Worship
Service for November 5, 2023
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: For all those who have paved the way for
our freedom of worship, we give thanks, O Lord.
P: For those who have taught us about the
witness and the power of love, we give thanks, O Lord.
L: For those who work in our church that we
may come to know what it means to serve, we give thanks, O Lord.
P: For all the saints, those who rest from
their labors, and those who labor still, we give thanks, O Lord.
L: Praise be to God, who continually inspires
and guides workers and witnesses.
P: Open our heart and spirits, O Lord, and
help us become good workers for You.
Opening Hymn – O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing Hymn
#466
Blue 4 vs.
Prayer of Confession
Lord of mercy, forgive us when
we make excuses for our lack of faith.
We let our selfishness and empathy get in the way of illumination and
peace. We find ways to duck out of our
opportunities for service and witness, claiming that we are too small or too
ill-equipped to be effective witnesses to Jesus Christ. How foolish we can be! All of our lives You have been present to us,
whether or not we knew it. Your love is
always surrounding us. Yet we have not
taken the time to recognize it. We whine
and complain about the misfortunes that have befallen us and wonder where You
are. We want immediate release from our
struggles. And when release comes, we
again move off in our own realms of self-centeredness. Help us, O Lord. Stop us from being so faithless. Open our hearts with Your forgiving Spirit
that we, having been healed and forgiven, may be effective witnesses to Your
love and compassion. (Silent prayers are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: You have always been loved by God. Know that you are healed and forgiven, that
God has placed a special blessing in your life.
Rejoice! For God is with
you. Serve God in all that you say,
think, and do.
P: Thanks be to God. AMEN.
Gloria Patri
Affirmation of Faith/Apostles’
Creed
I believe in God the Father
Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth; And in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord;
who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under
Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell; the
third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on
the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge
the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost,
the holy catholic Church; the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins; the
resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting. AMEN
Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s
Prayer
God of all creation, we
bless you for calling the world and all its peoples to come and share your
love, blessing, forgiveness, and healing.
We praise you for the gift of your Son, Jesus Christ, for his ministry
and passion, for his dying and rising to free us from sin, and for the gift of
your holy church that lives to tell the whole world this good news.
In this season and month of thanksgiving we give thanks, O
Lord, for all those who look to you for guidance and strength, or have
fashioned their very lives after that of a compassionate savior, who have
taught us the meaning of love, and have shared with us the lessons of wisdom
and grace.
We pray for the gift of peace with liberty and justice for
all people everywhere. We especially we
pray for the children of the world victimized by war, trapped in many kinds of
slavery, orphaned and left motherless or fatherless and homeless, who need your
loving care. We pray for refugee
families struggling for food and housing, for the sick, the helpless, and the
lonely. Remember them and deliver
them.
We pray for those who are ill in body, mind, or
spirit. Be with all who fight chronic
disease or crippling disability. Ease
suffering from pain, stress, and isolation.
Comfort the despairing. Renew
caregivers so they may continue their healing ministries to those under their
care. We especially lift up to you
in prayer…
As we celebrate today the gifts of all your saints, for
their faithfulness and for their giving of themselves and of their resources
for the benefit of their families, others, and the generations that came after
them. We remember all those who have had
an impact on our lives. And we remember
them by name:
In the following
moments of silence hear our inner groanings, listen carefully to our heartfelt
thanks and also our prayers, O Lord, to heal us inside and out…
All these things we ask in the name of Jesus Christ, your
Son, our Savior, who taught us to prayer together saying….…Our Father who art
in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name. Thy
kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our
debtors. And lead us not into
temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. AMEN.
Hymn – Soon
and Very Soon Hymn #757 Brown
Scripture Reading(s):
First Scripture Reading – Psalm
78:1-7
Second Scripture Reading – 1
Thessalonians 2:9-13
Sermon – “How Do You Grow a Church?”
This past month I celebrated 35 years
serving in pastoral ministry. That, in
and of itself, is kind of hard to believe; as I often forget that I’m no longer
in my 30’s and close to approaching the big 60.
I’m not sure how many of you actually know my background story as a
pastor.
In looking back on my
years in ministry, I remember the very first church conference I went to in
1988 as a student pastor. It was on
church transformation. Yup, 35 years
ago, the larger church with the big “C” was talking about church decline and
how to transform the church into gaining new members. And we’ve been talking about that for the
life of my entire ministry.
I grew up in a large membership church
of about 2000 members. There were three
services every Sunday morning, 3 full-time pastors, two full-time choir
directors, 2 organists, a huge full and part time general church staff, a 70
member adult choir, a huge children’s choir, a bursting Sunday School program,
various Bible Studies every day of the week, and a great after school youth
program. However, by the time I became a
senior in high school the church had lost members and had reduced the size of
the staff. There were only 2 of us in
the High School Sunday School class and the weekly after school program became
a seasonal program. A shift was
definitely happening, even in large membership churches. Over the many years since I belonged to that
church, they’ve maintained about the same level of pastoral staff and church
membership, but I know they struggle every year to continue the programming
that was foundational during my growing up years.
In 1987, after my first year of
seminary, I made the decision to look for an internship rather than a field
placement for my pastoral ministry class.
Most of my classmates did a field placement in a local congregation here
in Pittsburgh of about 10 hours per week servicing in churches looking for help
with their youth ministry. I did not
want to do that. I wanted more pastoral
education as I was one of the youngest students at Seminary and didn’t have a
lot of experience. I applied to two
positions: I applied to Highland Park
Presbyterian Church in Dallas, TX to be one of 6 student pastors at the church
for the 1988-1989 school year. That
church was an 8,000 member congregation.
They flew me down, put me up in a Hyatt Hotel, took me on a tour of the
church; I met with various church leaders, the senior pastor, and the associate
pastor (one of 8) who would be my direct supervisor who also interviewed
me.
My second application
was to be the student pastor at two small yoked churches in Roseville/New
Lexington, OH. The two churches had been
yoked for a very long time and their pastor of 34 years (who had also been the
mayor of Roseville for nearly the same length of time) had suddenly died of a
heart attack. The Roseville Church had 14
members and the New Lexington Church had 7 members. A member of the New Lex Church flew his
4-seater Cessna to the Allegheny County airport, where I was picked up and
flown to New Lexington, stayed with members of the congregation for the
weekend, had dinner with the session members, was interviewed, preached at a
neutral pulpit the next morning, had breakfast with the entire membership, got
a tour of the towns and the churches and was flown back to Pittsburgh. Within two days, I received a call from both
positions saying that they would like me to come to their church. An 8,000 member congregation in Dallas, TX;
the largest church, at the time, in our denomination. It was the kind of church I was familiar with
– a large staff, a large building, things happening at all times of day and
night with more programs than you could remember. Or, two very small churches in rural Ohio,
something completely out of my experience or even comfort zone. I realized as I needed to choose between
these two positions, that it might define the rest of my life and
ministry. I asked both of them to give
me a week to pray about it. I read
various scripture passages, spoke with my parents, to my pastors at my home
church, talked to some of my classmates at seminary, and good friends from
college. And I prayed. Nearly all of them suggested that the Dallas
church position made a lot more sense for me to accept. The day before I was supposed to call the
church’s back to give them my decision, I took the bus downtown. I went over to Station Square and took the
incline up to the top of Mount Washington.
I strolled Grand Ave. and looked out over the city of Pittsburgh and
prayed. Out of nowhere the downtown buildings’
structures became most prominent, like the skeletal vision of bones and
although it was not one of the scripture passages I had been reading and
considering, the passage of Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones came immediately
to mind. The bones did not morph into
bodies of flesh as it had done in Ezekiel’s vision, but remained bone-like
structures until the vision passed. On
the bus ride home, I couldn’t stop thinking about the tiny churches in
Ohio. In my immaturity at the time, I
may have had something called “a hero or savior complex” which unfortunately, I
think a lot of ministers suffer from, and thought that the only way these
churches in Ohio would remain open was if I went there. Thankfully, over the years I’ve learned that
I’m not the savior of anything.
When I arrived back at
my apartment on the seminary campus, I called the chair of the committee in
Ohio and accepted the position. It was a
9 month position. I ended up staying
there for 2 years and learned A LOT about ministry and even grew out of my
savior complex pretty quickly. I learned
that I’m not here to “save” the church.
I’m only here to preach good news and to maybe lead people to discover a
deeper faith.
As a minister, I’ve been
doing that for 35 years now and have served mostly only small membership
churches. They’ve been my calling and
passion for my entire ministry. This
week, I looked up both Roseville Presbyterian Church and New Lexington
Church. 35 years after I was there with
one church having 7 members and the other having 14 members, both are still
open, and are called by their Presbytery “teaching congregations” where student
pastors for the last 35 years have come on a yearly basis to provide a learning
opportunity.
35 years ago I
attended a conference on church transformation.
And every year since, I have received mail, flyers, videos, then later
also email and text messages, You Tube clips, etc… on marketing tools to grow a
church. Our Presbytery, over the years,
has also engaged in the same – offering conferences, workshops, weekend
retreats, studies, etc… on how to grow the church; seeing this as the only
remedy to the decades-long decline of membership in our denomination. And as my colleague in ministry Kerra English
would say, this translates into “how to get more butts in the pews so that
there’s more giving in the plate”.
And that’s exactly
what small membership churches (and maybe even larger membership churches) are
worried about anyway. Of course, the
consequences of not doing so may seem more dire for the small membership
churches, however.
How do you grow a
church?
Again my Kerra English
says, “You recruit and retain more members.
We’ve been a membership organization for as long as any of us in this
room can remember, so we can begin to think that’s the only truth, or the only
possibility. We begin to believe that
there is only one right answer to the problem of church sustainability – have
enough members, or more crassly, have enough people giving enough money to keep
the whole process financially afloat.
But, if you look at
the trends for any membership organization right now, they are all on the
decline – churches, Rotary clubs, and even bowling leagues. We currently blame it on the pandemic, but
the trend was well underway long before the pandemic. COVID just gave us a more acceptable answer
as to why a whole variety of institutions struggle to get support, especially
the kind of volunteer support that at one time seemed to be so very “American”.
To think NOW that a
membership drive will save the church is to not have a very vibrant imagination
for what church is or can be.
So, if the answer to
“how do you grow the church?” isn’t “get some more members,” what could it be?
Well, we are a
Presbyterian Church, after all, and the PCUSA has a new statistics-based
approach. We decently and orderly
studied what makes churches tick and came up with church growth by showing
certain marks of vitality. Seven of them
to be exact.
The Congregation
Vitality resource says that a vital church will be good at discipleship,
evangelism, having an outward focus, empower each individual’s calling,
Spirit-led worship, caring relationships, and having healthy systems in place. Basically then, you measure how much people
like what you are doing in each of those areas.
I think that sounds
great and is a wonderful list, but how exhausting! But it seems to be about church
perfectionism. Can we work that hard and
polish our way to congregational growth?
I think Christ’s
answer to church growth would be very similar to the way he answered last
week’s question about which commandment was the most important.
I honestly believe it
is about putting God first in your life with all your heart, soul, and mind and
loving your neighbor as you love yourself.
We can and we have
chosen as an institution to measure church success by membership and money, and
by rigorous discipleship, and by statements of belief in Jesus and by marks of vitality. But Jesus gives us a another, rather simple
one for absolutely everything. To
love. Are we loving God with all your
being, in all that we do as a church?
Are we loving our neighbors as a church?
If we add that to today’s
scripture reading, we should live among others in a way that exemplifies Christ’s
life for others – to live in harmony with one another, to work hard among them,
to be pure, upright, and blameless when it comes to our interactions with
others. And finally to urge and
encourage the same among one another.
Perhaps if we did away
with the silliness and got down to business they way Jesus would have us live,
we might show the world a church worthy of God and worthy of being part of
something that is actually wholesome and good.
Thanks be to God. AMEN.
Offertory –
Doxology –
Prayer of Dedication –
Giver
of life and all the gifts of our lives, receive now these tokens of our
appreciation which we set before you as signs of our love and
thanksgiving. We rejoice with thankful
hearts for all your blessings. Help us
to live our lives in service to you as our continuing gift of thanks. We pray in the name of Jesus Christ. AMEN.
Closing
Hymn – For All the Saints Hymn
#526 Blue 4 vs.
Benediction –
Now, dear friends, go from this place in confidence that
the God of Creation is with you. Go
boldly into the world, offering peace, hope and healing love, in the name of
Jesus Christ. And may the God of love,
hope and peace be with you always. AMEN.
Postlude
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