"Day by day, as
they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate
their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill
of all the people. And day by day the
Lord added to their number those who were being saved.”
--Acts
2:46
On the
show Parks and Recreation, Councilwoman Leslie Knope holds a hearing about the
expanding sizes of soft drinks in her town of Pawnee. It seems the local fast food chain
Paunchburger has increased the size of their “small” beverages to a whopping 64
ounces. Their medium-sized soda went to
128 ounces (most people call it a gallon).
Then, there is the horrifying 512 ounce version they called “child size”
(because the gigantic cup is the size of a small child).
On one
of my frequent hospital visits recently, I was talking with the hospital
chaplain and telling him about Atonement.
“We are just a small church, but very active,” I told him. “We have about 250 members on our
rolls.” “Back when I was in seminary,” he
told me, “a church with over 200 members wasn’t small. We called that medium sized.” As soon as he said that, it reminded me of
what I had learned about growing churches over the years and I realized that he
was right. Atonement is growing up.
We’re
becoming a medium-sized church.
Small,
medium, large…child sized… what difference does it make? Those words are not nearly as arbitrary as
they seem. Churches at different sizes
really do have different characteristics, different personalities, and they
function differently. One thing people
love about small churches is that you can really know everybody. When there is one service with attendance
below 100, you can look around the sanctuary on a Sunday morning and tick off the
names of who you know. If there’s an
unfamiliar face, it’s a safe bet they’re a visitor. When weekly attendance climbs above 100, the
percentage of visitors increases. When
there is more than one service, not even the pastor knows every
worshipper.
Which brings
us to some of the big changes churches see happening as they move from small to
medium. As churches grow through this
transition the roles of the leaders,
particularly the pastor, must transform.
The pastor’s time is inevitably drawn towards new plans and projects, and
helping new people take on new roles.
Churches making a successful transition to the medium size find ways to
share the ministry of routine calling on members and bringing communion to the
homebound. This is happening at
Atonement with our Caring team and trained Eucharistic ministers. Deacons, council members and other lay
leaders also take on more prominent roles.
They may end up leading events and being public representatives of the
church in ways that just the pastor would when the church was small.
The role
of the church council of a medium-sized church is different as well. Council becomes more focused on ministry
goals and policy decisions and less on deciding who we call to fix the toilets.
Authority and responsibility is spread
increasingly through the congregation to those empowered and entrusted with
particular details of parish life.
Council, in turn, works to keep the teams healthy and functioning so
that more people can become involved and more ministry can happen.
Our
congregation is changing. Sometimes we
welcome change, sometimes we dread it. Almost
always, change brings some level of discomfort.
We’re regularly dealing with a number of growing pains, including:
-- not knowing everyone… It’s exciting to see new faces, but also
confusing when you’re not sure who’s a regular and who’s new. We are currently working on a directory which
we will be producing in-house. This will
allow us to have regular updates and produce a more accurate directory with
more photos. This year I have invited
various ministry groups to spend a morning with the confirmation class to get
to know our youth a little better and to share a little about what they
do. But I hope that every member sees
themselves on the front line of greeting and welcoming new members, as well as
inviting them to serve.
-- we are tight
for space… For lack of available
space, we turned down 3 congregations in the last year who came to us wanting
to use our building. Storage is at a
premium. My office and all the rooms in the back have been used to store items
used by other ministries. Some evenings,
there are groups in every available room.
It is wonderful that the building is being used so much, but it does put
more wear and tear on the building. We
are grateful for the gracious spirit in which people help with clean up and
help make room for others who are using the building.
-- we are looking
to expand… A new building will bring
us new opportunities, possibilities AND responsibilities. Many have pointed out that this means we will
have more space that will need cleaning, more utilities that will break down,
and more upkeep in general. It will also
mean that some of our ministries will be able to function differently. We know that fellowship and the food pantry
will be directly affected – fellowship because we will now be able to have
larger meals cooked in a full kitchen; food pantry because they will continue
to need designated space to store and distribute their food every week.
Paul
Bartell has volunteered to help put together a “Master planning team” that will collect and coordinate various
other plans for the use of our property.
Areas to be designated for the prayer garden, playground, columbarium
(as well as access to it) and other outdoor projects should be identified and
marked. We hope that each ministry will
be thinking about how they might need to adapt as we expand our facility, and
share that with this group.
-- we have new
ministries… With our new English as
a Second Language (ESL) class taking off, men’s and women’s Bible studies up
and running, and expanding programs serving all ages, there is a lot going on
at this church. It gets hard to keep up
with, so to help us all get a good look at the many ministries that happen
here, we are putting together our first Ministry
Fair Sunday on April 24. Each
ministry team will put up a display somewhere in the church building, and we
will all take some time during worship that day to visit those stations. We will also be implementing a new feature in
the announcements – a “Classified Ad”
section for each ministry to share their needs for resources, members,
volunteers, etc.
After
the Easter miracle brought the Church to birth, God grew his people and
expanded their numbers, growing their hearts along with it. As we
pursue
our mission of sharing the love of Jesus, glorifying God and extending His
kingdom, we experience the newness of God as the people of Atonement. Like the early apostles, we recognize that
many of the changes we experience are due to the movement of God’s Holy
Spirit. We give thanks for this future
God is bringing about, even when it invades our space and messes with our
comfort zones. For years we have been
Wesley Chapel’s “small church with a big heart.” As our membership grows medium-sized, may God
also transform our love for Him and for our neighbors, growing our hearts
super-sized.
Peace,
God
commanded his priest Aaron to bless the people, and through that blessing he
“put his name” in them. God “put his
name” in us at our baptisms and has blessed us through Christ so we can bless
others with his love. As Christians who
have been made “priests to serve our God” (Revelation 1:6), we carry that
mission forward into today’s world. We are made to bless! Like Abraham, who knew he was “blessed to be
a blessing” (Genesis 12:2), we too are given promises and gifts to share with
the world. 
This
October is a month of blessing at
Atonement. We will be blessing pets and
animals before the service on October 2.
We’re blessing new members on October 16. We’re blessing Lutheran Outdoor Ministries
and our Lutheran camps with our prayers and pledges to Mission Possible. We’re blessing trick-or-treaters with our
Trunk-or-Treat festival on October 22. And
on October 30, we share the blessings of our Reformation heritage with a special
service and Reformation dinner. I
hope you will come and be blessed this month with God’s Word and Sacraments,
his grace and his love. And I pray you
will spread that blessing by inviting others, bringing your friends to be
blessed as well, and being a blessing to them through your care and concern.
Often we
think of Aaron’s blessing from Numbers 6 as a prayer requesting God to send his
blessing, as if it read “May the Lord
bless and keep you…” etc. But this
understanding would be a wrong translation of the original Hebrew words. The Scripture text is saying that Aaron’s
blessing is a promise from God himself.
The priest is actually speaking on behalf of God, speaking God’s own
words for Him! In other words, we should
think of it as saying, “the Lord WILL bless and keep you…” etc. This blessing is a statement from the divine
one who controls our future, controls heaven and earth, and holds each of us in
the palm of His hand. 
