January to June 2007 Index

June 10: "Team Building", I Corinthians 3, Farewell Sunday
'What's this church like? How's the minister, and the leaders?'

May 27: "Babble, Blah, Blah, Spirit", Acts 2, Pentecost & Confirmations
'I remember Pentecost - and so do you!'

May 20: "Imagine", Acts 1, Ascension Sunday
'Imagine there's no heaven? It's too easy! Re-enchant your welkin!'

May 13: "As for Me and My House", Acts 16, Mother's Day & Baptisms
'Lydia, like us, looking for a place of prayer.'

April 15: "Stand Up", Acts 5, Easter 2, New Beach United
'Peter stood up to the raging reactionaries - will we?'

April 8: "Immortality", Luke 24, Easter Day, Last Kew before Amalgamation
'As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be... Oh, yeah?'

March 18: "Pre-Arranging a Funeral", John 12, Lent 4
'I've got my plot and headstone. Have you?
John Donne 'Devotions' No man is an island...'

March 11: "Just Deserts", Luke 9, Lent 3, March Break
'Do I get what I deserve? God forbid, God forgive!
Am I worthy of what I enjoy? Thnk God, no!'

March 4: "Alert & Unafraid", Luke 13, Lent 2, 1 week after amalgamation vote
'Are you running scared? Are you stuck, with your head in the sand,
or up in the clouds? Is the sky falling? Go tell that fox...'

February 18: "Poker Faced", Luke 9, Transfiguration
'Gung Hey Fat Choy - we've come to pray, in our subculture,
practising Christians, not yet accomplished or finished'

February 11: "Being Un-Spiritual", Luke 6
'We know what's 'really' spiritual, and that's not us -
we do the duty that lies closest to us, the next becomes clearer'

February 4: :Done Fishing?", Luke 5, on working too hard...
'Work at it, as if it all depended on you - participate in it!
Pray for it, as if it all depended on God - play with it!'

January 21: "Anatomy Lessons", 1 Cor 12, Christian Unity, Robbie Burns
'Then let us pray that come it may
As come it will for a' that...'

January 15: Remedial Ethics Audit, Notes on fall study leave
My advisor said, 'I think you should take a course in philosophy.
'Oh, my,', I answered with enthusiasm, 'Do you folks have a course on that here?'

January 14: "Coming Out at a Wedding", John 2
'What are we still doing here?'
We conserve & preserve - reform & transform

January 7: "Do You Hear What I Hear?" Luke 3, Epiphany
Do you hear what I hear? I don't think so...
The Word is a cosmic Calvinist game of hide-and-seek clues Read more...

Team Building

TEAMBUILDING
Notes from Bill Bruce at www.kewbeachunitedchurch.com
Sunday, June 10, 2007

Text: I Corinthians 3

This was my last sermon after 7 years in a team of 3 fulltime ministers at Kew congregation. We set out on an ambitious plan for qualitative and quantitative growth. How did we do? About 3 years in, we saw we were not tracking toward all our goals, as mortality and mobility eroded our base, and deferred capital maintenance was revealed. How do we keep score now?

This was our farewell Sunday, as 4 of we 5 ministers of amalgamating churches said goodbye, and we thanked the councils and dialogue and transition teams who brought us through the process. About half of the lay leaders were missing, as on any Sunday. Some were traveling, and some were out scouting potential new ministers. How do we build and rebuild our teams?

So I told a story about the incomer to the Beach neighbourhood, who drops by one of our sites during a children’s midweek program:

The incomer asks the waiting local parents,
‘What’s this church like? How’s the minister, and the leaders?’

One of the local parents asks the incomer:
‘How’s the church where you’ve been? How are the clergy and elders there?’

The incomer rolls her eyes,
‘Awful! I hardly ever go.
The preacher never makes sense to me.
The leaders are cliquey to me.
You know what it’s like!’

So the local parent says to the incomer,
‘Yep, I know exactly what you mean.
You’ll find the church and the clergy here are pretty much the same as where you’ve been’.

The incomer shakes her head, clucks her tongue, and wheels off.

The other parent asks the one who offered the advice,
‘Why did you say that? Our church is OK, isn’t it? At least we try our best!’

The wiser one defends her response,
‘Church is what you make of it.
If that’s what she expects, that’s what she’ll find anywhere.’

Imagine and expect what your church might be. Act as if it were so, and see what happens. We set out to re-imagine what our church might become. We worked pretty hard at changing our habits of constant crisis and grumpy little circles doing church business on Sundays. We became a bit less toxic to young home-owning families – not total visible diversity, but a start!

The lesson I chose for today was not in the lectionary. It just seemed to be a word for us today. It’s from Paul’s letters to the church in Corinth. Our bible shows them as two letters, but they look to me like scraps of one end of a correspondence of more than two missives. I’m moving out of my office, and out of my apartment just now, and keep coming across pages that just remind my of longer and wider conversations. I think I Corinthians is like that, scraps and reminders of a relationship between one guy and a community.

Coming to one side of correspondence is like listening to a person on a cell phone, hearing one end of a conversation. It’s like listening to a preacher, not knowing the congregation. You have to guess at the other voices, and what is it about them that makes him talk like that. Corinth had divisions: factions, fussing, and frictions. The easy way to name them was by their leaders: Apollos, Cephas (Peter) and Paul. It’s tough to find words for religious stuff. We use shorthand, like leaders, or groups we identify with, to express our Christian identity. It can’t contain Christ.

I Corinthians starts with this ‘I belong to Paul’ or ‘I belong to Apollos’, and returns to it in this third chapter. Paul is scolding, chiding the folks for their divisions and conflicts. Some have gifts of charismatic ministry, of healing or speaking in tongues. Others are wed to ritual order. Each small group excludes those who are not loyal to their leader, or deride other small groups. Paul is hearing gossip from visitors, and sending advice back to get over it, or get past it.

These factions or groups aren’t enemies or competitors, but family. Paul likes Apollos and Peter. The followers of each leader are staying in one community – that’s why they fight! It’s more a case of opposition than contradiction, or one of emphasis. We each have a corner of what is true, and good, and beautiful. We tend to sum it up by association with a leader. We tend to defend and conserve it loyally in the face of alternatives. What’s necessary, or sufficient, as elements of our faith and life? What are ‘must haves’ and ‘may haves’, for us and for me, in our community?

‘I belong to Apollos, I belong to Paul?’ Paul objects, and demands we use a bigger framework: what’s our larger common identity in Christ? What is the process, what are our starting points and goals? Paul uses metaphors of growing, and of building, to appeal to something bigger than our partisan divisiveness. That’s what he had to say to Corinth. That’s what he has to say to us.

I’m no gardener, but I’m living with one, and serving among many. Beach people love gardens. So do a disproportionate number of religious people. I remember the government horticulturalist in northern Manitoba pointing out that she knew the same people in reserves and small communities from gardening as I did from church networks. You preach the sermon:
‘I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase’

I’m no builder, but I am living with them, as I take up occupancy in a new condominium 2 years overdue. Everybody boasts, then blames. It’s all about sequencing the trades, I’m told, but it does remind me of an old cartoon of tutorial assistance for barbarian hordes: ‘pillage, then burn’. Don’t just boast and blame, but build the best next bit you can, in your turn. You preach that too.

Dorothee Soelle puts it this way:
Keep us from the romantic illusion, God, that relationships fall from the skies like rain,
and from the conservative illusion that they grow slowly over the years like trees.
Teach us that relationships take work, like everything else that is good for us.

We’ve planted, watered, tended and weeded in the past 7 years, and in the recent months of amalgamation. We got better at some things. The 30-something and 40-something leaders changed our style. When some step back or move on, we have a space more their shape to fill. We’ve built, even as the base seemed to erode, and the foundation became more apparent. Explicitly religious stuff, of worship and study and service and care, mattered and lasted more.

Who and what made your church better for you? Who, and what, made it work best for you? What helped us to become more of what we were made to be and meant to be, without dragging us into petty conflicts that only attracted people who enjoy petty conflict? Mostly, for me, it all has to do with celebration, and care, and study, and service. But each complements the other. Each tendency is associated with a leader, or a small group, that made it incarnate for us all. But don’t reduce them to partisanship. They complement one another, and share this big tent.

This was the anniversary of church union. We used to be good at making friends, a century ago. We made heroic, daring, risk-taking and unholy alliances among various brands of Methodism: English or American, Primitive or Episcopal, English or Irish, Holiness or Brethren movements. We bridged stubborn grudges among Presbyterians: new light or auld light, covenanters, free kirk or ‘wee frees’ – and that was just the Scots, never mind the Reformed congregations who spoke German or Dutch, the Swiss, French, or Italians, our 20th century ‘church of all nations’ missions.

Jim McKibbin in Bellefair visioning 4 years ago reminded us of the risks those unionists took –and asked what risks we would be remembered for. I went on exchange to Sydney and the Uniting Church of Australia that same year. The Aussies are only 25 years into their union, still a first generation of uniters. I learned from those folks the language of being part of a movement, not just perpetuating an institution. I came back asking you to argue with me, not against me, and to speak with me, not about me. Are our divisions worthy of our foundations or our goals? Who belongs to Apollos these days – and who outside the club cares any more?

What will our legacy be? Who and what made church possible for you? I’m sorry I did not reach the goals we adopted together 7 years ago. They say that behind every successful man is a very surprised partner, household, or family. I remember folks from Kew coming to hear me preach. I left my mike on, while complaining to my colleague – what were you looking for? What did you expect? You took a risk with me, and our failures were worthy, and found us new ways.

How are we doing? How will we keep score? Reinhold Niebuhr the mid-century American theologian who grew up in a German-speaking immigrant community, put it this way:

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime;
therefore we must be saved by hope.

Nothing true or beautiful makes complete sense
in any immediate context of history;
therefore we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous,
can be accomplished alone;
therefore, we are saved by love.”

This was my last sermon after 7 years in a team of 3 fulltime ministers at Kew congregation. We set out on an ambitious plan for qualitative and quantitative growth. How did we do? About 3 years in, we saw we were not tracking toward all our goals, as mortality and mobility eroded our base, and deferred capital maintenance was revealed. How do we keep score now?

This was our farewell Sunday, as 4 of we 5 ministers of amalgamating churches said goodbye, and we thanked the councils and dialogue and transition teams who brought us through the process. About half of the lay leaders were missing, as on any Sunday. Some were traveling, and some were out scouting potential new ministers. How do we build and rebuild our teams?

The incomers are always asking:
‘What’s this church like? How’s the minister, and the leaders?’

Remember the question in response:
‘How’s the church where you’ve been? How were the clergy and elders there?’

You’ll find the church and the clergy here will be pretty much the same as where you’ve been. Whatever new staff and new leaders step up for the coming year, you’ll find they are practicing Christians, not always accomplished ones. Imagine and expect what your church might be, then act as if it were so, and see what happens. Expect surprises! Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. Keep risking, and keep learning.

Make something of it, and make a space your size, so that even if you step back, you’ll leave a space for somebody like you to step in. It’s a movement, folks, not just an institution. God forbid we reduce it to a personality cult, or a glee club without glee, or a service club without service. Plant, water, and God grants the increase. Build with what you’ve got, on the solid foundation of Jesus Christ. Build what will stand up to the fire: relationships, human community.

God forbid we hear that nonsense about ‘I belong to Paul – I only go when he is preaching’ or even ‘I don’t get that Apollos guy – it’s all Greek to me’. You know about gardening – you know about building, boasting, blaming. Preach the sermons. Live them out. You know the drill:

You may be the only gospel your neighbour reads this week
So write the vision and make it plain, in all that you do and all you say,
that she who runs may read it!

Christ within you, the hope of glory to come,
Go into the world with a tender and a daring love –
For the world is waiting.
And whatever you do, do it in love,
And in the name of God, who first loved you.

And as you go,
Be strong, and of good courage,
Do not be afraid.
For it is the Lord your God who goes with you
Who will not fail you or forsake you.

Amen. Read more...