Who's on Your New Member Prospect List?

Easter 3 2013

Acts 9:1-6; Ps 30; Rev 5:11-14; John 21:1-19

Father Adam Trambley

April 7, 2013, St. John’s Sharon

"Who's on Your New Member Prospect List?"

Ok.  So you’re on the vestry outreach and evangelism task force to target new church members.  (Well, we don’t really have such a committee, but pretend that we do and you have just been assigned to it.  These kinds of appointments happen when you don’t show up for meetings when volunteers are requested.)  So you are sitting around a table in the lounge with your Diet Coke, some brownies, a half-dozen other folks who also don’t really know what they are doing, and a stack of papers with prospective member information.  Just when the conversation is about to move on to PennDot road closings and potholes, you come across the following form.

Name: Saul of Tarsus.

Strengths:

·         Well-educated. 

·         Pius. 

·         Good citizen. 

·         World traveler. 

·         Good Bible knowledge. 

·         Famous.

·         Likes to write letters.

Weaknesses:

·         Hot-headed

·         Breathes threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord.

·         Has church members arrested and put in jail.

·         Votes to have Christians tortured and killed. 

·         Seemly uninterested in joining a church.

So what do you do?  You put him in the “No” pile, right?  He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy that we’d want to have in the congregation.  He’s definitely carrying some baggage.  And he doesn’t seem very nice.  It would take a miracle for him to become the kind of member we want, and even with a miracle, he’d likely still be difficult.  So Saul of Tarsus gets set aside.  If somebody really wants to contact him, they can, but the church task force isn’t going to waste their time on him.

Pretty straightforward.  Except we know that it isn’t.  We know that God wanted him.  We know that a miracle did happen, and he was still difficult, but that he was necessary to carrying out God’s plan of salvation.  We know that God did a miracle in his life, he responded, and the church took him in.  They had reservations, of course.  God tells Ananias to go get him, and Ananias asks God if he’s taken the time to read the prospective new member report on Saul yet.  But Ananias goes, and Saul is converted, changes his name to Paul, brings the gospel to the Gentiles which includes most of us, and writes important parts of the Bible.  That’s the kind of new member we’d want our task force to bring in. 

Seriously, though, the question is whether Paul’s conversion is a rare miraculous act of God or if we can count on regularly having people’s lives transformed?  To me, the answer is that we have to expect God to be changing people’s lives, and that some part of the Body of Christ has to be willing to work with people that sensible church people have written off. 

Here is what John writes in today’s reading from Revelation:

I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them singing,

“To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb, be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever.”

He heard every creature.  The Bible doesn’t say he heard most creatures, or every good creature, or every creature that could sing in key, or even every creature that he in his saintly wisdom expected to hear singing to God and to Jesus Christ.  So if “every” means “every”, and if we look around at how far away some people seem to be from singing in a universal choir, we can safely assume that God is about to do some miracles in the lives of people that we would not otherwise expect to become members of the Altar Guild.  If, in the end, every creature is praising God, then, just like in the case of Saul of Tarsus, Jesus Christ is going to show up to people and we are going to have the awesome, terrifying call of bringing them into the fullness of the body of Christ after their conversion.  Scripture says that beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news, and our feet might have farther to travel then we previously thought. 

Few churches, however, are counting on these transformations.  At our recent clergy conference, the Bishop was talking about a church researcher he met on an airplane who had numbers showing that almost nobody in the United States is reaching non-Christians.  Mainline churches don’t do a good job of discipline unbelievers, but that may not shock us.  What is more surprising, though, is that evangelical churches aren’t doing a good job of evangelizing either.  Even the mega-churches that seem to have everything a newcomer would wan,t fill their auditoriums with a very small percentage of new Christians.  Most are what a friend of mine calls “recycled” Christians. 

Now there is nothing wrong with bringing people who have left other churches back into an active church community.  Many people need a healthy church environment and a place to use their gifts for ministry.  We at St. John’s have benefitted greatly from good people returning to church in this parish.  In fact, most of you who have come to us from other places are truly answers to prayer.  Your gifts are helping us carry out the mission and ministry God has given us to do.  But if we only catch fish that have already been trained somewhere else to swim into church nets, we are not going to be as useful to God as we could be.  Instead, our goal should be to allow current Christians joining us to help us bridge the gap from where we have already been to the world of people desperately in need of God’s good news.  Welcoming Christians can help us learn skills to reach non-Christians. 

I know some church planters that say “bad people make good soil.”  From their experience, not only do we have an obligation to reach out beyond the expected prospects because everyone is going to eventually be singing God’s praises, but doing so actually makes sense for those of us trying to build up the kingdom of God. 

Their experience is that when they meet people who may be scary on some level, and they pray for them, and sometimes with them, and get to know them, and show them God’s love, and let them hear the good news as they are able, God shows up and things start to happen.  One thing that happens when people whose lives would not be testimony to the goodness of God have an encounter with God is that they actually change.  They repent.  They turn away from old behaviors. They want to learn how to pray and how to live the right way and how to become a disciple.  They are grateful for what God has done in their lives and talk about it.  Another thing that happens is that people notice.  Their family and former friends notice, and maybe decide that they want what this new believer has.  Other people notice, and give glory to God for the transformation, because they know that no human effort could have accomplished such a conversion.  Then the new Christians who were very much in the world bring their connections in the world, and their skills from the world, and their old lives of the world and lay them before the altar so that God and his Church can reach much more deeply into the world than would be possible with only good cradle Episcopalians.  That good soil of bad people quickly yields thirty, or sixty or a hundred fold.  Souls are saved.   Churches grow.  The heaven choir increases.

   

So, brothers and sisters, who do we want to put on our prospective membership lists?

Of course, we want to reach our family members and friends, and we are meant to do so.  Those are the connections God has given us in our own households to reach.

Of course, we are going to welcome with great rejoicing Christians who join us to find God in this place and use their gifts alongside of us to worship God, care for people and grow as Christians.

And, of course, we are going to accept the transfer letters of tithing tenors that love to teach Sunday school and repair slate roofs in their spare time.   

But beyond that,

Who are we going to intentionally pray for, even when we don’t really expect God’s answer to be “yes”?

Who are we going to offer to pray with, even when it is uncomfortable to offer?

Who are we going to spend time getting to know, even when there is much about them we would rather not know?

Who are we going to share God’s love with, even when we would never imagine being able to love them by ourselves?

Who are we going to proclaim the good news to, even when we aren’t sure if the seed can possibly take root?

Who are we willing to wait on God to work a miracle with, hoping to have an opportunity to lift up some serious glory in the highest when we see the Almighty at work?

Who are we expecting to see singing with us and every other creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, even if the rest of the world can’t believe it?

Who are we willing to watch come in here like Saul of Tarsus and turn our lives upside down in a way that changes the world?

Brothers and sisters, we are all on the task force for targeting new members for the Kingdom of God.  Some churches might be happy to reach only comfortable people.  But St. John’s is gifted and equipped and called to do some of the difficult work for the glory of God.  So let us make up our prospecting lists boldly, fully expecting to see God to work miracles until every creature in heaven, on earth, under the earth and in the sea is ready to join us as we sing praises to the one seated on the throne and to Jesus Christ, the Lamb.