This week we had to submit our annual statistics to the annual conference, which includes reporting on our finances, but then also about worship attendance, and membership, and how many people are impacted by the ministries of the church, and baptisms and participation in Sunday school and other classes. That is they are asking me to report things that they can count to try and account for how we are making disciples. The problem is, none of the things we have to report really say anything about that ultimately. Because you could have a youth group of 50, but not have them coming into relationship with Jesus, and you could have a youth group of five that is making deep disciples. So which is better? Well off of straight statistics, the conference is going to be happier with the 50, than with the five, even though our goal is making disciples. Of course you could have the opposite as well, I am not saying that big is bad, but it’s a matter of what is actually happening in those groups, which is harder to define.
In 2004, Willow Creek Community Church, which is located outside of Chicago and is one of the largest churches in the country, did try and quantify their ability to make disciples and to deepen people in their spiritual journey. Willow Creek, which began in 1975, was one of the primary pushers of the idea of creating a seeker church to bring in unchurched people by removing all the things that people associated with being church. And so, in their own admission, they undertook this survey to really prove how successful they had been in fulfilling the great commission and making disciples of Christ. But, the survey showed the opposite. That while they were great at getting people through the door, they were not moving them past seeking into discipleship.
I was in seminary when the results of that survey came out,
and I do have to say that there was some, or maybe a lot more than some
gloating, by churches, especially the mainline who had been talking about what
we saw as some deficiencies in what they were doing, which honestly had more to
do with jealousy than anything else, and so now was our time to talk about how
their model failed and how we were better. But, then it quickly became apparent
that we didn’t have anything to prove that fact, and that more than likely we
too had lots of people sitting in our pews who were also not making progress in
their discipleship process,. Who were not growing spiritually. Who were
stagnant in their faith, or even worse, who were still in the infancy stages of
the faith, who still needed spiritual milk rather than solid food, even if they
had been in the church for a long time. And so there was a lot of soul
searching that took place and new programs and new ideas, although we are still
not good at evaluating and being able to report on discipleship.
But that is what we are going to be looking at today is that
we have as a core value that we are going to be growing spiritually, that is we
are going to be working on deepening our relationship with God, with Christ, we
are going to grow in discipleship. And so I said in our first week that
Christ-centered needed to be our first core values because it flavored
everything else we did, and impacted everything else we did, and that is
certainly all true. And by saying that we are going to be Christ-centered in
our spiritual growth, what we are also doing is saying that we are going to be
increasing our Christ-centeredness, because that is what growing spiritually is
going to be doing for us. It’s like a feedback loop on itself. But before we
dig more into that, let’s once again say what our core values are. We are
Christ-centered, prayerful, inclusive, growing spiritually, caring and
compassionate and in service and mission. So we’ve already covered the first
three, and if you didn’t hear any of those messages, I would encourage you to
go back and watch them and they can be found on Facebook and YouTube.
And so as I said, when Willow Creek came out with their
findings, we began to hear a lot more about what is overarchingly called a
pathway to discipleship. Because what churches found was that while we were
doing lots of things, and we had small groups and fellowship groups and Sunday
school and other weekly activities, that there wasn’t anything that really tied
everything today. And more importantly there was not a way to incorporate
people new to the church into the church. It didn’t say this is what you need
to do first, and then other steps, and for those who had been in the church
forever, it didn’t say here are the next steps. These are the next things to do
in order to deepen your spiritual life, in order to become a better disciple.
And if it did, it tended to be a linear path that says you go from a to b to c,
and so on and then at some point you’re going to be done, or at least plateaued
somewhere, which is not the nature of faith.
First because we should never stop growing in our faith,
learning more, doing different things. As Maya Angelou said, she is always
surprised when people come up to her and tell her they are a Christian, because
her response is “Already? You’ve already got it? I’m still working at it
because I thought it took a lifetime to become a Christian.” If you remember
nothing else from today, remember Angelou’s brilliance there. But the other
problem is that we don’t tend to work in a linear pattern, especially when it
comes to faith. We are more likely to bounce around from thing to thing to
thing. And yet we still need to know what paths are even out there, what paths
we should be going down, what we are aiming for, because, as Zig Ziglar said,
“if you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.” So what is it that we are
aiming at?
The easy answer to that, as we’ve already said is
discipleship. Jesus tells us that we are to go forth and make disciples,
baptizing in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And yet, answering
what that actually is is hard, because the statistics ask me about baptism not
about discipleship because they don’t know what to ask. And this is true for
the whole church because what we have done is to go out and baptize and then
hope they become disciples. And in order to make disciples, we have to be
disciples. This is what the author of Hebrews is talking about this morning. He
says that those to whom the letter is being addressed, which is an unknown
group to us, should already be teaching new people in the faith, that is they
should be mature in the faith, but instead they have become complacent at best,
or maybe negligent at worst, and they are still only taking spiritual milk
because they have remained infants in the faith, a common analogy in the New
Testament letters. And so he is imploring them to move on in their faith, not
taking the basic teachings anymore, but moving onto perfection as the NRSV
says, but that other translations say is maturity. Faith is a process in which
progress needs to be made, and while at first it is reliant upon someone else
teaching, or feeding, those who are new in the faith, to reach maturity it is
dependent upon us to do the work ourselves, to be moving onto perfection, as
Methodists say.
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, talked a
lot about God’s grace, and he said there were three types of grace. The first
was prevenient grace, the grace that comes before, and that is God’s love which
is poured out for all of us, whether we know it’s there or not, that God loves
everyone and wants to be in love with everyone, and so God extends that grace
and mercy to everyone. The next type of grace is justifying grace, which is
when we accept God’s grace and mercy into our lives. We are consciously aware
of it, we take the spiritual milk, and then we start growing in the faith, so
that we can eat solid food. And so with justifying grace, we seek to live more
and more every day as Christ did. We grow in the faith so that our whole life
is transformed by our discipleship so that everything we do is infused by our
faith. And this is not just intellectual growth, but it’s moral growth, and
ethical growth and spiritual growth. Everything we are and everything we do is
infused by our discipleship so that we become fully Christ-centered, with the
goal to move onto sanctifying grace, the last of the three, in which we achieve
Christian perfection, which doesn’t mean that we are perfect the way that’s
normally understood, but that we are so full of the love of God that we can no
longer willfully sin. But achieving perfection in a Wesleyan understanding of
that, or full maturity, is only a temporary state, because we are human, and we
are therefore broken, and so we slide back and forth on this scale. Every day
is a new opportunity to grow in faith, to grow spiritually.
The immortal Crash Davis said that baseball is a simple
sport, you throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. If you go watch
a little league game, they warm up doing all of those things. If you go to a
major league game, what do they do to warm up? The exact same thing. Although
their level of doing it is radically different, but fundamentally they are
doing the same things. And growing spiritually is similar. What you do early in
faith, to learn and to grow, is to a large degree what you do later, but with
differences in skill. And the best place to start growing spiritually,
regardless of skill, is through daily prayer and daily scripture reading.
Wesley called these, and other spiritual practices, or spiritual disciplines,
means of grace, and we’ll talk more about them during the season of Lent, and
of course we also have already talked about prayer being foundational.
But to move from little league to the major leagues, to move
from spiritual milk to solid food, requires not just good coaching from
teachers but it also requires work on everyone’s part. As I said a few weeks
ago, we can put together a great worship service, but I can’t make you worship.
we can create an incredible pathway to discipleship to help everyone grow
spiritually, but if you don’t do anything then you won’t grow. And we are told
that Jesus grew in wisdom, and so if Jesus can grow, then certainly all of us
can. and so that first starts with me and other leaders. The fall after I was
appointed here I talked about the membership vows and I set some expectations
about them, which included the expectation that everyone would pray once a day
and also that we would read scripture daily, and then I never talked about it
again. That was my failure as a spiritual leader and so I am sorry for that,
and I am going to change that. We are going to talk more about expectations and
how we live into them, not to fill or check boxes, but to help us grow
spiritually. And so we are going to work on creating a discipleship pathway, or
at least begin that work so that we have things in place with the intention of
having a new director of faith development in place this summer to help lead us
and guide us on that path. And then there is the work we have to do ourselves.
There was a really interesting study that came out a month
or so ago that said that professional athletes were most likely to not the
first born, which is what I would have guessed, but instead to be younger
brothers and sisters. And why? Because the younger ones grew up playing with
their older siblings and their friends and so where pushed to be better, to
play beyond themselves or their age, and so quickly learned skills above where
they would normally be and kept pushing themselves even after they outpaced
their older siblings in skill. That is they sought to mature more quickly. Now
did that come easy? Absolutely not. At first they struggled and they fell and
they failed, but in that struggle they got better, and because they were pushed
and pushed themselves, they did not grow complacent. And the same is true in
our spiritual lives. We need to be pushed. If we are amongst a group of people
who are at the same place spiritually then it’s really easy to become complacent,
or even to become apathetic, and that lethargy can spread to others or even the
whole church.
We need to surround ourselves not only with people who will
push us in our faith life, to help us grow spiritually, but we also need to
surround ourselves with those that we might push, or pull, to grow spiritually.
To be the teacher, and more importantly to make new disciples. So growing
spiritually is about both teaching and learning, and always moving to new
things, and learning to live into the commandment to love God with all of our
hearts, minds and souls, so not just with the head, and loving our neighbor as ourselves,
and so service also becomes a way that we grow spiritually, which we will cover
the next two weeks.
Jesus teaching began in the synagogue and then led him and the disciples outside. So too does our learning start here, but it can’t end here, it is to lead us beyond ourselves out into the world to make new disciples. If you don’t know where to start or if you are stuck in your spiritual life, go back to the basics, pray and read scripture daily, and that is one of our expectations for what we all do. And then it leads us into small groups, and into study groups, and into service, because we as Methodists are called into personal holiness and social holiness. Indeed one of the things that made the Methodist movement was the call into being in relationship with one another, of holding one another spiritually accountable, by being asked “how is it with your soul?” with the belief that growing spiritually personally and communally would lead us into the world to serve, knowing that not only would these things help us to grow spiritually so that we would be moving on towards perfection, but that the Spirit would also carry us to perfection, to spiritually maturity.
So regardless of where you are, where we are, in our spiritual growth, whether we are only drinking spiritual milk or we are eating solid food, there is always room to grow and always room to help others grow, for one of our core values is to grow spiritually so that we might become more Christ-centered, more prayerful, more inclusive, more compassionate and more in service in order that we might fulfill the great commission and go forth to make disciples in the name of Christ. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.
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