SACRED COMMUNITY
Last Friday night I saw an intriguing documentary entitled, “The Smartest Men in the Room.” It was all about the rise and fall of Enron. Now I’m not going to go into all of the gory details, but I was absolutely appalled at the things Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling and friends did. At one point one of them actually said, “The Lord helps those who help themselves.” Of course, you know that phrase is not in the Bible, don’t you? In any case, that got me to thinking theologically. I thought, “Does God exist to serve us, or do we exist to serve God?” Again, does God exist to serve us, or do we exist to serve God? Keep that thought in mind as we move forward.
Have you seen the young men dressed in white shirts and ties going door-to-door in our community of late? They represent what is now known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, perhaps better known to us as the Mormon Church. Their mission, in a nutshell, is to convert anyone they can to the Mormon faith.
Now typically, they do their best to avoid going to the homes of the ministers in town. Yet recently, two of these young men actually did come to my house. Unfortunately, I was not home at the time, so my wife answered the door. As they tried to strike up a conversation, she quickly told them that her husband was the minister at the First Presbyterian Church. They duly noted her statement, then tried to give her some of their literature just the same. My wife politely refused, then told them that Presbyterians are Christians too and that she was really quite happy with her faith. As the young men started to leave, one of them suddenly stopped and asked, “Do you know any Catholics?”
I’m not exactly sure what they meant by that statement, but I have a pretty good idea. In my younger days, I was actually quite critical of Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses going door-to-door trying to recruit people to their way of thinking – what we might call proselytizing. Then I studied a passage from the ninth chapter of Luke where the disciples caught someone casting out demons in Jesus’ name. They tried to stop him because he was not one of them. Jesus said to them, “Do not stop him; for he who is not against us is for us.” Thus, unless we can prove that Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses are actually against us, we have to assume that they are for us. That proved to be a bit of an eye-opener for me. I am no longer as hard on them as I once was.
Say what you will about their process, but you’ve got to admire their dedication. I mean, how many of us would be willing to go door-to-door in an effort to expand the Presbyterian Church? They are committed to their cause. And if you were to ask them, “Does God exist to serve us, or do we exist to serve God?” their answer might be better than the typical mainline Christian.
Does God exist to serve us, or do we exist to serve God? Perhaps we will find an answer to that question in the passage we read from the gospel according to Luke. Jesus and his disciples had gone to a town called Nain. There they met a procession that was carrying a dead man out of town. He was the only son of a widow, and she was devastated, as you might expect. After all, no parent wants to outlive their children. When Jesus saw the woman, he had compassion for her. Then he stopped the procession and raised the young man from the dead.
At first glance, it might appear as if this woman had been served by God, not to mention her son. Thus, when we ask the question after reading this passage, “Does God exist to serve us, or do we exist to serve God?” we might be inclined to answer, “God exists to serve us.” But when we look at this passage contextually, we see that it’s really the other way around. You see, this event occurred very early in Jesus’ public ministry. He had recently called twelve disciples to follow him. He had just preached what Luke calls “The Sermon on the Plain.” And now he has raised a young man from the dead. As our passage puts it, after this event occurred, “Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, ‘A great prophet has risen among us,’ and ‘God has looked favorably upon his people!’” The point of this passage is God’s glorification. God does not exist to serve us, rather, we exist to serve God. There may be some clear benefits to serving God, as we see in this passage, but first and foremost, we exist to serve God.
I am not at all convinced that our culture sees things that way. Our culture is more inclined to look at life the way Winnie the Pooh looks at life. Author Rodney Clapp points that out in a book entitled, Border Crossings. One day Winnie the Pooh was sitting on a log when he heard a buzzing noise. He thought to himself, “If there’s a buzzing noise, somebody’s making a buzzing noise, and the only reason for making a buzzing noise that I know of is because you’re a bee. And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey. And the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it!” Of this, Rodney Clapp writes:
Now, even though this philosopher carries the strange title of Winnie the Pooh, and even though his work is mostly appreciated (only) by children, this bit of reflection deserves our serious attention. After all, it resembles the way the American Church is more and more thinking about God and discipleship.
This incident shows Pooh to be a pragmatic individualist. He cannot imagine bees possessing an existence and purpose apart from his own use and interest. Winnie the Pooh is the quintessential consumer, entirely practical and entirely self-centered. As Pooh himself puts it, “The only reason for being a bee is to make honey, and the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it.”
Thus reasoning, Winnie the Pooh has a range of other possibilities blocked from his vision. He cannot see, for instance, the wider ecological purpose of bees: how they weave into a fabric of flora and fauna not only by providing honey, but also by such crafts as pollinating flowers. Another thing Pooh cannot see is a theological purpose for bees: that in the wonder of their existence, they speak and spell the glory of a Creator God.
I ask you again, “Does God exist to serve us, or do we exist to serve God?” Winnie the Pooh clearly sees God existing to serve us. And perhaps more often than we’d care to admit, we see God in the very same way. We turn to God urgently and often when we want something from him. We turn to God seldom to thank him for his provision. As Lyle Schaller, the guru on church growth and leadership in the 1990s once said, “It used to be that people joined the church and said: How can I help this church meet its needs? Today people are more likely to join the church and say: How can this church help meet my needs?” The world has made us into consumers. The mantra, “Have it your way,” has come to be the way we expect our hamburgers to be prepared at Burger King, as well as the way we expect all other businesses and institutions to treat us…including the church. The world has made us into consumers, and its effects are nothing short of devastating.
Along that line of thinking, I recently came across an interesting article entitled, “Visions of the Sacred Community.” It was actually written by four Jewish men: Isa Aron, Steven Cohen, Lawrence Hoffman, and Ari Kelman. While the bulk of their research was done on synagogues, their findings seem to be quite applicable to the church as well. They write:
Congregational leaders who embark upon change efforts develop contrasting images of the qualities they seek in the congregation and of the characteristics they hope to shed, transcend, or avoid. They aspire to become what we call visionary congregations: those that most effectively develop, nurture and apply powerful, widely-shared and widely understood visions of the sacred community. In contrast, they distinguish their communities from what we call functional congregations, those that may excel at performing discrete functions that satisfy their consumer-members, but tend to fall short of genuinely achieving an integrated sense of sacred community.
The goal here is sacred community. Community is one of the things our Church Revitalization Task Force has tried to emphasize in recent weeks. Sacred community is found in what they call visionary congregations, but seems to be lacking in what they call functional congregations. Thus, obviously, we want to be a visionary congregation. Yet in order to do so there are certain pratfalls that need to be avoided, and there are certain characteristics that need to be developed.
Functional congregations – those that fall short of sacred community – tend to have the following six characteristics in common. The first characteristic is consumerism. In other words, we pay a certain amount to the church when we make a pledge, and we expect a certain level of service in return. That’s what we call “consumerism.” The second characteristic is segmentation. In other words, programs tend to stand on their own with very little integration into the life of the church. It’s a lot like the silos you might see on a farm. There is no overarching sense of connection or purpose.
The third characteristic is passivity. In other words, the ministry of the church is done almost exclusively by paid professionals. Worshippers sit passively in their pews, parents drop off their kids for religious education, and church boards deal with minutia. The fourth characteristic is meaninglessness. People feel like they’re just going through the motions at church without a genuine sense that they’re making a difference.
The fifth characteristic is resistance to change. You know the seven last words of the church, don’t you? They are: We’ve never done it that way before! The church that says that is resistant to change. And last but not least, the sixth characteristic of a functional church is nonreflective leadership. Leaders of the church are more concerned with programs and institutional arrangements than they are with purpose or with vision.
There you have it, the six characteristics of a functional congregation. A functional congregation will often be lacking in sacred community. The goal is to become a visionary congregation. A visionary congregation is much more likely to have sacred community. Visionary congregations, too, seem to have six characteristics in common.
The first characteristic is sacred purpose. A pervasive and shared vision infuses all aspects of the church. The second characteristic is a holistic ethos. The parts are related to each other such that the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Scripture, service and acts of loving kindness are intertwined throughout the church’s life.
The third characteristic is a participatory culture. People do more than sit in pews on Sunday mornings and avoid church commitments all week long. They are actively involved in the work of creating sacred community. The fourth characteristic is meaningful engagement. Meaningful engagement is achieved through repeated inspirational experiences that infuse people’s lives with meaning. That comes through worship and personal involvement in the life of the church.
The fifth characteristic is an innovative disposition. We have to be willing to try new things, and we have to accept the fact that some of the things we try will fail. People who sit back and say, “I told you so,” help no one. The sixth and final characteristic of a visionary congregation is reflective leadership. This requires a commitment to the overarching purpose of the church, attention to relationships, the mastery of both the big picture and the details, and a sincere and prayerful approach to change.
If the goal of our church is truly sacred community, then we need to strive to become a visionary congregation. Ladies and gentlemen, we are currently taking all the right steps. These are exactly the kinds of things the Church Revitalization Task Force has been considering, and these are exactly the kinds of things we’ve been discussing at our congregational luncheons. I suspect you’re going to be hearing more about these kinds of things in the days and weeks that lie ahead.
For now, however, let’s return to our initial question: “Does God exist to serve us, or do we exist to serve God?” If we believe God exists to serve us, then we have bought completely into the consumer culture around us. Yet if, instead, we believe that we exist to serve God, there is still a flicker of hope for our future. For a people that believes it exists to serve God might just be on the way to building sacred community. Amen.
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