Sermon

The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few: so pray the lord of the harvest to

send out laborers for his harvest.

Luke 10:2

In our national denomination, there has been for the past few years a significant interest

in church growth. This is prompted by the hard fact that as a denomination, and a very

small one at that, we have been shrinking in membership for quite some time. At our

seminary, we are very much aware of the need for ministers in our local churches, and at

the same time very much aware that in an era when most families need two wage earners,

very few of our local churches can afford both a building and a full time minister.

This morning, I should like us to entertain the notion that these facts do not constitute

"the problem" itself, but are symptoms of something deeper. At least one aspect of that

something, I believe, is a very understandable loss of a sense of mission. In the image of

our text, we have no clear vision of the harvest.

In one sense, this is nothing new. It would be an illusion to think that our church began

with a shared conviction of its nature and mission. Our theology has very little to say

about church organization, and our founders were by no means unanimous on significant

matters of polity. The century of our greatest growth was a century of conflict as well.

In 1823, one individual wrote, "I have just returned from the Convention . . . and have

been infested so awfully with the poison sphere of ________ and his deluded followers that

I am scarcely clear of it yet." No convention was held for the next two years because the

sphere was not suitable.

The depth and strength of the differences, though, should not be allowed to mask the

extent to which all parties shared a sense of the importance of their calling. The very

intensity of the disagreements testifies that this mattered supremely. There was a shared

sense, perhaps so deeply rooted as to be invisible, that the task of the New Church was

urgent. At the meeting which established the General Conference in England in 1789, one of

the resolutions unanimously adopted read as follows:

That it is the Opinion of this Conference, that the Doctrines and Worship in the Old

Church are highly dangerous to the rising generation, inasmuch as they tend to implant in

young people the idea of Three Divine Persons, to which is unavoidably annexed the idea of

Three Gods; the consequence whereof is spiritual death to all those who confirm themselves

in such an opinion.

In our own times, the risks of self-righteousness in such a statement are fairly obvious.

We do not share the sense that the young people in the Methodist church down the street or

the Episcopal church on the other side of town are being exposed to "highly dangerous"

doctrines. This means that we do not have the same sense of urgency about our own mission.

By way of illustration, none of our church bodies has ever sent missionaries to "the

"heathen" for the simple reason that we do not believe the heathen are damned. We believe

that the Lord is providing them with the means of salvation and therefore feel no cause to

rescue them. It seems clear--and perhaps on reflection a little strange--that we felt "the

Old Church" to be more at risk.

In any case, while there are clear risks of self-righteousness in this kind of missionary

spirit, there is also the live possibility that the concern is genuine. In fact, this is

the greater probability. When we look at the founders of our church, we are looking at

people who had experienced our theology as freeing them from mental bondage. Another of

the resolutions read in part as follows:

. . . these Resolutions are not intended in militate against, or in the smallest degree to

annul the Civil Authority in any Country, but only to emancipate mankind from the mental

Bondage and Slaver, wherein they have so long been held captive by the Leaders and Rulers

of the Old Church.

If you yourself have experienced this liberation and see others who have not, then you

have a vision of the harvest. Now that the burden of dogmatic orthodoxy has largely been

lifted, though, that vision is truly hard to see.

In fact, though, people do continue to be hurt by their religions. I doubt that there is a

counselor who cannot tell you of individuals who have been left feeling worthless or

condemned in the presence of a merciless god. I heard a particularly sad story lately. It

is of a young man who was at dinner with an evangelical minister and was asked whether he

had been saved. Because he was afraid of the pressure he would be under if he answered in

the negative, he said he had been saved, and then found himself obliged to make up a story

about his conversion. After some years, he is a faithful and valued member of this church,

feeling in his heart that he is a total fraud and doomed to hell.

This is just one story, of course. We do not have to look very hard, though, to become

convinced that there are a great many sad stories in the world around us. There are many

sad stories here in Bridgewater. Every once in a while there will be a human tragedy in a

community such as this, and we will realize that there has been one of these stories going

on right under our noses. The television news will show pictures of a street like the one

we live on, of a house like ours, with the ambulance in the driveway or the police

cordoning off the yard. The people next door will be saying that these were good

neighbors, to all intents and purposes normal people, and that they never would have

expected this to happen.

The more we look, in fact, the more we may be likely to conclude that the harvest is

simply too great for us to handle. There are too many problems out there. The world around

us is very big and we are very small. We have enough troubles of our own without taking on

the woes of the world. What can our church do?

There is another voice, however. This other voice echoes the best of our church's past,

telling us of the immense and invaluable resource we have in our theology. We may not view

that resource in exactly the same way as our founders did. We certainly do not seem to

share their assumption that the task of the church was to go out into the world with

doctrinal sword in hand and do theological battle with tritheism. We no longer spend much

time preparing the necessary weapons, and we generally find little interest in this kind

of combat in the people we meet. Still, we remain members of this church primarily because

of its meaning for our lives. We have a sense of its value.

The question is, then, how we are to relate that sense of value to the needs we see in the

world around us. To return to the image of our text, what is our particular harvest? When

the Ad Hoc Committee was convened to develop ways to make Convention a more effective

body, Paul Maring of St. Louis proved an invaluable member. He took us through a process

of "strategic planning" which I will not take the time to outline, but which was very well

thought out. The one element of it that I would stress is its insistence on beginning with

a clear statement of mission. Paul had led this process for a number of organizations,

some non-profit and some commercial, and the principle was clear. If an organization could

not clearly state what its goals were--or more precisely, if the members of the

organization did not share a clear vision of those goals--the organization would not

prosper.

The usual situation, as Paul described it, sounded awfully familiar. The organization that

was looking for help would prove to be running largely on habit. Patterns of action would

have been formed early on, when the organization had a clear sense of where it wanted to

go, and while those patterns would have sustained the organization reasonably well, they

would tend to become less and less adequate as circumstances and personnel changed. The

members of the organization would in fact share some vague assumptions about their

mission, but would not have thought them through or articulated them. As soon as they

engaged in the hard work of being precise about their purposes, lights would begin to go

on and bells would begin to ring.

Absolutely critical to this process is that the answers come from within the organization

itself. To offer a simple example, if an outside consultant comes in and tells me what I

should do, I feel little responsibility for the success of the program. If it fails, it is

the consultant's fault. But if I make just one suggestion and that suggestion is taken

into account, then I have a personal investment in the program. Specifically, the more I

participate in formulating the mission statement, the more meaning it will have for me,

and the more I will be devoted to seeing it actually bear fruit.

In a way, the disciples did not have our problem. They had the Lord as their trainer. He

sent them out into the world around them with the clear and simple task of proclaiming the

coming of the kingdom of God. They went out with the conviction of disciples, fresh from

their own experiences of his teaching and especially of his person. We are left to do much

more of our own formulating. But then again, we have a resource they did not have, the

resource of our theology.

The core of its distinctive contribution to our world can be stated in a great many

different ways. At the moment, I would suggest something like "Human nature can be

changed," or perhaps "Love is not blind." Either of these can open up into the whole range

of teachings about our relationships to the Lord and to each other. Each has potent

implications for the choices we make. Each applies to all our activities, not just to our

efforts to deal with societal problems.

Attention to the ills of the world can leave us feeling that our everyday lives are

insignificant. When I volunteered at St. Francis House in Boston during my sabbatical

semester, I was struck with the thought of how completely this admirable effort to aid the

homeless depended on our socio-economic fabric. The maintenance and heating of the

building, the telephone service, the delivery of clothing, the growing, processing, and

delivery of food--without all of these, this direct help to people in need would simply

not be possible. Is the telephone lineman engaged in helping the homeless when he simply

does his job? If he does it honestly and well, yes. If not, he is part of the problem. He

is taking more out of the system than he is putting in, and it has to come from somewhere.

The point is that especially in a society as complex as ours, almost everything requires

thousands of little tasks faithfully done. The number of people involved in clothing and

feeding us is simply staggering. Our whole way of life depends absolutely on this

multiplicity of little things. As she often does, Helen Keller puts it all together:

Our will to act becomes vigorous in proportion to the frequency and definiteness of our

actions, and the brain grows to its exercise. Then truly it implements faith. When we let

a resolution of a fine emotion dissipate without results, it means more than lost

opportunity; it actually retards the fulfillment of future purposes and chills

sensibility. There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract but not enough for the

concrete, because we allow our daily bits of bravery to evaporate.

Amen.