Oh, the mystery of it all

I led an event yesterday based on my affiliates study. There were about 30 clergy and lay leaders in attendance -- which brought home to me how concerned people are to find new ways of connecting with people.

In preparing for the day, I was struck once again by the deep mystery of faith. Over and over again this mystery is expressed in Scripture. Jesus' parables of growth in Mark 4 -- the parable of the Sower (or more accurately, the soils), the parable of the Seed Growing Secretly -- they tell us that the growth of the kingdom is pretty much out of our hands.

The Book of Acts describes this mystery too. The early missionaries go to a city, preach the Gospel, some scoff, many are indifferent, but some believe. And Luke doesn't seem to feel it necessary to account for the differences between them. He certainly doesn't attribute it to the clever strategies of the apostles. "Silver and gold have I none," Peter says to the crippled beggar in Acts 3, "but I'll give you what I do have" -- the name and power of Jesus Christ to make whole.

I'm sitting here looking down a list we made up a couple of years ago of younger folks who were kind of bobbing around the edges of our congregation -- showing up here and there, but not consistently. A handful are back. Quite a few are still bobbing. But a whole bunch have drifted even farther away. It's so easy to get discouraged. What could we be doing differently?

But then I think of the people who have arrived. And the people who have come alive. And there just doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, except that the Holy Spirit is at work.

Where we are perhaps failing as a church is not in producing the harvest, but in sowing the seed. I sense that we need a quantum shift in priorities, expectations and relationships, so that the bulk of our time and attention is turned to sharing Jesus. Not doing the demographics and the long-range planning as a prelude (or substitute) for sharing Jesus, but doing that first and the other stuff after. It sounds so simple, yet so much outside the familiar ministry boxes that I know I've been in.

Switching metaphors, Tom Bandy in his book The Roadrunner talks about the church's "fishing" mandate. Traditional churches, he says, would rather sit on the dock cutting bait, or set up "fish processing plants" where fish can be frozen or dried, or raise money to pay somebody else to fish -- anything except what Jesus commanded his disciples to do -- get out into the deep water, let down their nets, and fish!