THE STATE OF THE CHURCH (2007)

a sermon preached by
the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society
in Carlisle, Massachuesetts
Sunday May 6th, 2007

Those of you who have been around here at least as long as I have know that each year I like to preach an annual “State of the Church” Sermon on the Sunday of the Annual Meeting. This year, though, things are a little different -- this year I’m preaching this sermon two weeks earlier than I usually would, because two weeks from now I’ll be up in Portland Maine awaiting the results of the congregational vote to call me as their next settled minister...

And even though we are already talking about this as if it were a done deal (which it’s not -- the still do actually have to take a vote), it is also a good opportunity to look back at my four years here, and perhaps celebrate some of the things that we have accomplished together in the time I’ve been here, as well as to let go of any disappointments we may be feeling about things we wish we might have done a little differently. And it is also a good opportunity (at least from my perspective) to take a step back, and then from that detached and dispassionate point-of-view, to share with you as objectively and candidly and in as loving and kindly a manner as I can some of the things I have seen and learned about this church in the past four years, in the hope that this information might prove useful to all of you in the months and years ahead.

But first I want to take a moment to dispel a couple of rumors which, if I’ve heard them, I’m pretty sure many of you have heard too. To begin with, I did not decide to move on from here because I was dissatisfied with the size of my paycheck, and wanted more money. Attitudes about money were a factor in my decision (and depending on how the time goes I may have a little more to say about that later when I talk about Stewardship). But in terms of my own compensation package, as I have said many times before, Parker and I have very simple tastes and very modest needs, and have never had any trouble living comfortably within our means. Furthermore, I’m not really going to be earning that much more in Portland than I do right now...although I do suspect I will be able to get a little more for my money “Down East” than I can here in the suburbs of the Hub of the Universe.

As for the second rumor, I didn’t decide to leave Carlisle because (as one of you so eloquently put it the other day) the “turkeys” have finally gotten me down. To begin with, as far as I can tell, there are no real turkeys in this congregation... (although last Sunday we did have a couple of live chickens here in attendance). But the plain and simple truth of the matter is that ministry is simply hard work, and no one really knows or appreciates this more than someone who’s been doing it for as long as I have.

Part of the “mystique” of ministry is that we try to make it look easy, and natural, and effortless -- as though it were actually God working through us, rather than the ministers trying to do it all themselves. And over time one also learns that there are limits to how much any single human being can reasonably expect to do, or how much you can control...that things aren’t always going to turn out exactly the way you’d planned or would want them to, and that you don’t always see people at their very best either (especially at times of crisis in their lives, which ministers see a lot).

And most of all, you learn that you really shouldn’t take it personally, because at the end of the day it really IS God working through you (or at least attempting to, if you can just keep your own ego out of the way), and that no one can do this job for very long without some sort of divine intervention and assistance.

If I did have to characterize my reasons for leaving Carlisle, they would mostly be of a much more personal nature. I’m sure this comes as no surprise to many of you, but I have never really felt as at home here in the land of the bears and the mosquitos as I had hoped to -- and this actually has a lot more to do with the nature of the town than with the church itself, and with my own personality as opposed to any external consideration.

I feared when I first agreed to come to Carlisle that I would feel somewhat socially isolated out here in the woods, and I hoped that I would find ways of adapting. Unfortunately, “adapting” turned out to mean getting in my car and driving somewhere else. As a minister, it’s nice to be able to spend an hour or two in the afternoon getting out of the parsonage and going to the gym, then maybe getting a cup of coffee and reading or writing in a quiet cafe for awhile before coming back to church to attend an evening meeting. But when you have to spend another couple of hours driving back and forth between all those places, it starts to feel a little inconvenient.

Likewise, the kind of work that I came here four years ago expecting to do, and the kind of work I found here waiting for me that desperately needed to be done, turned out to be very different from one another. I tried to do the work that needed to be done, and I like to think that together we’ve made at least a little progress; but I also feel like I’ve done about as much of that work as I am able to, while the other work is still waiting for me.

And this brings me to the real reason I have decided to leave FRS, which is that this opportunity in Portland was simply too good for me to pass up, and those folks weren’t going to wait around for me to finish celebrating the 250th anniversary with all of you, much less taking my scheduled six-month sabbatical the following year, and then returning for a subsequent obligatory year of service afterwards.

And I understand that my work in Portland will probably not be anything like I expect it to be either, and that there will no doubt be many days when I look back nostalgically at the time I spent with this congregation, and think fondly of the many friends I have made here in the past four years. But the truth is, I have always been something of a “restless soul.” And it really does feel like it is time to be moving on.

But as I promised earlier, before I go I do have a few observations and insights about the future of this congregation which I think you may find valuable, especially if you are willing to listen closerly and consider them carefully, and then take it to heart, and accept what I have to say in the same generous and dispassionate spirit in which it is offered. And as I mentioned in my newsletter column this past week, these observations basically fall into the three broad areas of Mission, Vision, and Stewardship.

The basic mission of the church (or perhaps I should say, of religious communities in general) hasn’t really changed all that much in thousands of years. But our understanding of that mission, and our ability to adapt it to different contexts and situations, changes almost constantly.

When I graduated from Divinity School, I had an understanding of the mission of the church that was based on the writings of the 19th century German Sociologist of Religion Ernest Troeslsch (and yes, it’s OK to laugh at both his name and my intellectual pretension), and influenced to a large degree by the interpretations of Troelsch by the Unitarian Social Ethicist James Luther Adams.

I believed that the church was a human-scale voluntary association, in which we intentionally create a beloved community and a sanctuary from the pressures of day-to-day living, so that people might come together and connect with one another in a more profound way, centering themselves both emotionally and psychologically as they devote their attention to exploring more deeply their own spiritual lives, and pursuing that “free and responsible search for truth and meaning” we hear so much about; and then returning to their daily lives possessing both the wisdom and the inspiration to transform the world around them for the better.

I still tend to see the mission of the church this way, but over the years I’ve also become a lot more pragmatic about it. As many of you have heard me say before, for many years now I’ve suggested that the mission of the church can basically be boiled down to five core tasks: Worship, Education, Fellowship, Community Outreach, and Pastoral Care -- tasks which I just recently realized I “borrowed” at some point in my career from ideas contained in the now-famous bestselling author and megachurch pastor Rick Warren’s earlier book The Purpose-Driven Church, and adapted to fit a Unitarian Universalist context. And realizing this, I have also now decided that there are actually seven core purposes: which is to say that two of these tasks are complicated enough that they might easily be subdivided.

Worship is one very obvious mission of the church. There are lots of different theologies of worship, but in my theology Worship is a time when we recreate through ritual the fundamental, life-transforming experience of the church as a whole. We come together at a designated hour in a sacred space -- a space we MAKE sacred by our presence in it -- in order to be together with one another in community, and to devote ourselves to a period of learning, introspection, and self-discovery, so that we might return to the world wiser and inspired to make it better.

The Mission of Education is equally obvious: Church is a place where we learn how to become people of faith, and all the other things we need to know in order to live our lives as good and decent souls. And Pastoral Care is perhaps the mission we intuitively think of first when we ask ourselves the question “what do churches do?” What do Churches Do? They care for people in times of grief, and illness, and spiritual crisis.

It’s the tasks of Fellowship and Outreach that are more complicated than first meets the eye. The term “fellowship” is often understood as a synonym for community itself, that experience of what the Greek New Testament calls koinania or “life in common,” the experience of being a member of the family of God, and thus brothers and sisters to one another.

But there is another aspect of Fellowship which I have come to think of as the Mission of Hospitality, of actively welcoming strangers into our community as our guests. Without an active mission of Hospitality, the experience of Fellowship quickly becomes closed and insular, more like a club than a real church. This is why the Scripture cautions us “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” (Hebrews 13: 2)

The same “brotherly love” which we would naturally express to members of our own family should in turn be extended to all God’s children, since we can never be certain what important message these sojourners may be bringing to us. Pilgrims require hospitality in order to safely complete their pilgrimages. And likewise, those who offer hospitality to pilgrims receive the gift of their wisdom, and inspiration.

And the same is also true of the Mission of Outreach. Like a lot of religious liberals, I tend to think of Outreach principally in terms of Social Action -- that ultimate expression of our spirituality by which we attempt to change the world and make it better. But this is only half the story. We also have a mission to proclaim our “Good News,” to participate in a little old-fashioned evangelism as we share our message of “salvation” with others.

In other words, we witness our faith not only through our good works, but also through our willingness to actively invite others into partnership with us. And by partnership I mean FULL partnership -- not just some sort of “associate” status where we still make all the decisions, while they take over the work itself.

Worship, Education, Koinania (or “Community”), Hospitality, Social Action, Evangelism, and Pastoral Care. This is the mission of the church as I see and understand it now. But my personal Vision of how FRS might best achieve this mission doesn’t really matter much any more (if indeed it ever did). It’s YOUR Vision for the future of this church that truly matters. And this has been true right from the beginning of my ministry here.

I know there are people here in this congregation who wish that I had been a little more vocal about articulating my personal hopes and dreams for the future of FRS, who equate that kind of assertiveness with strong leadership and fault me for failing to assert myself more strongly. And I know there are others who feel that I was far too outspoken about these things as it was, and that I would have been a lot better off just keeping my eyes on my own work and my mouth shut. And again, I don’t take any of this personally, because I understand that it just sorta comes with the territory.

But from where I stand now, it appears to me that this church basically has its choice of three different paths...and the good news is that you don’t have to look very far down the road to see where each path leads. The first choice is to do nothing at all: to try to keep things just the way they’ve always been by avoiding change whenever possible. The problem with this path is that even if you could successfully keep the church itself from changing, you can’t prevent the world from changing around it. The decision to do nothing is the pathway to decline...it’s the path that leads toward becoming a small church like Billerica, surviving off of the legacies of the past without the resources either to thrive in the present or to embrace the possibilities offered by the future.

The second path begins with a decision to attempt to grow the church significantly. And by significantly I don’t mean the 15 or 20 additional households I’ve sometimes heard mentioned over the years. I’m talking about an intentional decision to attempt to double or even triple the present size of this congregation, which would require profound and substantial changes indeed.

The goal of significant growth would basically mean significantly expanding each of the seven areas of mission I mentioned earlier, as well as hiring additional staff and acquiring additional space in order to support those expanded activities. It would mean, for example, creating an additional worship service, and dramatically changing the ways in which you do evangelism and hospitality, essentially redesigning the entire program of the church from the perspective and around the needs of newcomers. And it would be expensive, since many of these costs tend to be front-loaded, no matter how much you may try to plan to “pay as you go.”

This is the path that leads toward Bedford or maybe even Concord, although initially by way of Littleton. But successfully following this path is not merely a matter of finding the right minister, and then doing exactly whatever that minister says. It also requires the commitment and hard work of an entire congregation of strong individuals, who share that vision and the desire to make it real. And even then, there is no guarantee of success.

The only other path I see is an attempt to improve the quality of your programs sufficiently enough that you can continue to bring in enough new people to sustain yourselves at approximately the size you are now, while at the same time attempting to adjust to the changing circumstances of the world around you. The trouble with this path is that it starts off in exactly the same direction as the second one, but then often runs in circles and doubles back upon itself, while at the same time it actually turns out to be the most expensive option of all, at least when costs are calculated on a per person basis.

This third path can likewise easily turn into Path One by default, especially when you have to stop and reconsider your direction every time you reach a crossroads. And it can often feel like a wrong turn, at least in those uncomfortable moments when you start to compare yourselves to other, more “successful” churches.

This brings me at last to the topic of Stewardship, which I know many people think of as just a euphemism for “Church Finances,” but which I hope you will grow to understand involves much more than merely money. In my mind, the word “Stewardship” reflects the simple fact that none of us really “owns” the church; rather, it is a gift which we have inherited as a bequest from our spiritual ancestors, and which we hold in trust as a legacy for our spiritual descendants.

Most churches pay for their ongoing operations from some combination of the same four sources. The first is revenue produced by assets given to the church by dead people. Some churches have large endowments, while others don’t have any endowment at all -- but basically, the longer a church has been around, the more likely it is to have accumulated wealth originally contributed by previous generations.

A second source is fundraising, a set of activities which potentially covers a great deal of territory, but rarely these days contributes a significant percentage to the budgetary bottom line.

The third source is through the rental of their facilities to other parties, such as the long-term relationship FRS has enjoyed with the Red Balloon preschool, or the anticipated rental of space in our steeple to cellular phone service providers.

But far and away the most important source of income for any congregation is current member giving. And it doesn’t really matter how much money it can raise from those other sources; without the generous financial support of its current, living membership, a congregation is destined to become lackluster and moribund. And the reason for this is that Stewardship truly is about much more than mere money. It’s about the passionate commitment to care responsibly for a precious gift that has been entrusted to us, and to pass it down to the next generation in better condition than we received it....

I likewise appreciate better than you might think the fact that nobody really likes coming to church on Sunday morning just to be harangued by the minister about money. And quite frankly, nobody should really have to. Because that ought to be YOUR responsibility: to talk openly and honestly with one another about how much it really costs to operate a church like this, about how important it is to you personally, and how much it contributes to the quality of your lives; about your dreams for its future, and its potential role in the larger community; and finally how you are going to share those expenses equitably among yourselves, so that each of you are contributing your fair share based on your own resources, and nobody feels like they have to do it all. Your generosity and willingness to sacrifice are what make the First Religious Society viable. It’s more than just a treasure you hold in trust for the future. It’s also a gift you give to one another.

But I do have one last thing to say on this subject.

It’s relatively easy to talk about the expenses of maintaining an older building, or the rising cost of heating oil and office supplies, or even the importance of funding our social justice ministries as generously as we can afford. But the most expensive line item in any church budget is generally “personnel” -- and this is typically a much more difficult subject to discuss, especially when you know the people personally, and you know that they know you.

But the bottom line is, when a congregation fails to discuss openly and honestly the real costs of operating the church, they inevitably end up compelling their staff to make the kinds of financial sacrifices that the members of the congregation are unwilling to talk about making themselves.

And I thought long and hard about spelling out this morning in actual dollars and cents just how much it has cost me personally to be the minister of this church for the past four years. I’ll spare you that exercise, but trust me -- it’s easily six figures...in fact, I think it might even be more than my entire net worth at the moment.

And I admit, it’s hard for me to take those numbers too seriously -- it’s money I’ve never had, and therefore I don’t really miss it much, even when it does add up to such a large sum. But my point is this. It’s wrong to expect other people to sacrifice so much without being willing to talk about sharing those sacrifices yourselves. And it’s a bad policy for ANY organization to put their key employees in the awkward situation where the only option they see for keeping even with inflation is to change jobs.

Yet even as I say all this, I also want you to know just how much I appreciate the generous spirit among you which makes this church possible at all, and how grateful I am for the privilege of having been invited to serve as your minister here at FRS these past four years. We all know that it hasn’t always been easy, and that it hasn’t always been fun...but is there anything in this life that is always easy and fun? There have been more than enough rewarding moments to compensate for the challenging and difficult ones, as well as memories and relationships which I know I will carry with me the rest of my life.

Parish Ministry is the kind of job I would eagerly do for free if I could afford to (and which I often have in times past). And it is also the kind of job which can’t really be done in isolation; it requires the support and participation of an entire congregation of “faithful souls” to make ministry possible in the first place.

And this, too, is a gift that you have given to me, and to one another... as we have gathered here, in this sacred space, Sunday after Sunday, seeking the wisdom and the inspiration to transform the world, and ourselves, for the better....