Message from Interim Pastor Kathleen Anderson

“The church exists only for the sake of those who are not yet part of it.”
 

A Presbyterian colleague serving in Spokane tells the story of a pastor in his first congregation in a rural area of Tennessee where the little town was overrun by construction workers who were building one of the first nuclear reactors in the country. This new pastor called his leadership together one Sunday after worship to propose a calling campaign to invite the construction workers to join them on Sunday mornings. His proposal was met with lukewarm enthusiasm. Someone said, “I’m not sure they’d fit in here,” and another said, “Oh, they’re just here on a temporary basis. They’ll all be leaving the area soon enough.” A vote on the issue was set for the next Sunday, and when pastor and leaders gathered again, one of the church members immediately said, “I move that in order to be a member of this church, you must own property in the county.” Someone else said, “I second that.” And the proposal passed.

Some years later, when this now-seasoned pastor was back in the area, he decided to see what was going on with his first congregation. Despite a new interstate highway being built on that side of the state, he eventually found the church and noticed something different about it. It was still white, and still looked like a church, but he couldn’t help but notice the parking lot was full—full of cars and trucks and motorcycles. Inside, the pews and the organ were all pushed to the periphery of the room and aluminum and plastic tables were set up in the space. At every table were people eating barbecue chicken, ribs, and pork. His first church was now a restaurant. The pastor turned to his wife and said, “It’s a good thing this is not still a church, otherwise these people couldn’t be in here.”

It’s not all about us. God is about us, yes, but not only about us. God is for us, yes, but not only for us. God is for all, for everyone, for the world. When the church is only about satisfying ourselves, we lose sight of mission, of vision, of why the church even exists. The church exists for all those people in the world who are not yet part of it, who do not yet speak its language, who still have unanswered questions. If we are not open to those outside the church, we will not long continue to be a church even for ourselves. This was, unfortunately, what the congregation of this story learned.

It’s not always easy, nor is it often comfortable to talk about the church in a different way, let alone to think about church as not being exclusively for insiders. But being comfortable is an enemy of faith. Comfort often leads to complacency and complacency demands no energy or urgency from us. Are we urgent? Are we eager? Maybe we need to recognize what God has done in our own lives before we are eager to share our own experience of God or serve others in God’s name. That realization is what Luther said feeds our faith which, in its turn, motivates us to good works. It’s through serving others that we serve our God: “Even as you have done it to the least of these, you have done it to me.” (Mt. 25)

The church is not only about us, because we are not the only ones who need it. The disciples wanted Jesus to give the kingdom of God to them in the form of a Messiah who would restore Israel to its former glory, but it was not just for them, either. The kingdom of God is for the whole world, and if we are not willing to share it, we cannot enter it. The church must be a place where people can come with questions and not just answers, where they can come with problems and not just solutions, where their hearts can be moved by contemporary music or jazz and not just classical music, or where they can be moved by classical music and not just contemporary. All of us in the church live in this world, and God does not call us to remove ourselves from it in order to be holy, but to go out into it being already made holy by God. We are called to be the clay vessels that carry the good news of Jesus Christ to the world, knowing, as St. Paul wrote, that the extraordinary power of the Word comes not from us, but from God. Indeed, everything we are and everything we have comes from God. How, then, do we use God’s gifts?

Peace,
Pastor Anderson

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