MOTHER CHURCH
Rev. Dr. Kathy Fuson Hurt

 

FBC, May 11, 2008

Scripture: Acts 2:1-21

 

 

 

          I took my love, I took it down

                                 (all quotations from Landslide by Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac)

 

            It was only a hill, though it looked like a mountain to my alarmed eyes when I turned around at the top to survey the snowy expanse I would be crossing on my first sled ride. All too easily I could imagine myself down at the base of the hill with not just my reflection but my body as well scattered over the ground.

            I grew up on the Gulf Coast of Texas, where neither hills nor mountains exist and snowfalls come on an average of once every ten years. Sledding is an unknown pastime. But because I came to live in hilly, snowy, Minnesota as a young parent, and because I felt it important for my son to partake fully of his culture and climate, I had summoned my courage to take him sledding.

     Obviously I survived the experience, for here I stand years later. My son did enjoy his sled ride and, I think, on some level appreciated his mother’s willingness to step beyond her Texas boundaries on his behalf. But more was at stake in that sled ride than simply a native southerner’s first taste of winter sports.

     For I am not just reluctant to go sledding because of a childhood with no snow. I am gun-shy in the face of most new experiences, and risk-taking runs contrary to my deepest instincts—not just because of some innate conservatism nor an introverted personality, but because of childhood training. My parents moved my five siblings and me out to the country to seal us off from a world they regarded as untrustworthy because it had shown itself, in their own growing-up experiences, to be dangerous and untrustworthy. Sins of the father and mothers are visited upon the children, and cautious, risk-averse parents produce cautious, risk-averse children. My parents taught us that we could only be certain of being safe if we remained close to home, both our literal family home and the metaphorical home of conservative values and a conservative church that they taught us. Some of us did, in time, wander away from this literal and metaphorical safe haven; others of my siblings have stayed nearby, still convinced, as my parents were, that the world in general is not to be trusted and danger is present at every moment. And there are days, when media reports are filled with accounts of terrorism and abuse and deception, that I wonder whether my parents may be right after all.

                        Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?

 

            When the disciples watched Jesus disappear into the heavens for the last time, they must have felt like any child bidding a parent goodbye for a first trip abroad, or a first effort at living independently, or a first year at college, or any major life transition that separates children from the security of their childhood home. All the teaching, all the time of having someone protective and authoritative nearby, was finished. As for what would come next—well, aside from some specific commandments about loving neighbors and serving others and going into new lands with some sort of message, the disciples had no idea what their next steps should be. Jesus had always made those decisions for them. And like any child moving into independence, my guess would be that they imagined recreating, as closely as possible, the same sort of environment and experience they had known with Jesus. Their own ministries would look just like his; the words they used would be almost exact quotations of his; the values they held, the people they spent time with, the politicians they supported or challenged, would all be mirror images of what Jesus had done during his time with them. For what other possibility could they come up with? We enter into young adulthood draped in the values and lifestyles that our parents taught us, over and over and over again, every day of the many years we spent in their presence.

 

                        Well, I’ve been afraid of changing

 

            A few years ago I sat in a clergy meeting and listened to a pastor of a large and successful congregation propound a shocking theory of church and ministry. “If we pastors were doing our job,” he asserted, “churches would be dwindling in size because people would be outgrowing their need for church.” As the other pastors leapt into the debate to argue him down, I found myself wondering what other profession I could find if my own church disappeared, along with all the other churches around me. Clergy training does not translate readily into other vocations, I realized (except for maybe selling used cars). So I joined in the attack on this outspoken pastor, for I very much wanted to remain employed.

            But time makes you bolder, even children get older, and I’m getting older too, and in the intervening years I have come to appreciate the truth of that daring pastor’s statement about church and ministry. While one may come to a church initially seeking comfort and reassurance, a safe haven in a dangerous world, hoping to be told that whoever you are, you are inherently worthy, a child of God, good enough, just as you are, remaining the same person you are when you start out at a church is not the goal. A church that does its job facilitates, even insists on, personal spiritual growth. So along with all that warm fuzzy affirmation that should greet you when you enter the church, you should expect also to receive a fair amount of challenging and reshaping of your ideas and values, your customary beliefs, all in the interest of moving you along on your spiritual journey, taking you from spiritual childhood into spiritual adulthood, and beyond.

            My question is, is this growth happening? Have you found your values and beliefs changed from the time you first entered the doors of this church? What is different today about your relationship with God, your interpretation of scripture, your prayer life, your understanding of the paths of Jesus, your awareness of other religious traditions, from the spiritual profile you presented as a newcomer? And to the extent you see yourself growing spiritually, what role does this church play in that growth, if any? As inherently conservative institutions, churches have not historically been so much places to grow as places to find yourself affirmed in how you already think and live. Most of us value a church full of people like ourselves, folks who think like us, a place where we will be comfortable. Yet how much can comfort and sameness and like-mindedness contribute to growth? 

            The account of the Pentecostal event, the coming of the Holy Spirit to the gathered disciples, is generally regarded as the birthing of the church. That the first moments of this new entity did not reflect what had already gone before, but looked like something completely different, is instructive. The disciples may well have expected that they would recreate the ministry of Jesus, replay his teachings and imitate his style. What the Spirit brought them instead was a new message and a new style that built on what Jesus taught while heading off into a fresh new direction. With the gift of tongues, this new ministry becomes cosmopolitan; with the gift of hearing, each in his native language, this new ministry becomes diverse; and the message of this new church becomes one of salvation and evangelism, focused on reflection on the meaning not so much of Jesus’ teachings but rather of his passion, his death and resurrection. All very different directions than what might have been predicted—and all something quite other than a mere recapitulation of the ministry of Jesus. Jesus’ influence is still very much present, but is right away being recast and reworked into a new faith perspective. And if the disciples themselves were surprised or felt alarmed at this departure from what they had envisioned for their work, that is not apparent in their behavior. These peasant fishermen and civil servants are transformed from followers into leaders, from spiritual children into spiritual adults, from dependents who mouth the ideas of their teacher into authorities in their own right, inspired to immediately come up with fresh interpretations of the meaning of their experience with Jesus.

            Time makes you bolder, even children get older. Liberal churches like ours do a fine job, I feel, of granting permission where none has been given before to all who enter here. We support and foster a kind of adolescent phase of spiritual growth, or what philosopher Paul Ricouer described as ‘critical distanciation from the symbols of religion.” We allow questioning, rejecting, self-determination, some risk-taking with great skill and kindness.

            But to grow older and bolder: the pastor of that clergy group felt that spiritual growth would lead people back out of churches as they became independent religious thinkers. I disagree with his thesis that religious growth results in an unchurched state. But I do believe that continued growth requires something very different from what now exists in most mainline churches—including our own.

            One of the most noted students of mainline churches today, Diana Butler Bass, has done extensive research on mainline congregations of all sorts and sizes, in all areas of the country, that are thriving. Several members from our church heard three lectures by Bass on this subject last fall. In all the churches she studied, Bass found the same characteristics, regardless of denomination or size, which she believes are essential to a vital mainline church. These characteristics also mark a noted difference in the way church is done from what has been customary in mainline churches for decades—and what is still customary in churches that are declining. One such characteristic of vital churches is a deliberate focus on intentional spiritual practices, methods both ancient and contemporary that always have been part of facilitating spiritual growth, methods that tend to be absent in churches that either do not recognize spiritual growth as the responsibility of the church because it is a private matter, or that see it as irrelevant. And it is interesting to find some of these practices right from the outset, in the church that is birthed at Pentecost and is being developed through the efforts of the first disciples. Over and over, the early disciples are described as committing time to prayer and reflection, engaging in discernment before making any significant decision, providing extensive teaching for converts to the church, offering hospitality to newcomers in the community, and practicing justice in the form of hands-on caring for those in need. Prayer, reflection, discernment, teaching, hospitality, justice: the same list of spiritual practices that Bass finds in present-day thriving churches, practices that were present in the church from the beginning but somehow got set aside as churches become preoccupied with purity of belief, issues of control, institutional maintenance, political maneuvering, public image. Ironically, these preoccupations that were intended to keep the church afloat have become the very preoccupations that will sink it if continued. And to the extent that we here at First Baptist allow ourselves to be distracted by such preoccupations while neglecting attention to deliberate spiritual growth practices—then we, too, will find ourselves withering, having lost touch with the very wellsprings of spiritual life. If you did not see our church figuring in your answers to my earlier questions about your own spiritual growth, or only figuring marginally, then that points to our own loss of focus and the work we have to do to return to the central responsibility of church life, namely making possible and supporting ongoing spiritual growth and maturation.

            Most myths about the growth and maturation process depict the central character, as part of a movement toward independence, slaying, conquering, or establishing a new form of relationship with a mother goddess. Though I do not wish for people to start leaving churches in droves—after all, I do want to still earn a living at this work—I do yearn for some transformation in our mother church, as she has historically been known, a transformation that will be brought about by us, her offspring. We still need her presence in our lives, but a different sort of presence that will guide our passage into full spiritual adulthood.

            And transformation of the mother, as the myths reflect, is a delicate and dangerous process. She devours those who approach her too timidly. She can be destroyed by those who approach her too aggressively. A delicate and dangerous process, but one still deserving of our engagement in this season of Pentecost begun, fittingly, on Mother’s Day. May this day when we celebrate the one who gave us life also be a day to commit to new life for ourselves and our spiritual community. And may the Spirit surprise us with gifts for renewal and growth that we never, ever expected to receive.