And we pray this in order that you may live a
life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every
good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power
according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and
patience, and joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to
share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light. For he has
rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the
Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. (Col 1:10-14)
I found myself
in a conversation last week with a man who had not had much connection with the
church for quite a number of years. He
had some pretty good questions of me as that conversation went on, but he
seemed shocked when he heard me talking about plans for growing the church in
my parish. His attitude was why would
you have a plan for future growth in an institution that clearly is
statistically heading in the other direction.
I told him that every ministry has to prepare and plan to grow, or it
might as well prepare and plan to die.
But foundational
to seeing growth in our parish ministries, is that need for the people that
populate our parishes to be ready to grow spiritually. I am not terribly caught up in the numerical
heresy, that the numbers sitting in the pews on a Sunday will tell you how
successful that church is. I have been
in many small parishes, where the numbers were low, for lots of reasons, but
where the people were growing spiritually at every turn. And I have been in large parishes where the
life of that community was stagnant and dying.
Minds must be
continually growing. I love watching my
youngest niece and nephew at play. They
are two years old, and every little thing that they encounter is a source of
learning. Simple walks outdoors always
bring a Wow! About things that I walk past every day without noticing. They pick up more and more words every
day. Their minds are growing daily.
And I have been
blessed to have spent time with people who inhabit our pews who are – as the
old prayer book would say, “Of riper years”, who are also engaged in growing
daily. It is a wonder to behold. Their minds are incredibly sharp, because
they are growing.
On the other
hand, I have met people who are much younger, who come with an attitude that
they don’t need to learn that. They even
approach their faith as though they have heard every sermon and understand
every bit of Theology that they will ever need to understand. Their done growing.
Well, I am a
farmer in my very earliest life, and I
can tell you that the moment that a seed stops
growing, the plant begins dying. That is a principle that applies to our
spiritual lives as well. The moment we
stop challenging ourselves to learn and grow, we are planning to die. The same is
true for our parishes. Unless we have a
plan to learn and to grow, we are in the process of giving up and dying.
Every one of us
as individuals, and our parishes as well, have a choice to make. We can grow until we have accomplished all
that God has for us, or we can choose to die until our heart ceases to
beat. I’m never sure why anyone would choose
the second option, but I still meet
people who appear to have done so,
perhaps not physically, but in
their spiritual life.
I want to tell
you the story of a saint of my ministry named Bisi. We often referred to her as “the Bishop”
because although she was always late to service, we always waited for her to
arrive walking very slowly across the parking lot. The sidespeople would say, “You can’t begin
without the bishop.” Many of us almost
thought that Bisi would never die, even though the white hair and the slowing
step bore evidence of a very advanced age. But the internal life of that woman
had immortality written all over it. She came to Bible Study always having read
and considered the texts, and primed with questions, and she held the answers
that came from the group up to the scriptures to see if they fit for her. She was constantly reading, and she would
pass books on to me that were more than many lay people would pick up, and she
would fully expect that when I was done,
I would sit and discuss the book with her. When I got the call on a
bright Thanksgiving Day, that she had sat down in her big chair at home, and
peacefully fallen asleep, not to wake again, I was shocked. The whole parish was shocked. Her constant commitment to growing her faith
had made her so alive that not one of us expected that she could ever die. I look back at her, and hope that I can do
the same.
So before we
move into this meeting, I want to ask you a simple yet really hard
question. Are you growing, or
dying? Is your parish growing or
dying? If the answer isn’t the one you
want it to be, then get on with the business of growing. You can plan and
prepare to grow, or you can plan and prepare to die. It’s the most important question we can ask
ourselves. My sense after only a few
months, is that in this Diocese, there is a very strong desire to grow. And growing things… they bear fruit. Growing parishioners tend to attract others.
Draw your church together, O Lord, into one great
company of disciples, together following our Lord Jesus Christ into every walk
of life, together serving him in his mission to the world, and together
witnessing to his love on every continent and island. We ask this in his name and for his sake.
Amen.
