2008 State of the Church Report
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Beyond the Walls:
Becoming an Outward Focused Church
“Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, "The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field." Matthew 9:35-38
When I met my wife I didn’t know much about horses.
What I didn’t know nearly got me killed too.
It wasn’t our first date, but it was nearly our last.
Wanting to impress her I told her I knew how to ride.
What I didn’t know is a horse that has been in the barn for a long time without having been ridden wants nothing more than to return to the barn and given the chance, to do it as quickly as possible.
It’s what happened to me.
The ride away from the barn was slow-paced an easy.
“Rocky”, (“Rocky” was the name of the horse) walked as calmly as a pony that gives rides to children at the county fair.
It was when we turned around to go back to the barn things got interesting.
The same distance it took us 10 minutes to travel away from the barn took what seemed like seconds to travel back to the barn.
When we got there I wasn’t sure we were going to stop either.
My wife, Karen told me later she didn’t think we would either.
When we finally did and I got off the horse Karen said two things.
First, she asked me if I was ok.
I said, “I was.”
Next she said –
“I thought you said you knew how to ride.”
That experience taught me two things.
The first thing it taught me was never pretend you know how to ride a 1,000 pound animal if you don’t know matter how pretty the owner is and how much you want to impress her.
The second thing it taught me was horses are better off outside where they belong and not inside.
It is to say while a horse may prefer to spend its life in the barn where it’s warm and safe and secure and comfortable and in the company of other horses, a horse that does will never fulfill the purpose God made it for.
God made horses for the out-of-doors.
God didn’t make horses to live their lives behind closed ones.
I’ve learned the same is true for Christians.
While as Christians we may prefer to spend our lives in-doors within the walls of the church we belong outside too and not to live out our faith on the outside means our not fulfilling the purpose God made us for either.
We see it in the passage I read to you in Matthew.
It’s a passage that (for this preacher at least) describes not only the mission and purpose of the church, but the heart of Jesus and the core of his ministry here on earth.
The Bible says simply, “Jesus went.”
It doesn’t say, “Jesus stayed.”
It says, “Jesus went.”
The Bible says rather than waiting for people to come to him where he was, Jesus went to them where they were.
Jesus took the initiative.
He took the initiative to talk to a little man who was up a tree.
He took the initiative to talk to go and lay his hands on a little girl who had died and raise her back to life.
Read the Gospels and you see Jesus’ disciples did the same thing.
Just like Jesus went, they went.
They went to the sick.
They went to the hurting people in their community and in the world.
It’s what Jesus calls us to do.
We’re to go.
Like the shepherd, Jesus said, who left the 99 sheep to find the one lost sheep we’re to go and do likewise.
We’re to go.
Not to go makes us like a horse that spends its life in the barn.
There’s a word for that.
They call it “barn sour.”
Christians suffer from the same illness.
We become “church sour.”
It’s also increasingly what the Church at-large is known for.
Instead of being a people “on the go” like Jesus was on the go we’re viewed especially, among 16-29 year olds both in and outside the church, as people who are sheltered.
We’re viewed as people who are more interested in having our own little social club that cares for its own rather than being people who genuinely follow the example of Christ.
Here’s how a 28 year old Christian described the church and the Christian lifestyle –
So many Christians are caught up in the Christian subculture and are completely closed off from the world. We go to church on Wednesdays, Sundays, and sometimes on Saturdays. We attend small group on Tuesday night and serve on the Sunday School advisory board, the financial committee, and the welcoming committee. We go to barbeques with Christian friends and plan group outings. We are closed off from the world. Even if we wanted to reach out to non-Christians, we don’t have time and we don’t know how. The only way we know how to reach out is to invite people to join in our Christian social circle.”
The challenge we face as Christians is to find balance.
We need to find balance by being in the world, Jesus said, but no of it.
Rather than expecting people to come to our doorstep we do have to go.
With humility and energy and an unwillingness not to be offended by what we see or experience once we get there we have to go.
If we don’t go we will never be the light Jesus said we are to be.
If we don’t go we will never be the salt that flavors the earth like Jesus wants us to do.
While it may be more desirable in some ways to insulate ourselves from the culture and isolate ourselves from the world we live in we can’t spend our lives in the barn.
Like a butterfly that breaks out of its cocoon we have to break out of whatever cocoon we’ve encased ourselves in if we have any real hope of helping people and introducing them to Jesus.
Here’s how John Stott puts it.
Taken from the book Unchristian Pastor Emeritus at the All Souls Church in London, England Stott writes –
If we belong to Jesus Christ, we have a double calling in relation to the world. On the one hand, we are to live, serve, and witness in the world and not try and escape from it. On the other hand, we are to avoid being contaminated by the world. So we have no liberty either to preserve our holiness by escaping from the world or to sacrifice our holiness by conforming to the world. Escapism and conformism are both forbidden to us.
The majority of young people 16-29 who are outside the church feel we’ve escaped.
72% feel we are out of touch with reality.
70% feel we are insensitive to and don’t really care about others
As the Church for more and more people we are known more for what we are against and oppose than what we are for and support.
A growing population also sees us more concerned about being “right” than we are genuinely caring for people who we think are wrong.
True or not it’s how people see us.
Friends, that’s our reality.
As a local church it’s also our reality.
It’s people’s perception.
As one of your pastors, it’s also a perception we are changing little by little because of the outward focus we find ourselves taking in places like Hixon, Tennessee, Mexico and Mississippi and, this summer Chicago.
It’s a perception we are changing even more right here in our own backyard. Ministries that find us reaching beyond the walls in our own community include: the Love Basket, Food pantry, special church-wide fundraising events, distributing backpacks to students who may need one in the area, Midnight Mission, the start up of the Hopeful Hearts program designed to meet the needs of hurting children and families serving as a host site for special events for members of the community who make their homes in group homes, cooperative programs with other churches, serving foodstuffs at a Johnstown area soup kitchen, serving as a catalyst for now a more than 1-year concentrated effort to overcome racism and prejudice and oppression, 4 years of Kingdom Assignments most of which were local in their emphasis and outreach and, finishing construction projects for families whose circumstances changed in ways that kept them from finishing the work themselves including, finishing replacing a roof for an area gentlemen whose roof was under construction for almost 2 years but nowhere nearer completion.
We celebrate them.
We invite you to please plan to attend next Saturday night’s program here in the church Fellowship Hall at 5:00 PM as part of the church’s “Missions Weekend” celebration where you can discover more about the church’s mission ministry and how God has used us to reach out in 2008 to make a difference in people’s lives. The challenge is not to rest, however. The challenge is to do even more because there is more that needs to be done. It’s also something it appears you recognize the need to do more of.
It’s why, in part at least, the results of the recent Natural Church Development survey of 30 members of our church family who are involved actively in the church said the one thing we need to do better than we do now is reaching out to meet people’s needs where we find them. Officially, the words for it are Needs-oriented Evangelism.
Needs-oriented Evangelism involves four things. First, it involves personal evangelism. Second, it involves corporate evangelism and the implementation of church-wide evangelism strategies. Third, it involves being more seeker aware and seeker friendly. The fourth and final thing it involves is assimilating new members into the life of the church. The order is significant because it begins with people and their needs. The order counters the criticism or perception that we are only interested in having people “join our club.” While Christian community is certainly something we want everyone to experience, it’s not the driver. The driver is compassion. The driver is justice. The driver is caring and loving and making people feel valued and affirmed for who they are.
Community is what follows. As you will hear later in this report as a church we’re committed to both. We are especially committed to meeting people’s needs. It’s why we are presently in the process of forming a Church Health Team to help us, as a church, develop and implement a strategy to address the needs of people in the community and county that presently are unmet. The Team will be made up of 6-8 persons.
In addition to developing and helping to implement a strategic plan the Team will identify resources we can use. They include, in part the Caring Evangelism course presently being taught by several of our Stephen Leaders. They include the upcoming Western Pennsylvania Clinic on Evangelism, Saturday, March 14 in Mars, PA. The Conference is a one-day version of the three-day event help at the Billy Graham School of Evangelism. The topics for the day include: How to Build and Evangelistic Church, Strategies for Discipling and, Teaching Your People to Share Their Faith
The Church Health Team is also building a library of printed resources and materials for study and personal reading we believe will help us help others by meeting them where they are.
If you are interested in more information about the Team, if you have the spiritual gift of evangelism and a passion for reaching people for Christ, and want to talk with someone about serving as a member of the Team please see me.
It will take all of us.
Mobilizing the church to reach out will also challenge us.
We said it earlier.
In the year ahead developing a church-wide strategy for outreach is not the only challenge we face however.
Other challenges we face are these.
Expressed as commitments we are making instead of challenges we are facing in 2009:
1. We are committed to structuring Sunday mornings in a way that will allow for meaningful Bible study and Sunday school for all ages at the same time meet the worship needs of our two worshipping communities.
To that end we are presently beginning to study how and what other large churches both in Western Pennsylvania and across the country are doing in an effort to help us develop a model that makes sense for us here at Grace.
2. We are committed to developing a comprehensive Spiritual Growth Plan that provides both a foundation for spiritual growth and opportunities for everyone, regardless of where someone is on the spiritual growth continuum the opportunity to grow in Christ and, at the same time, experience community as the Body of Christ
Just last week your pastors and others who have been involved in an on-going way met to evaluate where we are, what is working and what isn’t.
3. We are committed to developing a comprehensive church-wide children’s ministries program that includes Sunday school and Children’s Worship but also includes things like popcorn and a movie and similar events and activities to nurture the lives of the more than 200 children between the ages of 6 and 12 now on our church roster.
4. To that end we are also committed to developing a long-range staffing plan designed to help us meet the growing and ever-changing needs of persons in the 21st century.
5. We are also committed to a church-wide, year-long stewardship program designed to provide practical advice and spiritual principles in the Bible given to us by God to help us honor him and meet the needs of others with the resources we have from him.
Included in the program will be regular reports of the church’s financial strength, spending and receipts.
Today I’m pleased to report that even with the economic downturn we have experienced as a country including, here in Western PA receipts last year exceeded “Current Expense” receipts for the previous year by almost $80,000.
That’s significant especially when, in addition to Current Expense offerings, we received another $292,000 in Called to Grow giving.
6. Thanks to your giving and the giving of others our 2009 Called to Grow commitment now finds us focusing on the acquisition of land and/or a building to house the church’s
ministry, worship and community center.
Presently we have just under $160,000 set aside for that purpose.
7. Lastly, this year we renew our commitment to provide worship services that are God-
honoring, meaningful and inspirational for everyone.
It’s why we have two off-site services one on campus and one downtown and need to be open to the possibility of a third if not a fourth.
We also need to be open to the possibility of change in our on-site services because the faces in worship change.
As a church we need to recognize that. It’s one of the reasons in many churches including, this one 70% of young persons between the ages of 18 and 22 who were a part of the church leave. It’s not the only reason. Sometimes it’s because they go off to college and don’t return. Other times it’s because they move away for work and don’t return either. Too often though they leave and don’t come back because they find church boring, irrelevant and outdated. As a church we need to realize that.
While we can be grateful our overall worship attendance last year increased by almost 70 persons our totals at the end of the year were still lower than they were for the years 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. The loss of our young people is part of that. To illustrate the point we looked at our own records. Here’s what we found.
We estimate more than 200 persons who were youth when I came are either no longer involved in the church or, because they live away now are involved only minimally and their attendance in worship is limited to the summer (in some cases) or Christmas and Easter.
Here’s something else you may find interesting about Sunday morning worship.
Since 2000 an estimated 64 members of our worshipping community have also died.
Forty-four of those persons we estimate further were a part of the church’s traditional worship community.
Add to those numbers an increasing number of persons who now go west or south in the winter,
who have enough sense to stay home on Sunday mornings when the weather is bad, persons who now make their homes in nursing homes or other care facilities like St. Andrew’s who aren’t able to attend if they want to because of failing health and, parents who don’t come at all or less often because their children have moved away and it’s easy to see why attendance has dropped as dramatically as it has.
The other variable affecting worship attendance we believe is helping persons experience acceptance and love when they do come to worship so given the opportunity they will return not because they have to, but because they want to. They’ll want to return because they’ve experienced God while they are here in worship, in Sunday school, in fellowship and in other forms of meaningful community, the kind of community God calls us to be and will take all of us to create.
This year with God’s help, we will.