Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 18, 2007

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Five years ago yesterday, March 17, 2002, was a pivotal day in my life. I frankly don’t remember much of it. I remember being here leading worship with those of you who were here then for the first time. It’s hard to imagine now, but the only ones of you I knew even a little bit were the members of the search committee. And Manny. I’d met Manny at various Conference functions before that day. I remember waiting here in the sanctuary with my wife Francie of blessed memory and our two adult children while you repaired to the Fellowship Hall. I remember being called into the Fellowship Hall and being told that you had voted unanimously to call me as your pastor. I remember Ron Park hitting me up to give a talk at Monroe Kiwanis ten days later and telling me exactly what he wanted me to say. Most of all I remember the warm welcome you gave me and my family. I was pleased, gratified, and apprehensive. You mean I really got a call to pastoral ministry? That’s what I’d wanted for so long and worked so hard for, but now what? Now what do I do actually? I had very little clue. I didn’t know what to expect from you, and you sure didn’t know what to expect from me. We were entering together on a new adventure, and neither you nor I knew where it would lead.

Today, five years later, we’re still engaged in that adventure together, and this morning, rather than give a regular sermon, I want to take a look back over the last five years and reflect some on where we have come together in that time. Next Saturday, March 24, will be the five year anniversary of my first official day as your pastor, and next Sunday I want to take look forward at what I can discern about where we are headed together. But today let’s look back over the past five years to see how far we’ve come.

I can illustrate how far we’ve come with a story from rather early in my time here. In the spring of 2003, with the cabinet’s approval, I created a group that came to known as the Renewal Taskforce. At one of the first meetings of that little group I asked the question: What difference would it make to Monroe and Sky Valley if this church weren’t here? Not what difference would it make to the people in the church. I knew what difference it would make to them. What difference would it make to the people of this area outside the church? The answer that we all came up with was not very encouraging. We all answered that question: Not much, and that answer highlighted the major issue the church faced in those days. We did not have a clear identity. We did not have a clear mission. We did not clearly know what our place and role in this corner of God’s creation were. We did not clearly know who we were called to serve or what sorts of people we might be able to reach. Clearly, we had a lot of work to do.

A good deal of work had already been done. After a long period in which the church had had either virtually no pastoral leadership or pastoral leadership that was not a good fit for the church, things began to turn around during the one year tenure of my immediate predecessor Diane Schmitz. In early 2001, under her leadership, the church adopted its current Mission Statement. That statement, which is printed on the back of your bulletin each week in case you haven’t seen it, is a visionary expression of a progressive, Open and Affirming faith. Yet it was only a beginning, and in 2002 and 2003 some real lack of clarity remained about just who this church is. Although the Mission Statement contains an Open and Affirming affirmation, the church did not consider itself Open and Affirming, for reasons that don’t really matter any more. There was a sense that we were the progressive Christian alternative in town. When I came you were already saying things like “we take the Bible seriously, not literally.” You already had the motto “uniting faithfulness with discovery.” Yet our identity as the Open and Affirming, progressive Christian alternative in the area was at the time inchoate at best, and it certainly wasn’t known by much of anyone outside the walls of this church.

And then there was the problem of demographics. It’s hard to imagine now, but when I came to this church five years ago there was not one child in this congregation. No infants. No toddlers. No preschoolers. No grade school kids. No youth. There was no Sunday School because there were no Sunday School age kids. There was no child care because there were no children who needed it. There was no children’s time in the service because the 50-somethings were the young people in the congregation. Now, a church certainly does not consist only of young families with children. This church had—and has—a solid core of long time members, most of them senior citizens in 2002, who had been the church for many years and still were—and are—its backbone, its solid foundation. We value all of our members of whatever age. That being said, the total lack of young families and children in 2002 indicated a problem. It indicated that the church was stagnating, not attracting new people of any age. It was a worry because those faithful souls who had been the church for so many years knew that they couldn’t keep doing it all forever. Clearly, we had a lot of work to do.

And then there was the real world problem of money. When you called me five years ago, you called me part time. You couldn’t afford full time ministry. There weren’t enough people to support full time ministry. There wasn’t enough income. Diane had been part-time too because that was all you could afford. Yet we all more or less knew that real church renewal takes full time pastoral leadership. Clearly, we had a lot of work to do.

These three major problems—lack of a clear identity, lack of young families, and lack of money—were, and are, all closely related. In those early days of my ministry here, whenever I tried to work through how to go about addressing those problems, the one conclusion I kept coming back to again and again was that we had to start with the identity piece. I didn’t know how to attract young families, and the conventional wisdom is that a church can’t attract what it doesn’t have. I couldn’t waive a magic wand and create a bunch of new money. I could, however, work with the church to develop a clear identity, to define its mission and its purpose for being. That’s what I was hoping the Renewal Taskforce would help us do, and it did. People would ask me how we were going to attract families with children. I’d say: We will start to attract them when someone with children comes and stays anyway because of the message. Identity was the key to attracting new people, and attracting new people was one key (not the only one) to solving the financial issues. And I’d say: Some of those families will probably be gay and lesbian families, because, popular stereotypes to the contrary notwithstanding, gay and lesbian families have children; and we will make them more welcome here than they would be anywhere else in this town. Identity was the key to solving all the church’s problems, and Open and Affirming was the key to that identity.

Well, we’ve come a long way, haven’t we. We are now officially Open and Affirming and have been for nearly three and a half years. We’ve gotten a bit notorious around here for it. It has cost us at least one member, and it has cost me community relationships and opportunities to serve. One local pastor even called me “apostate” because of it. Another told me that if I didn’t change my ways both I and my church would fall because of our sinful beliefs. But look at us today! We’re growing, and there is a new energy and a new optimism around here that I think, if we’re honest about us, those of us who were here five years ago weren’t all that sure we’d ever see. We have children. We have Sunday School and child care and a children’s time in the service. And some of those children are from lesbian families, just like I thought they would be. It started when Kim and Anya came and stayed anyway because of the message. And then the Bahreys, the Hollands with their grandson Isaiah, Cindy and Diana with Jesse, the Neves, and all the rest of you. Now people come and stay because we have children and children’s programs when before they used to leave because we didn’t.

And it all flows from your vision and your courage in claiming and proclaiming your identity as the Open and Affirming, progressive, non-literal Christian alternative in Monroe and Sky Valley. And so I think it is providential that our Epistle lesson this morning is that great, absolutely foundational passage from II Corinthians. There Paul says that in Christ everything old has passed away and everything is made new. And then: “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.” II Cor. 5:18-19 NRSV That is our message, the reconciliation of all people in Christ, reconciliation to God and to one another. We proclaim God’s unconditional love for all people. We do not let ancient cultural prejudices that made their way into the ancient writings that became the Bible blind us to that unconditional love. We proclaim Christ’s word of reconciliation for all people. That is our identity. We have claimed it, proclaimed it, and it is making us new, alive, and whole. We have done it together. It is not my doing, it is our doing. By the grace of God we’ve come an awfully long way together in the last five years. Let us pray without ceasing that God will continue to guide and to bless us as we move ahead, always proclaiming that nothing, absolutely nothing can separate us—or anyone else—from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.