One of the things I’ve learned in my few months here is that, years ago, there were a lot more people coming to this church on Sunday morning than there are now.
Now, that’s hardly something that’s unique to this church. It’s not even unique to small towns. The United Methodist church is in decline nationwide, as are a lot of other Protestant churches. Almost everywhere in America, there are fewer people going to church on a Sunday morning than there used to be.
Those are facts. Facts are just facts; we cannot choose our facts. What we can choose, though, is how we’re going to respond to those facts.
One way we can respond is to just accept this decline as inevitable. You’ve known churches that have done that; so have I. Those churches say, “Well, of course we’re going down. The town is smaller. There just are not the people here there used to be. There’s nothing we can do about it.” They accept the fact that they’re a dying church. So, they just continue to do the things they’ve been doing until they cannot do them any more. At that point, the church becomes no more than a place to go on Sunday morning. Eventually, as the church gets smaller and smaller, it’s not even a place to go on Sunday morning, because there’s not enough money to keep the doors open any more. So, the church closes, an event that saddens some people but surprises no one, because everyone accepted that as the inevitable outcome a long time ago.
That’s one response, and it’s one we can choose if we want to. However, it’s not the only response. We can also choose to refuse to just accept that we’re in decline. We can decide that we’re not a dying church, we’re a living church. We can decide that we’re a church with a mission. We can decide that God put this church here for a reason, to make disciples of Jesus Christ. We can decide that this church is needed here, and that we’re going to do everything we can, not just to keep it going, but to make it the church God wants it to be and to make it a church that does what God wants it to do.
That’s the choice I think God wants us to make. It’s true that there are not as many people living in this town as there used to be, but it’s also true that there are plenty of people in this town who are not going to church anywhere. Look at it this way: there are officially 1,162 people living in Gettysburg. You think there are 1,162 people in Gettysburg who go to church on an average Sunday? Half that would be 581 people. Are there 581 people in Gettysburg who go to church on an average Sunday? A quarter of it is 290. Are there 290 people in Gettysburg who go to church on an average Sunday?
*Note—the population of Onida is 658. The population of Agar is 76. This makes the other numbers above and below change, obviously, but the point being made here applies to both of those towns as well.
I frankly don’t know how many people in Gettysburg go to church on an average Sunday, but I know it’s a lot less than half. The point is that, whether the population of this town is declining or not, there’s still plenty of room for this church and all the churches in town to grow. There’s no reason that decline has to be inevitable. There’s no reason we cannot have a hundred, a hundred twenty-five, a hundred fifty people worshipping here on a Sunday morning. I’m not saying it’s going to happen next week, but there’s no reason it cannot happen.
The thing is that it’s not going to happen by itself. We cannot just open the doors on Sunday morning and expect people to walk through them. It’s not a case of “if you build it, they will come.” Those of you who are here today will come, but for the most part, additional people will not. We need to do things to get them here, because they’re not going to come by themselves.
That’s what we’re going to talk about over the next several weeks. In thinking about how to approach this, I remembered a story about the legendary football coach of the Green Bay Packers, Vince Lombardi. The Packers were a great team under Lombardi, but they went through a stretch once where they lost a few games, barely won a few others, and just generally seemed to be in decline. Lombardi decided that the way to approach this was to go back to the basics. So, he stood in front of the team, held up a brown object, and said, “Gentlemen, this is a football.”
I think the way to talk about church growth is to start with the basics, too. So, what we’re going to talk about is “What is the church?” When we say we want people to be part of the church, what is it that we want them to be part of?
That may seem obvious, but it’s really not. We use the word “church” to mean a lot of things. One way we use the word “church” is to refer to this: the building. The structure. This place we come to on Sunday morning, and sometimes for meetings during the week. When people ask “where’s the church?” that’s usually what they want to know: where is the building?
Another way we use the word “church” is to refer to our worship service. When people ask “what time is church”, that’s what they mean: what time does your service start. When we say, “I want to be on time for church”, we mean that we want to be there when the service starts. That’s another way of referring to “church”.
Another way to refer to church is to the denomination or the congregation we’re part of. When people ask “what church do you go to”, that’s usually what they mean. We say, “I’m a United Methodist,” or “I’m a Lutheran,” or I’m a Catholic,” or whatever. We’re saying that’s our church, that’s the denomination or the congregation we belong to.
Those are all things that the word “church” has come to mean. When Jesus used the word “church”, though it meant something different. To Jesus, “church” did not refer to a building; the early Christian church did not have buildings. To Jesus, “church” did not mean a worship service; Jesus worshipped God every day, wherever he happened to be. To Jesus, “church” did not mean a denomination; there were no denominations in the early church.
To understand what Jesus meant when he used the word “church”, let’s look at our reading from Matthew. Jesus said that if someone from the church sins against you, you go to that person directly and confront them. If that does not work, you go to that person again, taking one or two other people as witnesses. If that does not work, you and the other person are to bring your problem to the church.
Have you ever known anyone to do that? I never have. In five years as a pastor, and in all my years as a member of a congregation, I’ve never experienced a time where someone brings their problem with someone else to the church. They might consult the pastor, they might consult one or two people they respect, but I’ve never known anyone to bring a problem like that to the whole church. I doubt if anyone else here has, either. It’s something beyond our experience.
The reason it’s beyond our experience, the reason it seems so strange to us, is because of the way we think of the church. If we think of the church as the building, or as the worship service, or as the denomination, we’d never think of someone bringing a problem with someone else to the church. When Jesus used the word “church”, though, he meant something else. To Jesus, the “church” was the people of God.
When we think of the church as being the people of God, our whole perspective on what it means to be “the church” changes. All of a sudden it does not seem strange to bring a problem with someone else to “the church”, because the people of God don’t stand by when a relationship is falling apart; the people of God try to help. The people of God don’t just stand and watch when they see someone going down the wrong path; the people of God try to do something about it.
That’s true of other things, too. The people of God don’t wait for someone else to do something when they see a person in trouble; the people of God step in and take action. The people of God don’t wait for the government to do something about the homeless or the hungry or the sick; the people of God do something themselves. The people of God don’t wait for people to come in to the church to hear the word of God and be saved; the people of God take the word of God out of the church to others, and the people of God take the love of God out of the church and show it to others.
We hear those things, though, and we think, well, that sounds good, but we’re just this little church in this little town. We cannot do anything about this stuff. We’d like to, really we would, and we’d do it if we could, but there’s just no way. The problems are too big, and we’re just too small.
Well, we cannot do everything, but guess what? God does not expect us to do everything. God knows our limitations; God knows them better than we know them ourselves. Here’s the thing, though: God does not expect us to do everything, but God does expect us to do everything that we can.
Exactly what that looks like is something we’re going to explore over the next several weeks, as we talk about more about what the church is and what it does. The thing is that it all starts with a decision, the decision I talked about at the beginning of this message. We can decide that we’re a dying church, a church that’s in an inevitable decline and there’s no way to do anything about it. Or, we can decide that we’re a church with a mission. We can decide that God put this church here for a reason, to make disciples of Jesus Christ. We can decide that this church is needed here, and that we’re going to do everything we can, not just to keep it going, but to make it the church God wants it to be and to make it a church that does what God wants it to do. We can decide that we’re going to be the people of God for the town of Gettysburg and the surrounding area.
The decision is ours. What’s it going to be?
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