The Crippled Beggar

It was wonderful to be home.  While visiting with family and friends in person was a great joy, there is still no place like home. After a long, difficult journey home of 1250ish miles with two children under the age of 5, our vacation was finally over.  Don't ever try to do that many miles by yourself in a 24 hour period.  It is never a good idea, take it from me.

You can probably imagine it took us several days to recover from the return drive.  After a few days, I felt we were probably ready to head out again as a family.  However, my eldest child came down with a fortunately short lived stomach bug Saturday morning.  Picking up our Bountiful Basket was a lot of fun with a pukey kid in the back seat.  Since our church was having worship that evening instead of Sunday morning, we opted out even though he was feeling much better by then.

Next came Sunday morning, and I decided we would trek into Lincoln to worship somewhere contemporary.  Oh how I miss contemporary worship.  That lead us to a neat little church in the northern part of the city.  Considering the problems our home church is having and my not really enjoying liturgical services, my plan was to just embrace the experience, forget our home church and all the stress there, and just....WORSHIP.

Don't you love it when God changes your plans?  It seems to happen more often than not, and this particular morning was no exception.  As I was being greeted by several members of that church, I ran into a gentleman who was very good friends with my pastor.  Not only that, he had worshiped at my church recently. WHAT?  I wanted to put our church out of my head. Sigh.....  Ok God, you have my attention now.

The service started and the praise music was just what I needed.  We all sat down to hear the message.  They had started a series on the book of Acts and that morning, chapters 3 and 4 were up to bat.  The pastor started it off with Acts 3:1-11, the story of Peter healing a crippled beggar. (Read the scripture in the link or none of the rest of this will make any sense) It is a popular story, but this pastor presented it in a way I had never heard before. Not only that, it slapped me in the face, my church is just like the crippled beggar.

Let me repeat that, MY CHURCH IS JUST LIKE THE CRIPPLED BEGGAR.  Not only that, we are at a place where we need to make some real decisions.  

You see, our church building burned down in January.  We are now in a position where we, as a congregation, need to start deciding about the church's future.  Do we rebuild?  Do we have the money we need to rebuild? Where?  What should it look like?  How much debt can we afford?  What can we afford?  Are we viable enough to rebuild?  Should we merge with another church?  Should we simply disband and go on our mournful way?

We have more questions than answers.  But you know what?  We are asking the wrong questions.  Being a good steward of what God has blessed us with is important, but it should NEVER be the goal.  And yet, that has become our church's goal, to rebuild from the ashes.

You see, just like the crippled man, Syracuse UMC has never fully had a mission of evangelism and making disciples.  This makes the church a cripple since that is what Christ's Church is meat to do, go out and make disciples.  Just like the twisted and deformed bones of that crippled man, the bones of our church are not what they were meant to be.  We have a poor foundation.

The crippled man was smart, he knew where to sit so that he would garner the most attention and make the most money.  He chose the beautiful gate of the Temple.  Everyone with sight would call our old church building beautiful.  It truly was.  But beautiful buildings do not disciples for Christ make.

The crippled man begged for his sustenance.  Our church is also begging for it's sustenance. It is hard being a church in survival mode because you can't see the forest, just the trees.  And we need money in the bank and people in the seats.  Yet, it always comes back to money and survival.  No church will EVER be able to fulfill it's calling to make disciples when it is in survival mode and focusing on staying open.  Staying open does not equal going out to make disciples.

Everyone knew this crippled man.  He sat there, every day, and saw the same people every day.  He was a fixture in that community.  Our church is a fixture in our community.  And you know what else?  The community is watching us.  

We have such a tremendous opportunity here to help grow the Kingdom of God.  To go out and make disciples and empower other local churches to do the same.  But in order to do that, while stewardship needs to be a consideration, it simply CAN NOT be our focus.  It can not be our goal.  We do NOT need a church building to be effective in God's mission.  And we can be a spark for revival for thousands of people and our community, building or not.

The question remains, do we focus on building a building to worship once a week and hold funerals and fundraisers?  Or, do we focus on the Great Commission, to go and make disciples of all the nations and allow Christ to lead and heal our congregation from it's deformity?  The answer to those questions will very soon put the church on the road to closure or to vitality and life.