Gratitude and Good-Byes

As many of you know, it's been a tough year. After a bout with shingles in January, I had a miscarriage in April and a second miscarriage in June. I've been away on leave since our second miscarriage, and missed the church very much. I'm so grateful for the outpouring of love we've experienced in these months, and for the time away.

This time away has also been a time of deep prayer and reflection, and I've come to a difficult decision. I’ve discerned that God is calling me away from pastoral ministry. I'll be at Battle Ground Community UMC as the pastor for the next month, through September 27, and then the church will have a new pastor; our District Superintendent, David Nieda, is looking for someone now. I'm going to miss the church so much. I also believe in this church with all my heart and I know God will be with you.

Below, I've posted the manuscript from the sermon I shared this morning. Thank you so much for being part of my faith story, and thank you for the wonderful ministries of this church.



Scripture: Philippians 1:3-11

I thank my God every time I mention you in my prayers. I'm thankful for all of you every time I pray, and it's always a prayer full of joy. I'm glad because of the way you have been my partners in the ministry of the gospel from the time you first believed it until now. I'm sure about this: the one who started a good work in you will stay with you to complete the job by the day of Christ Jesus. I have good reason to think this way about all of you because I keep you in my heart. You are all my partners in God's grace, both during my time in prison and in the defense and support of the gospel. God is my witness that I feel affection for all of you with the compassion of Christ Jesus.

This is my prayer: that your love might become even more and more rich with knowledge and all kinds of insight. I pray this so that you will be able to decide what really matters and so you will be sincere and blameless on the day of Christ. I pray that you will then be filled with the fruit of righteousness, which comes from Jesus Christ, in order to give glory and praise to God.

Our scripture today comes from Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi. As he wrote this letter, Paul was in prison. Things were not going well for him. But he wrote this letter, and the whole thing is just full of joy and gratitude. In fact, after a short salutation, the first words of the body of the letter are, “I thank my God every time I mention you in my prayers.” Paul is so grateful for that church.

And today I want to share how grateful I am for this church. In the past two years here, I’ve gotten to know a community of people who really look out for each other, who are completely committed to Christ, and who love above all. Thank you for being who you are, for facing challenging conversations head-on, for listening to the call of the Holy Spirit. Thank you for joining me in trying new things over the past two years, for your courage and creativity.

Thank you for your wonderful support when I had shingles, and then in May and June when we shared that we had had a miscarriage, and that we were pregnant again. It meant so much to us to share those things with such a loving church.

And I want to thank you for the love you poured out toward us when we had a second miscarriage, barely two months after the first one. The notes and cards meant so much, and we could feel the love and prayers being sent our way.

I want to thank you in particular for allowing us to have this time away. I know many of you have had pregnancy losses. I don’t know if you felt this too, but for us, we really believe that Agnes and Micah are our children. We really, 100% believe that, and at the same time, we had them for such a short time – we knew we were pregnant with Agnes for less than two weeks before she died, and we knew about Micah for barely a month. They were here for such a short time, and even that time was more a feeling than anything else, we didn’t get to hear their voices or see their faces, I wasn’t even very pregnant. And that makes it all seem very unreal, almost like a dream.

But having time away to say good-bye – time that was different from everyday life, time that was separate and strange – that made Agnes and Micah feel more real. If we had just jumped right back into normal life, we would have been denying the very real impact those two babies had on us. For us, it would have been like saying they didn’t really count, they weren’t really our children.

So thank you for saying that they did count. That’s the gift you have given us this summer. You have allowed our children to be real people, even though they were here for such a short time. I cannot thank you enough. There is no greater gift you could have given us.

When things like this happen, you start to look at your life. I have complete confidence that God called me into pastoral ministry. I am so grateful for these past four years as a pastor, and I know that I was called into pastoral ministry.

But I also believe that our callings can and do change over time. We can’t just listen once and then go and never look back. God keeps speaking to us, keeps guiding us, and what was right at one time in our lives may not be what is right today.

I don’t think it would be possible to live through this past year without being transformed, without being changed. And these past months as I’ve prayed and listened, I’ve heard God calling me in a new direction.

I don’t know all of God’s reasons for calling me away from this now, but I’d like to share some of my ideas of why that might be. I also want to share this because there are moments in your life that become part of your faith story, moments that have lasting significance as we walk with God. I think it’s important for us as Christians to share those moments, to share our faith stories. This year has become one of those moments for me. This moment will be part of my faith story all my life. So I want to share that faith story with you, as I’ve gotten to hear and share in yours for the past two years.

I don’t know how to be a pastor without being 100%, all-in. I think that’s good and right, a pastor should be all-in, but for me, that also creates quite an emotional roller-coaster. Every week, every day, every hour – for me as a pastor, in every moment, everything is at stake. Every day is the best day ever, if I saw evidence somewhere that someone was growing in faith. Or else it’s the worst day ever,

if what I saw that day was a barrier to growth. And if it’s a best-day-ever, then I have to hold on really tight to it, figure out how to duplicate it, improve on it, figure out what happens next to help us all keep growing in faith. And if it’s a worst-day-ever, then I have to figure out how to fix it, how to help remove the barrier to growth.

You might be thinking that maybe I should relax a little about the whole thing. And you’re right. And I’ve tried and tried to do just that, and it tends to last about a day, because it matters so much to me. I’ve been all-in.

I’ve known this about myself for a long time. I’ve seen myself go through these cycles, like the cycle I experience each week as I prepare for Sunday; I love preaching, I love thinking and wrestling with a Bible passage, and sharing that, but I hate Saturdays. I think it’s safe to say almost every Saturday the past four years has been a bad day. A really bad day. Because I want Sunday to matter, want it to count. I’m all-in. That same cycle that happens every week, it happens to a different degree every year, and even every day. I don’t know how to be a pastor without being all-in, which makes it an emotional roller-coaster.

For a long time, I just assumed that was how my life would be. It was something I had accepted. Sometimes I would think, “Wouldn’t it be nice if my life were different?” But I would immediately think, “Well, that’s not my life,” and that would be the end of it. I had accepted the roller-coaster.

Well, this year, my whole life has been an emotional roller-coaster.

After we lost Micah, I had no hope. I didn’t care about the future, didn’t even really care if I lived or died. Not that I wanted my life to end or the future to be bleak, I just didn’t care. For a long while, I didn’t have any interest in praying. I felt totally betrayed by God, the God I had trusted to keep my children safe, and who had completely failed at that.

And I knew I had to pull it together to come back here. And that felt even more hopeless, not because I didn’t want to come back, I missed you all so much, but coming back meant re-entering that pastoral roller-coaster, when I felt like I had whiplash already.

And then, for the first time, it occurred to me that maybe I didn’t have to be on that roller-coaster anymore. Maybe I could have a different kind of life. That had never crossed my mind as a real option before. There’s this ride at the Wild Waves amusement park up near Tacoma, the ride is called the Wild Thing. You get in the car and off it goes, it’s got corkscrews and loops where you’re upside-down, drops from a great height, the whole bit, and then you come back to the loading area, and you have an option: you can get out if you want, or you can go a second time. If there's no line, you can just keep going around and around.

What happened for me was like pulling up to that loading area, assuming that I was going to keep going, that that was the only option – and then someone telling me that if my body and soul were sick and sore from too many loops and corkscrews, I had the option of getting off the roller coaster.

When this occurred to me, immediately a Bible verse came to mind, you might know it, it’s from Jeremiah 29, “I know the plans I have in mind for you, declares the Lord; they are plans for peace, not disaster, to give you a future filled with hope.”

A future filled with hope. When I thought I had no future and no hope.

There’s a story about John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, after he had been preaching and leading Methodist societies for quite a while, he still always felt far from God, no matter what spiritual practices he used, no matter how he prayed and read the Bible and gave generously, and he did pray and read the Bible and give. He did all those things – he did them religiously, so to speak. But he still didn’t feel close to God.

And then one day he went to a Bible study meeting at a church in Aldersgate. They were studying the book of Romans, using Martin Luther’s writing on it. Wesley recorded this in his journal: “While [the reader] was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

This moment in Wesley’s life is famous. It’s the moment when Wesley’s faith went from knowledge of God to trust in God, trust that God really loved him, as he had helped so many others to believe.

Over the past four years, I’ve found myself preaching about grace, God’s free gift of love for us, and how we never have to earn that. I’ve found myself preaching about the holiness of ordinary life, the holiness of regular things like eating lunch and going to work and just regular time with the regular people we love. I’ve found myself preaching about how we don’t have to earn God’s love, we don’t have to be extraordinary, that God loves us as we are already.

But like John Wesley, the things I’ve been preaching about – I’ve believed them, I’ve known them to be true, but I haven’t felt them to be true for me.

I’ve believed in the holiness of ordinary life, but I’ve also got voices in me that say “Rachon, you have to be extraordinary.” Voices in me that have told me that ordinary life is not enough for me to earn God’s love.

And when I thought of that Bible verse from Jeremiah, about a future with hope, and when it occurred to me that I could get off the roller-coaster, it was like God gave me permission to be ordinary. Like God was saying that I was already loved 100%, and didn’t need to earn or create that love. I didn’t need to earn my place in the world. It was okay to be ordinary.

Having permission from God to be ordinary – it feels like a miracle.

So I’m looking for a job in the accounting field, because you know what? I love data entry, and math, Excel spreadsheets. As in, I actually do these things for fun whenever I can. Some people read books or watch movies for fun, and those things are okay, but what I really want to be doing is sorting data. And I’m not going to be embarrassed about it anymore, I’m not going to think it’s not good enough anymore, because, well, someone’s got to sort the data, and it might as well be someone who’s really going to get a kick out of it.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the service, I’ll be here through the end of September, through September 27. After that, the church will have a new pastor. In the United Methodist system, most pastors who are switching churches in any given year make the switch on July 1. That means that most likely, what will happen is that the church will have an interim pastor, starting in October and staying here through the end of June, and then a new permanent pastor on July 1 of next year. I know that’s a lot of transition.

And one thing I want to say today is that I’m sorry. I do believe this is the right thing to do, I do believe this is where God is calling me, and I trust that God wouldn’t call me in this way unless it was also good for this church. But I know that transition is difficult, and this year of much transition will not be easy. I’m so sorry for that, and for how my being away these past months has impacted all of you.

I’m sorry, and I’m also hopeful for this church, even for this year full of transition. I hope that you’ll find that even with all the transition, an interim pastor can be a real gift. When churches approach interim times intentionally, they can be times of great growth and transformation. I hope that you will ask questions like: “How is God calling us to grow this year? What is God preparing us for? What good transformation does God have in mind for us through this? What is our mission this year and into the future?” Because God does have a future with hope in store for you and for this church.

I know this sermon hasn’t been following the Bible passage all that much, but let’s get back to it now. After Paul expresses his gratitude for the Philippians, he says this: “I’m sure about this: the one who started a good work in you will stay with you to complete the job by the day of Christ Jesus.”

Whoever your pastor is, the one who started a good work in you is the Holy Spirit. Whatever this year looks like, the Holy Spirit is present in this church, and the Holy Spirit is not going to leave you. I am confident that the Holy Spirit, who started a good work in you, will stay with you to complete the job.

And I’d like to echo the final words of this passage: “This is my prayer: that your love might become even more and more rich with knowledge and all kinds of insight. I pray this so that you will be able to decide what really matters and so you will be sincere and blameless on the day of Christ. I pray that you will then be filled with the fruit of righteousness, which comes from Jesus Christ, in order to give glory and praise to God.”

My heart is filled with gratitude for you. May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, now and forever.

Amen.

On Email and Facebook Habits

Apparently, it's time to re-think my email and Facebook habits. They've gotten a little silly. Here's the back story:

This is what my email habit used to be like, before simplicity:
6:00-6:30am - Alarm went off. I immediately went to the email app on my phone. What if I had missed something overnight??!! I read it, but don't respond or sort it - it just stayed in the inbox to deal with later.

9:00am - Now that I was at work, I actually responded to those emails I read earlier and sorted them out of the inbox.

Throughout the day, at ridiculously short intervals, I would check the email.... right up until I was in bed ready to go to sleep. But at some point in the evening, I would stop responding and sorting, just leaving them in the inbox, unless it was something really urgent.

I think that "something really urgent" might have happened once? Ever?

But what would happen was this: I would get an email at 9pm that I would worry about for the next twelve hours, that would keep me up at night, that I wouldn't be able to stop thinking about. Or I would wake up and the first thing I would see was an email that worried me. (I worry easily.)

And every one of those emails could have waited until 9am the next morning.

This is what my Facebook habit used to be like, before simplicity:
Every time I checked my email, I would check Facebook too. In case there was something good. What was the "something good" I was looking for? Still not sure. It mostly left me feeling depressed, angry, or like I had just wasted a bunch of time.



Yep, that was me.


A few months ago, I adopted new habits, in the interest of simplicity:
Read emails ONLY AT WORK, where I can immediately respond and sort. Don't open the email app outside of work. Don't open it! Leave it alone! Trust that if there's an emergency, someone will call rather than email. On the Sabbath (which I take on Fridays), don't open the email app at all. At all! No touchy!

I made my Facebook app a little bit harder to get to on my phone, and turned off the notifications. I briefly checked it each morning ONLY AT WORK to see if anything really earth-shattering had happened, gave myself a rough time limit, and then closed it for the rest of the day. I didn't open the app on my phone at all.



These new habits were terrific! I loved them. They made my whole day better. And I never missed anything important.

A few weeks ago, I totally lost these wonderful new habits. I'm finding myself, again, checking email and Facebook as I wake up in the morning, way too often throughout the day, and way too late at night. Why? It makes me sad and anxious and wastes a lot of time to do this. So why do it?

As with all the things that keep us away from simplicity, it's about unfounded fears:

• The fear that if I don't check email and Facebook, something will happen that will be out of my control. The reality is that things will happen out of my control whether I check my email or not.
• The fear that if I don't check email and Facebook, someone will have a problem that they can resolve without me, and I won't be needed. Seriously? Dumb. But still there - we all need to be needed.
• The fear that if I don't check email and Facebook, something disastrous is happening that I'm responsible for, and I won't know about it until it's too late. There's an emergency that needs my immediate attention, and if I fail, then people will think less of me.
• The fear that I'm disconnected from people I love. Ironically, of course, checking email and Facebook too much tends to create disconnection rather than connection.
• The fear that I don't have something to do. Too often, I do this just out of boredom. I'm between one thing and the next. I'm waiting for somebody or for a particular time. What do I do in the meantime? Pull out the phone and check the email and Facebook. But in truth, it's okay to not have something to do. Some of our best moments come at those times.

So, my friends, this is my commitment to going back to much healthier, simpler habits regarding email and Facebook. See you at 9am! (But not tomorrow, 'cause it's the Sabbath.)

Question and Response

Every so often, we have a "Question and Response" day at church. I like to post those here, as well. We had some great questions. I certainly don't have all the answers, and I welcome comments and discussion!

1. Would it be possible to have small Communion cups for people who can’t see so well?

Yes! Thank you for asking! And I encourage you to always ask questions like this. Speak up for what you need to better connect with God. I can’t promise that we’ll always be able to make it happen, but we certainly can’t if we don’t know. Thanks for asking, and let’s do it!

2. What does the Bible offer us?

We call the Bible the “Word of God.” That means different things to different people, but let me share what it means to me.

In the first part of the gospel of John, it says, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” It’s talking about Jesus, Jesus as the Word of God. The Greek word that’s used is “Logos.” In ancient Greek culture, the idea of “logos” was some kind of wisdom or consciousness that permeated everything and was involved in creation. So the gospel writer is using that idea and applying it to Jesus, saying that Jesus is the Logos of God, Jesus is the Word of God, Jesus is the wisdom or consciousness that permeates everything, that was involved in creation.

And then John says that the Word of God became a human being. “The Word became flesh and made his home among us.”

There’s a theologian named Karl Barth who took this idea and thought, well, if Jesus is the Word of God, then how is the Bible the word of God? This is what he came up with, and I think it makes a lot of sense.

Karl Barth says this: God is really, really interested in communicating with humanity, in having a relationship with human beings. God is so interested in that that God became human, basically to communicate with us. God communicates in lots of different ways, in prayer, in the actions of the prophets recorded in the Old Testament, in fact, God can communicate in any way God pleases - Barth’s famous example is that God can communicate even through a dead dog on the side of the road. A little grisly, but true, right? God can communicate any way God wants.

And at the same time, we don’t have any control over whether God communicates or not. That’s totally up to God. There are some places, like the Bible, where God frequently chooses to communicate. But not always. We can’t force God to communicate. We have to look where God has chosen.

And the one place that God has chosen to communicate completely - not just to communicate a little bit about who God is, this is not just a brief text message from God or just a voicemail on an answering machine, this is God showing up at our door - the one place where that has happened is in the life of Jesus. That’s why Jesus is the “Word of God.” Because in the life of Jesus, God has communicated God’s own self to the world. God has said, “This is who I am. This is what I want from humanity. This is how much I love you.” It’s not that Jesus’ words are the word of God, but Jesus’ whole life, from beginning to end, everything he said and did, is the Word of God.

So if that’s the case, if Jesus is the number one place where we get to see who God is, what life is for, how we ought to live and think of ourselves, then what we really need, two thousand years later, is lots of folks to tell us about Jesus. Because we weren’t there. So that’s what the Bible is. In Karl Barth’s view, it’s really not quite right to say that the Bible is the Word of God. That’s Jesus and Jesus alone. The Bible is the witness to the word of God. The Bible tells us about the word of God. In the Old Testament, the Bible shows us the culture, the religion, the traditions and stories that formed Jesus, the culture and religion and traditions in which God chose to be born. That has got to be relevant for who God is - God could have chosen any place, any time, and God picked that place and time. So we should get to know as much as we can about it. And the New Testament describes Jesus, the Word of God, based on the accounts of those who lived with him.

So that’s what I think the Bible offers us: the clearest window that we have into who God is, what life is about, how we ought to live, and how we ought to think of ourselves. That includes great comfort and great challenge, but most of all it includes knowing that we are here for a purpose, that we are loved just as we are, and that God is still working in our lives.

3. If all Christians go to heaven when they die, where do all the rest go?

This is a huge question, and entire books have been written about it. I highly recommend Love Wins, by Rob Bell, which looks closely at what the Bible actually says, is easy to read, and brings up a lot of the questions that all of us naturally ask. You may not agree with Rob Bell’s conclusions, and that’s okay – it’s still a great overview. I also want to say that I have had to make choices here about what to include and what to leave out. I have my own beliefs about this, which inevitably color my response. I am not right about everything, and I am still learning. You are welcome to disagree or to come to different conclusions. I also recommend reading the Bible on your own to come to your own answers. A good place to start for this question is by reading Luke and Romans.

Overall, the Bible is pretty quiet about what happens when we die - it’s just not the main subject, life right now is the main subject. Much of what the Bible does have to say on the subject is metaphorical, including the book of Revelation and many other passages. The passage I find most helpful in thinking about what happens when we die is from 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul says that life after we are raised from the dead will be so different from life now that it’s like the difference between a tree and a seed. Again, a metaphor, but I find it helpful because it basically says, “No, we don’t really know exactly what life is going to be like after death, but we can trust God that it will be good.”

But we want to control it, don’t we? We want to know the itinerary, we want to read the guidebook, we want to know that it’s worth going, we want to know the road map of how we get there. And we want to make sure that all the people we love are going to get there, too.

So let’s see what the Bible says about going to heaven. And again, the Bible doesn’t give us a clear road map: Do x, y, and z, and you get to heaven. In fact, it goes back and forth between two ideas: your actions are key, or the grace of God is key. There are passages like Matthew 25, where Jesus is talking about the end times and separates people based on whether they’ve fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, taken care of the sick. In these passages, it’s clear that what you do determines whether you go to heaven or not. And there are other passages that emphasize that it’s only by God’s grace - by God’s free gift - and it has absolutely nothing to do with human actions. Paul, the writer of Romans and many other books of the New Testament, held to this view quite consistently, though he also says that a good life is important. That second view, that grace is key, is where most Protestant churches have landed. A good life is still important, but the good life is the evidence of God’s grace, not the thing that makes us deserve God’s grace.

So how do we get to heaven? If it’s by God’s grace, does that mean that it’s by claiming the opinion that Jesus is God and that his death and resurrection get you to heaven? What about people who do what Jesus said but aren’t sure whether they can even believe in heaven? What about people who claim Jesus but don’t even make a hint of an effort to follow him? What about those who lived before Jesus, or before worldwide evangelism, or in some other way never heard about Jesus? What about your kids or brothers or sisters or friends who you love, people you believe that God created out of love, but who don’t believe in Jesus?

Many Christians, including me, believe that all those people will actually go to heaven. And many of us feel some guilt for believing that - like we’re somehow twisting faith, we’re cheating somehow. But even though it feels like cheating, we can’t help it. We just can’t get ourselves to believe that a good, loving God could love our kids, our brothers and sisters and friends, any less than we do. We just can’t get ourselves to believe that a good, loving God could condemn someone to eternal punishment based on one mistake. But sometimes we feel guilty for believing that, because the overwhelmingly more publicized Christian position is that some will go to heaven, and others will go to hell.

But as we already explored, the Bible has very little to say about heaven and hell, and much of it is metaphorical. Here are three different positions that all have solid Scriptural support - even though they’re not all widely publicized. And it’s not cheating, it’s not twisting Scripture, it’s really just looking at what does the Bible say. Three positions with solid Scriptural support:

-Position A: The widely publicized position that some go to eternal heaven, a big party with God, and others go to eternal punishment. For instance, Matthew 25:46 “They will go away into eternal punishment. But the righteous ones will go into eternal life.”

-Position B: A much less publicized but still Biblical position: some go to eternal heaven, a big party with God, and others are destroyed completely. For instance, the famous John 3:16, which promises that whoever believes in Jesus will have eternal life - the opposite implied is not eternal punishment, but eternal death. There are other passages that support this as well.

-Position C: God keeps giving us chance after chance to accept the gift of heaven. There is no arbitrary cut-off line set at death. There is no “too late.” As Romans 8 says, “I’m convinced that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord: not death or life, not angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers or height or depth, or any other thing that is created.” Death is explicitly listed there. Nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ. There are other passages that support this position, as well.

As you may be able to tell, this is the position that makes the most sense to me. I don’t think it excludes the idea of a temporary punishment or cleansing after death. In fact, it makes sense to me that we would all experience some kind of cleansing after death. But there is no clear Biblical argument that death is the last chance, period. There are a couple of verses that seem to hint at that, but in my opinion, they are far from convincing. In my view, the whole direction of scripture points to love that does not stop giving second chances. The whole story of Israel, the story of the prodigal son, Jesus’ life and death and resurrection, the Bible is full of a God who does not stop giving second chances.

So the question was, “If all Christians go to heaven after they die, where do all the rest go?” Others may answer this differently. There’s Scriptural evidence for different positions. But my reading of Scripture, my knowledge of God, my experience of love, says that nothing can separate us from God’s love, not even death. That eventually, we will all gladly accept the free gift of heaven that God offers.

Again, I recommend Rob Bell's Love Wins. A more technical discussion can be found here.

4. Why do people go to church?

I think you all can answer this better than me. I can tell you why I go to church. First, take a moment and think: why do you go to church?

I love church because I think it’s a practice-run for the kingdom of God. This is like the rehearsal hall for the kingdom of God. Human beings have the privilege and the responsibility of working with God to create the kingdom of God, to create a world of love, joy, peace, hope. We struggle with it and we mess up a lot, but I think that’s part of our purpose in life.

And that’s really hard. It means loving folks who are different from ourselves. It means trying to figure out together what the kingdom of God really looks like, and none of us have quite the same ideas. And even when we agree on what it looks like, we’re often really bad at it. I believe that in the kingdom of God, nobody is afraid to talk to their neighbor. Guess what? I’m still afraid to talk to my neighbor.

So church is the place where I can practice. Where I can try it out, and maybe I say something awful, but here it’s okay because I’m forgiven. Here it’s okay, because I’m loved, and whoever I say that awful thing to, well, they can tell me, so that I can learn and do better next time. At least, that’s church at its best.

I also love church because I really need a lot of help remembering that God is a part of my life. I need lots of spiritual practices. I need to pray and read the Bible and sing every day. I need to meet with folks who will ask me how it goes with my soul. I need to come to church every week and be surrounded with other folks who are hoping to get a glimpse of God. Because if I’m left to myself, I’ll forget. I’ll get caught up in the tiny things of life, in the trivialities, and I don’t mean the beautiful tiny things but the tiny things that start to feel like huge burdens and mountains to climb and terrifying monsters. I need constant reminders that I belong to God, that I am loved, that no matter what I do or don’t do, I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

5. Why are so few coming to church? Where are all the youth?

First, how many are coming to church? We’re going to focus on US trends here, and we’ll see that they are reflected in our local church - and in thousands and thousands of local churches across the country.

In the 1948, Gallup polls started asking about religious affiliation. At that time, 91% of Americans identified as Christian. Ninety-one percent! That held steady for a couple of decades, and in 1975 it started inching down, 87%, in 1990, 82%, in 2010, 76%, and in 2014, 72%. That includes all Christians - Catholic, Protestant, and more. But the group in there that changed most dramatically was Protestant - including the United Methodist Church. In 1948, 69% of the US was Protestant. In 2014, 37% of the US was Protestant. Most, though not all, of that drop has come from folks under 35.

Compared with those statistics, our particular local church has actually stayed much more consistent. We’ve fluctuated some but we’ve generally averaged between 70 and 120 folks on a Sunday over the years - a pretty wide range still. Some of that difference is explained by how people go to church now - many folks who consider themselves regular churchgoers attend church maybe twice a month. Other weeks, they’re traveling, they’ve got other commitments, they’re working. Many of our most faithful members simply can’t be here every week. That was the case far less often fifty years ago. Many more folks came to church basically every week. So even though the number of folks involved in the church has not dropped dramatically, the average Sunday attendance has gone down noticeably.

But that certainly doesn’t explain everything. It doesn’t explain how in 1948, 69% of the US was Protestant, and in 2014, 37% of the US was Protestant. That kind of huge change - that represents millions and millions of people - that means a few things. First, it means that nothing this particular church has done or not done has caused this change. There was never a magic formula to get folks to come to church. There was no program that could have reversed this change. There was no huge mistake in our theology or our approach to Battle Ground or our choice to be a United Methodist Church or in our leadership or anything that has caused fewer people to be going to church. This is happening in basically every church, basically everywhere in our country. There are exceptions, but those exceptions also don’t have a magic formula or program or perfect theology.

Fewer people in church, and especially fewer young people, feels like failure for church. We often have it as our goal to get more people, to reach people for Christ, to, as the mission of the UMC says, “Make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.” Those are good things. But if we look at the declining numbers of Christians in America and we feel like we’re failing somehow, I think first we need to look farther back than 1948.

I read this in a blog recently - unfortunately I accessed the blog through Facebook and now it’s lost on the Internet and I’ll never find it again. But this blog claimed - and I think it’s true - that when we compare how many folks go to church now with how many folks went to church in the 1950’s, we’re missing something really big. The 1950’s, this blog claimed, were not by any means the norm of religion throughout history. Rather, because of our national reactions to the Great Depression and two World Wars, that was a time when an abnormally large percentage of folks made it a priority to go to church. In much of western history, while most folks would claim some sort of belief in God, the reality is that a huge portion of folks were Christian in name only - nominally, but not actively, Christian.

In the 1800’s, as folks made their way across the western frontier, the United States was nominally, but not actively - in fact, one estimate is that in 1850, only 34% of Americans adhered to a particular denomination or church. That’s way lower than what we see today. We were nominally, but not actively, Christian.

England was nominally, but not actively, Christian in the 1700’s when John and Charles Wesley started the ministry that would lead to the beginning of the Methodists. Europe was nominally, but not actively, Christian in the 1600’s when Martin Luther and other Reformers started calling for people to live out their Christianity more deeply. Even in the 300’s, when the Emperor Constantine made Christianity basically the national religion of Rome, folks were nominally, but not actively, Christian. And before that, when Christians were persecuted throughout Rome, they were such a minority that they probably couldn’t have imagined a nation where 72% of people claimed Christianity of some kind - and that number was a significant decrease.

And yet, God was working in every one of those times.

We often feel like we’re failing because the number of people who claim Christianity is going down. The number of people in church is going down.

But what I wonder is: What is God getting us ready for? What is the Holy Spirit up to? I don’t really want to be nominally, but not actively, Christian. I don’t want that to be what success looks like. I want to follow the Holy Spirit, even if it’s only a group of twelve. I want to follow the Holy Spirit, even if it means being criticized and laughed at. And I trust completely that the Holy Spirit is leading us somewhere good. I have no idea what that’s going to look like. But I trust the Spirit.

(See statistics here and here.)

6. Please tell us one thing that Paul did to promote Christianity and build the church that was just beginning. What does that mean for our church?

Paul never gave up on Jesus. Paul was frequently very, very frustrated. He was frustrated with the people he ministered with; too often, they got caught up in spats, or in theologies that Paul didn’t agree with, or they felt hopeless and helpless in the face of persecution. He got mad, he got loud about it, he was thrown in prison, he was almost certainly executed. But he never gave up on Jesus. He never gave up the passion he had or Jesus. How completely all-in he was for Jesus. He never said to somebody, “The Holy Spirit has left you.” He kept praying, he kept showing up, he kept doing anything he could do to show the love of Jesus with every single breath, to as many people as he could. It was largely Paul’s passion that the Holy Spirit worked through to build the church that was just beginning.

7. I was thinking that maybe to draw more young families to our church, that I could organize a “date night” for our community. Parents could drop their kids off here for a couple hours and go out on a date. We could put in The Reflector, the BG Facebook page, and so on!

Yes! Let’s do it! Come and talk to me about details. I wanted to read this one aloud because if we’re following the Holy Spirit, it means trying things. The Spirit frequently doesn’t sit still. The Spirit prompts us, and we get to follow. So thank you for listening to the Spirit, and for taking action on it.

8. Sing some hymns from Godspell

Okay!

On Accepting Invitations, One Step at a Time (including a cute dog picture)

Periodically in my life, I've been awesome at exercising. I would walk every day, or run every day, or go to the gym two or three times each week. This has generally lasted between a few weeks and a few months before the habit falls apart - but I've always been able to get back into it after a while.

Then came 2015.

2015 is the first year I've ever met my health insurance deductible. And that was all by the middle of April. My newly re-started running career hit a wrinkle in January when I got the shingles. (Yes, I'm 30. Yes, that seems to young to get shingles. Yes, I got it anyway.) And that was just the beginning of this screwy year for my body.

So... now I'm not really walking. Or running. Or going to the gym. Or, in general, moving more than I absolutely have to.

Every day, my husband Erik takes our dog, Henry, for a short walk. For the sake of cuteness, here's a picture of Henry:

While I was running every day, or walking every day, I'd usually decline to go with them on these walks. You know, I already got my exercise in for the day - usually much farther and more intense than a dog walk. Checked that box; now's the time to sit and relax.

So every day Erik would ask, "Do you want to come with us?" and I would say no.

And then when I had shingles, and all the other screwy stuff, well, no, I didn't want to go. For some of that time, I could barely walk.

"Do you want to come with us?" "No."

Well, I'm feeling better now. Feeling like I should be exercising again. Only now, it's overwhelming. How did I ever find time to do that before? I can't figure it out.

It recently occurred to me that the simple thing to do is not to decide, all of a sudden, to start running 2 miles a day every day again. Maybe that's something I'll get to in the future.

The simple thing is to take the small invitation that's offered to me every day by a great husband and a cute dog: "Do you want to come with us?"

Simplicity starts where we are. It's not about jumping into something overwhelming, all at once, to totally fix our lives or to be somebody else. It's about being who we are and taking one small step, every day, to be more and more the person that God has called and created us to be. One step at a time, build a habit - or let go of a habit - that lets you be the whole person God has made you to be.

And I think part of simplicity is seeing the easy opportunities that call to us every day - and to not just keep rejecting them out of hand as I was doing. Little by little, step by step, saying "yes" to those opportunities.

"Do you want to come with us?" Okay. Let's give it a try, one step at a time.