The Nature of the Church | Church Off the Map | Lenten Series

Transcript

00:00:00:45 – 00:00:08:00
Clint Loveall
All right, friends, as we get started, could you help me thank our food people this evening?

00:00:10:53 – 00:00:37:15
Clint Loveall
We’re grateful for that. There’s a sign up back in the window if if you haven’t had an opportunity to do that and would like to. The sign up is there as we get started tonight. We’re kind of a hopefully a little bit of a switch. Change of directions we’ve been over the last couple of weeks thinking about some of the challenges of the church, some of the issues, some of the trends that are maybe less than desirable in the in the big picture.

00:00:37:22 – 00:01:06:39
Clint Loveall
And we I think tonight not only begin to hopefully get a little more positive, we also begin to narrow the focus down a little bit and we’ll tell you why that is down the road, because I think it I think it says something. I think there is a chance in which the answers to some big problems are small.

00:01:06:39 – 00:01:28:51
Clint Loveall
And but we will have we can talk about that more as we get that on the table to start with. I want to read something for you. This is from a man named Tom Long. Used to be a professor at Princeton. He was there when you was already gone. By the time you were there was a preaching professor ended up as an administrator.

00:01:30:07 – 00:02:06:09
Clint Loveall
Was for was either president for He may have been anyway. He wrote a book called Beyond the Worship Wars. This is a little bit dated, but early in the book he writes this list Characteristics of Vital churches. And so this book is really about what churches, what churches who are doing well do, in his opinion. And so I’m going to read you some of this list.

00:02:06:50 – 00:02:55:28
Clint Loveall
Make room somewhere in worship for the experience of mystery. Make planned and concerted efforts to show hospitality to strangers have recovered and made visible a sense of drama in worship. Emphasize congregational music that is excellent and eclectic, creatively. Adapt space for a strong connection between worship and mission. Maintain a relatively stable order or way of doing things with room for flexibility and move to a joyous experience towards worship Experience Move towards a joyous experience in the worship experience.

00:02:56:07 – 00:03:26:38
Clint Loveall
So I want to throw those out there and we want to go with this conversation. We want to start with some discussion, your own experience of being in various churches. And we’ll start. Pastor Uh, let’s start positive. If you have visited a church and you had the experience, maybe it was on a trip, maybe it was a friend’s church, a family member’s church.

00:03:27:01 – 00:03:55:54
Clint Loveall
But if you visited a church and you have walked away with the, with the perception that there’s some good things happening here, what gave you that perception? So in other words, if you have visited a congregation and you had a positive experience, what was it that communicated? This seems like a good place. That makes sense. All right. Go for people.

00:03:56:07 – 00:04:34:42
Clint Loveall
You. Okay. So you were. You were welcomed. Yeah. Thanks, Donna. I think that’s huge. What else? Okay. Preaching or. Yeah, What a real good. Okay. They did. Yep. Okay, good. So I am going to try to find the sanctuary. Okay, So it was nice. I mean it. Yeah. I mean, your building can help you. Sure. Yeah. But. Okay.

00:04:35:33 – 00:04:46:48
Clint Loveall
If you okay? Yeah. Okay. Music is for a lot of our people. Music is huge, I think for a lot of people, it’s just maybe different. Interesting.

00:04:47:29 – 00:05:10:15
Michael Gewecke
I’ll just add one thing. I. I think that many of the places I have gone that have lasted have an impact on me. It may seem like a small thing, but have you? You’ve been to churches where people from the church contribute and worship. They read prayers. They they contribute. It’s liturgies. There are many churches where that is done only by the pastor.

00:05:10:16 – 00:05:19:06
Michael Gewecke
And I think it says something about the congregation. When the children’s sermon is done by congregant, when the liturgy is done. I’ve always found those places to be more compelling.

00:05:20:31 – 00:05:23:56
Clint Loveall
Not to sell you at the flip side, but of, you know, if the other.

00:05:24:01 – 00:05:28:26
Michael Gewecke
Guy is saddling me with it. Yeah, you can’t just say not do it. You’ll be.

00:05:28:26 – 00:05:34:04
Clint Loveall
All right. You’ll be all right with.

00:05:34:04 – 00:05:52:31
Michael Gewecke
So what? Go ahead and we’ll we’re going to we’re not going to linger here, but flip this on the other side. What would be markers of congregations you’ve been to that Maybe time felt like it went longer as opposed to shorter. What have been experiences of church that has not been its life giving?

00:05:52:44 – 00:06:06:45
Clint Loveall
Yeah, maybe it was. I don’t think that for me. Or maybe it was. I’m not sure good things are happening here, but if you’ve had the opposite experience, what in that experience communicated that feeling to you?

00:06:06:59 – 00:06:24:50
Michael Gewecke
I was in a church where Latin was spoken and that didn’t engage me very much. I I’ve got to just add on to that, Tony, because I had a similar experience. Well, I’m not going to able to say it was a friend. It this happened to Rachelle. So here we go. We’re we’re in Brant, we’re in Branson, Missouri.

00:06:24:50 – 00:06:44:20
Michael Gewecke
We’re at this this church. And Rochelle just need to use the restroom. And it was a two hour service or whatever. So she just escapes down the hallway. Right. But then there was an usher who walked down with her. Now you can talk to her about this. I’m not making this up. Walked down with her and escorted her to the bathroom, waited and then.

00:06:44:42 – 00:06:51:36
Michael Gewecke
Right. And had not even scored her back to the sanctuary. That was weird. A negative experience.

00:06:52:24 – 00:07:19:06
Clint Loveall
Yeah. There’s a sense of who and and a lot of you know, a lot of churches that are facing decline. That’s an unfortunate reality because the fact that they’re smaller than they used to be means they’re generally in a space that accommodated bigger. And I have I’ve occasionally preached in places where there was room for everybody there ten times over.

00:07:19:06 – 00:07:47:06
Clint Loveall
And that’s a really that’s a lot that’s tough. You just feel that drag on. On everything. Yeah. Anything else? Oh, so outside of your tradition. Yeah, that. Well, I think any time you feel like I’m not sure what’s happening, especially for people who like Bulletin and Order, that’s that’s tough. Pearl is when someone is in your life. Oh, yeah.

00:07:47:06 – 00:07:59:29
Clint Loveall
When someone’s got your spot. Wait a minute. You have a spot. Even when you go visit other places. That’s pretty impressive. Pearl That’s pretty impressive.

00:07:59:31 – 00:08:02:06
Michael Gewecke
Some would say the spot was for ordained.

00:08:04:06 – 00:08:19:15
Clint Loveall
So. Mm hmm. Um hmm. Mr. Stevens, can I tell a story?

00:08:21:28 – 00:08:54:12
Clint Loveall
So I love this about Stan. I know this to embarrass him, but it is if you receive a summons like they’re spot. Right. So if you’ll ever notice, the service was get here way early for church, so they would never have to be in the position of ever feeling awkward about. Oh, someone’s in our spot. So what I love about that is the balance between sort of liking routine but being sensitive to we’re just going to make sure this is never an issue.

00:08:54:13 – 00:09:23:09
Clint Loveall
I remember when when Stan told me that, I just always thought, that’s a really good answer to that problem. So I’ll give you a give you a couple of things that I think make it difficult. I struggle when I visit churches and it happens right every time. There are things that are always unexpected. On Sunday morning, you start your first hymn and it’s not on the screen.

00:09:23:22 – 00:09:49:53
Clint Loveall
That’s part of the reality of doing things. And it there’s there’s a mistake in the world. You’re never going to eliminate that. But if you’ve ever tried to be in a place where it felt like the people doing it didn’t know what was happening, or that there was a disconnect, or that they hadn’t put much thought or preparation into things, that that’s one for me that just I can’t do it.

00:09:50:56 – 00:10:18:30
Clint Loveall
That’s a that’s a tough one. Well, we want you to keep that in mind, because tonight, one of the things that we want to talk about is we want to suggest that in some ways the church really is an answer to some of its own problems. And last week we suggested that some of the struggles we’re seeing look like their own issues.

00:10:19:22 – 00:10:50:02
Clint Loveall
But we want to make the case that we think in many instances those things are symptoms. Now, some of them are beyond our control. We live in a part of the world that is shrinking small towns. If you’re if you’re a Presbyterian church in Bronson, Iowa, where I grew up, you know that there are some things that you can’t control and that but we want to the encouraging thing is we want to say there is much the church can do that does have an impact.

00:10:50:02 – 00:11:14:25
Clint Loveall
We do have some we do have some ability to affect our situation. The revolutionary moment for this, I was in Texas. We used to have these. We we’d have a person it was called the Fall Festival of Faith. It was usually a professor from from somewhere. They come in, they spend a weekend with us. They do two or three sessions.

00:11:14:25 – 00:11:49:46
Clint Loveall
They preach on Sunday, and they had a theme. Sometimes they had written a new book, sometimes they just had a deal. A lot of times they were one of the pastors friends. And I don’t I feel terrible about this. I don’t remember his name. I couldn’t even tell you where he was from. But one of my later years there, I’d been there a while and the gentleman who was speaking was preaching on a Sunday morning, and he made a remark that I’m sure most people didn’t get, but it changed the way I thought about the church.

00:11:50:34 – 00:12:17:00
Clint Loveall
He said in his sermon, It is the nature of the church to grow. I couldn’t tell you what he preached. I couldn’t tell you what text he said. But that line wouldn’t leave me alone. I have thought about that line for 25 years since, and it has become the foundational way that I think about the church. It is the nature.

00:12:17:00 – 00:12:41:41
Clint Loveall
It is inherent in the church to grow in the same way you talk about a baby, a child, a plant. It is the nature of the thing to grow. And when we hear that, we we naturally think size. Right. Well, a church has to get bigger, but in some ways, I mean, in many ways that’s a good thing.

00:12:41:42 – 00:13:10:49
Clint Loveall
We see it in the Book of Acts, but sometimes getting bigger is the least important way to grow. Sometimes if you’re my home church in Bronson, Iowa, you’re probably not going to get much bigger. And sometimes, as we’ve learned, unfortunately, from churches that have done it and failed. Bigger can be easier than better. Sometimes bigger is is not that hard.

00:13:10:49 – 00:13:34:24
Clint Loveall
You just do what people like and you do it a lot. And it doesn’t always mean good. And so, yes, I think you can make a case that, yes, the church needs to be concerned, concerned about its physical growth, but in some ways, that is not a goal in itself, but an outcome of being church.

00:13:34:49 – 00:13:57:52
Michael Gewecke
Right. And I agree wholeheartedly with that. I think that there are some places you need to emphasize some things at a different way than you do in other places. And if you’re in an evangelical, non-denominational congregation, that the idea of growing and trying to nuance that, well, what about your spiritual growth? What about your biblical understanding? Mean those can be very important conversations.

00:13:57:52 – 00:14:23:15
Michael Gewecke
I’d say Presbyterians as a body do need to wrestle with that awkward thing on our shoulders, though, that says that the church can also grow in size, and that’s a good thing. When I went to seminary, people would talk about, well, you know, it’s okay, it’s good for churches to grow and evangelism and everybody in the room sort of like, can I go hide under a blanket somewhere?

00:14:23:16 – 00:14:49:03
Michael Gewecke
And the reality is the gospel is itself compelling. We don’t need to hawk it on street corners if people see it. Now, I’m getting ahead a little bit. But the point is here, it’s a good thing when the church grows. And I think pastors leadership doesn’t do congregations a favor when they never invite the congregation to be hospitable and welcoming and to invite the congregation to allow that to be a part of the church’s life.

00:14:49:03 – 00:15:00:19
Michael Gewecke
But that is a mistake. And I think that we should welcome growth, though that’s not the only metric that matters. I think you could even push me to say it’s not the primary metric that matters, but it does matter.

00:15:00:59 – 00:15:28:12
Clint Loveall
And I think one of the one of the distinguishing ways to look at that is an organic kind of growth versus a forced or a planned kind of growth when growth is its own end. When when a church says we’re X number of members and by next year we want to be X plus 100. I think that’s a little bit dangerous because one can assume that an increase in numbers is actually an increase in the church being the church.

00:15:28:58 – 00:15:52:40
Clint Loveall
But one can assume, I think, that when the church is the church, there will be a corresponding growth over time. And if that’s not bigger, it will be in other ways. It will be deeper. A church may not get big. A church’s discipleship may increase, though the people of that congregation may be better able to navigate the scriptures.

00:15:53:04 – 00:16:32:47
Clint Loveall
A church’s commitment to service might be deeper to stewardship, to to giving in a spirit of abundance. There are many ways that the church is called to grow, and unfortunately, partly because we’ve seen big churches get big and partly because we’ve watched our own churches get smaller, we’ve tended to overemphasize size. You know, when I sort of I try to avoid these conversations, but when you hang out with other pastors, sometimes it starts with you go to some pastor thing and the first thing, everybody you know how many people are in your church.

00:16:33:43 – 00:17:09:10
Clint Loveall
And I’ve you’ve heard me says before, I’d like to say, oh, I don’t know, 1,000,000 million five. It just the idea that that matters is a problem. And it’s a problem because it grows size for its own sake. It isn’t progress, it isn’t growth. You can get bigger and not grow. And having said that, though, I want to be clear that I do think when the church is the church, I don’t think the church has still power.

00:17:09:10 – 00:17:30:10
Clint Loveall
I think people will be drawn to it. I think people will come in. I do think churches will get bigger in many instances, if that’s possible in their context. But not not always. And so when we when you hear us say growth tonight, keep in mind that we we mean a much broader thing than how many people are on the membership roll.

00:17:31:39 – 00:17:56:52
Michael Gewecke
Yeah, I would add to that that growing as a congregation is a is a beautiful thing, but it’s always a tenuous thing. I had a thing that really shaped my understanding of this, that it may sound philosophical, but I keep it really brief. So I was I was learning about art and the Pythagorean theorem and the idea of what makes something beautiful.

00:17:57:03 – 00:17:59:22
Michael Gewecke
What was the idea? Yeah. Thanks for the.

00:17:59:22 – 00:18:01:25
Clint Loveall
Laughter. I always wonder where he’s going, right?

00:18:01:27 – 00:18:26:32
Michael Gewecke
Yeah. So here’s the thing. The thing that I learned from that professor of art was that every thing that we consider beautiful is in right proportion to everything else. So an image is balanced or a person’s face has the right proportion of all of the elements, and that’s what we perceive as beauty. I think the church that is growing, it’s a better met.

00:18:26:33 – 00:18:53:06
Michael Gewecke
Instead of looking at and saying, Here’s your number, here’s the number of people in the pew, or this is how much was in the offering plate. It’s better to look at how well-proportioned all of those things are to one another. And if you have it, then the case is this. If you have a church who is growing deeper in their faith and in the world and in their evangelism and their service, and the neighborhood around them is growing and they never quantitatively welcome someone their sanctuary.

00:18:53:06 – 00:19:14:03
Michael Gewecke
They never grow numerically. That proportion is off. That’s my point. It’s just I think we can measure that. The beauty of a vibrant, changing congregation when these things live in a beautiful tension and that’s what makes it harder, is because you can never pin it down the moment you stick a pin in it, you kill it, right? That’s it.

00:19:14:14 – 00:19:40:15
Michael Gewecke
You can only measure it in motion. And that’s what makes the church beautiful, is it’s always a living, changing organism. And I’ll be honest with you, for someone like myself, I have some perfectionistic tendencies. I would love to nail down the church and freeze frame it and say, That’s good, like that. Would I love that idea? But that’s just an idea that the church is a makeup of all these beautiful people.

00:19:40:28 – 00:19:59:09
Michael Gewecke
You know, I’m struck on a day like this Sunday, if I did that, if I somehow was able to freeze frame this moment. None of those folks today who we welcomed would now have a place here. Like, now we have this new wonderful adventure that we get to incorporate them into our life and service and education. You see where I’m going?

00:19:59:16 – 00:20:03:25
Michael Gewecke
It’s always in proportion. It’s never just one metric by itself.

00:20:04:04 – 00:20:31:10
Clint Loveall
Yeah. So I mean, the I think the the premise behind that is that the church is not meant to be static. The church is not meant to be staid, you know, And that’s different than stable. That’s different than reliable. That’s different than having a pattern. But, but we are not to be we never get to just lock into something and say, okay, this is this is it.

00:20:31:22 – 00:20:55:53
Clint Loveall
This is how we do things. This is who we are. This this is now our path, because that’s not growth. Growth is change. Growth is adaptation and vibrancy. Growth is all of those things. And sometimes those things are messy, but that’s what it means to live. That’s what it means to grow. And this is overstated and I want to be sure I say that.

00:20:57:30 – 00:21:33:07
Clint Loveall
But to some extent, whatever a church, when a church struggles in an area, it is in part representing a struggle to be the church. So when churches are in periods where they’re not growing, they’re not fully living into what they’re called to be. If a church is never bringing in new members, if a church is never increasing, its discipleship of the church isn’t growing in stewardship.

00:21:33:21 – 00:22:02:31
Clint Loveall
If those are the things that are the nature of the church to happen, then when churches don’t do that, they’re not fully being the church. Now, I’m not talking about they’re not Christian. I don’t mean anything like that. I mean that they’re not experiencing the things that it means to find the heart of being the church together. The church is not meant to be static.

00:22:02:51 – 00:22:32:56
Clint Loveall
And again, the point is not to be bigger. It’s to be more faithful. But if that’s true, then our biggest problems are not that money is going down and attendance is going down in programs or struggling. The fundamental problem underneath all of that is that we’re sometimes failing to be the church, and when we fail to be the church, we get poor results, we get bad outcomes.

00:22:33:32 – 00:23:08:34
Clint Loveall
But the core central problem is deeper than that. It is that we are not releasing that thing that is meant to grow, that somehow we’re keeping it from that or we’re not experiencing that. And that means that our biggest problem is not those things. And it also means that the riskiest, most dangerous thing we do as congregations is fail to be the church, that that’s the worst thing that we can that can happen to us.

00:23:08:56 – 00:23:16:46
Clint Loveall
Not all this other stuff. The fundamental bad thing that we can do is fail to be the church.

00:23:17:33 – 00:23:45:10
Michael Gewecke
So a professor who gave me words to understand this in undergraduate school was a charismatic Catholic. You know, let that just sink in for a second. A charismatic Catholic. And he was talking about the church and this is how he described it. He said the church is like an engine. You have to have all the components that keep the energy inside and translate energy into motion.

00:23:45:10 – 00:24:07:42
Michael Gewecke
That’s what an engine does, right. Contains and then it can propel well, he said. But a church that’s an engine with no energy in it is completely worthless. And for him, that image, I think, struck me because ultimately the church is always tempted to be one of those two things and at our best were both. Let me give you an example.

00:24:07:42 – 00:24:26:38
Michael Gewecke
This so Rachelle and I know I mentioned that some of you have heard this before, but we went on a trip to England, and on one day we went with some friends, We rented a car and one of our friends was kind of deathly afraid of driving on the wrong side of the road. So it was like a whole day of kind of a comedy of errors.

00:24:26:38 – 00:24:43:03
Michael Gewecke
But we did it. We were going to drive and we went to this little area called the called the Cotswolds, which is like this beautiful rural area. And because they brought me with, we had to stop at every church that we went to and there’s this little country church. So we went into it and I remember like it’s yesterday.

00:24:43:15 – 00:25:11:06
Michael Gewecke
I mean, we’re talking old stone must have been quarried not far away, local built building, beautiful, hundreds of years old. And you go through these big doors with wrought iron on them and you walk in and they’re on the table is neatly arranged. When I say neatly, I mean, like, nice stacks of, you know, three fold paper with the names of all the prominent church members over time.

00:25:11:06 – 00:25:29:45
Michael Gewecke
And these, like little candles lit. And I like this whole tour throughout the congregation. And we went through and I looked at all of it and it was all interesting to me what it is, this thing on the, you know, stained glass and what is this thing over here and why is this person got their own special little grave in the middle of the church?

00:25:29:45 – 00:25:48:28
Michael Gewecke
That seems a little weird to me, like all that kind of stuff. And then we left and I thought, huh, that was kind of like a church that during the week is a museum. And I was interesting. And then later that day we went to another town and the girls wanted to go get coffee and baked goods and I didn’t want to do that.

00:25:48:28 – 00:26:14:34
Michael Gewecke
And so I saw another little church off the way. So I wandered into that church and it hit me. This is the same day it hit me. There was crayons passed out on the pew and there were like little posters that kids had made tacked to the wall. And then they still had the candles and they had I mean, this is an Anglican church, so it’s a high liturgy church.

00:26:14:49 – 00:26:38:38
Michael Gewecke
But yet the feeling when I walked in that room was, Oh my goodness, people live here, Our congregation is animating these walls. It’s the difference between when you walk into the model home and you walk into someone’s living room, it’s ineffable. It’s I don’t know how to tell you what it looks like, but we’ve all felt it right.

00:26:38:38 – 00:27:00:52
Michael Gewecke
You know, when you’re in the home. And that was what I experienced that day, that some churches and that’s no Christian criticism intended for this foundation, because surely it was a historical building. And so that they want to show people that I completely understand. But just the aspect of of sensing the life of a congregation struck me that day.

00:27:00:52 – 00:27:07:49
Michael Gewecke
And it seems to me to be a way that helps me understand what a healthy congregation could and should feel like.

00:27:09:18 – 00:27:33:10
Clint Loveall
I was reading recently and ran across a quote from Martin Luther. And Luther wrote, Where God builds a church there next to it, the devil would build a chapel. And I was kind of fascinated by that. So I did a little digging and I started thinking through the word stuff. There’s no word in the New Testament for church building.

00:27:33:59 – 00:27:55:48
Clint Loveall
The word church means those who are called or called out and the word fellowship means household. But I was curious about the word chapel. I didn’t I didn’t know the origin of that word. It’s not really a biblical word. It’s an old English word. Now, I won’t bore you with the history, but it literally means a sanctuary for relics.

00:27:57:14 – 00:28:42:19
Clint Loveall
And in the Middle Ages, many churches would build a chapel next to their property or on the property sometimes attached to the church, and they would house the relics. And I know it’s partly the framework through which I look at it, but I’m struck by that contrast, the idea of church versus chapel. And as a Presbyterian pastor, I think I could form a pretty solid argument that many of our congregations see themselves as chapels rather than fellowships of people who are called out.

00:28:44:06 – 00:29:21:39
Clint Loveall
And I think that, you know, I there’s something true in those words for me. It it it rings true with my experience. It’s that the church is always in danger of letting itself become a sanctuary for relics. And by relics I mean the past. What we’ve done, what we’ve been, that the days that are behind us. And we’ve had that, as you know, our discussion that there are lots of challenges, there are lots of bare barriers to growth.

00:29:22:26 – 00:29:54:01
Clint Loveall
Growth is hard. We live in a time right now where we’ve we’ve said it the last couple of weeks, Presbyterians, we’re not growing. We’re not doing that well. There are relatively few Presbyterians having the experience of growth, at least numerical growth. And I would argue in probably in many other ways, those other kinds of growth as well. It it is a tough moment right now.

00:29:54:01 – 00:30:17:47
Clint Loveall
And in the last sort of maybe visual story that I have as a youth pastor, one of my great summer gigs was I took a kid’s backpack, packing. We went to Southern Colorado, we hiked around that. That’s great for kids. It’s a great trip, a great thing to do. But one year we were not sure we’d be able to go.

00:30:17:47 – 00:30:37:33
Clint Loveall
There had been forest fires in the area we were in had been burned, and so they were saying we we were letting people in. We weren’t letting people in. Anyway. We got word that we got to go, and so we had to change our route a little bit. But at one point we did hike through an area that had been pretty significantly burned.

00:30:37:33 – 00:31:03:36
Clint Loveall
And it was, you know, you think of the mountains as beautiful. This is sort of black fields, meadows and trees that had been singed and all that undergrowth had been kind of burnt out. But we had been long enough. We’d been a couple months or a month or so behind it, several weeks at least, and already there. So you’re looking at the ground and it literally is black.

00:31:03:36 – 00:31:27:32
Clint Loveall
And then these little green shoots are sticking up because you may know this, that’s how the forest takes care of it. So it gets caught up with all this underbrush that things can’t grow through. And the one thing the fire does is lets everything start over. And so it was amazing to just see those little chutes among the ashes that at the time didn’t look like anything.

00:31:27:57 – 00:31:58:49
Clint Loveall
And to think they will be the next generation of of life in the forest, they will be what populates that area in the coming years. And then you start thinking about Jesus, talking about mustard seeds and sparrow oils and little things. And that’s where it starts. But it has to start has to go somewhere in order to nurture that growth, the church needs to do some things well.

00:31:58:49 – 00:32:23:06
Clint Loveall
And this is where this is where the conversation can get uncomfortable, I think, for pastors and for parishioners as well, because we understand that growth is a gift from God, but we can get in its way. It is a thing God offers us. We don’t take credit for it. We don’t do it. But there are some things we probably have to do not to stop it.

00:32:23:06 – 00:32:46:39
Clint Loveall
And so there are things the church needs to do. Well, I think we think in order to make an opportunity for growth Now, can God grow a church in spite of them not doing things? Well, sure, that’s called grace, but on the whole, we think you have to be trying to be decent. At least that some stuff to give you a shot.

00:32:46:39 – 00:33:07:46
Michael Gewecke
Yeah, just a very short prelude to this. So this conversation is very wonderful because this is a very different frame than when we were originally talking to the presbytery leaders about this, because when we when we were talking to leaders, it was about here are some things you might want to think of in your congregations. So I want to reframe that for our time together tonight.

00:33:08:02 – 00:33:39:21
Michael Gewecke
What’s amazing about this conversation is that this isn’t about what we need to be tracking and thinking about. This is an invitation for you. Where are your gifts to do these things in this place, which is the beautiful part of this conversation, is that we’re all in the place where we all labored together. And that’s amazing. So as we go through this, you know, if something strikes you as that is the thing I’m passionate about and I look out this room, you are the people, so many of the people who do these things.

00:33:39:21 – 00:34:04:15
Michael Gewecke
And it’s because of the work that we do together that I think that that we at first prayers have the blessings that we have in the midst of this season. But worship is obviously on that list. And I think when we talk about doing worship well, what we mean is not not the end product. Clinton has used the analogy of worship being like kids making a meal to give to their parent.

00:34:04:33 – 00:34:24:32
Michael Gewecke
At the end of the day, our kids have made us meals and they’re disgusting, but they’re beautiful because our kids made them because they gave them to us and they thought of us. Right? And I don’t know what God thinks about when the screen doesn’t work on Sunday morning. I mean, I assume that God thinks, well, the toast is burnt.

00:34:24:32 – 00:34:49:13
Michael Gewecke
But they tried, you know, and we do every week, every Sunday we try and we try again and we all do it. I mean, the gifts, the choir and the music and the sound booth and the liturgies and the preparation, We don’t even think of the people who made the PowerPoint and the like. We don’t conceive of the communal work that worship is, but the maintenance, the divine worship is that old language.

00:34:49:13 – 00:35:12:25
Michael Gewecke
That’s the thing that when we show up on Sunday, we’re we’re cooking something as best as we can as a love gift to God. And that reminds us, I think, at its best when we the best that we can, it reminds us that it’s worth doing and the one we offer it too, is worth giving it to, and that reorients our lives a really meaningful way so that the congregation can then grow in the midst of that.

00:35:13:11 – 00:35:47:45
Clint Loveall
And the most significant language that Michael is using there is we live because I think that a congregation that understands worship, understands that it’s not something that happens to us or for us. It’s something that happens to and for God that we do. We not being the musicians and speakers and readers and children serving people, we being everybody who comes in that morning to give praise to God that that is a communal collective task.

00:35:47:45 – 00:35:57:32
Clint Loveall
And churches that don’t understand that struggle to do it, it’s just built in.

00:35:58:31 – 00:36:17:13
Michael Gewecke
Yeah, and that’s critical. But I’ve had conversations with pastors who who remark jokingly, I didn’t know how to take it. Jokingly, they said, I don’t like to preach, so I don’t prepare a sermon. So I just show up and whatever I say is God’s word for the people. And I think I mean, you didn’t even try to put it in the toaster.

00:36:18:18 – 00:36:38:00
Michael Gewecke
I mean, like, you should at least try the toast, the toaster strudel. I mean, I know you didn’t make it, but try, you know, I got to tell you, I you all have been very gracious with the sermons I’ve preached. I know you’ve gotten some real stinkers, but the point isn’t. I think we all at our best understand it’s not about the product.

00:36:38:00 – 00:36:55:51
Michael Gewecke
It’s about the heart that we bring to that thing. And I think that our congregation where that lives at the at the center knows that we can disagree about a lot of things. But this is the thing that we get to do. And when we get to do it, it brings us joy and it brings us together.

00:36:56:58 – 00:37:23:42
Clint Loveall
Yeah, there’s a lot of places you could go in that I think, again, a worse a congregate in that worship. Well, understand we have differences. Some people like some songs better than other songs. This thing verses that think that there’s room for all of that, there’s room for change, there’s room for flexibility, there’s room for sameness, tradition that that a worshiping congregation tries to make room for all of that.

00:37:23:42 – 00:38:04:12
Clint Loveall
And I think one of the things that shows through that to move on to our next thing would be joy. I don’t think I mean, you you’ve sat through services, I hope not too many here, but I mean, maybe you’ve sat through services that didn’t have join them. The brutal there’s just it’s just no good if a church is not experiencing some kind of expression of joy on a regular basis, then that that church is going to struggle to be motivated, to struggle to grow the Christian life is to be a joy filled life.

00:38:04:12 – 00:38:40:49
Clint Loveall
The Scripture makes that abundantly clear. And to whatever extent we don’t do joy in the church, we’re missing an opportunity. And I and I know Presbyterian, we’re not known for that. I mean, that’s not our that’s not our label. Nobody says all the dang joyous Presbyterians again, but in our own way, we do make room for it. You know, I, I just, I, I cringe when I’ve been in worship and I feel like there’s no joy there.

00:38:40:49 – 00:38:46:33
Clint Loveall
It it it’s sad. It. It hurts. Yeah. It’s it’s no good.

00:38:47:07 – 00:39:06:19
Michael Gewecke
In the life. I don’t want to. It’s big things. But also like I remember one congregational fellowship night when there was this little girl, just a little toddler, and the person who was manning the dessert table let her grab two hands full of sugar items and her face lit up. And she ran all across the room, you know, double fisting.

00:39:06:37 – 00:39:11:25
Michael Gewecke
And I just thought everyone who saw that smile, it was one.

00:39:11:25 – 00:39:12:23
Clint Loveall
That everyone her parents.

00:39:12:23 – 00:39:44:38
Michael Gewecke
Probably well, they don’t count. They don’t count. No. But the point the point I want to just make there is that I think sometimes we oversell manufacturing things. We don’t need to do that. We just need to let some space for joy to live and it will happen. Yeah, let’s move on. Outreach our congregation that that does not have an understanding of the gospel moving out of its walls is always going to be tempted to be an engine without any energy inside of it.

00:39:44:56 – 00:40:08:07
Michael Gewecke
And I think that one of the things that I have been so grateful for in this place is that awareness that we that we are not called to serve ourselves, were called to serve the community in the world. We do that in many, many, many different ways. And we the amazing thing about that is for a congregation that doesn’t have a very high level, we still have a lot of ways that we can do that.

00:40:08:07 – 00:40:31:28
Michael Gewecke
We can change and grow and adapt. And I think that’s the beautiful thing about outreach is this image. I’m sure you’ve heard it before. You know that in the ancient world, pandemics inside cities happened on a cyclical calendar. So that’s why the royalty always left the city in the middle of the summer and they went to their cities in the forest so that they didn’t get sick with all the stuff going around in the city.

00:40:31:28 – 00:40:55:21
Michael Gewecke
So the poor people would be left, the rich people would leave was the basic pattern, you know, who are the only people by story who ran into the city during the sickness was Christians. They ran into the city so they could care for the wounded. I that’s that is the the witness of the church outreach that we literally get sent out of our places to go serve other people wherever they might be.

00:40:55:35 – 00:40:56:52
Michael Gewecke
And we do that to God’s glory.

00:40:57:27 – 00:41:18:09
Clint Loveall
I want to be careful. I don’t want this to sound like an us and them kind of thing, because I think there’s just an inherent temptation for this. But in the conversations I’ve had with churches in the midst of their struggle, one of the things that always strikes me is the temptation to look inward when the church begins to struggle and you say, Well, hey, why don’t why don’t we get excited?

00:41:18:09 – 00:41:39:30
Clint Loveall
Why don’t we do a mission thing? Well, what if we need a furnace? What if we need or do you need a furnace? No, it works now, but maybe next year. And then there is this litany of reasons why we can only focus on ourselves and not on others. And I really think that’s a death bell for church.

00:41:39:30 – 00:42:07:49
Clint Loveall
I think when a church starts doing that, that is a sign of really bad things to come, usually fairly quickly. But it is in my experience, it is remarkably consistent. The more struggle a church is having, the harder it is for them to look past the small circle. And it and it just it’s just a staircase that really leads to an unfortunate place.

00:42:07:49 – 00:42:32:57
Clint Loveall
So again, scripture is full of the idea of we have to look beyond ourselves. One of the ways that happens is with what’s called hospitality root of the word, the hospital, the place where people are cared for. This is how we welcome people. This is how we celebrate people. Those of you have been a long time here. At first press have probably heard this multiple times.

00:42:32:58 – 00:43:01:04
Clint Loveall
I’m sorry to repeat it again, but I sometimes have this idea that, well, yeah, they are. We’ll do it now. So that idea that somebody goes to a church and and they don’t feel welcome, as Donna said earlier, you know that nobody seems to care that they’re there. And Jane and I had this experience. I’ll tell you just quickly, my senior year of seminary, I knew I was going to be in a church.

00:43:01:04 – 00:43:24:36
Clint Loveall
I knew we weren’t going to church together in the foreseeable future after that. So I didn’t serve a church my senior year and we just visited churches and we went to one church in Louisville Presbyterian Church, relatively medium sized church, big church, old brick church went in greeter hands, bought and sat down. They passed the deal. We wrote our names.

00:43:25:15 – 00:43:52:21
Clint Loveall
Nobody said a word to us all morning. Not a word, nobody. We leave. I think Tuesday of that week I get a letter from the church, from the pastor. Hey, nice to have you visit. We enjoyed having you. Well, I’m 24 or five. I know everything. Lots of eagle, a writing back, a letter. And I said, if you enjoyed having us there, you hit it.

00:43:52:21 – 00:44:23:58
Clint Loveall
Really, really well. I didn’t. I think I said it nicer than that. I but I sometimes think when a person shows up at church, imagine the back story to that, that God has maybe been working and shoving and pushing for years in some cases. And then somebody gets to the door of the church and we don’t tell them hello and God just goes, People, you’re killing me.

00:44:24:39 – 00:44:51:23
Clint Loveall
It yeah, the very least we can do is make sure that people know this is a place where we’re grateful that you showed up. Hospitality is essential. It’s one of the key things that we can do. Not everybody’s going to stay. Not everybody wants our brand of church. But what nobody should leave thinking is I don’t think they cared that I was there that day.

00:44:52:13 – 00:44:54:52
Clint Loveall
That’s unacceptable.

00:44:54:52 – 00:45:11:04
Michael Gewecke
Another thing that that ties into that idea of the hospital is the way that we care and show compassion for one another. And I don’t think we need to spend a significant amount of time on this other. I’ll only say this, there are two kinds of prayer lists. And you know this right? There are two kinds of prayer.

00:45:11:04 – 00:45:34:01
Michael Gewecke
Let’s there’s the prayer list where you are aware of someone’s need. You lift them up in thought and prayer. You find ways to engage them through a card, through a visit, through through whatever means you can, through the different circles of a church’s ministry. That’s one kind of purpose. The other kind of prayer list is the gossip chain and churches.

00:45:34:01 – 00:45:59:43
Michael Gewecke
They sometimes mistake that. And I’ve been in churches. That’s not been my experience here. But there are churches that that that only get to the knowledge part and never to the prayer part, never to the caring compassion part, the caring. And we’ve got to remember that this is this is core to who we are. That’s not we have deacons and they’re a team here at the church that help lead us in that effort.

00:45:59:43 – 00:46:22:13
Michael Gewecke
But we are the ministers of this church, and so we’re called to do the care and compassion work of the church because we’re all nurses and in this place. And I think that it’s worth remembering some of us can can serve in those ways uniquely, but all of us are called to serve in that way as part of our Christian calling.

00:46:23:02 – 00:46:48:01
Clint Loveall
The last thing I would say is I don’t sort of you know it when you see it flexibility. It’s the ability to absorb change and change routine and do new things when old things no longer work. And to recognize patterns might need shifted or changed in again. This is not a strong suit for churches, just Presbyterian congregations. We struggle with this.

00:46:48:01 – 00:47:24:18
Clint Loveall
I think all churches in many ways struggle with this or. At least a lot of them. But if you if you think of something very rigid, it will be hard for that thing to grow. It will break, but it won’t it can’t grow because it can’t make room for new space, new life. And so if the church is going to be a place where growth is possible, I think it has to be willing to explore some new avenues and do things it hasn’t done before.

00:47:24:18 – 00:47:46:03
Clint Loveall
I I’ve said this many times and I, I know in many ways we have the benefit of speaking to a place that does a lot of these things well. One of the things that I most deeply appreciate about first press is the willingness to kind of say, Well, let’s try it. Let’s see if it works, let’s see what happens.

00:47:46:28 – 00:48:20:02
Clint Loveall
And I have colleagues who I think beat their head against the idea of rigidity all the time. And and I feel like I rarely do. And I think that is one of the deep strengths of this place, is a willingness to kind of try to solve problems in in creative ways, you know, and maybe Michael could speak more to this in a weird way.

00:48:20:02 – 00:49:06:43
Clint Loveall
COLVARD Both gave churches an opportunity to be creative and exposed an unwillingness all at the same time, because most churches came up with new ways of doing things that they dumped as soon as they could. And and they went back to the we’ve always done it that way pattern and most of that didn’t result in in any well it not in growth or what looks like growth so this is this is a big change I think this is a major challenge for Presbyterian congregations.

00:49:06:43 – 00:49:27:09
Michael Gewecke
My eyes were really open to this and I’ve I’ve lived in constant gratitude ever since this moment. I was talking with another pastor and the conversation about a project we were working on together came up and the pastor said, Well, don’t worry, I’m going to be able to get money to do this. And I said, I didn’t know to be worried about that, but I was glad I didn’t need to worry about it.

00:49:27:27 – 00:49:57:10
Michael Gewecke
And he went on to explain why I didn’t need to worry about because he said, Well, you know, I saved my tithe for the church. I don’t actually give it to the church. I just say that to do special projects. And I that hit me like a truck. I realized, oh my goodness, wow. Light. And I’ve been grateful as hard as every day since that conversation that that there’s room and resource here to do that kind of work.

00:49:57:10 – 00:50:12:10
Michael Gewecke
But it struck me in that moment. And then now I’ve seen it in different forms. It’s that’s all over. And I think that it’s a it’s an important thing to practice together to make room and space for that.

00:50:12:10 – 00:50:41:56
Clint Loveall
So the case we want to leave you with is the idea that at at its heart, right, we all know where people we’re falling, we’re selfish, we get in our own way, we trip over ourselves, we bump into each other. There are lots of challenges. But when the church gets it right, there’s nowhere else. There’s nothing else like it.

00:50:42:34 – 00:51:02:34
Clint Loveall
When the church says to somebody who gets diagnosed with cancer, Don’t worry about it. And for a month they bring food and they shuttle the things that are happening behind the scenes. At first press and other growing congregations, When I go and visit somebody and they say, Oh yeah, so-and-so was just here. They brought me this or they did this for me.

00:51:02:54 – 00:51:38:22
Clint Loveall
The kind of things that you and I in most cases may not even know about When the church gets that right, there really is no other place like it when we have those moments in worship, whether they be music or prayer or a child where there’s no other word but all but just sheer to be overwhelmed by that sense of presence when we say goodbye to the saints that we’ve known and loved, and we do so in the hope that that’s not the end of their story.

00:51:39:19 – 00:52:07:10
Clint Loveall
When the church acts like the church, it doesn’t need a PR program, it doesn’t need a lot of marketing. The gospel is our best witness. And when we when we participate in that, I it is it’s something that people desperately want and it’s something that people desperately need. And we don’t have to make it. We don’t have to create it.

00:52:07:35 – 00:52:24:43
Clint Loveall
We don’t have to strategize about it. We just have to let that happen amidst us in a way that, you know, in a way that matters. And then we need to try to stay out of its way, kind of.

00:52:25:06 – 00:52:42:57
Michael Gewecke
Yeah. And that’s going to be the bridge to next week. I think the thing to leave you with in the interim period is to just reflect on in this time. The great good news is Presbyterians who care a lot about the history, about the tradition, about the value of the church and the Gospel and the scriptures we’ve been given.

00:52:43:30 – 00:53:06:01
Michael Gewecke
We don’t have to rewrite it. We this stuff is the core of the gospel. And so we we don’t have to make a whole new thing. We just need to focus on the fundamentals of the thing that has been handed generation to the next. And when we do that, it itself is an amazingly powerful seed and I think that the organic imagery is the right imagery.

00:53:06:01 – 00:53:18:16
Michael Gewecke
It is. We handoff from one generation to the next. Here’s here’s the seed as best as we have. See what grows in your context. And I think that there’s some beautiful imagery in what that looks like.

00:53:19:12 – 00:53:41:11
Clint Loveall
To my knowledge, these words are older than everyone in the room. It’s from our Book of Order. The church is to be community of faith, entrusting itself to God alone, even at the risk of its own life. The church is to be a community of hope, rejoicing in the sure certain knowledge that in Christ God is making a new creation.

00:53:41:45 – 00:54:10:39
Clint Loveall
This new creation is a new beginning for human life and all things the church lives in the present. On the strength of that promised new creation. The church is to be a community of love where sin is forgiven, reconciliation accomplished in the dividing walls of hostility are torn down. The church is to be a community of witness pointing beyond itself through word and work to the good news of God’s transforming grace in Jesus Christ.

00:54:10:46 – 00:54:38:33
Clint Loveall
It’s Lord and friend again, when we live up to that when we get that right, I really think most of our problems go away. I really think if if we could get to that, if we could make that our cornerstone, if we could stop obsessing over things that aren’t near as important as those things, we would find ourself in a better position.

00:54:38:33 – 00:55:01:54
Clint Loveall
And I think the hope for the Presbyterian Church, to whatever extent there is, isn’t that we’ll get the right program or that will make the right investments or that we’ll, you know, find some new great way of doing something. It’s that will do what we’ve always been called to do better. And I’m getting ahead of ourselves a little bit.

00:55:01:55 – 00:55:27:45
Clint Loveall
We we’re going to kind of land there next time. But let me stop there, Michael, Anything to add right? Yeah, that that’s the same route. And as I understand it, the word of hospitality actually came first. And then when they had a place to do that, they called it a hospital. So we actually start with the experience and get to the building.

00:55:28:33 – 00:55:50:52
Clint Loveall
Yeah, Yeah. Thank you. Anything else? Comments, questions, thoughts. I’ve said this before, but I get that a little bit when somebody tells me I don’t go to church because they’re hypocrites there. And I like to ask, where do you think they should be? I mean, we’re right. Of course they’re sick. Yes. Yeah, there’s all of that in church.

00:55:50:52 – 00:55:59:31
Clint Loveall
And and then I always laugh when somebody who doesn’t go to church is telling me how bad church is, because I want to say you don’t really know the half of it. We’re worse than that, you know.

00:56:00:39 – 00:56:26:34
Michael Gewecke
Well, yeah, And just to take that analogy, we were just talking with my sister in law last night, who’s a nurse, and she’s just talking about, you know, that the internal hospital stuff is drama. There’s a lot of stuff that happens there. That’s true in church, too. I mean, like, the reality is we we like to think that there could be a space that everything is perfect and everyone agrees with us and we all get along.

00:56:26:58 – 00:56:48:18
Michael Gewecke
And that space is generally just big enough for one, you know, And I’ve kind of always imagined like, you know, the church that we all want and I’m in, this is me. I think the church that at my worst that I want is the one where we all come into church in our little enclosed bubbles and we sit next to each other.

00:56:48:30 – 00:57:04:17
Michael Gewecke
But we’re all doing our own little thing that the church as a hospital is one where we are living life together. We hold each other’s hands and we we help shovel the dirt when it needs shoveled and we deal with the stuff that needs dealt with and and we run up against our brokenness. But yet, in the midst of that, God is at work.

00:57:04:17 – 00:57:31:04
Michael Gewecke
And so to cleanse point my last word here tonight is if you’ve ever experienced and I think everyone here has, whenever you’ve experienced God working in the midst of a community, and when that community gets to be called church, you know that there’s nothing more compelling than that place. And there’s not another civic organization or government program or there’s nothing like the church being the church.

00:57:31:04 – 00:57:35:27
Michael Gewecke
And that’s a beautiful gift that we should be the ones to hand off at.

00:57:35:34 – 00:58:01:53
Clint Loveall
Yeah. And very briefly, I think I said this Roger would remember this. Ron. Bob, there may be others who were in Mississippi on one of those early trips. We went down after Katrina. We and, you know, I those guys are all good at doing stuff. I’m good at running to Home Depot. So that’s my job. And they tell me what they need.

00:58:01:53 – 00:58:32:25
Clint Loveall
I try to go get it. And I was struck by every time I went there, there’s some new church bus or some church band from Connecticut or Colorado or Alabama or wherever. And I just think it’s funny that if we got all these Christians in a room and start talking about theology, we’d get in a big fight. But when somebody had a hurricane, we just all showed up and said, Hey, how do we help?

00:58:32:25 – 00:58:58:15
Clint Loveall
We’re here because Jesus told us this is how we should live. And man, the more of that we can let through. And I get it. We have to argue about things. We have you know, we have different opinions. That’s that’s well and good until it gets in the way and if we could do more of the other stuff, we wouldn’t we wouldn’t be too worried about whether churches are going to make it.

00:58:58:51 – 00:59:09:54
Clint Loveall
We just wouldn’t we’d be we’d be figuring out other stuff. All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for being here. Thanks again for the food. We will hopefully see you next week.