Even if I weren’t the offended pastor of a more traditional style church, I’m way too much of a cynic to think they could pull off what they’re selling. They could become quite adept at entertainment I suppose – but does entertainment meet the true ends of being the church? There are some real “downer” type messages in scripture that could easily be overlooked. As for boredom – any gathering of people has its boring side from time to time. There are mornings that any one of us may drag ourselves to church instead of being elated to get here. I’m certain that there are times that my sermon is dull or at least uninteresting to some, or we sing your least favorite hymn, or you just want to be at the lake rather than here. I get that, but I think it’s safe to assume that Faith Promise can’t be everything all the time either. I also get that we are a collection of people – real human people – who are prone to hypocritical acts from time to time. We can’t always practice what we preach, and to relative newcomers to Christianity, that can make it seem rather like Christianity may not be worth much.

However, you do have to give kudos to Faith Promise for one thing. They’re not afraid to get out there and tell people that they think they have something pretty special. Presbyterians in general have the reputation for being notoriously awful at evangelism – which has come to mean something like inviting people to your church. When you have a theology that is relentless on saying that God is in control of people’s ultimate destiny, it seems less relevant for us to be so grabby about getting behinds in the pews. But when we put all our theological eggs in one basket, we abdicate our responsibility in sharing that we do have some pretty good news that we like to talk about when we’re here, and that we’re trying to act on our thankfulness for all that God has done for us. I’m not saying that we need to become something that we’re not – but that we can learn from those who see things quite differently than we do sometimes.

What a church practices tells a lot about what it believes. The early church might have called that evidence of God’s “Spirit.” What is the “spirit” of the church? What is the unique “spirit” of this church? The spirit of this church, I think, affirms something other than a cookie-cutter style faith. It acknowledges, much of what was discovered in that early Pentecost moment, that we are different people from different places perhaps trying to share a common language about God. It affirms the importance of “action” as a response to God’s grace – because Jesus mandates that we care for the poor and neediest among us. And yes, our faith is evangelical, not in a shouting, demanding sort of way, but in the ways that missionary-evangelist D.T. Niles described it as “one beggar telling another where to find bread.” (Willamon, p. ) I hope you will be faithful in speaking about the church’s ability to nurture and be there for those who are sick and hurting – because we do OK on that front at least some of the time. This is the unlikely place where spiritual bread is found time and again.

In Will Willamon’s book, What’s Right with the Church, he too acknowledges that the church is a strange sort of collection of people, and not the pristine community some would make it out to be. It doesn’t make much sense to us logically. In fact, directly quoting him, he says, “The ultimate proof of the Resurrection is not an empty tomb or the Shroud of Turnin. The ultimate evidence for the Resurrection is the existence of something so unlikely and inexplicable as the church. One cannot explain the birth or the impact of the church in any other way except as the resurrected Body of Christ.”

Sometimes it’s tough to speak so eloquently about the church. We too often start with the problems and ask, “What’s wrong with the church?” rather than seeing it’s endurance through both good and bad as a testament to what it can be when the Spirit is present with us. Willamon also says, “The unity [Jesus] creates is not for a cozy mutual admiration society. The source of our unity is also the impetus for our mission. The whole vine grows; there are yet ‘other sheep’ who must be brought in; the Body is edified and grows until the ‘fullness of Christ’ is attained in the time of the completion of his Kingdom.”

God builds the church, not us. I think that much is still true. It is arrogant for us to believe that it’s any other way, that I can preach sermons that will magically bring people to spiritual maturity, that we can kill all hypocritical impulses, that we can be exciting and renewing week, after week, after week. “The church has always had too much going against it,” argues Willamon, “too many negative forces, too may reasons why it should not be here at all, for its continued presence in the world to be explained in any other way than as an act of a gracious God who wills that we should not be left alone, that it should not be left up to us.”

Yes, church in one sense, worship especially, is a “royal waste of time” to quote another leader in worship education (Marva Dawn). There is no usefulness in it, and usefulness, or at least looking busy has become a cultural obsession in our day and age. It’s extraordinarily counter-cultural to think that worship has any value at all, and to give it only the “entertainment” and “happy feelings” sort of values is to limit the potential of being Christ’s Body in the world to but a fraction of what it can be.

I hope that you wonder from time to time what it means for you to be a part of the church – not whether or not you’ll serve on Session, or how many Sundays you can skip, or if you’ll remember to bring snacks for the junior highs – but what it really means to you to be a part of a community of the broken faithful. Given the opportunity, could you tell another beggar where to find bread?

Amen.