Gloria Dei Evangelical Lutheran Church
Helping our community experience a new life with Jesus
		A Letter from Pastor Mike September /October Editions of the Herald Angel on the theme: Behold God Doing a New Thing (September) Once a month I arise well before dawn, drive 90 miles to the Hawkins family farm near North Manchester, Indiana and join a small group of pastors for Hands On Pastoral Education (HOPE). Here we spend our morning helping with chores around the farm, getting our hands dirty and our boots covered with manure. We spend our afternoons discussing how this experience is like being church. After all, being church can also be a messy business. It just never seems to fit neatly into the sterile organizational models offered by a business school or even a seminary. Increasingly my experience is that church is more closely related to a living organism than a machine-like organization. But why does it matter that we draw such a distinction? One reason is that the church is changing and how we react to those changes depends on our understanding of the nature of the church. If it is machine we approach the changes one way i.e. do less here, do more there to try to “get the old equipment back on track.” On the other hand, if the church is alive and evolving in Spirit led ways perhaps the changes or adaptations required are of us. Sitting in the late morning shade of the farmhouse porch we pastors brought our own viewpoints, experiences, theological perspectives and questions to issue of the changing church. We agreed that the church of 21^st Century America is undeniably different than the church of 1^st Century Judea, or the church of 16^th Century Saxony, or 19^th Century Clinton County. The church grows, the church dies and because we serve the resurrected Lord, we are an Easter church, rising again for the sake of a world in need. From an “organic” viewpoint the cyclical nature of the church’s existence is proper. In nature there is a balance between growing and dying. Either too much growing (e.g. cancer) or too much dying eventually distorts and destroys living things. And so we HOPEful pastors contemplated what an evolving church may look like and how our ministries may be affected. We summarized our discussion with two questions: what kind of church is God giving us? And will we recognize it when we see it? At Gloria Dei we have recently been paying special attention to identifying experiences of God in our lives and the life of our church. It is this type of vigilance that is required if we are to identify the church that God is giving to us in our time and our place. Discernment is a task for the priesthood of all believers. What is certain is that there are chores to be done. Let’s pull on our boots and prepare to get our hands dirty. A living church can be messy and beautiful place to live and work. (October) I have been thinking about the church God is giving us and whether we will recognize it. Our new bishop, Bill Gafkjen, puts those issues in the words of Isaiah, “Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:19). Within the church there are things dying; within the church there are things aborning. What the church will be in the next generation is as yet a mystery. I’ve also been intrigued with idea that the church is closer in nature to a living organism than it is to a machine-like organization, a model so prevalent in our society that it has become a default metaphor for many complex things, things as varied as the human body and the cosmos. Alert to organic images, I was struck by a passage from Wendell Berry’s essay, “A Native Hill,” in the book, The Art of the Commonplace. In this particular passage, Berry, a noted conservationist, is describing the importance of topsoil to the health of a place. He writes, “(The topsoil) is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peacefulness.” Reversing Berry’s metaphor, I believe we, the church, can take hope in the fact that Christ is the ground (the topsoil) of our being. And so paraphrasing Berry along his line of thought, we can say, “Christ keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility.” I don’t yet know what the church will be in the next generation. I do know, however, with the certainty of faith (the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen) that grounded in Christ, in power and peacefulness, the church will live and grow anew. A question that is left to us is, “Will we recognize the church God is giving us?” In other words, will we be a part of the “new thing” springing forth or will we cling to the old thing which is dying? At Gloria Dei we continue to practice the discipline of looking for God in our lives and the life of the church. In recent weeks I have received several inspiring stories of God at work in our world, but those are tales to be told at a later date. For now with open eyes and hearts we pray that we will perceive the new thing with which God is blessing us. Peggy Crawford’s WELCA Sunday Reflection on Philippians 4:1-9 Reflections Gloria Dei Lutheran Church is a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) For comments or problems with this website: webmaster