I gave a 45 minute sermon today, the longest ever for me off the top of my head. Here is the sermon Intended to give.

Today, we celebrate the 43rd anniversary as a church. Eleven and half years ago I came to the Valley church. The actual numbers of members were then 30 something. The facility was not kept up, and I observed layers of dust and pizza stains on the banners in the sanctuary. One clergy, interested in the position of pastor, attended a Sunday service quietly while the search for pastor, he later told me the bathrooms on the street side were “terrifying.” He declined to apply. I later learned that the MCC denominational office in West Hollywood had written off the church and gave this church a year or two of surviving.

Here we are eleven and half years later. Like most Protestant denominational churches our size, we are principally an older congregation. And our numbers decrease through attritions: people moving because of jobs or the expensive cost of living in California; folks becoming more house-bound as they age or through illness. The MCC denomination from which we originated has shrunk from 40,000, when I joined in 1995, to well below than the 8000 globally, with fifty percent or more of churches smaller than our own. MCC has lost its cutting edge and prophetic voice when Troy Perry retired. This is not Troy’s fault. It is the lack of qualified leaders and leaders with a passionate vision for service. Their concern is maintaining their own positions. We have lost talented pastors, flourishing congregations, and theological thinkers. More importantly, there is no vision of the movement for a viable future. Maintaining your position or institution is not vision that sustains anything but decline.

One social change author writes,

Ultimately, the relation and legitimization of established authority and power structures weaken the bonds of religious community and threaten to dissolve the fascination of the original movement. (Wolfgang Vondey)

I have to confess that I was fascinated and attracted to MCC as a movement through its Pastor in St. Louis, Brad Wishon, and then Moderator Troy Perry. In 1995, we shared a protest on the steps of St. Louis City Hall together. Then there was creativity spirituality, passionate energy fighting for our human rights, laced with a vision of radical inclusive love and prophetic courage to stand up against cultural hatreds and discrimination. Many were fighters and prophets for LGBT justice. But the fascination disappeared after Troy retired. We shifted from prophetic to preservation mode.

The mission was lost for maintenance of the institution. And that is always a dangerous turn. The denomination has been unable to adapt to the realities of changes that the millennium brought: greater acceptance of LGBQI folks, the marriage and family movement, the migration of more 30,000 members to other churches because they no longer wanted to be part of a ghettoized church and because other churches have welcomed them back. But more important the prophetic and cutting edge fascination was no longer there.

What lesson can we learn from this picture? The lesson is that mission, not preservation, defines a movement and a church. When mission is no longer the central driving force of church, it becomes a museum whose mission is preservation of artifacts, dead bones, and past memories. I am reminded by today’s reading “Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.” Mt. 9:17

Jesus makes it clear that disciples need to live out the tensions between the claims and memories of tradition and the contemporary warrants of the gospel mission. Our inclination as human beings is toward the safety of tradition or what we are familiar with. The mission, Jesus understood very well, involves inconvenience, energy, passionate commitment, and the desire to follow Christ. The easier path for us, and I include myself, is to fall back on what we know.
Let’s move to today: Many are churches are unable to adapt to change, they become increasingly evolve into museums, preserving the past. I can’t tell you the number of stories how congregations in decline have to choose whether they can afford the expenses of the church facility or a pastor.

This church in the last eleven years had its ups and downs, with the ebbing and the increasing of membership. Early on I grieved every person who left the church, and finally I realized that no one church ever meets the needs of all folks for all times. I found myself prayer for those folks and grateful for their time spent in community and prayerful for their journey.

But we are here today, while you may celebrate the 43rd anniversary, I thank God that the church has existed these past years, despite the prognosis that it had one or two years left. What has let us to this point?

First, we had the ability to adapt. We had a make-over of this church. I heard for awhile from a current board member that this was an ugly little church, but when he and others tapped their creative and decorating genes, this church became a lovely church with a spectacular garden, with a new pipe organ, solar panels, a new altar with a redwood burl, and comfortable seats. One of our deceased members Bob Cross complained that his butt hurt from the uncomfortable seats we had. Many times when I sit down I am aware of his comments about the chairs. For him, one of the greatest positive changes were the seats you now sit in. So thank Bob Cross for his complaining, it brought the change you are sitting on.

While making-over the church to be more welcoming is part of our mission of hospitality, our primary mission as church is to imitate the radical inclusive love that Jesus practiced in sharing the good news of the gospels in word and in the witness of our lives and the actions of the church.

Rev. John Dorhauer, the newly elected General Minister of the United Church of Christ, calls for the church to be “risk-taking, creative, and cultivate ingenuity.” These were the virtues exemplified earlier by Troy Perry that MCC has sadly lost. They are virtues for adaptability to change and thus survivabilty.
Adaptability to change has been a central virtue of the Jesus movement. A bunch of Galilean and Judean outcasts, fisherman, tax collectors, and housewives from the countryside, single women like Mary Magdalene after the resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit, transformed the Jesus movement ragtag bunch of rural misfits and outcasts into an urban movement. Within three years of the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Jesus movement spread through the cities of the Roman Empire; all of Paul’s letters are addressed to communities in cities. They were house churches that brought men and women, upper class and slaves together in the weekly worship around the Lord’s Supper. Women found equality with men in this Jesus movement. Slaves dreamed of the freedom that they experiences in these churches. Remember Paul’s baptism formula in his Letter to Galatia: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Gal. 3:28 Slaves could dream of freedom, and there was only one identity generated from baptism, being in Christ.

These country social misfits of the Jesus movement were charged to spread the good news, and the good news of Jesus Christ challenged the power structures of the Roman Empire and it cult of Emperor worship. Risk-taking, creativity, and ingenuity were descriptive of the post-Easter church.

Risking-taking is about radical inclusion and openness, and I will add openness to change. Barbara Fiand asks Christians a significant question, “Why is it that many of us do not even connect anymore in the day-to-day living out of our religion with Christ’s ancient vision of inclusiveness?” We have become a radical inclusive church. What is preventing us from filling these chairs on Sunday?
We have actively worked to move beyond just being an LGBT church to welcome heterosexual folks at worship? How often have we bragged about or church to others? Or invited folks to join us for events and worship? The strongest drive for inclusion comes from the outside. And this was the ingenuity that Jesus had. He invited strangers, outcasts, the poor, women, men, and children to dinner with himself. It is our mission as congregants not only to live the good news of Jesus but imitate him. We will become more inclusive as individuals see that as part of the mission of the church and as community we market ourselves as an open and inclusive church. Let’s not keep that a secret any longer. Tell a friend. Tell someone each week and invite them to join us.

Creativity is built upon risk-taking. How willing are we to explore various spiritual practices, change our worship style and experiment? There are few churches as creative as us. Look at our fund-raisers over the years. We may need to become creative in the style of worship to attract folks to our service. I am now talking to Roxy Mountains about a gospel drag fundraiser for January or February.

Ingenuity is built upon the previous two virtues: It differs from creativity because it involves cleverness. How clever are we for the Lord? For the church? Cleverness has traditionally been called “discernment,” the ability to listen to God as God calls us to mission and service. Can we initiate and implement new things to realize our mission of radical inclusive love?

Let me give you example: We were ingenuous enough to make the Earth a member of our congregation and embark upon a journey of greening our church with solar panels, efficiency saving and conserving measures for water. How do we reach folks who care for the Earth and life and invite them to the church? You might say, “That’s the pastor’s job.” You would be partially right and partially wrong. It is our job together.

These characteristics must transform us enough to engage the gospel mission. There are those who are consumers and those committed to mission, and many in between. The consumers come on Sunday and take away the message and grace home with them. We all hope that it provides for a seeding of their lives in God’s grace.

But we be transformed to become missional. Besides the above, we have vacancies on the board. We are down in our numbers of people for our feeding program. We need volunteers for caring for our garden. And we need people to take an active interest in bringing folks to church. We can’t be just consumers or what I understood as Sunday Christians as I called them as a child. We must be the living word of the Gospel, and our mission is to share the good news of God being with us and inviting us to create a mission to transform the world. God bless you!