The Good Old Days
From the start of the industrial revolution the economy of the city of Sheffield, England was based on steel production. But by the 1970s the work became more mechanized and loosing their jobs, the people began to move away. Those who remained sank into poverty, becoming one of the poorest communities in England. By the early 1990s the Methodist church in Sheffiled was down to four people, Ann, Frank, Jack and Mary, whose combined age was just under 300. As you can imagine it became nearly impossible to keep up their church building. Even a pub in the neighborhood went up for auction because it couldn’t sell enough beer. Things were very bad for the church and the surrounding community.
Sheffiled is not very different from most American urban areas. We have seen great change over the past 5 decades. The boom times after WWII led to mass migrations away from the cities, into the suburbs. Urban communities declined into poverty, and the population there changed as the long-term residents aged, and immigrants increasingly moved into the neighborhoods. During this time most mainline urban churches have greatly declined as the children moved away, and cultural barriers made it nearly impossible for the new residents of the city to be at home in the old established congregations.
The community of Israelites at the time of Isaiah also knew bad times. Their country, once united and strong under kings David and Solomon had first divided in a civil war, and then been conquered by the Assyrians and Babylonians. By the time of Isaiah few Israelites lived in their own land, but had been dispersed through the vast Babylonian empire.
What can we, the people of God, do in times like these?
Remember the Past
One thing that can help is to remember past times when God’s grace was evident. It is often easier to see God’s grace in our lives when we look back. And telling the stories of how God saved us in the past can give us courage and strength to face present problems. Our passage from Isaiah today exhibits this pattern. The Lord “makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters…brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise.” Here the Israelite captives in Babylon are reminded of the time when their great, great grandparents were held captive in Egypt and how God parted the Red Sea so they could pass over. Then when the Egyptian army with its horse drawn chariots followed into the seabed, they were destroyed as the water came crashing around them. The people Isaiah spoke to knew very well the rest of the story; how God led them through the wilderness as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night; how God gave them manna from heaven when they were hungry, and water from a rock when they had thirst; and how God eventually led them across the Jordan river to the Promised Land. Remembering such a good story of God’s mighty acts served to cheer up the Babylonian captives, to help them take heart in their current situation.
When I was serving my first congregation in Lynn, I discovered that many of the stories the members told me were of the glory days of that church. They had some beloved pastors. One, Wilbur Ziegler was a great preacher – so good that our Conference preaching award is named after him. Another amazingly managed to serve the congregation for over 20 years. In those days the fairs were glorious; the Sunday School teamed, children were lured on Sundays in order to participate in the wildly popular musical productions led by a talented and dedicated choir director. Most people walked to church from the surrounding neighborhood. At the end of the 1990s when the congregation had aged, and most of those Sunday School children grew up and moved away, and the list of official members on the books was many times more than those who came to worship, those who remained found comfort in remembering the good years of the church.
I suspect that the members of the Methodist church in Sheffield were no different. And things went along at a slow but steady rate of decline until there were only four members left. When it came down to Ann, Frank, Jack and Mary rattling around in a big building which they couldn’t afford to maintain, those old memories of glory days were no longer helpful.
Do Not Remember?
It might seem a little shocking when Isaiah shifts so quickly from reminding the Israelites of God’s gift of salvation from Egypt in the past, to this, “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.” Yet we can see how remembering the glory days can change from a source of comfort to a trap of inertia if we aren’t careful. The pop singer of my youth, Bruce Springsteen, captures this trap in his song Glory Days. He sings of one young mother, lonely and divorced, who says, when she feels like crying she starts laughing thinking about the glory days. But he also lifts up the friend whose only topic of conversation is the days when he was a high school baseball hero. Springsteen ends his song by admitting that time slips away and leaves you with nothing but boring stories of glory days.
There are three ways we can get stuck living in the past. First we can just be mesmerized into inertia, trying to live in the past. Churches who persist in putting on a fair even though fewer and older people are doing all the work, few if any people from outside the congregation come to it and it no longer generates much income, are living in the past.
Another way we can be stuck in the past is by remembering the disasters of life and holding on to the anger, or allowing fear of similar disasters to keep us from trying something new. Before I went to seminary the UMC offered a program called Vision 2000. My church in Amherst participated and I was on the visioning team. The assumption was that things would be very different at the turn of the century and we should prepare for it. We worked earnestly at the process given to us, and so did many other congregations. The problem was, it didn’t work. We didn’t get any new or exciting visions, some of the steps fell flat, and by New Year’s Eve 1999 the program was largely forgotten. If we remember the past and get stuck in it, we are likely to balk at any new program our denomination offers us. Natural Church Development? Equipped for Every Good Work? Rethink Church? These things never work, so we don’t even try.
Finally we can get stuck thinking that God’s grace will come to us in the future exactly as it did in the past. If the Israelites in Babylonian captivity waited for a new Moses to be lifted up, they would have never returned home to Israel. God blessed the mainline churches of America with a baby boom, and some other compelling social conditions in the post war era that made them grow bigger than at any other time in history. But that doesn’t mean this is how God will grow our churches now.
Something New
Through Isaiah God’s voice chimes in, “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches; for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people.”
For the Israelites the new thing God did involved leading some of them back to Israel to rebuild the temple. But ever since Babylon, many more Jews have continued to live in the Diaspora through the Mideast, spreading to Europe and eventually to America and other lands. And after the temple was destroyed again in 70 AD the new thing God did involved the rise of the synagogues in Jewish communities, with Rabbi’s taking the place of leadership once held by the Temple priests. From a Christian perspective this new development paved the way for Jewish followers of Christ to spread his gospel – the first missionaries like Paul frequently stopped at the synagogues when they traveled with the Good News.
Remember Ann, Frank, Jack and Mary from Sheffield? The new thing God led them to do was to finally sell their big old church building and purchase that neighborhood pub, called the Furnival, when it was sold at auction. They agreed to buy it for almost 50,000 pounds – an amount they didn’t have at the time. But the four found the funds with help of a charitable trust, attracted a Baptist pastor to come work with them for only 6,000 pounds a year and they opened the new Furnival in September of 1996. Then they started by praying, reading scripture and listening to the people in the neighborhood. Asking what they wanted, what they needed, and what new thing God had equipped them to do. The people asked for a quiet spiritual place to pray. And a place that would help them deal with issues of social justice and oppression in the community. The faith community started to grow, slowly – but the work of reaching out to the community really took off. The church members see themselves like yeast in the dough – not trying to make the whole community be yeast – but helping the depressed neighborhood rise. At first they opened a café where people could find an accepting place of welcome, similar to the old pub (“everybody knows your name”). Now it has two main efforts – the Cellar Space which works in educating youth who have trouble with school, and health and well-being projects. They also manage some storefronts and offer some rooms for community meeting space.
Wesley Church has a similar story of something new that God has led us toward in the merger of the original church with the Korean congregation. But that merger is 10 years old – not so new any more. We’ve had time to get used to one another and to settle into some regular patterns. And so God’s word for us today presents us with a challenge. “I am about to do a new thing; now it spring forth, do you not perceive it?” What new thing does God want to do with us? Does God want to fill up this sanctuary at 10 on Sundays? Perhaps. Does God want us to develop something new between the English and Korean members? I believe so. Does God want us to be yeast in the Hillside neighborhood of Medford? What do our current neighbors need and want?
How can we share God’s grace beyond our loving little community?
This is what I have been thinking and praying about. I hope you will join me in this effort during the season of Lent. Lent is not only a time of letting go of some things, it is a time to be open to new things, to stretch our limbs so that they can bend in new directions, to loosen up so that God can mold us and make us according to his gracious will.
Will you join me in prayer? God of creation, the flow of infinite life in your Spirit dislodges and moves all that stands between God’s never-failing grace and us. Form us as your people. Form us to learn from the past, but not to live in it, as we move into your future. Form us to listen for your voice – springing forth in creation, breaking out in Spirit, and calling all to something new.
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