Pecot's Putterings

In one way, Easter is a season in the church calendar of hide and seek. The lectionary (a yearly series of Bible readings used in common by many churches) uses the stories of Jesus in that weird time between the crucifixion and the ascension. This is "nothing-we-expect time". Jesus dies a horrible death, painful and gruesome, but this is real and tangible. And at the ascension, Jesus rises into the sky to heaven to rule the universe. This universal, spiritual picture of God is also something we can get. But in the middle, for the proverbial fifty days, Jesus is around in a body, but not quite. Jesus is with his disciples, but not quite. What they experience mostly in this is his absence and a growing sense of hope and presence. And so, in Easter we tell these odd stories of how Jesus begins to appear in the lives of those who love him, and just as quickly disappears

However, another tradition in the liturgy of the church is to read the stories of the early church, especially as told in the book of the Acts which is a continuation of the gospel of Luke. Here, the disciples finally begin to "get" what Jesus was telling them, they go out to spread the news and the church grows quickly. But then they build communities out of an odd assortment of people. The early disciples of Jesus had a heck of a time; they didn’t know what they were doing. Each seemed to think something different from the others and within minutes of the beginning of the church, there were conflicts, schisms. In ten years, the early church would be unruly beyond repair. And so, they begin just where it seems we are now.

Some people come to a church and then leave disgusted because they notice that the church community is mostly the same as the secular community. Politics is just as bad, if not worse. People are just as weird and obnoxious. "What’s the Point?"

Our history of dealing with community and diversity is a mixed bag. It is as if the christian community plays hide and seek with us in the same way that Jesus did after the resurrection. In two thousand years we have some shining examples of brilliance in building community and there have also been some horrifying events and movements. Most of the social services in our country got started by Christian churches as have most of the inquisitions and holy wars in the last thousand years of Western history.

To make matters worse, one biblical image of the Risen Christ is the church. We see Christ most vividly when we look at the Christian community. Should we all run screaming from the doors of the churches. Perhaps, but this is also the beauty of our faith. You can be a spiritual person all by yourself, but you can’t be a Christian. You can follow a perfect deity all by yourself, but if you join the Christian community you are stuck with a God that is pretty messy. And there is amazing beauty in this. Our spiritual path is to discover God in our lives at the same time find God in each other as we work out all the craziness between us. As we build community, we also build our spiritual selves.

So, what are the building blocks of community. What are we trying to accomplish and what do we have to work with? This next couple of months we will be taking a look at building community

Ted

Building Blocks of Community

Invitation

Communities do not form unless members invite new people in. The United Methodist Church is dying, it has lost more than half of its members in the last twenty or so years, because it’s members have forgotten invitation. Or that is one of the theories. People end up finding their way to a church by all sorts of means, but it is rare for someone to darken the doors of a church or come back unless some individual (not a answering machine, or newspaper add, or website) has invited them. And very few people, even if they become regular attendees to a worship service, will join unless they are invited.

The same thing is true of friendship. There may have been a time when neighbors dropped by or milled around each other enough so that they became friends, but now it is rare that people get to know one another, unless they invite others into their lives. The single world is taking this very seriously. They know that people just don’t fall into relationships. The two single most important aspects to finding strong relationships are preparing oneself (knowing onesself) and learning how to invite someone into one’s life.

We are seeing two things about our church that are very interesting. One is that the newcomers that find their way to our church are increasingly doing it because someone they know is telling them that this is an exciting church, that there is something different about it and special. But, we are also hearing that people just don’t know one another. The first steps of invitation are getting along pretty well, but once folks get into the door, they aren’t connecting as much as we would like. It won’t just happen. To make friends at church and build a community, we must all invite others into our lives.

Creating An Identity

We have spent the last couple of years trying to figure out who we are. If you know who you are and what you have to offer, you can develop a way to clearly communicate this and thereby grow. Institutionally we do this through values exercises, goal setting and assessment studies. The Mission Statement is the end of this process and defines identity and intention. It is a statement of faith.

Any mission statement is a curious mix of intention, obsession, denial, hope, self-fulfilling prophesy and truth. They statements do two things.

They stick a community in a hole by limiting its self-perception and categorizing its ministry.
They open up a community by allowing it to claim it’s real gifts and focusing its energies.

Probably every one of us would have something different to say about this. But if we look carefully, we see common elements unfolding. What would you say is our identity as a church? "We are informal. We sing a lot. Children talk in church. We tell lots of stories. We are a congregation full of very busy people. We are a hundred year old church. We are a very young church, 65% of us haven’t even been here for a year and a half yet. We love each other. We don’t know each other very well. We love to sing together." What would you say?

As our church has defined itself, we use our perceived identity to cast ourselves into the future in faith. Our present mission statement expresses this hope in four ways.

Oddballs

When I was growing up, I am sorry to say, I used to make fun of the Down’s Syndrome kids in school. I’m sure all of my friends parents taught us right, and I probably put up a pretty good front when around adults. But we all knew that these folks were weird, funny. They didn’t behave as we expected and were somehow scary because of that. As I got older, I got kinder, but still felt very uncomfortable and wished them elsewhere. However, my high school was half a block from the Down’s Center in Palo Alto. And that school was doing a pretty good job of educating folks around the neighborhood about the humanity of their Down’s kids. We all came into contact with more and more of these people and somehow they became less threatening to us, to me. As we learned to talk and relate, they became friends and a whole group of people suddenly joined my circle of awareness.

I was an oddball, too. My feet had been burned early and I spent way too much time in school on crutches or wheel chairs or being embarrassed in gym class about what my feet looked like. I could feel people pull away from me, and so whether it was true or not, I pulled away and just didn’t tell people about my feet if I didn’t have to. I spent a lot of my life pretending I was normal sometimes at a great cost in Band-Aids and healing ointments, but at a greater cost of losing truth and acceptance of myself, and pulling out of community.

One important element of any community is how it treats its oddballs, the people who are perceived as different, those who are marginalized. Much of twentieth century theology evolves as it asks the difficult questions that arise as we examine Nazi Germany and confront a whole culture built upon annihilating those who are different. Right now, the world is at war in the Balkans where a leader and a people are "cleansing" their home by genocide. There is no tolerance for difference, it is perceived as threat. And the violence unleashed in this fear is terrifying. As right-wing forms of religion become more and more common in our world, there are more and more little holy wars. It is a sad thing indeed when it appears that a community can actually be built on intolerant nationalism or threatened spirituality.

This sad and dangerous world trend is also a challenge in our communities. The stranger visiting for the first time has a cup of coffee at fellowship hour all alone. The visitor of another race is chased away by indifference and aggressive curiosity. The wheel-chaired member still can’t find a place to sit. The obnoxious old geezer is shunned, the youth unguided, the angry avoided, the single man mistrusted. The smelly street person finds his way to a church and discovers he always has a pew all to themselves. The dying member is never visited. The alcoholic is never asked how they are today. The mentally challenged young adult can’t find any way to serve their church.

One of the important building blocks of community is the faith and strength to find relationship for those that don’t fit in. As our century has institutionalized certain forms of help, we have all too often also ghettoized ill-fitting populations of people. Certainly, there are appropriate issues of boundaries that come up as we deal with differences and certain angry behaviors. However, within diverse populations, a community can grow only just so far without finding places for those who don’t seem to fit it. The violent answer for this tears the heart out of the community as it destroys the victim.

Learn new languages. Invite people different from yourself to dinner. Get to know your own boundaries so you can hold them for yourself without resentment when someone who does not have them is around. Learn about your need for control. Ask yourself why someone different than you is threatening. Ask yourself what is going on inside you when you feel violent. Create a mentality of accessibility (not just for wheel-chairs but for many entries). Know what you are called to do for yourself and learn to let others do their thing without feeling guilty about it. Confront intolerant actions within your community, nation and world.

Remember that the Christian church, at its best, has always been a community of and to outcasts and oddballs. And so, if the truth be told is our country. When we forget this, we become a church far different than anything Jesus hoped.

Unruly Leadership

At the very beginning of Acts, the disciples start going out and doing their own thing as if each one was in charge. Overcome by the spirit of grace in their midst. they travel the globe touching people for a moment, gathering a quick community and then moving along.

No one asked Philip to baptize the Ethiopian eunuch. It just happened. And, it makes a great story that the huge Ethiopian church begins here. But what if others didn’t like the people others baptize. The acts of grace which seemed wonderful to one plagued another colleague later on. It gets a little humorous because some of the early communities had very little teaching. When the evangelist left town the communities invented themselves based on what they knew and what they dreamed. When the evangelist came back into town, they were sometimes horrified at what evolved from their few words. (We can love the struggle of Paul as he addresses Corinth that although he said that communion was to be a celebration, he didn’t mean that much of a celebration).

The early leaders tried to unify but the church was growing too fast and pretty soon no one was in charge. And yet what developed was a church spread by passion and relationship. Somehow, in the messy-ness of leadership, the Holy Spirit could be found. The thousands of divisions in the church can either mean that God has really made a mess of the Church or that perhaps God loves this kind of diversity and anarchy.

At Morgan Hill United Methodist Church, we are slowly dismantling the coordinated leadership and committee style and encouraging each of us to find out what we want to do or what God wants us to do. We will sort out how it all works together as we go along. This makes it hard to figure out where we are going. It is, perhaps, a little harder to figure out how to plug in. Communication lines are atrocious. But in this, we may come close to the dance of the Spirit.

Communities need leaders. What kind of leaders are we looking for? Not someone perfect or charismatic but someone who has a call and goes for it, and someone who will share what they are doing with others in the community.

Drop Dead Discipleship

The Acts has a great story of discipleship. It is the tradition in this community for each member to share their resources. One husband and wife decide to lie about what they have so they don’t have to give their full share. When the husband lies he dies right in the assembly. And as his wife does the same thing, bang, down she goes.

Surely one of the reasons that this story is recorded and told is to scare people into an honest tithe. But there is a good issue in this story that suggests that when we lie about ourselves to our community, not only is the community impoverished, but that we kill our spirits in the process.

Whether or not we tithe, we all give something to our faith community. If we are dishonest with others, or ourselves, about our gift something is gravely lost. The bodies pile up on the church floors. We may see this in part when it comes to our financial gifts to the congregation, but how much more so when we look at how we present ourselves to the community. "How are you today?" "Fine." In this phrase a hundred prayers are lost and the real life of a community is blurred.

We are called to recognize the force of an honest presentation of oneself to the community. To claim our true gifts and our true weaknesses builds a community based on reality and in that there is power.

Isn’t this the challenge of the spiritual journey to honestly present ourselves into God’s hands for transformation. How much more this is true for community.

In the lies, we fall to the ground. Humility is standing on your own ground being truly and fully yourself. It is neither making too much of yourself, nor too little. Humility is self-valuing and self-grounding. Humility takes oneself lightly and honestly and fully all at the same time. And upon this community is built.

Saying Goodbye

Finally, there is no community without a place for saying goodbye. One of the marvelous images in the Acts is the apostle Paul building a church and then leaving and getting into a shipwreck. He thinks he is on his way to the next job, but then everything crashes. Goodbyes are like that. Someone, who is important to us in some way and by some measure changes. They stop doing what they are doing, they develop a new relationship, they argue and fall away, they move, they get sick, they die, they go off the committee, they leave for the evening. There are a thousand places and times when we must let go of one another. If we love one another, we crash somehow -- our hearts ache, our spirits clutch, our patterns fall apart.

In our church this is especially difficult because so many people are coming new, so many people move away that the church itself is changing from day to day. It isn’t the same church as it was just three months ago. We say goodbye to all those who move away and we struggle with a church that has changed. It isn’t like it was a while ago. The system doesn’t work like it did even in September.

Saying goodbye is an art form that has escaped most of us. But here are some helps.

For a community of faith that knows goodbye, there is also another important element of saying goodbye: training. Do we have adequate systems for passing on what we know so others can take over essential jobs, so that in new projects others can act in continuity with what has gone before. Building systems that orient and train takes seriously the dynamic of change within the community, values the past, and prepares for the future.

Originally published in the Easter Season 1999 Good News Letter of the Morgan Hill United Methodist Church.

United Methodist Church
Morgan Hill, California

Building Community

Pecot's Putterings

Building Blocks of Community

Invitation

Creating An Identity

Oddballs

Unruly Leadership

Drop Dead Discipleship

Saying Goodbye

United Methodist Church Morgan Hill, California

Building Community

Pecot's Putterings

Building Blocks of Community

Invitation

Creating An Identity

Oddballs

Unruly Leadership

Drop Dead Discipleship

Saying Goodbye

United Methodist Church
Morgan Hill, California