Pastor's Column, January 2009

One of the comments I hear most often is, “our church has gotten so busy!” We’ve got an awful lot going on, and the period around Christmas has a particularly full calendar. When we get busy, it’s easy to get caught up in the rush of activities and lose focus on the point of all our business. That’s never a good thing, and it’s especially dangerous in a church, since our work only matters if we keep it connected to our reason for working. None of our services, events, or meetings matter if we don’t keep them focused on God.
This Christmas Eve, we’re focusing on both God and our neighbors. We will be giving our offering for the Christmas Eve service to the Salvation Army. More importantly, we will be posting flyers about the service around the downtown area and the neighborhood, and will specifically invite the families who come to the Lord’s Table on Christmas Eve to join us for worship. Please take a moment to invite your neighbors—friends and strangers both—to our service.
After church on December 28, we’ll be having a special congregational meeting to vote on the appointment of five new elders. This might seem like a dry formality, but I want to lift up the significance of that meeting. In our church, elders are called and ordained. When we ordains a ministers—pastoral ministers or elders—we are saying that we recognize and affirm a gift of God given to specific people to build up the community. And one of the basic principles of our church is that the gift of ministry has to be recognized and affirmed by God’s people. We have all sorts of boards, committees, and individual leaders, but all of those are secondary to the whole people of God. And so this business meeting is a holy time, a moment when we join together to speak the Word of God.
On January 4, the next week, the church will be celebrating our 175th anniversary. We will be learning about and reflecting some of the history of our church, and our celebration will be completed by the ordination of our new elders—a step into the future that will start the next 175 years of our church history. Afterwards, we’ll have a light lunch. All this will give us a chance to consider where we have been and where we are going, to think about the heritage that we are
January 11, the week after that, we’ll be introducing another step into the future. Back in November, the board decided to get involved in a process to help us open up to God’s calling for us, as a church and as individuals. Over the next year, we’ll be working with other Disciples churches in Indiana, regional staff, and an expert in church transformation. A group of church members will be the guides who lead the church through this process, and we’ll be lifting up them and the whole church.
So please take time to be involved in these celebrations, and pray with me that our business doesn’t turn into “busy-ness,” that we continue to do the Lord’s work and not just church work.