rich’s blog

Okay, alright. It’s like the first church of chatty kathy up in here. Let’s pray.

Prayer:

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus

Today:

So today we’re continuing to talk about things that the church has to talk about. We’re having an internal conversation.

And what we’re talking about is volunteerism.

Yeah, baby. That’s right. Volunteerism. Sounds compelling, hunh? I mean, just hearing the world sets our adrenal glands off, right? We can barely contain ourselves. “Calm down, Jeff, hold it in.”

Problems, Disclosure:

Actually, I had a difficult time–not only with putting together today’s message, but with the language of it, right? Should we talk about volunteerism, volunteering, being the church? Today we’re talking about some basic things: what it means for us to join together and get the business of God done. And we’ll use the words volunteerism, volunteering, because they’re words we’re familiar with. I hope you won’t hate me for it.

And this gathering together that we do, to do stuff as the church and for the church, for one another is not just one of the biggest miracles there is, but also one of the biggest problems, because all sorts of dysfunctional behavior rises to the surface when you try to work with people the way we’re supposed to work together. So it’s a fun topic. Exciting.

All is Strange & Vague.

And along with this exciting topic, I thought it would be good to have fresh in our minds that 1 Corinthians passage that was just read to us. And I know that few of us have ever heard or seen this passage before; I know it’s unfamiliar and strange. And I’m sorry if its newness makes us uncomfortable.

I’m kidding right? If you drive by a church building enough times you’ll eventually memorize this passage. I think I used it a few months ago. But sometimes common things are important things, right? Water. Housing. Footwear.

So we will look at it again; it’s important, and relevant.

Boundaries:

But before we start, let me just lay out a primary boundary for our discussion, if that’s okay.

We aren’t talking today about our need to go volunteer in the world, to join in, in the name of Jesus, on some good thing some group is doing.

Remember, this is an internal conversation we’re having, and what we’re talking about is what it means to volunteer, to do work, for and in the church. The church is the context for our discussion today. And not the capital-C, “universal church,” all God’s babies, but really, the local church.

Which for us means…us. Smoky Row Brethren Church.

At base, we’re talking about what it means to act on behalf of, volunteer for, the maintenance and promotion of Smoky Row Brethren Church. I mean, this is the boundary of our discussion.

So let’s do this thing.

Today’s Passage:

If we’ve been a part of a church for, say, a year, then someone has brought to our attention the passage that this morning was brought to our attention. It’s basic, in the sense that it presents some fundamental information about what a church is and isn’t.

Let me read it again. Listen along, if you could; you can turn to your Bibles in one second.

There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work.

Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. To one there is given through the Spirit a message of wisdom, to another a message of knowledge by means of the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by that one Spirit, to another miraculous powers, to another prophecy, to another distinguishing between spirits, to another speaking in different kinds of tongues, and to still another the interpretation of tongues. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he distributes them to each one, just as he determines.

Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.

Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

Now: I am not going to do world-changing exegesis here, but let me say a couple of things about this passage.

Today’s Passage: A Coupla Things

First of all, we could draw out any number of worthwhile things from this passage, and they would be good. This is probably why the passage, and those around it, are so popular. We could engage with all sorts of tricky church practice questions. But like so many things in our lives, figuring out how to limit ourselves well is important. So we’re simply not going to talk about all the things we could.

The context of this passage is important. It’s in a big section where Paul, the author of 1 Corinthians, is trying to talk to the church at the city of Corinth about basic church life; what to do when they gather together, how to interact with one another when they are so different, what worship should look like. He’s laying stuff out; and his position on these things is based entirely on his theology. We can see that in today’s passage, right?

Everything he says about the church relates to theological truths: For example: We all have the same Holy Spirit, who works in different ways, yes, and gives different gifts to each of us, but unites us together into one body; Jesus’ body on earth. We’re one body–Jesus’ body–and each one of us is a body part, but we’re all animated and held together by the Holy Spirit.

Is this new information? It’s not, really, right? We’re the body of Christ on earth, the church, and Jesus says that we’ll do as his body greater things than he did.

Today’s Passage: Highlights

And people will highlight various things from this passage: If our church is full of people who are insecure in certain ways, and want to be the center of attention, the most important folk in the room, we’ll highlight how it’s the hidden body parts that we take the most care of, how Paul reminds us that we honor the highest those body parts that aren’t extravagant, all up in your face, show-offy, and celebrities. And it’s a little warning that if you want the spotlight, be careful; because God doesn’t always honor the person in the spotlight as much as, say, the unnoticed operator behind it.

If we know our church is full of people who, because of all sorts of terrible lies we’ve learned from friends and family and the world, really believe we are no good, without usefulness, we’ll use this passage and others like it to point out how important every body part is. Which is true, but doesn’t always connect with us if our parents told us we were useless they whole time we were growing up, right? We’ll come back to this before the morning’s over.

But let me assume, just for kicks, and just for a little while, that we are a church where everyone shows up, everyone realizes that they have not only an important, honorable part in this body, but an important part to play. I’ll just assume that we have experienced the truth that each one of us, each part, has equal concern for each other, and we realize that “if one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”

I’ll assume that we have shared in the sadnesses of one another, have shared in the excitements & joy of one another, that when one of us is picked out, especially honored, that we all take joy in that, and that when one of us is picked off, especially troubled, we are each troubled and hurt with them.

I’ll assume we’re like Voltron.

You remember Voltron, right? The wildly popular 80s anime cartoon?

Five pilots who control robot lion spaceships that join together to form Voltron, a giant robot who protects their planet? But you can’t form Voltron unless all the robot lions are there, right? Every pilot has a part to play, is a part of Voltron.

People of God, I know you had televisions in the 80s.

Voltron: Picture

Voltron can do anything, when all the robot lions play their part, join together to form Voltron. This is like the church. We pilot robot lion spaceships, every one of us. And if you think Voltron can do anything, you should see the body of Christ when we get rolling.

Here it is:

Here it is, here’s the basic point I want us to hold onto for right now: It takes all of us to do our business. We get this right? Can we at least intellectually assent to the idea that it takes all of us.

It takes all of us to take care of our business, church business? We understand the concept?

Assuming we understand this concept, that in order for us to do our business we all have to show up, what things to do we need–conditions, virtues, attitudes–for us to have the best possible situation for volunteering that we can possibly have. Pragmatically, practically, what helps best position us to have a situation wherein we can best do the church stuff that we do?

And you, O Philosophical One, might ask? “What is ‘best?’” And I would respond, “O Philosophical One, it’s at least a situation where it’s easy to volunteer, where volunteering is one step in the process of individual and collective church maturity, where God is noted and glorified in the volunteering time.” And a bunch of other things, but at least these.

So: the best situation.

The Best Situation: Time

Time.

We are too busy. And we bemoan this all the time, but the reality is that many of us–and if not you, pray holy one for the rest of us–but we are addicted to, and imprisoned by, calendars in which we have given over all of our time. We have shows to watch, places to come and go to, games to play, people to respond to, a thousand updates to read, jobs to do, things to maintain, and all the pebble-sized, attention-demanding things that fit in the cracks between this stuff.

We have embraced a way of living in which many of us no longer feel control over the events of our lives. Some of us are out of control, and controlled not by God, or Love, but by glowing rectangles, sound-bytes, and speakers.

And we know that for the church to be good, for the church–us–to fulfill God’s hopes for us–that it requires time, right? It takes time to take care of business, whether that business is putting on an event like this worship service, or painting or pulling weeds, or making friends, or redrafting constitutions. It all takes time; we know this.

And we shove the needs of the church right into our calendars, with all the rest, squeezing our lives even tighter than they are. We cannot live two or three people’s lives worth of stuff in the tiny one-person space of time each of us have been given.

The best situation for us would be to check ourselves, and figure out how we can live individual lives that have time in them to not only take care of the business of the church–work days and life groups and food pantries and learning opportunites–but the business of being alive generally: work and rest and play.

I honestly think that we are strangling to death our spiritual selves, and the church itself, becoming murderers, by filling our lives too full, and not leaving enough time in them.

The Best Situation: Gifts

Gifts.

Maybe this goes without saying: but the best situation in a body is when the heart beats blood, the lungs oxygenate it, the eyes see and the ears hear. I mean body parts are specialized, right? They have different functions, and yet they are all good, and important. Each of the Lion robots belonged in a particular place in Voltron; it’s just how it worked.

The best situation for taking care of our needs, the needs of Smoky Row Brethren Church, is one in which all of us are acting with the skill & power of the gifts that the Holy Spirit has given to us.

This does not excuse us from doing things we are not “best” at.

I remember–the image is burned on my brain–of a picture I saw in 9th grade of a person who had lost their thumb in an accident, and had, instead, a big toe transplanted there. Crazy.

You’d never be born with a big toe for a thumb, but this person’s body was able to function as a body should, do all the things a body does, because this thumb was acting like a toe.

Do I have to connect the dots, really? Sometimes we do need to do that which we are not gifted for. And it’s not ideal; it’s simply imperative. It has to be that way.

But the reason we identify spiritual gifts, pray about how we can serve the church in a gifted way, do these sorts of things is because the best situation is one in which all of us are acting out of our gifted strengths & power to do what we do best.

The Best Situation: Invitation & Responsibility

And the best situation is one in which it is common to invite one another to use our gifts to meet church needs. I mean, this is basic–everything I’ve said is basic–but this is basic-basic. If we as members of the church have a need, that need should be shared, so that it can be met. And if we, as a church, the collective lot of us, a body, have a need, that need, too, should be shared so that it can be met.

And ideally, we share it one-on-one, but sometimes we just have to broadcast that sucker. Because let’s be honest, we can’t meet the needs we don’t know exist, can we? Needs are meant to be shared. It is unfair for us to grow bitter or hurt if people do not notice and meet needs we have left unshared.

But the partner to invitation is responsibility, right? If we are invited to meet a church need, we have a responsibility to consider how we might meet that need. In some instances, we have an obligation to meet that need. This is just true.

And it doesn’t mean that we can say, “You have to help me.” When Paul says that we must both “carry our own load,” and “carry one another’s burdens” he’s pointing out this tension-truth, that we are individuals with personal responsibility who have been joined together and are now responsible for each other.

We could say so much more about this: How we can’t ignore needs because we weren’t personally use the excuse that we weren’t personally asked ignore needs.

I mean, how many of us have noticed something that needs attended to, a church need, and either ignored it “Someone else will pull those weeds!” or blamed someone “Why didn’t so and so get those weeds pulled! It’s their responsibility!” I’m pretty sure that’s not best practices.

And a strong organization can help with this, right? That’s not today’s discussion, but ideally, there’s a church structure that’s known, and church needs are allotted to various ministry teams formed by various people, and if you or I see a need, we gently go to the representative of the appropriate ministry and we say, “Hey, I noticed weeds need pulled. I wanted to let you know I noticed it, and offer my help in some way.” And honestly, we’re getting there. A good organization structure can position a church for this best situation we’ve been talking about. And by the end of the year, I think we’ll be rolling with this. It makes me happy.

But: a little summary on this one. The best situation would be an environment where church needs are shared, individual needs are shared, we are always on the look out for ways to meet both individual and church needs, and we take responsibility for helping to meet the needs we become aware of. We don’t have the luxury of saying “That’s not my problem.”

This isn’t a tall order; this is simply giving voice to needs, and meeting them, right? Acting with the smallest bit of mature responsibility.

The Best Situation: Freedom & Control

Let me make a bold claim, and suggest that we don’t know everything. That not one of us knows everything there is about everything.

Okay; except for you.

In the best situation when we are trying as a church to meet the church’s needs, and do the church’s work, sustaining and promoting Smoky Row, we are teaching one another how to do things, right? We are teaching one another how to do the things we do. For those of us who are really good at x, we are teaching others how to do x. For those of us who are great at y, we’re teaching others how to do y really well.

But this isn’t so easy, right? For various reasons. I mean, think for a second of something you’re good at. It can be building a turbine engine, dusting, praying, thinking of clever tweets, model airplanes. Anything. Now, who here thinks that their way of doing this thing they are good at is a pretty good way. I mean, you’re good at it, right? You’re competent; your way of doing the thing works, it’s proven. If you teach someone how to do something, you’re going to teach them your way of doing it.

But that gets tricky. They might, after learning, do it a different way. And you might lose a little bit of control, right? In the best situation, we acknowledge to ourselves that it is hard to give up control over a task, we tell the person we’re teaching that they might learn another way to do this job, and if it works for them, then its okay, and you’ll be around to answer any questions they have.

Sometimes we ask a person to do something, don’t teach them how to do it, and then when they discover on their own a way to get the job done, we get mad at them for not doing it our way. Do I need to point out how unhelpful that is? I do, don’t I? Because it’s like normal church practice in some places; and it can’t be here, not among us.

Again: we need to really empower people to do things well, which means training them to do what we do, and offering help if they need it in the future; but allowing them to do it their way. Allowing them even to fail, but safely, with our support and our kindness, positioning them for humility & more learning. I would take the risk of failing and embrace the humility of learning in a heartbeat in an environment like that. Good guides don’t laugh when a person slips off a path, even if we’ve told them to keep away from the edge.

So for those of us in positions as teacher & trainer: how can we give up control? how can we help well? For those of us in positions as learners; how can we learn well, and trust in our own strengths? And this is a conversation we’ll be having as a whole church as we begin to put leadership development strategies into place.

The Best Situation: Truth-Experiencing Moments

Remember my made up assumption from earlier? That we’ve all experienced how important we are, we know what our gifts & strengths are, and we have shared in the joys and the pains of each other, have experienced the fact that the body has need of us, that we are needed.

It wasn’t a good assumption, not really.

It’s probably not true, even for how small a group we are this morning.

Some of us may still mourn, just slightly, when others are rejoiced over, because of our own fears & insecurities; some of us may rejoice the smallest bit when others are troubled, because of our bitterness & our hurts. Some of us just don’t buy the notion that because we come together now, because we’ve been parts in this body for a length of time, have shared in the Spirit that is pumped by God throughout this body, we are objectively, truly, linked together. We just don’t buy it; we might even think we can slip out unnoticed, and it would make no difference.

Except it would, it does.

Has your leg ever gone numb? and so you stand, thinking that’ll help, and it tingles and it’s terrible; I can’t describe this, you have to experience it, right? standing on a numb leg. The church, our church, can sometimes be a place where we are a body standing on numb legs, where our hearing has gone out for a minute, or our eyesight. All it takes is for any one of us to show up and reject, say no, give up our role & purpose, as a part of this body.

And a body simply cannot do all that much when it’s momentarily blinded, deafened, numb; the body is paralyzed to act.

Our actions affect one another, Smoky Row Brethren Church. While we weren’t looking, something happened: we became linked together.

And I don’t enjoy talking about this, because it’s not fun; it can cause us to feel defensive for all sorts of reasons; but I’m just telling the truth.

Just as a body is more than the sum of it’s parts, but something else–you get this, right? I mean a pile of legs and arms and organs isn’t a person, is it?–But just as a body is more than the sum of it’s parts, so a church, our church, is bigger than all of us showing up: and yet, if you take away any one of us, our body is affected by it. This is truth; and in some measure, I suspect, we have experienced this.

But in the best situation, the best situation, a situation in which we are working to meet our needs as a church, as the body of Christ, one key thing we are doing is creating moments to experience this bit of true fact as reality. Does this make sense? If whenever we do a church thing–a potluck or painting, start a new club or clean something, teach or learn–if we do what we can to help each other realize that we affect this church, that is good.

We affect Smoky Row Brethren Church; our gifts matter, and we ourselves, individuals, are factors in the final sum of Smoky Row’s health. And knowing this factually is qualitatively different than experiencing it. We should try hard to create moments where we experience ourselves as vital parts of Smoky Row’s body. Because the Spirit does flow through all of us, and we are bound together in Jesus’ name.

For some of us this means taking enormous risk, or doing great soul work before the Lord; for some of us it means simply telling another person that we value them, or asking someone if we’re valued.

I don’t want to be a part of a church whose parts are all numb, connected but not really engaged, sleeping. And I know none of us do.

So listen to me, really:

I need you, not as pastor, maybe as rich, but just basically as another part of the body we form. I need you to show up, shake yourself awake, risk engaging, and position me to experience the truth–not just be able to recite it–that my engagement with this body of ours really is important. And in return I can make this promise: to try and position you to experience the same truth, that you matter here. We matter here.

Each of us pilots a robot lion spaceship; and if we don’t show up: no Voltron.

Conclusion:

So we’ve talked about a few things, right? Tips & techniques that we should be aware of if we’re going to help create the best situation for taking care of business, our own churchy business.

We’ve talked about how we need to examine our time, create space to do things for one another and all of us, how we need to discover our gifts and act out of them, while not neglecting the simple needs that we as a church must attend to.

We’ve talked about the imperative we have to invite one another into our needs, and the responsibility we have to meet needs when we’re able. And we’ve discussed how important it is to position each other to experience the truth that every part does matter, each person here has a spiritual stake–is spiritually staked to–the health of the whole.

And we do have needs as a church; we always will. And this is a sign of health & growth, isn’t it? Healthy, thriving bodies take care of themselves. But better than this is Paul’s promise that the Spirit of God is pumping right through us, binding us together & giving to each of us just what our church, Smoky Row Brethren Church, needs to take care of itself.

We can’t forget this, as we join together to take care of the work of the church, as best as we’re able: we have what we need to take care of our needs.