November 9, 2003
The Mark of a Healthy Church
Riley E. Jensen

I begin with a brief word of warning to any visitors who have stumbled in this morning from the highways-and-byways of life.  We are delighted that you are here, and it is a mark of this church that we may have a large number of visitors on any given Sunday.  So please know that you are more than welcome.  The fact is that we save places for you every Sunday.

But you happen to be here (actually we believe God has brought you here) on a Sunday of celebration and commitment that we call Loyalty Sunday.  It is a time when we celebrate who we are and what we are up to.  Last week we had a wonderful Ministry Fair that filled The Gathering Place with displays highlighting the many outreach ministries of Westminster.  This is also a time when we offer ourselves and our financial commitment for the work of God in this place for the coming year.

We do this not only because we feel good about what is happening here (which we do), but also and primarily because we have taken vows of membership to be faithful in support of this church.  Later in the service you will see the aisles filled with those who love God, who love the church, and who are seeking to be faithful.  And, of course, we have no objection to your joining the stream either even if you just want to see what it feels like.

Okay, enough for warnings!  Let’s go to our scripture lesson which provides a benchmark for how we are doing as a church.  We are a society that is consumed with benchmarks from the MEAPS to the bottom line.  How are we doing?  Are we reaching our goals?  Are we the kind of church we are supposed to be?

As we come to this scripture, it is important to be reminded of the central thought of the whole letter of Ephesians which is that in this world there is nothing but conflict and brokenness.  Therefore, it is God’s aim that there should enter into the world a sacred oneness in Christ.  It is the church’s job to model this unity in Christ, and in order to do that they need to be a certain kind of people.

The aim of the Church then is that her members should reach a stature which can be measured by the fullness of Christ.  Some translations use the word “perfection” when talking about this goal, but unfortunately that plays into the kind of guilt-ridden mentality that so many of us have when we wonder if we are good enough to be Christians.  The more accurate meaning is “maturity” -- that kind of maturity that can resist the winds of doubt and deception that can blow us off course.  Of course, when we want to know what that maturity looks like, we look to the example of Christ.

So what is the mark of a healthy church?  The healthy church is one that is growing up into Christ.  That’s what the writer of Ephesians is urging upon the church -- grow up!  Grow up!  And then your lives will be centered and not so susceptible to those who would deceive and lead astray.

As a child whenever I did something silly or stupid, I remember being admonished, “grow up”, or with a heavy sigh that betrays the weariness of all parents when their young charges don’t seem to get it after repeated lessons, they would say, “When are you going to grow up.”  Of course, that was all I ever thought about during those young years -- growing up!  Growing up so that I could ride a bike; growing up so I could drive a car; growing up so that I could get out from under the restrictive authority of my parents.  In much the same way, Paul is pressing the Ephesians to grow up into mature Christians.

Now I would emphasize that the meaning of Loyalty Sunday in the context of this mandate for growth doesn’t mean genuflecting before the traditions of the church and protecting them at all costs even though in a church like Westminster we value our history and honor our forbearers.  Neither is growth in and of itself a virtue.  The truth is (and I know this from personal experience) that in the untended garden the bad weeds grow just as well, if not better, than the good plants.  Therefore, every gardener and farmer knows that the growth of the good is a constant struggle with that which would choke it off.

Another way of putting this which we all understand from the youngest child to the oldest adult is that growing up is hard.  I have a book in my library entitled Growing Old Isn’t for Sissies.  But then all of us engage in the fantasy that sometime we will reach that point or pinnacle in life where our self-doubt has been erased, our anxieties resolved, and our insecurities removed.  One of my friends and mentors as he was nearing retirement years ago shared with me a moment of candor, “You know I have been at this job for a lot of years, and somehow I thought it would get easier, but it’s not, it’s getting harder!”

As a younger person I appreciated his honesty but had little understanding of the reality.  The challenges of life continue to unfold for each of us, and the reality is that it never gets easier.  The patriarch of management consultants, Peter Drucker, once said, “Here I am 55 years old and I am still trying to figure out what I am going to do when I grow up.”

You see growing up is tough stuff and it never gets any easier, even for the stars.  A secret that I manage to keep from most people is that I am a big John Grisham fan.  While I like to project the image that I think nothing but deep thoughts, and read big books with lots of footnotes, the truth is that I like nothing more than relaxing in front of the fire and losing myself in one of Grisham’s latest novels that is driven more by plot than dialogue.

His latest offering which I discovered while checking out the sales at Sam’s Club is Bleachers.  It’s a quick little read with a simple plot.  Former High School football star returns to his small town roots to mourn the death of his old coach, and in doing so resurrects the memories of a conflicted past that was never as great as everyone who idolized his football exploits thought it was.  It is really the story of the pain of growing up, and how we seldom see things as they are in the midst of that growth.

You see, immaturity views maturity as stasis -- reaching your goals and living happily ever after.  There are some who have so romanticized the meaning of marriage that they have not thought beyond the bliss of romance and the thrill of the ceremony.  For others the goal is a secure job, a home in the right neighborhood, and having a family.

The metaphor for maturity that Paul is using here is growth.  We are always growing he tells us.  And in order to grow into mature Christians, and not simply stay as we were when we arrived at the door of the church this morning, we need to be open to change.  Now this is being offered up to us not as a revolutionary credo but as a choice between life and death.

The choice is available to us.  Would we rather rest in the comfort of our prejudices (those that we have grown up with and which have nourished us and preserved us up to this moment) or would we rather risk confronting our fears and being transformed beyond them.  That, of course, is not an easy choice for any of us but it is the choice of growing up into the fullness of Christ.

One of the most frightening things about going to seminary is encountering the Humpty Dumpty approach to theological education.  Soon to be retired Dr. Tom Gillespie, President of Princeton Seminary, challenges each entering class by telling them, “Our purpose is to take your faith apart and then help you put it back together again.”  For those who look at their faith as a form of stasis, and maturity as a plateau to be reached, that can be a destructive and frightening image.  But those who experience it discover a growing and dynamic faith that is prepared to face a changing world.

So Westminster Church, on this Loyalty Sunday, it is time for us to ask how we are stacking up.  Are we growing up?   Remember that line of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, when she was informed that President Calvin Coolidge had died?  She said, “How can you tell?”  The great Catholic prelate, Cardinal Newman (himself a profile in change and transformation) once said, “Growth is the only evidence of life.”

And that’s what’s happening this morning.  We are checking to see if we are alive.  We are checking to see if we are growing.  Offering our financial pledges to the work of God in this place is certainly not the only way to do that, but it is an important part of taking our pulse to see if we are alive and growing.

Of course, I would not for a moment suggest that how much you give places you on some sort of spiritual hierarchy of your spirituality.  But we know from scripture that our growth in giving is a mark of our spiritual growth and health.  Friends, we also know that these are difficult times and some of us are not able to give what we wish we could.  There are also others of us who are more than able to step up and do more than we have done in the past.  This is what unity in Christ means; we piggyback on God’s gifts to each of us.

My friends, the mark of health for all of us is growth.  “Grow up,” says Paul.  Grow up into the full stature of Christ.  Grow into a deeper transforming knowledge of Christ’s purpose for you and your life.  Never be satisfied with your own status quo, spiritual or otherwise.  For when you refuse to open yourself to new possibilities, you will die.  Therefore, Paul’s charge to each of us individually and as a church is -- for Christ’s sake and for ours, grow up!

Amen.

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