March 6, 2005
The Rev. Fred C. Plumer
"From Theory to Practice"
Joshua 3: 1-14,17 Luke 17; 20-21
 
For the last two days I have been working with a group of people from your congregation talking about finding ways to help your church grow and meet the challenges that all churches are facing in this new century.  Part of my task was to inform this group of some of the rather disturbing statistical data that churches in general and particularly mainline churches like our wonderful United Church of Christ are facing these days.  I won't take you through the numbers here but they are no secret.
 
Mainline denominations are loosing members every year and with the estimated average age of the existing memberships across the country now estimated to be in the sixties, it does not take a statistician to understand that we face a very formidable challenge if we want our church to survive into the next century.
 
Let me tell you, however, that I see this also as a wonderful opportunity, especially for the more liberal and open denominations like our own.  Maybe this is the time for our churches to remember that Christianity started as a progressive movement on the margins of society.  It started as a critique of the social system.  It started as a deeply spiritual journey that was founded on the theological construct of "radical inclusivity," as New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossing refers to it.  The movement that we call Christianity today began as a critique of the culture and not as an apologist of the prevailing culture.  It started as an opportunity to transform the world and to be transformed in the process.  And maybe if we remember these things and try to recapture that mission, we will discover why the faith was so vital, so dynamic and so powerful for so many throughout the ages.
 
We have a wonderful story to tell and we have a powerful message to share.  And most importantly, we have knowledge of a transforming path that can change lives in positive and beautiful ways, and just maybe in the process, change the world.
 
But instead of celebrating that reality I believe, all too often we focus on the wrong issues, the wrong subjects, the wrong concerns, in our churches across the country.
 
Buried in our tradition, we have a life-changing path to offer, a path that I believe that is desperately needed today.  But it is clear that we are going to need to make changes in the way we do churches if we are going to help others have eyes to see and ears to hear.
 
I don't know how many of you remember the advertisement campaign a few years ago that went something like:  "It's not our father's Oldsmobile anymore."  Well, of course most you may know that today there is no more Oldsmobile.
 
The problem was that while the ad was great, General Motors never made substantive changes in the car.  It was a new ad, but it was pretty much the same car.  I have argued for years that no matter how many times a denomination reorganizes and no matter how much money they spend on advertising, unless we find better ways to share the transforming message of the gospel, of the Christian path, we will go the way of the Oldsmobile.
 
So today I believe in many ways we are like the people of Israel right after Moses has died.  Joshua is their new leader and he has told his people that is time finally to cross the Jordan to go to the Promised Land after forty years of hellish living.  In today' s story we find the people standing on the edge of the River Jordan maybe knee deep in the water.  If it indeed this story has any historicity, I have often wondered what it might have been like for the tribe of faithful people as they stood there wondering what was out there.
 
Joshua may have said that they were headed for the Promised Land but I am certain that must have sounded pretty scary.  After all, they had been living the way for a generation.  It was a living that they were used to.  It was the way that they had always done it.
 
I've wondered over the years how many people would have said, "Hold on, Josh. That is not the way that Moses would have done it."  Or how many whined, "No way, Joshua. I'm not going unless you can tell me exactly what is over there."  How many grumbled about these new fangled ideas that these young smart alecks have.  How many would have said, "Are you crazy, I am not going without a map"?
 
No, I do not think that it would have been an easy task, even for the great Joshua, to get his people to move in mass across the river that day.  Some would have stayed right where they were.  Others would have followed but would have complained every chance that they had.  I suspect that there was only a small minority who ran up to Joshua and said, "Let's go. brother. We have an important adventure ahead of us."

And my dear friends, that is' exactly what we, have. We have an adventure, an opportunity and a challenge.  But the question is of, course, how do we meet that challenge?  How do respond as a church to the call to cross the Jordan?
 
I know that several you have read the book Behold I Do a New Thing, written by C. Kirk Hadaway.  Kirk starts this insightful book, with the question: "What is the business of the church?"  He then goes on to answer his own question.  "The purpose of the church is to transform people-to bring down their self-constructed walls, dissolve their delusions and help them see God."

According to Hadaway, only when a congregation rediscovers its purpose, can it then find its mission.  "That mission," he writes, "is to be a church that actualizes [its] purpose... to form a transformational community."
 
After studying hundreds of churches, I concluded over a decade ago that the problem with most of our mainline churches today is that we are no longer clear about what our purpose for being really is.
 
About seven years ago, two highly respected professors from Stanford University Graduate School of Business, James Collins and Jerry Porras wrote a book called Built to Last.  The book was based on a six year study they conducted on exceptional and long-lasting corporations as compared with other companies that were not so exceptional.  They wanted to know if they could identify any common characteristics in these exceptional companies.
 
They discovered that these special companies all had three things in common.  First, all of these dynamic organizations had a clear understanding of their "core values."  And second, these successful and exceptional companies each had a "bodacious" dream for the organization of the company that everyone involved shared openly.
 
But the most important thing that they found in common was that these organizations, from the secretary to the CEO, all understood the fundamental reason for the organization's existence.  Each and every one of them could articulate the organization's purpose for existence.
 
Furthermore, the research with other companies indicated that if an organization did not have these three things, values and clarity of purpose, and a dream for the future, clearly defined and understood by the vast majority of the employees and participants, the organization would not thrive over the long term.
 
Both Dr. Collins and Dr. Porras felt strongly that these principles applied to all organizations including non-profits and churches.  And there is the challenge.
 
You see, for sixteen hundred years the church thought it knew why the it was in business.  The church had the keys to the kingdom, you see; it offered salvation; it had the exclusive ticket to life after death.  Over the centuries there may have been debates about which denomination had the real tickets or correct pass but the churches knew why we were in business. We were brokers for a "life after death" pass.
 
Somewhere after the 1950s, as our society tried to adjust to our growing multi-culture nation, the idea that Christianity was the only way to get to heaven began to lose hold in our mainline churches.  About the same time scholars in our universities and seminaries were debating the biblical meaning of words like heaven, eternal life and salvation.  And over the years, rather quietly, a profound shift occurred in our liberal churches.  We no longer saw ourselves as the sole gate-keepers to eternal life.  And in the process, we lost the clarity of our purpose.
 
But you see the church did not start off as the brokers for a ticket to a place where we go when we die.  If you read Jesus' teachings carefully they are more about how to live one's life here on this beautiful planet.  His lessons dealt with living your life in harmony with God's ways.  His teachings were about living your life fully and completely in eternal time - starting now.  It was and still is a profound and powerful way to live.
 
I believe that the purpose of the church today is the same thing it was when the movement began 2000 years ago.  It should be, I believe, about changing lives.  A dynamic church that is true to the teachings of Jesus should be about finding ways to provide a place, a path and support for spiritual growth and transformation.  The church should be creating and fostering opportunities to experience God's Kingdom, in Jesus' words, or God's realm, here and now.
 
So I would argue that whatever else a dynamic religious community might be today, it must be a community that promotes and fosters real experiences of God's Realm, or as Neil Doug-Klotz describes the Kingdom of God, "an expression of the face of a powerful and overwhelming unity."
 
A dynamic faith is not the result of memorizing creeds, or Scripture or even the result of a tightly structured belief system.  A dynamic faith is a result of an experience of that in which one has faith.  A dynamic faith is open to the mystery of a God-Force that offers an overwhelming sense of unity with all Creation.  It is without boundaries and often defies words.
 
Now the amazing thing is that Jesus provided us a very specific path that we can learn and we can teach that will help anyone who wants to experience. Unfortunately for this path to work it has to be learned; it has to be walked; it has to be practiced.
 
We all know about the path.  Have an active prayer life.  Learn to be silent and hear the "voice of God."  Be willing to repent - that means take responsibility for our actions that harm us or others and change the course of our actions.  The path challenges us to put more trust in the God Force of the Universe.  It calls us to forgive, unconditionally.  It requires us to give up our judgment of others.  It calls us to live with compassion for all sentient beings, everyday.  It reminds us to be willing to take risks on behalf of others.  It challenges us to live with a generous heart.  And regardless of what life has handed you, calls us to live in gratitude and celebrate the wonder of life.  Those are the lessons, aren't they?  Unfortunately, they may be easy to list but they are difficult to live.
 
When I was about fourteen years old and in my fourth year of piano lessons, my parents found a highly regarded piano teacher for me.  They did this because everyone kept telling them that I had a great talent.  It was a long trip to this man's home but it was supposed to be worth because, you see, I had this great talent.  But football and girls and an active social life were cutting into my practice time.
 
One day I showed up for my lesson with this piano teacher and started struggling through my current piece with him sitting next to me.  All of a sudden this man started banging on the keys with both hands.  "Practice, practice, practice!" he yelled.  "What a waste!" he screamed even louder. And then, only a little more calmly, he looked at me shaking his head and said, "You will never know what you could have been."  Then he fired me as a student.

I often wonder if Jesus were to return today and visit some of his churches and listen to the acrimony over some of the silliest things; theology, belief systems, gays in the church, budgets, the color of the carpets... I wonder if he would not feel like my former piano teacher.  I wonder if he would not just want to yell - practice, practice, practice.
 
I sincerely believe my friends that if the people in our dying churches would focus on the lessons that we have been given by our Teacher, and practice them, not only would the people in those churches be transformed, but I am positive that more and more people would be drawn to those churches to learn how they too could experience this Realm of God - the "thin spots" of the holy as Marcus Borg refers to them.  They too would want to be part of these sacred communities where people learn together how to live their lives, fully and fruitfully.  They too would want to know, how does that work?
 
Jesus once said that we should take our light from out from underneath the bushel.  Sometimes I am afraid we forget that the light is even there.
 
We have a wonderful message to share my friends and it is a message and a path that the world desperately needs today.  It may very well be a saving message once again for the world.  And we may just have to find a different ways and creative ways to share it.  And maybe we all have to learn to practice, practice, practice.
 
The point is that today anyone who loves the church is standing on the shore of the Jordan.  Do we stay or do we move forward?  Do we take a risk or do we stay where we are and take what we get?  Do we become a transformational sacred community or do we hold on to the past?