So, yesterday I wrote a blog about shifting the narrative. Believe me, I am working on that! The idea was prompted by a blog I read recently that a friend had posted on Facebook. It began, “I want to go to a dying church …” and proceeded to talk about the richness of congregational life even when many would point to those very elements as signs of failure.
Like many United Churches, our congregation lives faithfully but looks around to see mostly gray heads in the pews. We are grateful for the clutch of children and youth that gather each Sunday morning. We feel sorrow when someone leaves for one reason or another because we miss them and notice that they are gone. And we tire when we hear of the raging success of the evangelical church up the road that has a parking problem because so many people crowd their parking lot and clamour to get to their worship of rock music and “Bible-based preaching” (I put that in quotes because … well because most of my readers will understand that I don’t think much of that preaching is really in the spirit of the Bible …)
I think success is based on being faithful and keeping honest to our calling to follow Christ. Jesus did not preach prosperity and success by numbers. He talked about small things – leaven in a loaf, mustard seeds. He said, “When two or three are gathered…” Jesus did not talk about success in terms of numbers of souls saved or rich financial security he talked about reaching out to the ones on the margins and living a humble life.
The blog post, which was written by someone named Keith Lewis, says, “I want to go to a church that made hard choices” “I want to go to a church that chose love,”. “That’s what I want my children to learn about God.”
I don’t know who Keith Lewis is but I am grateful to him for expressing my deep held belief that it is too easy for church people to measure success based on popularity when we should be using faithfulness as our yardstick.
