On Growing ... or not.

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.