Power in Weakness

2 Corinthians 12:2-10

I stand before you this morning in a spirit of confession.  We have been together long enough for me to come to you with an open heart and tell you that I am frustrated.  Part of it is who I am by nature, a driven, passionate person, but part of it is about what I believe God is calling us to do.  You might expect a pastor to be used to learning to be patient, especially since God seems to have a timeline that has nothing to do with clocks or schedules or deadlines.  But after much prayer and profound discernment, I have come to the conclusion that my frustration is something like a holy gift.  It appears that this frustration, that many of you share too, is something that God is using to pull us, to compel us, to drag us into an entirely new way of doing and being church.

Many of you know that I spent this past week in Michigan, a land where people go out of their way to say hello and don’t hesitate to call on the name of Jesus.  We gathered in Grand Rapids, for the biennial gathering of the United Church of Christ.  I joined nearly four thousand disciples of Jesus Christ and I realized that I am not the only one who is frustrated.  There are pastors and lay people, organizers and lovers of church, all across the country who are equally perplexed about how we can be the Church we believe God is calling us to be.  While most of you know that my ordination is with the United Church of Christ, given our covenant with both the United Church of Christ and the United Methodist Church, I have felt the need to tread lightly when it comes to celebrating the denomination that has been my life long home.  But today, it feels right to share with you what it was like to spend seven days surrounded by conversations around the future of the Christian Church in this country.  The UCC is smack dab in the middle of the kind of frantic crisis that forces change.  They are certainly not alone, churches all across the country, across all denominational lines, are having conversations about what it would look like for us to be the Church in this time.  But our current financial situation has not just invited us, but compelled us to finally begin to ask the hard questions that should have been asked twenty years ago.  And because of this need to think strategically with dwindling resources, most of the conversation and energy at the Synod of the United Church of Christ was focused around the topic of a unified structure and the possibility of a single governing board.  As you might imagine there are both theological and practical reasons why a single board might be necessary.  Currently, in the national setting of the United Church of Christ, there are five boards that are all separately incorporated, with separate endowments and different ideas about which direction the church should go.  Because of this, there were numerous resolutions, on which we were gathered to vote and discuss and to prayerfully discern how God is calling us to move forward as a unified body.  Some of the reasons to move toward a single board have to do with being good stewards of our resources and other reasons range from an increased ability to plan ahead as a unified body to the need for our financial resources to be combined.

On the surface it seems like an obvious direction to go- of course we would want to reduce costs, reduce the amount of time spent in gathering the hundreds of people who have made up these boards and increase the church’s ability to move forward together as a United Church of Christ.  But what emerged as the conversation continued was great concern that reducing the size of the governing body would give power to fewer people and increase the likelihood that underrepresented groups would be left out and important voices would not be heard.

You might be wondering what this has to do with you and why when the weather is finally turning nice we are talking about the structure of our church.  But friends, this feels urgent.  I know that few of you are connected to the wider church and often feel as if it has nothing to do with your own walk with God.  But whether you are hearing this for the very first time or you have planted your feet firmly in this place, it is no secret that God is calling us to a new way of doing and being Church and we need to move forward together.  The conversation of the wider Church is just the conversation we have been having here.  For years, you have been wondering what to do with fewer resources, aging membership and fewer people interested in serving on a committee, which for decades has been the only way to be fully incorporated into the life of the church.  For years, you have been wondering what to do as the culture becomes less and less interested in religious institutions and therefore people are less likely to attend and less likely to give generously to the ministries of this place.  For years, you have been asking, what would it look like to have unified leadership of some kind?  What would it look like to reduce the need for so many committees?  What would it look like for us to be able to think strategically to plan out more than a few months in advance in order to do what God is asking us to do?  Our vision team has been working on these very questions for more than two years.  Some of what the group proposed was brought to Church Council and to our myriad committees last year in an effort to receive feedback.  Since then, we have been meeting almost twice a month and spent hours in conversation, prayer and working to create a unified leadership model and a culture where God can work in our church in such a time as this.

Given what we know, our church has some of the same questions as the national setting of the United Church of Christ.  If our church leaders are made up of a smaller group, how can we be sure that all of the voices are heard?  If committees are no longer the heart of the life of the church, how do we fully integrate new disciples and communicate the vision that emerges both from the leaders and throughout the congregation?  If new ministries begin to pop up outside of the official structure and do not necessarily have representation on the leadership team, how do we find ways to support them? 

Those of you who have had ideas for something new here, know how our current structure limits possibilities.  So what would it look like for each and every ministry to have the same goal- the goal of saying yes, the goal of making it easy for each and every single one of you to carve out a ministry of your own here at the Cotuit Federated Church?  If you wanted to start an after school program for kids, where would you go?  With whom would you speak?  Do you need approval from a committee, if so which ones?  Right now, it isn’t clear whether you reserve the space with Judy, talk to me, meet with Trustees, Christian Education or all of the above.  What would it look like for us to have a structure that is grounded in the goal of giving you the chance to use your gifts for the glory of God in this place?

While it is clear that there is more to be revealed, the answer to most of these questions is trust.  The answer is the power found in the core belief that each and ever person who serves, will have nothing less than the glory of God as his or her goal.  The answer is deep and profound trust in one another.

And perhaps this is part of our struggle and part the frustration that many of us share.  We live in a time in which power is expressed by might and numbers and sheer force.  But the Gospel, the words of Paul in his letter to the community in Corinth tells us about something radically different- the power found in what the world calls weakness.  We worship a God who has power that is found not in coercion but in a sacred lure.  We worship a God whose power comes in the small and steady push, that voice that will not let us give up.  We worship a God who tells us that the way to life is something entirely different than the prescription offered by the world. 

Even as confess my frustration, I believe in you.  I believe that this church is something special.  As many of my colleagues have lamented about how their congregations refuse to face the reality of the wider culture around them, you have been willing to begin to ask these difficult questions.  But I want to know that you are willing to take the next step.  What would it look like, if in a year from now, each of you could clearly claim your ministry in this place?  What might it feel like for you to be able to say, “Welcome to the Cotuit Federated Church, my name is Bob and my ministry in this place is ______ fill in the blank?”  Many of you can already claim a ministry.  We have ministers of CraftFest, ministers of Vacation Bible School, ministers who teach our children, ministers of cleaning the sanctuary, ministers of chair yoga, ministers of prayer shawls, ministers of Pancake Breakfast ministers of music, ministers of our church yard, ministers of the children’s choir, ministers or cleaning the kitchen and on and on.

If we are really to be the church God is calling us to be, it will take all of us.  It will take people who have been here forever and those of you who have not been here long, people who understand how we work now and those who don’t, people who love our church how it is and those who don’t. 

In the coming months, you will hear more conversation about our structure, about leadership, about our own spiritual gifts and I want you to join in.  You will hear conversations and presentations because God is on a roll.  And I want to know that those of you who have not been charged with the large task of restructuring will begin to step forward.  I want to know that you are willing to speak and to be heard, to offer ideas and seek solutions, to find a way to say yes instead of saying that it cannot work, to risk leaving behind what we have for the faith that God has something far more powerful in mind.  We know that the power found in trust, the power found in claiming a ministry of our own is not weakness, but the abundant life we have seen in Jesus Christ.  What it would look like for us, for each and every one of us, to dare to figure out together what it means for us to be the Body of Christ in this place, in such a time as this?  Amen.