Worship Service for January 21, 2024
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: Your love, O God, reaches to the
heavens. Your faithfulness to the skies.
P: Your righteousness is like the mighty
mountains, Your justice like the great deep.
L: Earth’s children, high and low, take
refuge in the shadow of Your wings.
P: We feast on the abundance of Your house;
You give us drink from Your river of delights.
L: For with You is the fountain of life; in
Your light we see light.
P: Glory be to You, O God, our life and our
light.
Opening Hymn – All Creatures of Our God and King #455/63
Prayer of Confession
Lord, we cannot help but
wonder why we want to keep the good news of the gospel a secret. We profess that Christianity is for
everybody, but neglect to pass on Your good news to those we see every
day. We have become reservoirs of Your
goodness and grace, and not channels through which others can experience what
we have heard. We like to spread gossip,
but seldom tell anyone else about the gospel.
We want to be better witnesses.
Give us the strength, courage, and motivation to do better. (Silent prayers are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: This is the good news in Jesus Christ: God
loves us more than we love ourselves.
God forgive us, encourages us, and frees us to love others.
P: In Jesus Christ we are forgiven. Thanks be to God!
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
Precious and Holy Lord,
allow us to recognize Christ present in this place. Let us recognize Christ in one another. And more importantly, let us recognize Christ
in the face of strangers we meet each day.
We are members of your body and you have called us to do your work in
the world. You have called us to show
your love, your mercy, and your graciousness to a world in pain, to a world
full of anger, and to those who are lost and alone. Let that work begin in us today. Enable us to carry out your work in our
communities, in our neighborhoods, in our places of work, school, homes, and
among our friends and acquaintances.
Lord, open our eyes of
faith to see you in all the peoples of the earth. By the power of your Holy Spirit, enable us
to be your instruments of peace, of grace, and of redemption.
Be with the leaders of
our churches, our communities, our states, our nation, and the countries of the
world. Light a fire of compassion and
care within them for the people they govern, a fire of passion for the needs of
their own communities and peoples. Lord,
bring peace to the corners of the world that have not known peace in a long
time. Bring harmony to those who have
fought, disagreed with one another, have said hurtful things against one
another, and have held hatred in their hearts.
Dear God, we also pray
for people in our church, our own family members and friends – those who have
undergone surgeries, procedures, rounds of curative medicine. We pray for those who have broken bones,
broken hearts, and broken spirits. We
pray for those who have lost loved ones.
Show your presence in times of need and heal us of our afflictions.
We especially pray
for….
And now in this time of
silence, we lift up to you, the burden of our own hearts….
Most excellent Lord, we
give you thanks for hearing us this morning.
Continue to watch over us as pray 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 – Here
I am, Lord #525/589
Scripture Reading(s):
First Scripture Reading – Psalm
36:5-12
Second Scripture Reading – Mark
1:14-20
Sermon – “The Time Has Come”
Twenty years ago, I was given a
tremendous opportunity of being one of the workshop leaders at a conference
called the Churchwide Redevelopment Conference.
It was held in Pheonix, Arizona and I went with one of my members from
the church I pastored in Leetsdale. I
had been going to this conference every year and as usual the conference was
well attended and exciting. Worship was
inspirational and the keynote speakers were exceptionally good. I was one of forty speakers that led various
workshops during the conference. The
workshop I led was called Redevelopment in a
About 400
participants total came to this workshop at two different time slots. I don’t think it was that well attended
because of me, but rather because of the content of the workshop and the need
for small churches to rediscover the joy of being a church and reconnect to
their communities. Since then, nothing
has really changed. We are all still
trying to figure it out.
Over the course
of the last 30 some years, I have read practically everything there is on
Congregational Redevelopment and on Redevelopment Models. Beginning all the way back to 1987 when I
served a church as their Summer Evangelist in Pottstown, Pa, then in 1988 and
1989 when I served two yoked churches in Ohio and even in 1990-1994 when I was
serving a larger church in Edgewood, I became fascinated with the concept of
redevelopment and smaller churches. In
1997 when I went to the Leetsdale Presbyterian Church, I was finally given an
opportunity to put the skills I’d learned and the passion I’d had for small
churches into practice. During the 11
years that I spent at Leetsdale, we saw tremendous growth in the membership of
the church. In fact, percentage-wise, we
had more new members one year then any other church in our Presbytery. We saw tremendous growth in the spiritual
life of its members, and in the outreach it had to its community and even to a
smaller extent, the world.
But what exactly
is congregational redevelopment? The
textbook definition of Congregational Redevelopment is a re-direction of a
congregation’s ministry in light of significant changes among its membership,
its community to be served, or both.
Redevelopment includes a planned effort or intent to refocus the
congregation’s ministry.
After 30 some
years of reading almost everything that has been written about congregational
redevelopment and serving 6 distinct congregations in need of redevelopment, I think
I’ve learned a few things. And in so
doing have been able to create my own model of redevelopment. It was this model that I shared at the
redevelopment conference.
Part of the model I use has some essentials in
it; some core purposes for the church. For
me the core purposes for being a church are;
1) to come together
to praise God
2) to share the good
news with others
3) to support one
another in life’s journey.
These core
purposes are things that are never finished, so I believe that a congregation
is never really done redeveloping, that the model is one that can be used
continuously over and over again. They
are not stagnant. They are ever changing
and growing with the community and with the members of the church.
Going back to
notes that I made and what I’d written for and later about the conference, one
of the powerful lessons that I learned as many people shared their stories with
me, is that many churches have lost sight of those core purposes. In going back to those notes, I want to
revisit some of my own core beliefs, as well.
This morning I’m only going to use today’s scripture reading to touch on
the first core purpose – to come together to praise God.
For a lot of people,
and this includes people in any size church, going to worship on Sunday
mornings is just an obligation. It’s not
joyful, it’s not exciting, it’s not in any way uplifting. If you leave church on Sunday morning feeling
more anxious and more depressed than when you came in – than we aren’t doing
what God has called us to do. You may
feel challenged, you may feel convicted, or you may feel slightly uneasy
perhaps because of God’s word being preached, but you also better feel excited
and rested and recharged.
If we claim to
worship a God that loves us and has unspeakable power, than we better show the
world that it is fun and enjoyable to be here on Sunday. The act of putting together a worship service
takes effort, thoughtful planning, energy and should be done in a team
approach. I will personally confess that
I’ve gotten negligent in this. I do it
alone. And in so doing I’ve tried to
make it as easy as possible to lessen the time, effort and energy it should
take. And in so doing, I’ve taken the joyful
creative process, and simply made it into a template. That has to change, if we are to get back to
the core purposes that I had, at one time at least, professed.
Today’s passage
that we read this morning from Mark, Jesus says that the time has come and he
goes out to recruit his disciples, the beginnings of his church. You know, I think Jesus had it easy when he
started his church. Seriously, I think
Jesus had it easy when he started his church.
He started from scratch. He went
around town, gathering up disciples that he knew he could lead, teach and
empower. He wasn’t given a bunch of
people that already had preconceived notions about how church was going to be. He didn’t have to fight age-old battles about
who gave money for some chair in the church’s parlor that was refinished in
1967 and therefore can’t possibly be redone again or worse yet, thrown away
altogether. You wouldn’t believe the
stories I’ve heard and the ones I personally know about. One church I served had a television for the
youth group down in their Youth Room. Now
you have to imagine, it was a 1970’s Large Console Television. When I came to the church, I asked about
using it and was told that it didn’t work.
When I asked if it could be fixed I was told that someone had already
looked at it and it wasn’t worth fixing.
So I asked if we could get rid of it since it took up so much space in
the room. Heavens no, we couldn’t since
the “Smith family” (not their real name) had given it in honor of their father
who passed away ten years ago and the church didn’t want to offend them. After
all, there was even a plaque on the TV about the gift and the giver.
So for my first
year there the youth sat with this enormous console television sitting in their
youth room that didn’t work and hadn’t worked for the past five years, but took
up almost a ¼ of the space, until I finally took it upon myself to ask the
family if we could get rid of it, since it didn’t work. You’ll never guess what the family said. They said, of course we could get rid of it,
if it didn’t work. And they even donated
a brand new television to replace it.
Jesus didn’t have
church boards or committees who kept saying, “we tried that already and it
didn’t work then or we’ve never done it that way before.”
A number of years
ago our Presbytery brought in a man by the name of Ken Pridy, supposedly a
well-known national speaker on Church Redevelopment. I had signed up to hear what he had to say
about redevelopment. One of the staff
members at Presbytery called me and asked if I could run out to the airport and
pick him up and bring him to the hotel where he would be staying. It was early afternoon when I picked him up and
neither one of us had had lunch yet, so I took him out and thought that I’d
have an opportunity to pick his brain a little bit about redevelopment. I was quite honestly shocked to learn that he
really didn’t have any actual redevelopment experience, but rather all of his
models and experiences were in New Church Development. The whole time I was with him for lunch, I
kept thinking – Redevelopment and New Church Development aren’t the same thing
at all. In my opinion, New Church
Development is easy. Redevelopment is a
lot harder.
There are a lot
of people, even well-intentioned people who used to get Redevelopment and New
Church Development mixed up. Some people
assume that if a church is dying or is stagnant in one particular area, then
either the area can’t support a church at all, or a new church needs to be
formed because the old church has lost its mission and purpose.
I prefer to think
of it in these terms - New Church Development and Jesus’ own model for
beginning a church are extraordinary. It
is easy to get caught up quickly in the extraordinary. It is not every day that a new church gets
formed, there can be a lot of excitement, a lot of hype, a lot of rallying
around something new and different. You
have completely wiped the slate clean and can envision anything you want
to. You have a blank canvas to work
with. Wow! That’s great and fantastic!
But Redevelopment
is working with history. Where perhaps
your grandmother used to come and help clean the pews each Saturday
morning. Where perhaps your parents got
married and walked down this aisle.
Where perhaps your children got baptized here. Where perhaps you used to help with Vacation
Bible School each year, participate in the youth programs, help with the food
bank. And the story of history goes on
and on for each member whose family has been here for generations. History reverberates off these walls even if
you are a newer member without such history here. It’s still in this place.
Redevelopment is
working with the ordinary. You’ve got
ordinary people, going about their ordinary lives, doing ordinary things that
they’ve been doing in the same church that their parents, grandparents, and perhaps
even great grandparents did those things.
These people come to church on Sunday, participate in mission, run
programs, visit the sick, attend committee meetings, work on youth programming,
practice with the choir, and fix an aging building. There’s nothing new and exciting about any of
that! Each year we work through the
calendar and ask ourselves, what did we do last year? And we do the same thing again.
And yet, even as
I say that about Redevelopment being ordinary and New Church Development being
extraordinary and that Jesus had it easy because he was doing a New Church
Development model of ministry, I’m reminded that throughout history we’re shown
in the Bible over and over again that God picked ordinary people to do
extraordinary things. God picked people
out of their ordinary lives, to do extraordinary things.
Jesus said, “The
time has come.” And he went about the countryside gathering new disciples and
beginning a new church. Using the same
words of Christ, I’d like to say that “our time has come”, not to start a new
church and wipe the slate clean, finding new disciples and new recruits, but
rather for ordinary people, you and me, to begin to do extraordinary things and
who knows what might follow.
To re-energize,
revitalize, and redevelop the church we’re apart of today.
Offertory –
Doxology –
Prayer of Dedication –
These
gifts, Lord, represent our lives, our possessions, all that we are and
have. We offer them now to you as
symbols of ourselves, so that you may take us and bless us and, through the
power of your Spirit, shape us into the true body of your Son. Amen.
Closing
Hymn – Be Thou My Vision #339/562
4 vs. Brown Hymnal
Benediction –
Friends, as
the disciples walked with Christ so long ago, may you go from this place and
walk with Christ as well. Feel the power
of the Holy Spirit guiding your path.
Know that the love of God is poured out for you and rejoice. Go in peace.
AMEN.
Postlude
No comments:
Post a Comment