which we rolled out last
summer, and have items for you to take in order to indicate your participation
in and support of this church, but also so that people will begin to see it and
identify it with us. This again is part of learning to tell our story, which
will include working on increased publicity and advertising, as needed, for
people to begin to know all the ways we are working to offer the good news and
God’s love to the world. This will also include increased online presence, not
just for worship, but a redesign of our website, which is under way, and
increased social media presence, and if you would like to participate in that,
we would love your help.
And the truth is we would love your help, and need your help, for everything we do, for all of us to take ownership of this church and our mission of being God’s love in action. Everyone probably knows the 80/20 rule, that 20 percent of the people do 80% of the work, and we could not do that without those key volunteers that we have that we are giving thanks to each week in worship, but in the church there shouldn’t be an 80/20 rule. It should be a 100/100 rule. 100% of the work is done by 100% of the people, because that is what God calls for us. As the people are called to renew their covenant with God, Joshua says to the people, you must choose this day whom you are going to serve. You can serve the old gods, you can serve the other gods that surround you, or you can serve the Lord. You can’t serve multiples, because you can only choose one. So whom are you going to serve this day? We are going to serve the Lord. Whom are you going to serve tomorrow? We are going to serve the Lord. Who is this congregation going to serve? We are going to serve the Lord. Choose this day whom you will serve, and as for me and my household, we are going to serve the Lord. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.
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