This post started off as an account of this mornings service at Sherburn in Elmet Methodist Church, but following various reflections and conversations on facebook it has grown and changed... (apologies if it is a bit disjointed; I've written it in stages- so please bear with me if you dare read it, and accept my apologies for repetition!)
Let me start when I intended to both begin and end; this Sunday I led my 6th Covenant Service of the year, it is always a privelege to lead Covenant Services and I value their place in our tradition and recognise them as a gift to the wider church.
When it came to the sermon I based my sermon mostly on John 15: 1-10, again looking at the need for spiritual pruning not only in our individual lives but in the life of the church. Last week I used the same text and spoke to a church in a very different place to the one I addressed today.
Sherburn is a medium sized active church with lots of new growth and bags of potential. BUT (and this is no secret for I preached it), it needs to be careful of becoming complacent. It is currently the second largest congregation in the Circuit and has recently had an influx of new members. While one or two of the new members are truly new members most are not, most have come from other smaller Chapels, Chapels that have recently taken the difficult decision to close.
Over the last few weeks different members have told me how wonderful it is to see the church full again (there were 60+ this morning), and spoken of how we will be OK for a while. My response (again no secret) is that it is not OK to be OK! If we were to really reflect on where we stand it would be very sobering.
The church today needs to submit/yeild itself to the pruning of the Holy Gardener, for too long it has struggled to maintain now fruitless branches, insisting that because they once bore fruit that they must be maintained. Maintaining those branches has saped our energies, and if we insist on maintaining them they WILL kill us!
In many ways this is the story of God's people throughout history, again and again the theme of the remnant brought back and restored is played out, we can read that story right through the Old Testament. But I don't beleive this was God's plan, not is it his plan that we be reduced to a remnant (though we are drawing amazingly close to that position). The reason for the exile and diminishment of the people of God was disobedience, the people chose their own ways over God's ways!
Today (and everyday) that choice is laid before us again; part of the discipline of discipleship is to be alert to the call and challenge brought to us by the ministry of the Holy Spirit. God is active in his church today! God wants the church to respond to his call. Another thing I have heard a few times recently, knowing I am moving in August has been rather a grumpy- "well I hope the new minsiter will listen to what WE want!" I hope she won't, I hope she will try to listen to the whisper of the Spirit through the activities and voices of the church and community and in the still small voice that comes when we are at prayer- I suspect she will because I have met her!
My message then was not comfortable, but I hope it offered hope, for there is hope, God is calling us to grow in a new way, and we are seeing signs of new growth, but in order to enable that growth there will need to be some tough pruning, we cannot sustain both.
Following the sermon I prayed and then while we listened to Tenth Avenue North's "By your side" I offered the congregation a chance to receive a blessing through annointing with oil. As I marked each forhead with oil I prayed a simple blessing in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that each one would be given grace and strength in the tasks they were called to. You could have knocked me down with a feather when the entire congregation responded. In a sense the blessing was given in the same way that baptism is offered in the Methodist Church, before the promises are made as a sign of God's prevenient grace! The congregation were responding to God's grace by offering themselves to him and receiving his strength for the task, when we prayed the Covenant prayer together there were more than a few tears.
So how about the facebook conversations- they centered around my posting of fellow blogger Dave Faulkener's post on Mark Driscoll/ Mars Hill and when discipline becomes control. The conversation that sprang up was on the need for discipline in discipleship but how it needs to be tempered with grace. The consensus was that many folk especially young folk crave strict boundaries so there is a certain appeal in tough discipline, but that maturity in discipleship calls for the healthy development of the fruit of self control in balance with the other spiritual fruits (Galatians 5). We mused on how the church has failed to offer discipline in discipleship, that the call to holiness has become unpopular, it seems we prefer to make folk comfortable. I wonder if this tendency towards a soft undemanding discipleship has caused many folk to simply walk away, for the Gospel when softened to be palatable looses its teeth and therfore its appeal! We need a radical Gospel, a Gospel that calls us to make a difference to be salt and light in out communities, a Gospel that demands much of us and offers a real alternative!
The new growth we are beginning to see needs nurturing and training, the people who are responding in different ways will need discipling, and one thing is clear the church growth in the 21st century is going to look very different to the growth we saw 50 years ago. In time the time will come when the new growth needs tending and pruning; the challenge is to allow that to happen, to be willing for change within the change, not to repeat the same mistakes that have caused the diminished and confidence poor congregations that so often are the mark of our denomination, and while I recognise this is not the case everywhere we must be willing to see things as they are, to rise to the challenge for the season for growth is upon us!
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