Dear Church Family:

This week I was privileged to attend a Christian conference in Birmingham Alabama. The “Pro Ecclesia” (“For the Church”) conference is an annual event that draws scholars, clergy, and laypersons from across the denominational spectrum to pray, fellowship, eat, and converse together, all centered around talks about essential matters of interest to us all. Borrowing a descriptive phrase from the Nicene Creed, this year’s topic was entitled, “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic? Championing the Marks of the Church in an Age of Polarization and Ecclesial Confusion.” In other words, the task before the conference participants was to consider together what it means for the Church to be one body in Christ amid our many divisions, and especially when our unity is put to the test as it is now in polarizing and confusing ways. As if to prove the point, the conference was attended by Episcopalians and breakaway Anglicans, by mainline Lutherans and offshoot Lutheran bodies, by Catholics and Orthodox (the original division) alike. As a United Methodist, it was noteworthy that one of the presenters was from the Global Methodist Church. You get the idea. Our very presence together was a visible reminder of our disunity, but also a sign that many in Christ’s divided body share a holy desire to find the unity we are unable to attain on our own.

As a special feature of the conference, many of us toured the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, across the street from the 16^th Street Baptist Church where four African American girls were killed in a KKK bombing in 1963. That act of villainy captured the attention of the entire nation and crystalized the resolve of many to finally address our violent history and living legacy of racial segregation. As we saw the painful images and heard the stories of the martyrs, it occurred to me that the disunity of the church has long been paralleled in a deeply divided nation, torn apart by dehumanizing systems of racism that have plagued the body of Christ as well. In a different era, what we call “the mainline churches” were all divided over race. The tour of the institute made painfully clear in retrospect, that churches and believers were on both the right and the wrong side of our country’s shameful and protracted racial divide.  

As the conference proceeded, I thought also about what we are attempting to do right now at Pender—to engage each other in needed conversations as Christians who agree on the essentials of our faith but are not of one mind about important matters regarding marriage and sexuality. As most of us know, those disagreements have divided the UMC, as well as Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and others before us. Sadly, there is more to come.  After three days of wrestling with other Christians about the church’s divisions and the obstacles to unity in our time, I came away sobered by our persistent human propensity toward sin and self-delusion, but also strengthened by this fellowship of the Holy Spirit in which we caught a taste of how God works tirelessly in the wounded body to bring truth, love, and light among those who humble themselves in faith to receive the grace that only God can provide through the Spirit who makes all things new.  

Francesca Murphy, Catholic Professor of Theology at Notre Dame, reminded us that the leadership of the Spirit over God’s people has always seemed “preposterous” to mere human minds. In ancient Israel, the cry was, “We want a king like other nations!” In our age, it’s “Let’s vote!” In both cases, the message is, we want human leadership of our preferred kind. But the judges and prophets of Israel, and 2000 years of Christian apostles and faithful witnesses, have proven that God’s ways of leading his people are not our ways nor the ways of the world. While the world (and sometimes the church) tears itself apart, meeting our shared desire for unity in the church will not come by clinging to our human means of power. Our true hope will come to pass as we submit our minds, hearts, and wills to Christ the Lord of the church, and seek direction from the mysterious but ever-present Spirit of God who freely bestows on God’s humbled people every needed grace and endows the willing and faithful disciples of Jesus with the preposterous gifts of unity, holiness, universality, and the apostolic faith. This is the Spirit of God whom we confess by the Creed as “The Lord, the Giver of Life.”  

Beginning this Sunday, Pender UMC will take the next step in a necessary and hopeful process of discernment about our future as a congregation. We will begin needed conversations about hard topics—during a Sunday school class this week, at a Monday night gathering and a Tuesday night Bible study (both at the church at 7:00pm). There will likely be more to come. All are welcome and encouraged to attend one or more of these gatherings for this is a family conversation. If we are honest with ourselves and with God, we take this next step acknowledging that the challenge is too big for us. We will not find unity on our own. But to confess our failings and weaknesses is not to resign ourselves to more division and pain. Our desire is for the life-giving Spirit of God to do a new and unimaged work among us.  

So how are we to access the Spirit’s life and gifts in this needful time? As professor Murphy put it, everything begins with prayer. The Psalmists extended the call to Israel with an invitation to “Seek God’s face” and “Wait on the Lord.” The promise of prayer is that those who turn their anxiety and the church’s neediness into a heart-felt search for God’s face and purposes, will be able to face each other and their greatest challenges with Spirit-born love and truth-telling, humility, and courage, for their confidence is not in themselves but in the God who acts in life-giving and sometimes preposterous ways for our shared life and the life of the world. And what begins in prayer will be sustained and strengthened by a shared life of prayer. The best way we can prepare for needed conversations will be to stop our fretting and planning and turn to God with our true needs and holy desires. A prayerful people is a people who can, in Paul’s words, “speak the truth in love.”

As we strive for an elusive unity at Pender and in the divided body of Christ, our first challenge will be to cast aside the illusion that we can fix ourselves. Once we have humbled ourselves together before the Lord, we will then be positioned to place ourselves again under the Lordship of God’s Son and in the care of the Holy Spirit who guides us in his sure way and perfects our new life of love in Christ. Some will call it preposterous. The followers of Jesus know it to be the mysterious and true leading of the Triune God for our every need. 

As I have been confronted in these days with the church’s failings and our human limitations, I am again grateful for the ever-creative and resourceful Spirit of God—who makes a way where there is no way, and who is ever breathing new life into the Church and guiding the faithful into the way of Jesus, the Head of the Church. If that is your faith too, then I encourage you to spend much time in prayer in these days, then join your brothers and sisters in Christ as we participate in an essential family conversation.  

Come, Preposterous Spirit, Come!

Pastor Bruce