This week, as I was talking with you in my sermon on Sunday, I’m still thinking about the interplay of church as organization and church as people. The buzzword in church circles is “missional”-the focus is on how we are living the mission of God, not on how we organize ourselves or how we provide a service (we are not like manicurists or exterminators, for example, though we do emphasize service to the world). It’s hard not to fall into a consumerist way of relating. Our contemporary culture just uses that language; it’s convenient. Who is our market? How can we promote our message to resonate with them? How are we meeting the needs of our funders? What balance of challenge and inspiration, happy music and solemn music, will please our patrons?
We do need to be accountable, and the opinions of those who gather do matter, but we are the church because God has a mission in the world, not because we want to strengthen our organization or please ourselves. The sacraments are food for our souls and we come because we are hungry, but we also believe that feeding that particular hunger makes us attuned to other kinds of hunger in the world. We are healed at the altar and reminded of our deep worthiness as children of God so we can go out in the world and join in God’s work of healing others. That’s mission-that’s church as body, not church as service provider. We want a strong organization to serve the mission, but the organization is not the mission.
Understanding ourselves as a gathered body instead of a corporation frees us in a really particular way. This is what Simon and Andrew learned when they started fishing for people-it’s God’s mission, not theirs, and they’re free to succeed or fail, as long as they’re listening. The question for us is how to listen. Listen to our city, to where we are called to be in ministry. Listen to each other, to how we can help each other hear the call of God in our lives. When you coach your kid’s sport’s team, that’s part of God’s call for you. When you stand on the Common for the peace vigil, that’s part of God’s call for you. When you watch your grandkids after school, it’s God’s call.We don’t just live out our call as Christians within these four walls.
I wrote two weeks ago about the small group model we are considering for Lent education, beginning on Tuesday, March 11. It’s beginning to be a bit more fleshed out, and we’ve settled on reading the book The Restoration Project by Christopher Martin, whom I met at a conference last year. Martin uses the restoration of Leonardo DaVinci’s painting, the Last Supper, as a metaphor for how we can be restored to the image of God, and how our parishes can be home bases for transformation of the self as well as the world. The theological model he uses is based on the steps of humility set out by St Benedict in his Rule of Life. Christopher is a priest and a father of two, so at the same time as the method is steeped in Christian tradition and monasticism, it’s also very practical and tied to the life of ordinary people living now. The hope in beginning these smaller groups is to be able to support one another in all the different ways we live out our callings as Christians, as well as to know each other on a deeper level.
As she has generously done for the last two years, Erin Jensen will coordinate children’s education with a mix of Godly Play and other projects. Everyone is welcome to come for dinner at 6pm, and then the first education portion for children and adults will be from 6:40 to 7:30, with our simple meditative Eucharist at 7:30. What’s different this year is that there will be a second group that will convene with the same content after the service, so if you can’t make it as early as 6 you can still participate, joining at the Eucharist at 7:30 or just the group beginning at 8. If there is interest, there would also be a daytime group, so please let us know if that works better for you. Contact Anna Jones with questions. If the groups are successful, they may continue beyond Lent, but we’ll start for five weeks to begin with.