The Book of Exodus tells us God inspired Moses to lead his people – the Israelites – to escape from bondage in Egypt and journey through a desert wilderness. Clearly, neither God nor Moses forced them to go. They wanted to be liberated. They chose to follow Moses into the unknown. Yet, as you heard, as soon as it dawned on them that water and food are limited in the desert, they began to complain: “We were better off in Egypt. At least we had pots of meat and plenty of bread. We should have stayed there to die, instead of dying of hunger in this wilderness.” This was only a few weeks after they had escaped and they were already giving up in despair!
I generally like being in an actual wilderness – but for a couple hours, no 40 days or 40 years! And I have gotten lost a couple times on hikes and it took twice as long to find my way back. That isn’t fun. Much harder and more scary are the spiritual and psychological wildernesses I have experienced. I imagine all of you have found yourselves in one or more of those. Wilderness journeys are just part of life. I am in one now – a wilderness of grief. I have never felt that God put me in a wilderness experience to test me. The opposite – God has always and is now helping me to get through it and helping me to find the nuggets of learning, of beauty, of healing in the midst of the hard parts.
I believe our spiritual community, our chosen family of the Church of the Village, is on a kind of wilderness sojourn, too. We have been on a journey of becoming a loving, deeply relational, progressive, inclusive, anti-racist church. Yet, we are making this journey as a church in a post-church world. What does that mean for us and more generally for all those who strive to really practice the teachings and example of Jesus? Our church community feels so alive, so vibrant, and is thriving in many ways, so it may feel odd to you to hear that we are wandering in a wilderness. But it sure feels like it to me.
All churches face huge challenges in the current historical context. In North America, Europe, and elsewhere, Christianity has experienced a steep membership decline for more than 50 years. This accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic. People have left churches, and often faith altogether, for many reasons. Often rising to the top tier in polls and surveys are:
1) the exclusion of LGBTQ+ persons and others by churches and whole denominations
2) the hypocritical and judgmental behavior of many churches and religious folks
3) the anti-science attitude of a significant percentage of Christians, including denial of climate change
4) what is often called the problem of evil – by which I mean the difficulty so many people have believing in an all-powerful (omnipotent) God who apparently refuses to intervene to end evil and unnecessary suffering or does so only in limited cases. This God is often presented as coercive, controlling, all-knowing, unchanging, and distant.
This decline has impacted every denomination and churches of every size. The United Methodist Church went from 10.7 million members in 1968, mostly in the U.S., to 5.4 million members in the U.S. The schism over LGBTQ+ inclusion is going to increase that drop significantly.
In the New York Annual Conference, for example, 75 percent of the congregations have 25 or fewer persons attending worship each week and most are seniors. Many United Methodist churches are not attracting any new members and certainly no young people. Hundreds or even thousands of UM churches across the U.S. will close in the next few years.
In our own relatively small congregation, we are doing better than many churches because we continue to attract new people every Sunday. We are drawing in a significant number of new members each year who are diverse in many ways and include many young adults. We have consistently excellent worship experiences. We have developed robust policies and processes and a strong and inclusive lay leadership. And we have broadened and deepened our theological understanding and spiritual connections in recent years, especially with our embrace of open and relational theology.
Yet, we face big financial challenges, including a big expensive building. We are dealing with a lawsuit inherited from the Washington Square UMC that will need to be resolved in the next 12-18 months. We will need to make some big and emotionally difficult decisions over the next couple years.
But is our situation hopeless? Should we just give up on trying to promote an open, relational, loving, inclusive, and justice-seeking way of being Christian? Should we say, like the Israelites in the desert, “It’s too hard – let’s go back to Egypt”? Absolutely not! While our success is never guaranteed, we should never discount what God might accomplish through us with our cooperation and collaboration. I am convinced that, now more than ever, God needs our witness along with the voices of thousands of communities like ours. The world needs us. Sometimes, the transformation we seek is right around the corner, but we can’t see it. I have been reading the book Do I Stay Christian? by Brian D. McLaren. I strongly recommend it. Brian writes:
“[R]eality isn’t simply what is. Reality also contains within it the seeds of what can be but is not yet. In other words, part of the reality to which we must be loyal is the future possibility that is subtly present in the present moment. (Richard Rohr says it like this: “Saying yes to ‘What is’ ironically sets us up for ‘What if?’”)
The truth is today we can see signs of a big shift. I believe that our open and relational theological perspectives provide coherent, deeply spiritual, and biblically-affirmed understandings of the character of God, how God relates to the world, and how the world actually functions. These theological perspectives have found a deep resonance in our own community. God led us to grasp an open and relational faith and practice that makes sense and strongly aligns with our deepest needs. And it has the potential to reach other churches in our Annual Conference, too. At a NY Conference clergy gathering in October, I was happily surprised to get 20 of my clergy colleagues to sign up for a study group process-relational theology. Moreover, my work on the new book, Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God, has taught me how widespread this seeking has become across North America and beyond. There is a large audience hungry for these perspectives among people in a broad spectrum of mainline and evangelical backgrounds.
The Church of the Village is a relative small community with big dreams. And I sense we feel ourselves called to be a leading church in promoting and helping to create a vital and transformative expression of what it means to follow Jesus in the risky times we inhabit. Where might God be leading us and what might we become along the way? What if? What if our efforts, combined with many others, could spark a much larger movement of God’s Spirit inspiring hundreds of thousands of Christians, ex-Christians, ex-evangelicals, progressive evangelicals, Catholics, and many among the Spiritual But Not Religious crowd to find their center in a God of uncontrolling love, deep relationality, and collaboration toward inclusive well-being?
Friends, we may be wandering, but we are not lost. We are on a sojourn with a purpose. We have a sense of the direction we need to go, even though we cannot know precisely what our future will look like. In Deuteronomy, we hear that God offered the Israelites a vision of “a good land…a land where…you will lack for nothing.” There was no guarantee they would make it. It took 40 years of struggle, disappointment, wrong turns, learning, and growing for the Israelites to get to their destination. And even after they arrived, the Bible makes clear this “promised land” was no paradise. They continued to struggle, suffer, make mistakes, evolve, and grow with God’s companionship, comfort, inspiration, and leading, no matter what they were going through.
We should expect the same. We won’t always hear God’s beckoning clearly or implement well the possibilities God offers us. We may end up in a very different place than we envision now, but be assured God will accompany and guide us every step of the way.
My prayer is that we journey together with a sense of hope and adventure. We have built up our courage, resilience, persistence, perseverance over many years of striving and struggle. Let us hold onto these and keep listening deeply to one another and to God’s leading. Let’s keep following Jesus by treating one another with love, compassion, forgiveness, humility, and self-giving. Let’s be patient with those among us who walk more slowly and with those who want to race ahead. Let’s cherish our beautiful spirit of openness to trying new things, while expecting some of what we try will fail. In the midst of it all, I know we will also find plenty of opportunities to laugh as much as cry, experience joy as much as sadness, to tell stories and make new ones. I am so glad to be on this journey with you, infused with and led by God’s uncontrolling, persuasive love.
1 Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned (St. Martin’s Press, 2022).
Exodus 16:1-3 (The Inclusive Bible)
From Elim [the Israelites] set out again,
and the whole community reached the wilderness of Syn,
which is between Elim and Sinai,
on the fifteenth day of the second month after they left Egypt.
They began to complain against Moses and Aaron there in the wilderness. The people of Israel said to them,
“If only we had died by YHWH’s hand in the land of Egypt,
when we sat next to pots of meat and ate our bread till we were filled!
But now you have brought the whole community out
into this wilderness to die of hunger!”
Deuteronomy 8:1-10 (The Inclusive Bible)
[God said],
“Observe with great care every command that I give to you this day,
so that you may flourish, and may take possession of the land
that YHWH swore to give to your ancestors.
Remember how YHWH, your God, led you on a wandering path
through the desert for forty years, humbling and testing you,
to learn what was in your heart;
whether you would keep God’s commands or not.
God humbled you with hunger and then fed you manna,
which was unknown to you and to your ancestors,
to teach you that you cannot live on bread alone,
but on every word that flows from the mouth of YHWH.
Your clothes did not wear out,
nor did your feet swell up during those forty years.
Understand within you that as a parent disciplines a child,
so God disciplines you.
So keep the commandments of YHWH;
walk with reverence in the ways of God.
For YHWH, your God, is bringing you into a good land –
a land with streams and pools of water,
with springs flowing in the valleys and in the hills,
a land of wheat, barley, vines, fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey,
a land where bread will not be scarce and where you will lack for nothing,
a land where rocks are iron and copper is dug out of hills.
You will eat and have your fill,
and you will praise YHWH, your God, for the good land given to you.
The Word of Life and Salvation
Thanks be to God.
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