St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, January 2, 2011

Seeking, Discovering and Deepening – Rev. David Mundy

Isaiah 60:1-6 Matthew 2:1-12

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Canadians and Americans are neighbours – and good ones for the most part – but we’re not the same. This isn’t exactly “breaking news” for most of you, but it is true in many facets of life including religion. Americans are statistically more religious than we are, they are more likely to go to church and tell others about their faith, and when they gather they are far more inclined toward the “bigger is better” approach.

So there are lots of what are called “megachurches” with thousands out for worship on a Sunday. One of these gigantic congregations is the legendary Willow Creek, near Chicago. The pastor, Bill Hybels, began Willow Creek in a movie theatre in 1975 – in fact the congregation still has the name of that theatre. Today it is a sprawling church complex with an average of 20,000 people attending three weekend services, most of them young. That’s a good size town! I noticed online that during this past Christmas season Willow Creek was offering services every night of the week, including one entirely in Spanish – “tickets still available!” the website trumpeted.

Willow Creek became well known for what it often called the Seeker Service, which attempted, apparently quite successfully, to create a worship experience that didn’t seem “churchy.” So, the worship leaders didn’t wear formal church garb, the choir was replaced with music groups, the congregation was invited to come dressed casually, and coffee and doughnuts were available in the entrance. The sermons were “seeker friendly” aimed at those who didn’t want to hear high falutin’ religious talk, and they stayed away from the topic of money. It was essentially the KISS theory – keep it simple stupid – and it seemed to really work.

The growth of Willow Creek was soon taken as a template for success to be emulated by other churches. Everywhere congregations were offering “seeker” or“seeker-friendly” or “seeker sensitive” services in various forms. Of course this change of course was met with varying degrees of success, but nearly everyone was paying attention. Suddenly pastors all over North America were wearing Hawaiian shirts on Sunday morning and praise bands sprouted up everywhere. Willow Creek offered training courses on how to be like them. Our denominational magazine the United Church Observer did a cover article on the phenomenon a couple of years ago with the title The Willow Creek way: Can liberal churches learn from the mother of all U.S. megachurches.

If this sounds familiar, I have spoken to you about Hybels and Willow Creek before, but I’m coming back to the subject today because an interesting thing has happened in the past few years. Willow Creek continues to attract huge audiences – I mean congregations – but the leadership has come to realize that they needed to reexamine their model for building the Christian community. They saw that in their own congregation there was a revolving door for many of the curious. When they polled their committed members, they found that an alarming percentage felt that they were either “stalled,” or “dissatisfied” in their Christian life. They spread the net wider surveying tens of thousands of churchgoers in these “seeker” churches with the same findings. So they have developed a new three-year program of Christian growth called Reveal.

Discover the four segments that characterize the journey of spiritual growth.

Learn more about what catalyzes and stunts spiritual growth.

And understand how the church needs to change in order to help people become more like Christ.

They have come to realize that while it is still important to meet people where they are as seekers, or the “unchurched,” that is only the starting place. All of us need to deepen our faith, to become disciples of Christ in our own way. It’s one thing to get people to church, but the hope is that they become mature Christians. I must say that I admire Willow Creek because they already exhibit all the signs of success, if numbers and buildings and money are the measure – “if it ain’t broke, why fix it?” They appreciate that there must be more.

This morning on the first Sunday of this New Year we listened to the passage of scripture which tells us about some of the original seekers of the Christ Child, the Magi or Wise Men who are only mentioned once in the gospels or anywhere in the New Testament. For such mysterious figures they really have captured our imagination, both reverently and irreverently. When I was a kid, we lustily sang a version of the carol We Three Kings:

We three kings of Orient are

Tried to smoke a rubber cigar.

It was loaded, it exploded . . .

Listen, this may seem rather innocent now, but for an eight-year-old in the 1960's this was really risky stuff! We honestly don’t know all that much about the Magi but the speculation is that they were both astronomers and astrologers from the Zoroastrian religious tradition who made an arduous journey of anywhere from a few months to three years from Persia to find the young Jesus and his family.

The Magi serve as a symbolic model for those who were on the journey of spiritual growth in quest of the Messiah. Yes, they were seekers and explorers in a foreign landscape. At the same time they were disciplined seekers who understood that their journey required commitment. And when they found Jesus, they knew enough to offer their adoration and gifts. Something or someone is revealed to them – they experience an Epiphany.

How does this story work for us as twenty-first century Christians in our Canadian context? We certainly don’t have a problem with too many oversized congregations – the average attendance for a United Church today is between sixty and seventy. We could probably count up all the people who are attending United Churches this morning from here to the Quebec border and not tally up 20,000 people.

And we are realizing that in some ways we are broken and not sure how to fix it. Across the country the United Church is closing one congregation a week, on average, and locally two United Church congregations were forced to close their doors during this past year. Many smaller, aging congregations are fighting panic because the Grim Reaper has been seen at the church steps and they’re wondering how to barr the door.

Those congregations which do still have signs of life have been doing whatever they can to connect with folk in more contemporary ways, using projection within worship, along with and versions of scripture such as The Message which offer a fresh outlook. We are finding ways to introduce music which has been written during the lifetimes of our younger members, not just the meaningful hymns of the past, and with this blending the use of traditional musical instruments with guitars and keyboards.

The caution for us is that we could get so caught up in the earnest desire to find the right techniques and practices for making a congregation relevant that we fail to appreciate that first and foremost our purpose is to reveal Christ and to make his light known.

Our Oshawa Presbytery, made up of thirty pastoral charges in the area including St. Paul’s has entered into a process of spiritual reexamination and revisioning which involves time every month on our agenda. Instead of “business as usual” we are trying to encourage a deeper conversation about the reason we are all here in the first place.

In the first few months we have asked congregations to consider their strengths and weaknesses, their disappointments and their passions. As we move into the new year, we will ask how each of these Christian communities not just how they can survive, but how they can thrive.

Viability Vitality

Attendance Mission

Buildings Relationship

Cash Incarnation

This second column suggests that we can’t be preoccupied or content with survival. I should tell you that some of the congregations in our Presbytery are actively engaging in this process. And strangely, some of the congregations which are most reluctant to participate are the ones which need to do so most.

The Good News is that making the commitment to the journey of Christian faith and spiritual growth together does not require 20,000 people or 1,000 or even a hundred souls. If we look to the Magi we know there were only a handful of these purposeful travellers who made the demanding trek in search of Jesus. Our vitality is rooted in a deep and meaningful faith in Jesus the Christ. Every one of us can ask, “am I a Christian, not just a churchgoer?” If our answer is yes, then we can commit ourselves to the discovering and deepening aspect of our faith, which comes through worship, and study and prayer.

This morning we can be grateful for the evidence of Christ’s presence in our midst in many ways. We have much for which we can be thankful as a congregation, including the children and young people who are being nurtured as Christians.

Back in October, on our anniversary Sunday, three of our young people spoke about their faith during worship and did so with surprising ease and eloquence. Afterward many people commented on their poise and sincerity. They also admitted that they would probably be “tongue-tied” if they were asked to do the same. These three Wise Ones raised the bar for the rest of us and I invite you to emulate them in their enthusiastic and thoughtful faith. And I hope we will be as inventive and creative and passionate about who we can be as the Christian community.

One last thought today. Maureen Dowd who writes for the New York Times attended a convention of people who collect Nativity Scenes after she discovered that her brother is a closet collector himself, something which really surprised her. She was fascinated by the rather whimsical creations, including an undersea depiction of the Nativity with Mary as a mermaid, baby Jesus covered by a beach towel, and the three Wise “Men” as a crab, a crocodile and a seahorse.

She also liked an old German version which showed only the Magi as they were getting ready for their journey and it depicts them directing servants to pack up the gold and frankincense and myrrh. What a great image.

Today we can pack for our journey of Anno Domine, the Year of our Lord, 2011. We are still seekers, and we can open the way for others to discover and deepen with us in Christ. We might not know exactly where we are going, only the one we are seeking. The promise of this year is that we can have our revelations and epiphanies as the people who worship in Christ`s name. Thanks be to God!