Dear Church,
There you were, all
dressed up for your annual congregation meeting, wearing your anxiety.
Seeing again
that pledged giving can’t pay for anticipated costs, you pleaded for reassurance
of someone doing something to make it so you wouldn’t be financially at
risk. You noted fewer people, again; and
heard some reasons why. You presumed “We
can’t keep operating like this”—referring to the manner to which you have been
accustomed for the last half-century. “Yes,”
you admitted, “there are always tough times.”
But you wore the anxiety of seeing writing on the wall growing more
permanent.
Rest assured,
dear Church, you picked out your fashionable anxiety for reasons right and realistic. You love your Church. You can’t imagine your world without it. You can’t picture a life that doesn’t include
your sacred music, familiar worship, sacramental rituals and traditional
calendar. Frankly, you can’t imagine
that God could love the world in the best way if your Church simply ceased to
be!
So you chose
designer-anxiety even, to match the “money issues” that are pushing changes
that will force you, dear Church, to transform into something you cannot
like. Because to stop the financial
hemorrhaging, you have to stop paying—that is, cut back on the music program,
reduce the office hours, and contract with a part-time minister. So super-chic anxiety is important to your "appearance" because
when you’ve asked about what’s imperative, spiritually fulfilling, joyful, and
brings excitement—the music program, worship, and full-time pastoral ministry are
staple responses.
You know you
*should* move to ease your financial worries; but you know the medicine is a
bitter pill that will make things be different.
The prescription, too, could hasten your death as much as "insufficient funds" if the
side-effects are less people coming because they find the lack distasteful. Yet still you ask, “What’s to be done so that
you won’t run out of money?” or “What can you change to avoid capitulation?”—borrowing
2 more anxious outfits for the price of 1—because the answers to financial
freedom create the changes you don’t wish for and won’t allow to happen!
You asked,
dear Church, if your leaders faced your questions, too. Surely, you know they have. They’ve listened. Felt your pain. Seen your ambivalence about choices. Shared your guilt and same sense of
responsibility. Don’t you know? It’s hard to choose to stop the bleeding when
the voices grumble against even small steps.
It’s hard choose new responses when the whispering declares, “But, we
can’t afford it.”
But as hard
as this is to conceive, you must come quickly to know, dear Church, that your trendy
anxiety is unbecoming. That Jesus died
and rose again to save you, doesn’t ever mean that the life to which you have
become accustomed must always be preserved.
In fact, quite the opposite is true.
Jesus was meant to transform you!
To follow Jesus means not staying the same—no matter what you do, or don’t even try.
Craig
Barnes, the President of Princeton Theological Seminary, writing in a very recent article
for the Christian Century magazine,
observes:
"The church has never looked less attractive than when it dresses in anxiety. …The church has to stop fretting about its future. The anxiety takes up the air and leaves the church too lethargic to offer anything to the world. The alternative response is for the church to do what it’s always done at its best, what it did from the beginning: stop thinking about its future and sacrifice itself to its mission. …Fretting about the viability of our [church] only distracts us from the only thing that has ever given us purpose—keeping up with Jesus.”
[You can read
the full article here, where Barnes would remind any church dressed in
anxiety that she’s called instead to “follow Jesus--to whom she has given over her
life” in the waters of baptism. No
Church should be afraid of death—“You can’t scare [people who have died and
been raised].”]
Yet long
before this eloquent observation, dear Church, this word of life always at risk
of dying, is written into your very definition:
“The Church is to be a community of faith, entrusting itself to God
alone, even at the risk of losing its
life” (Book of Order, F-1.0301). That
you wear anxiety is misleading; for you should be clothed in the fabric of the
one to whom you have given yourself in
faith!
This is
really hard for you to conceive, dear Church, because everyone and everything
you know from the world around you tells you yours is no way to live. “Yours is a failed business model because you
can’t project to operate beyond 2 or 3 years.”
“Yours is a failed life because you appear to be dying.” “Yours is ‘unsuccessful’ because you ‘can’t’
or ‘won’t’ make the prudent changes.” Everyone—that
is, but Jesus—whose name is attached to an institution that has stood the test
of more than 2,000 years-time.
Dressed in the
anxiety the world gives you, dear Church, you keep asking, “How long—how long
do we have until the money runs out?” as if that’s your measure, focus, and
calling. But what if you chose not to
dress in the world’s anxiety? What if
you turned your back on the world, and tried keeping up with Jesus? What might be revealed if you chose naked
transparency? What if you chose an aim like
this one, attributed to John Wesley—that like Jesus you are called to:
“Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.”
Do *this*,
dear Church, and how could anyone quibble that you were unsuccessful or not
beautiful, or not effective, or not faithful to your calling? Even if by doing *this*, it costs you your
life? For isn’t part of what the story
of the garden reveals is that sin is in the desire to clothe yourself and hide
your nakedness?
You must have
been thinking, dear Church, that your task is to save yourself. But you were given life and commissioned instead
to show Jesus to the world, to imitate Jesus, even if it costs you your own
life! The question you should be asking
is not, “How long can you survive?” but rather, “How are we living out our
days?”
What your
leadership believes, dear Church, is that God’s power outlives the world’s
power. This is part of the star-light
that guides us in dark and light times, trusting a gut instinct informed by our
experience of scripture, and a faith most often expressed near death: “If we
live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord—so that whether we
live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.”
Your leaders
may exhaust all the money that’s been given to you over time, dear Church; or
we may seek to discover new ways and wild possibilities. But in either or in every way, it will be in
giving witness to Jesus Christ—the best we can, by all the means we can, in all
the ways we can, in all the places we can, at all the times we can, to all the
people we can, as long as we ever can.
© Rev. David Stipp-Bethune; Teaching Elder
and Pastor, The Presbyterian Church of Llanerch, Havertown, Pennsylvania
