Pastor's Dream
For A Church Where God Makes Extraordinary Servants!
Years Later,
Will They Be Asking, "Were You A Christian Back Then?
At my high school reunion last Saturday night, Gail asked me, “Were you a Christian in high school?” Ouch!
Without getting too personal, let me give a little background.
I pretty much disappeared from my hometown, Portland, Oregon, right after high school and I haven’t really lived there since. At my ten year reunion, which I did not attend, I was a topic of conversation. “He’s a what? A pastor? You’ve got to be kidding!” At my twenty year, which I did attend, I was repeatedly asked if it were true. Last weekend I found myself after dinner in a quiet part of the rose garden outside of the party, reacquainting myself with a steady stream of old classmates who sought me out either to share the stories of their (sometimes pretty weird) spiritual journeys, or to ask for some advice from someone who presumably wouldn’t show his face for another ten years.
So Gail’s question caught me a little off guard. I tend to be focused on the future, but I guess at a reunion, conversation does drift to the past.
I started high school in the 60’s and on the west coast at that time, things were pretty wild. They say if you remember the 60’s you weren’t a part of it. Gail asked me if I were a Christian back then because you wouldn’t have known it to watch me.
The previous night my classmates met in a bar in the old neighborhood for an informal get together. It was there that I learned that Janet, with whom I attended school for thirteen years, had died in the last year from alcohol and drug use. Steve, who we used to call “Freak” for various reasons, sought me out to tell me of his decision about a dozen years ago to leave behind the drinking and drug use he began in high school. He remembered the journey that began for me before my senior year in high school.
I asked Gail if she remembered. It was during that year that I first gave serious consideration to the Lord’s call to “live a life worthy of the calling you have received” (Ephesians 4:1). The lifestyle transformation I underwent that year was the beginning of a journey that has led me here with you.
Gail said one more thing before our conversation ended that really hit me and that I’ve been thinking about ever since. She said, “Well, some of us were Christians back then and we were always looking for others, so I just thought I’d ask.” Gail and I had a wonderful visit, and I was glad to report that I had come a long way since 1973. I’m making mistakes every day, but I’m glad I’m not making some of the same ones I made thirty years ago.
But it makes me wonder, who’s your Gail?
You might be in high school yourself as you’re reading this. You may be well into your retirement years, or you may be going about the business of business and family, but I expect there is a Gail in your life, someone you mix with on a regular basis who is, this very day, looking for a Christian.
Your Gail might be like mine, a Christian surrounded by a hostile culture who is looking for a little support from a sister or brother in the faith. A cord of three strands is not easily broken, the Bible tells us. Your Gail might be more like Steve or like Janet, caught up in the ways of this world, sinking slowly into the despair that meets everyone who does not know Christ. Someone might be looking for you.
How will they find you?
It’s a lot easier for me these days. Even strangers, like people I haven’t seen in thirty years, find out I’m a pastor and seek me out to have spiritual conversations. (Sometimes it works the other way. People find out I’m a pastor and quickly change the subject.) I expect it’s not so easy for you. but I also expect that you wish there were easier ways for you to let those around you know that you are filled with a hope and joy in Christ that you wish they had too.
I want to help.
I have a dream for our church. My dream is inspired by the dream of Christ himself for the church, that the world would look at us, and see him. That the world and our friends would see our acts of love and see Christ acting through us. That the world and our friends would see the hope we have and see Christ who gives it. That the world and our friends would see the fruit of all we do in the name of Christ, fruit that grows on branches, and see the Vine to which we are connected. I want your church to be the place where you learn to bear that kind of fruit.
The prophet Micah once asked, “With what shall I come before the Lord? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings and calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams and ten thousand rivers of oil?” Certainly, he saw, God desires more than the outward acts of religion! “And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:6-8).
I want your church to be a place where you can learn to “act justly,” that is, to find an injustice, somewhere around you where people are treated unfairly, and step in and change things, to fix something that is wrong.
I want your church to be a place where you can learn to “love mercy,” that is, to be always sensitive to those who are hurting, to hurt with them, and to offer acts of kindness and love from the fountain of heaven that hurts may be healed.
I want your church to be a place where you can learn to “walk humbly with your God,” that is, to know by faith the height and length and depth and breadth of the love of Jesus Christ, and to experience to daily indwelling of God the Holy Spirit as he comes to you in word and sacrament.
I want you to be the extraordinary servant that God has called you to be in your baptism and that he is transforming you to be day by day.
I want your Gail and your Steve and your Janet to see Jesus in you.
For the next ten weeks I’ll be preaching on the last chapters of Ephesians and the book of James. Together we’ll wrestle with the Lord’s call to live as extraordinary servants, to live lives worthy of the calling we’ve received. I hope you’ll join me every week. And I hope you’ll seriously consider joining your fellow members in the ministry discovery process this fall, beginning on Sunday morning in September.
And I hope that very soon someone you know will ask you, “What makes you the way you are?”
You’ll have a great story to tell!