“Being the Church”
First Presbyterian Church of Potsdam, NY
July 16, 2006
The Reverend Laurena Marie Wickham Will
Mark 6:1-13 He left that place and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. On the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded. They said, “Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him. Then Jesus said to them, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.” And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief. Then he went about among the villages teaching. He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics. He said to them, “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.” So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.
 I clearly remember it. It was winter time and the session of my home church was meeting at Miss Y’s house. Miss Y was elderly and had a lot of difficulty getting out in the winter so was agreed that they would hold meetings in her home and she would make her most wonderful donuts. I arrived right on time at the beginning of the meeting with my liaison from the Presbytery’s Committee on Preparation for Ministry. This was the night that the session would interview me, then recommend to the Presbytery that I move from an inquirer to a candidate for ministry of word and sacrament. I was through my first two years in seminary and half way through the third. I had not been home in a while and I was excited to see the session members, many of whom I had known since childhood. Seminary was going well and I had completed several field education Placements in addition to Clinical Pastoral Education as a Chaplain in a Physical rehab hospital. It would be great to share my experiences with them, the little church of not more than 40 members was so excited when I had become an inquirer several years before.
My liaison opened our time by letting the session know I had been meeting with the committee regularly and they were pleased with my work and felt I was nearly ready to begin seeking a call to serve a church. The session asked many questions before asking me to leave the room for their time of voting. I was taken into the next room where I was to wait while they discussed me and voted. The first thing I noticed was that the walls were very thin and so was the door between the rooms, I could hear the discussion begin. Feeling guilty for being able to hear I thought I should move to another room but before I could leave I heard the voice of Mr. X. Mr. X was probably in his mid 40s with two little girls of his own, not yet in High School. Though I didn’t know him well, his wife had always been one of my favorites, she substitute taught for a while and was the kindest of souls. I was sure he would be as kind as his wife, he had always seemed to be. But what I heard him say shocked me, “I don’t see how that little girl can be anyone’s minister, what could she possibly teach anyone.” I was so very surprised, stunned even, the session discussion went on and took a very long time. Mr. X told the Session that he could not approve of letting me go on, “it was one thing to let her go to school but completely another to allow her to be ordained.” I was horrified to say the least but with or without him the session passed the vote and soon after the Presbytery examined me and affirmingly moved me to the candidacy phase of the ordination process.
My liaison quoted this piece of scripture to me that night. “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.” But I wonder, is it only in their home town that the problem lies. Mark and the common lectionary, choose to tell this story along with the one about Jesus sending the disciples out to share what he has taught them. Interestingly with this sending out Jesus includes a warning about how some will not welcome them and not want to hear what they have to say.
I read a sermon by Duke University’s William Willimon that got me thinking more about Jesus and the message of God’s love he brought and the way that message has been heard and spread through the Church. Dr. Willimon points out that: “Jesus provoked controversy; his followers also provoke controversy. Something about Jesus, something in his teaching or in his person, turned away more people than he attracted.” Isn’t that an interesting thing to think about? In the church we have long been about attracting folks, haven’t we? It is a dichotomy, we want to get more and more folks to come to church, yet we are called to share the good news. Yet, as with Jesus, sometimes the message makes some folks turn away.
I remember one Sunday in particular I was preaching about textual criticism and the Bible. Discussing the historic writings in the context of not only their history as a passed on story but in the history of when they were put into this book we know as The Bible. The next day I found one of my parishioners in my office telling me he and his wife did not come to church to be challenged in their belief but to find peace and comfort for life.
I don’t believe that the good news necessarily has the effect of sounding like good news for everyone, particularly if it is not in line with popular thought in the main stream of Christianity. This is what happened for Jesus too. He offended faithful folks with his radical message of love of people before love of law.
In spite of Jesus’ warning and plight, we in the church do anything we can not to offend folks, but to attract them. To be honest churches place a great deal of pressure on pastors to do this. Get more people coming, preach sermons that will make them want to come back, meet each Parishioner’s needs so they will stay and if they leave it is often thought of as the pastor’s fault and therefore the pastor must do something to get them back.
I remember going on vacation for two weeks only to come home to find that a few couples in the church had decided to start a new social group for the over 50 crowd. The women behind the group had not talked to session about it nor brought it to any committee. This group developed in a moment of what they felt was real crisis. There was a couple who had been coming to church for over a year who had not yet joined. They were originally Methodist but upon moving home in retirement were under the impression that the Presbyterians had more to offer, a better music program, and more activities for them to go to were at the top of their list. But the couple had soon become disenchanted in the church, complaining to folks that there just wasn’t enough for them to do in the church. Of course they didn’t join committees or become members, so they were not involved in those ways, but they wanted something more social with the people. The folks who started the new group were fearful that this “wealthy” and very politically connected couple might go elsewhere. This couple had rubbed elbows with all the national politicians and some international. They were in a position to really “help” the church even though they chose not to join and not to do any of the work of the session and committees.
In spite of the new “AARP” social group and all their picnics and day trips, all its activities to please the couple, the pair soon became increasingly disenchanted and moved to a nearby Methodist church. The efforts made by some members to bend over backward to make them happy was not really what the couple wanted. I am not sure they even knew what they wanted.
In their book Selling Out the Church, Philip D. Kenneson and James L. Street write:
Not long ago, Jim [a pastor of a small congregation] entered a supermarket and ran into Jan Matheny, a woman who only the Sunday before had visited with her husband and three children in the church that Jim serves. After exchanging pleasantries, Jim told her how much the church appreciated her visit and how he hoped they would return. Jan replied, ‘We enjoyed the service, but right now we’re just shopping around for the church that meets our needs.”
After all, what is the church about if not about meeting our needs? Perhaps that is [even] why [we] are here this morning, to get our needs met. Of course, the church wants to meet peoples’ needs. But that begs deeper questions: “Which needs should the church attempt to meet? Who determines which needs the church will not attempt to meet? Does the church’s meeting of specific needs serve a larger goal or purpose even more important than people’s needs, as we define those needs?” (p.64).
We live in a day when many are convinced that the church should get into marketing, that the church should take its cue from business and be more “consumer oriented.” Pastors are caught up in the movement to create “user friendly” worship, worship in which people have their needs met. Often this means worship that sacrifices challenging messages for feel good ones, easy ones to hear, something the congregation can agree with. There is more and more pressure on the pastor to lead the church in marketing and helping churches devise programs that help folk’s have their “felt needs” met.
There are great pushes to develop surveys to find the need of the people and then develop a church program and worship that meets those needs. In my thinking when we become more interested in having people consume what we offer we are beginning to loose our understanding of not only worship but what it is to be a church.
As Willimon goes on to say in his article: “In this view, worship is a product that congregations offer for consumption, with the primary concern being how to attract and satisfy more customers (or how to keep the ones you’ve got). The supermarket doesn’t tell you that you should prefer Romaine lettuce over Iceberg. Rather, the grocer discovers which products you want and offers you those products cheaply and efficiently.” Willimon goes on to say, “So, when last fall Duke Chapel sought to improve Sunday services, what did we do?” Like so many of us he says, ”We mailed a questionnaire with lots of questions about what was thought of our worship, what folks liked and didn’t like.” He continues by saying, “What if a congregation believes its worship is not a product for consumption, like lettuce, but an activity that it engages in to the glory and honor of God, like prayer?” What if the church asked the question, “What does God need from us?”
In one church I visited, in response to their survey, found the answer was more music and less scripture. I had a colleague and friend who served as an interim in that church with its two services. The first service, he was told, was only to be music. When he received from the session the order of how the service went he found that although it was all “religious music” they had even done away with all prayers and scripture readings because the people found these things boring and not meeting their needs.
Another church wanted to be sure and be finished with worship in one hour so folks could be assured that they would be able to get home by a little after noon. They sat down with the order of service and did away with all “unnecessary” parts, removing all scripture but the one before the sermon and requesting shorter greetings and shorter children’s sermons.
Another church had some who wanted to disband worship altogether and just get together socially and to do things with their contributions that met the needs in the community. The desire was to meet the needs of the people and if this meant saving money for giving by having no worship and no pastor so be it.
It seems that when we do this we forget about Jesus’ call to set aside time for worship and his warning that we may be unpopular. William Willimon says:
There may be reasons for not letting the customer and the customer’s needs determine the shape of Sunday morning, reasons which are not merely related to our insensitivity or the antiquated attitude in the church.
By living in a society in which most daily choices are consumer choices, people have come to view their relationship to the church in similar ways....But once people come to view choosing a church like choosing among competing brands and styles of basketball shoes, then enormous pressure is exerted among the church to conceive of itself in those terms as well” (p. 68). And [as Kenneson and Street put it] this tendency toward consumerism may be the most detrimental contemporary temptation for the church.
Many years ago, the great sociologist, Ferdinand Toennies, criticized the role of the market in creating a society in which there was no real community, but rather only individuals who approached others with the attitude “I give so that you will give back to me.…
Somehow I don’t think this is what we want of church, but perhaps where we are headed as a society.
What if the church serves people, not as a market transaction, but because it is the people of God? What if the choir works hard on their anthem, not because they hope you will like it and be inspired by it but because the choir knows that we are called to be a sign, a signal, a foretaste, a beachhead of God in the world? What if I’m preaching this sermon, not because I think it’s uppermost on your list of weekly wants, but rather because I believe this is what God wants?
What is the greatest service the church can render the world? Perhaps the service we render is not necessarily what the world thinks it needs. The church is not only about meeting my needs but also about rearranging my needs, giving me needs I would never have had had I not come to church.
Isn’t it the role of church to lead our society, knowing fully well that the message it shares may be unpopular? The people in Jesus’ time didn’t like the message of unconditional love any better that we do now, they wanted rules to follow to know who was in and who was not, just as some of us do now. Society is comfortable with hate and judgment, who is in and who is not. We are a consumer people and we don’t want to hear that we might not even really know our own needs. We live in a world where we want to know exactly where our donation is going and make sure it is helping only those we want to have help, we want to come and find out what we are getting in return for our commitment and donation. If fact we may not even want to join, just in case we become dissatisfied with what our money pays for, we can leave and purchase a new brand with no strings attached.
While we are asking what people want, we ought to ask the more frightening question, What does God want? “What does the Lord require?” is a fundamental question.
I close with one last quote from Dr. Willimon:
The church is not here to meet people’s needs. The church is called to the counter-cultural activity of serving God in a world that does not worship God. “Most Americans are deeply formed by this market place of created desire, spending vast fortunes in an attempt to satisfy those insatiable needs. It seems that faithfulness to the gospel would call the church to challenge the very ethos of our culture by identifying many of those felt needs as illegitimate. Instead, churches too often cast themselves as one more social institution dedicated to legitimating this marketplace of desire. Such churches, by catering to the whims of discriminating consumers, encourage their constituents to expect the church to function as another service agency whose purpose is to court them by providing a smorgasbord of programs and services (p. 73).
[and I would add entertainment.]
Instead of marketing, our primary metaphor ought to be formation. We ought to spend more energy worrying about how the church ought to form its community and its members as “concrete embodiments of the gospel such that it, and they continue to offer a profound, perhaps even radical, alternative to the dominate structures and institutions of the day”(p. 75).”
AMEN |
First Presbyterian Church of Potsdam, New York