The Welcome Table
sermon at Pathways Church, June 9,
2013, Rev. Ron Robinson
Thanks for the
privilege to be with you today. I have been an admirer and supporter of
Pathways from the early conversations in the district and it is particularly
wonderful to be with you for the first time this month as you lift up and look
at some of the multiple ways church is becoming visible in the world. Your
learning and your leadership from this is going to be more needed than ever
because of our changing world.
I am a little out of my
element preaching like this. Once in our church life a few years ago before we
went missional I preached, sermonically,
like this I think 20 some times in a row, but now the preaching and
teaching is more fused into the community ministry itself, and we do as much
worshipping with others in their spaces as we do just by ourselves, and when we
were holding our own weekly worship services we used pretty much a common
liturgy, but sometimes not one at all,
focusing on sharing stories of what was happening in our lives and in our
community, prayers for all, and eating together, usually with a hymn or two, but
sometimes when the Spirit led we might sing 16 hymns all acapella, and then
serving together often during the week, sometimes gathering for meal and study
or meal and service together three or more times a week. Like a small group
ministry, on its own, on stereoids.
But I am going to be preaching
today about church and the religious community I planted and have been a part
of in the northern Tulsa area for the past ten years. It has been ten years of
radical change, as you will see (flexibility of forms in order to sustain
the relationships in order to serve the mission has been one of our core
values, all as a response to the fluidity of our culture). I have to confess,
though, that we have succeeded so well in that regard that anything I say about
us today might not be true about us even by the end of summer. We have already
changed so much from the time two years ago when we were on the cover of the UU
World magazine. Now we are going through another wormhole, another re-boot,
another examination to see if our default settings, so to speak, are still
capable of keeping us oriented toward our reason for being---
And that is, helping
God’s loving liberating mission to heal our hurting neighborhood. See the double
focus is then on healing our neighborhood, something few if any groups of any
kind in our area of abandonment are committed to, but also on doing so in the
image of the loving and liberating community forming God. So we need to both
live in and with our neighbors in service, and in and with the life of God, getting
to know both better, letting that guide us.
In our own particular local
culture of change this past decade, we are a microcosm of the experiences
underway around us. Why we do church as we do is a result not only of the place
we are rooted and its realities of poverty, and our own finite resources and
yet vision of the Infinite, but also because of the realities of the broader
religious landscape affecting us all.
A year ago this month I
laid out some of these in a lecture for North Texas Unitarian Universalists. And
let me say that your bringing in of different ways church is manifesting itself
these days is a good response to one of the realities I sought to depict last
June, that we need a broader bandwidth of how we become the church in order to
meet people where they are, meet them physically and spiritually, as they themselves
are more diverse in the kinds of spiritual relationships they seek and they
need in this new culture that has moved, even in our neck of the woods, first
into being post-modern, then post-Christian, then post-denominational, and now
post-congregational. And yet so much of church manifests itself still in
modern, attractional, denominational, and congregational culture that was the
dominant default for some 500 years.
By “post” I don’t mean,
Lord knows, the absence of any of those, just that they are not as they were,
and will not be to an even greater degree, so privileged and dominant in the
culture. Church researcher and
consultant George Barna in his 2005 book Revolution has captured well the
post-congregational world coming at us quickly. Based on his research of what
is already happening, he predicts that in 2025, in just a dozen years, that
Americans will get their primary spiritual experience and expression in these following
venues: 30-35 percent of us will still be in local institutional or organized churches,
whereas in 2000 it was 70 percent; 30-35 percent will be in alternative
faith-based communities of a wide variety from house churches to marketplace
gatherings to new monastic communities to missional communities to recovery
groups to pilgrimages to places and major events, just to name a few, compared
to just 5 percent who were in 2000; 5 percent will get their spiritual community
through family, which is the same percent as in 2000; and 30-35 percent will
connect spiritually primarily through the arts and media and culture compared
to 20 percent who did so in 2000.
How will Unitarian Universalism match up in those categories
by then? Will we still be limited to congregations in a post-congregational
world? If we don’t create a bigger bandwidth of what church is, we will be
appealing to a much smaller segment than even we do now. In 1776 our churches
as part of what we call Congregationalism were the most prominent religious
body in the thirteen colonies, with 668 congregations out of 3228; that amounts
to some 20 percent amid 17 different religious groups. I am not sure what our
percentage of individuals were then compared to the total of the population
then, but it is safe to say it was the most sizeable of any church groups. The
impact of our values then upon the culture around us was even greater.
In 1960 around the
time of the merger of the Unitarians and Universalists we were down to 1 member
per 1000 Americans,; by 2007 that number had dropped by another 30 percent,
down to 0.7 members per 1000 Americans. I believe in the past five years it has
continued to drop. In 1960 we were double the numbers of the Foursquare Gospel
church in the U.S.; by 2007 they had grown by 80 percent and are now double our
size in the U.S. I remember sitting on a plane to Boston with the leader of
their house church networks back about 7 or 8 years ago who was flying into
Boston to help organize their networks there as they had been for a while
branching out beyond their traditional congregations. In 1960, Jehovah’s
Witnesses were only three-tenths of one percent more numerous than we were in
the U.S.; since then they have increased their share of the U.S. population by
177 percent and are some ten times our size. One group in American
religious society, the Church of God in Christ, increased by more than 700
percent during that time period of 1960 to 2007. (Rodney Stark, in
The Triumph of Christianity). Unitarian
Universalism has its years when it does grow overall compared to a previous
year, with usually that growth coming in the largest getting larger, but after
years of decline beginning in the Sixties, we are now I believe basically back
to the numbers we had at the time of merger.
But in just comparing religious bodies from 1960 to now, we
miss out on a lot because by far the fastest growing groups in terms of
percentage of members to the population were groups not around in 1960. They
have not had to have the kind of radical discontinuity with the past that is
necessary to grow in the new cultural and competitive context (See Lyle
Schaller’s book on Discontinuity and Hope). A world where in a given week
now 65 percent of people in their 70s and above are in a congregation; but for
baby boomers the number is 35 percent; and for Gen Xers it is 15 percent and
for Millenials, some of whom are already at 30 years old, it is just 4 percent.
(see Mike Breen’s Launching Missional Communiities). And the numbers aren’t
changing as people get older.
The take-away is that no matter how good we get at what we
have been doing we won’t change those numbers much at all, especially without
the massive resources required to be competitive in trying to attract and keep
people—that’s
why the large can keep getting larger. But it is also why the small, with a big
vision, and large risk-taking, can thrive by changing the competition, changing
the scorecard as missional church author Reggie McNeal describes it. And it is
why the middle-sized will probably have the hardest most anxious time,
depending on which way, toward which vision, they seek to grow, up or down,
often being pulled in both directions.
I think these numbers tell us we have to get good at two
things: we have to get good at breaking out of our ruts that develop so
quickly, our dominant molds, our prevailing modes; and we have to get good at
not caring ultimately about all those numbers I just detailed, numbers about us
and other churches. For living in a world where the concerns of our church and other
churches or faiths or beliefs are our major environment and focus is like
living in the Holodeck of the Enterprise, like living in The Matrix, like
living in the American Dream’s Consumer World Entertainment Marketplace Empire
that shapes our sense of self and reality, like Narcissus of old focusing on
his image in the pool—it is a false world that will use us up. Those church numbers
do reflect a reality calling us to face new challenges, but the answer to that
challenge does not lie in seeking to change the numbers about us, but about our
commitment to changing the numbers of the suffering around us, which is the way
we also, by the way, heal the suffering within us.
Which brings me to the number we at The Welcome Table spend
most of our time thinking about and working on…..a 14 year life expectancy gap
between our zipcode and others in our area. In light of those numbers we do
not seek to become the best, biggest, brightest church in our community, but
the best church for our community, building it up, brightening it. If we have to change in order to change the
lives of our neighbors, we do it. This reality also guides why we believe
church exists—not ultimately to bring people of like minds or like values
together, not because we have a message or principle about religious ideas to
convince people of, not because thinking rightly necessarily changes the world.
For while my faith and theology undergirds and guides all
that I have done and seek to do, in our new world it isn’t where I personally,
or communally, seek to first connect with people. Not with shared ideas, not
with thinking, not even with shared spiritual practices such as worship, but in
shared mission. As a Christian, I don’t need more Christians. As a Unitarian
Universalists, I don’t need more Unitarian Universalists. What I need more of
are neighborhoods and lives of an abundant and serving spirit.
I was taught that the common worship service on Sunday was
“for company”, it was a way of attracting people by publicly broadcasting our
message, week after week, and then we had to work to get them to stay and get
involved. Adding church worship to their busy lives was hard enough that it was
almost impossible to get the majority to then get involved with running the
church, and then especially to add in serving the world outside. Now I look at
putting the world outside first, meeting people for the first time in service
there, and inviting them to then enter worship and study as a way to grow in
the spirit in order to serve others more deeply, or to find out from them how
their worship and study was energizing and shaping their service. I would
rather have more serving community with us than worshipping with us.
While Churches used to
be places for people’s believing then behaving then belonging, now it is the reverse--people seek belonging,
learning to behave, also in the sense of behavior, of common practices, of
shared actions, which then end up opening up for growing and sharing beliefs. We
seek first to be the church in relationship, in action, in mission with others
for others, trusting that the space that creates is where belief can best be
grown and shared.
That hasn’t, however, always been the case here. We started
out, ten years ago, in a very different place and path.
In some ways we began in Weston, Mass. in 2002 during the
annual convocation of the Christian Churches within the Unitarian Universalist
Association when during worship and on my knees with hands laid on me by
ministers and those in attendance I was commissioned as an evangelist; this
coming just two months after I had been officially ordained by All Souls Church
in Tulsa and was serving as a hospice chaplain, the first of my bi and tri
vocational ministries as church planter. So the idea was to create another congregation
in our UU Christian tradition, to be message-oriented primarily. Such a
church, like many churches, could be placed practically anywhere you could
attract enough people around the message to operate an organization to
perpetuate that message. The goal and work then was to attract those people to
achieve that purpose. Get more people to think like me, to value what I value,
and the world would be a better place. Of course, in our world today,
with the reputation church has, church is not only the only place to accomplish
that goal; it might not even be the best place.
The concerns of any particular local piece of that world,
especially a place where it needs to be better in the worst way, so to speak,
was not the concern. Just creating an institutional expression of these
religious values was mission enough; and the place I was in at first, a fast
growing suburb without any progressive religious institutions, seemed the kind
of vacuum where just enough folks could be found to accomplish that task.
We started as a group of nine, half of whom had not met one
another and one whom was supportive but only came to lend moral support, on Jan.
6, 2003 on the Day of Epiphany in our living room, and each week after that one
place or another or day or another. First we were named Epiphany Church and met
in homes then motel banquet rooms and at Panera Bread meeting room, then in our
own rented space in a small commercial strip; our first public worship was Palm
Sunday and Easter Sunday 2003. We had 25 people on that first Easter; it is probably the most we have ever had for
worship in the past ten years. The Sunday after Easter we had three people.
We could have stopped then, like so many church plants dying
of a premature birth and inadequate leadership and limited resources and in a
culture that didn't fit with us. For we discovered soon that culture trumped
theology and message in many ways and people in our area wanted and were
getting new churches the way they were getting new box stores, fully stocked
and operational and geared to them from the day they opened. As a grassroots
non-funded parachute drop church plant in such an environment, we didn’t have
the resources for the vision of church we sought. Being different
theologically wasn’t enough.
But we continued to be open to where the Spirit would lead
us, would need us, and so it was through many "deaths to what we had
been", through many steep learning curves. We began with a change in that
cultural environment, moving from a place of accumulating wealth and
accumulating people, with demographics of people with college educations, to a place of poverty and declining numbers of
people, with few who had been to college.
In September 2004 in a re-start we moved to the
unincorporated area of Turley, OK and the far northside of Tulsa in the 74126
zipcode; it was mostly because of the cheap rent, was halfway point for some of
our leaders at the time, who lived miles from one another, and was the place where my wife and I grew up
and were moving back to. Still at first we were promoting ourselves as Epiphany
Church and meeting still on Sunday mornings, then on Sunday evenings, still
primarily focused on offering worship and study, and food, and when we could
doing things out in the neighborhood like planting flowers, and cleaning up
streets; then because Epiphany was a word that few in our area seemed to know,
and because we were becoming more informal, like a house church in public, we
became called The Living Room.
In January 2007, with a core group of six to eight people and about a dozen in worship, we made our big missional transformative move; we had just lost our biggest financial contributor from our original group, but we felt called to serve our community and its severe needs of abandonment. We had talked among ourselves, particularly with the growing percentage of people who lived right around our space and came for the community and food I think and then the worship, and we talked with others outside of us about what they felt the community around us needed. More People who believed like us was not on the list. Neighborhood Pride, spirit, safety, healthy food, cleaner environment, sense of a community, better animal control, better schools, these were tops.
In January 2007, with a core group of six to eight people and about a dozen in worship, we made our big missional transformative move; we had just lost our biggest financial contributor from our original group, but we felt called to serve our community and its severe needs of abandonment. We had talked among ourselves, particularly with the growing percentage of people who lived right around our space and came for the community and food I think and then the worship, and we talked with others outside of us about what they felt the community around us needed. More People who believed like us was not on the list. Neighborhood Pride, spirit, safety, healthy food, cleaner environment, sense of a community, better animal control, better schools, these were tops.
So, with fewer people and less money, we took a leap of faith
and paid more and rented a four times larger space across the street and opened up not billed as a church, but as a
community center soon with library computer center clothing room food pantry
health clinic and gathering space, in which we created space to worship amid
the space we gave away for the service of others, rather than having a separate
worship space, and we also worshipped during the week and travelled to other
churches to worship with them on Sundays, UU churches and others.
The center was called A Third Place Community Center and
started embodying the concept of third spaces where people of great differences
could come together for the common good, especially in an abandoned place of
the Marketplace Empire, with people left behind and left out, in the lowest
life expectancy zipcode in our greater area. We were still then known as either
The Living Room Church or sometimes as just Church at A Third Place but we were
shifting from church as a What to church as a Who.
My take-away: As we failed at what we thought we wanted to
be, we became what the world needed us to be.
In 2009 we completed the missional move by creating the separate
non-profit A Third Place Community Foundation to connect with others and
partner with them for renewal in our area, and to be the organizational wing of
our mission, while as church we became organic, incarnational, even smaller so
that we could keeping dreaming and doing bigger things. Which we did the very
next year.
In summer 2010 through our nonprofit we bought the city block of abandoned homes and trash dump and transformed it into a community garden park and orchard, and called it The Welcome Table, named after the demonstration garden spot across the street we had put in as partners with the local United Methodist Church on their property loaned to us—where we have now a native wildflower plant preserve--and named after the hymn of that name which our children loved to sing when we worshipped, especially when we worshipped outside at our garden spots.
In summer 2010 through our nonprofit we bought the city block of abandoned homes and trash dump and transformed it into a community garden park and orchard, and called it The Welcome Table, named after the demonstration garden spot across the street we had put in as partners with the local United Methodist Church on their property loaned to us—where we have now a native wildflower plant preserve--and named after the hymn of that name which our children loved to sing when we worshipped, especially when we worshipped outside at our garden spots.
Then At the end of 2010 through the nonprofit we bought the
original Methodist church building which had been the largest abandoned
building in our community for several years. To tie in with the garden, we
called the community center project also The Welcome Table. And so when we
moved into it our church/missional community became also The Welcome Table.
In our new space, the oldest church building in our area, we have been expanding our food pantry and have a community art space, and crafts space, and more room for our community events we throw like our free holiday parties that have grown in leaps and bounds. We are now leading the way in getting a new seniors group going in the area, and are trying to put together a coalition to buy and use for the community the Cherokee Elementary school that has been closed, another source of abandonment just as is our recently closed postal service, the closing of another of our civic groups, the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
In our new space, the oldest church building in our area, we have been expanding our food pantry and have a community art space, and crafts space, and more room for our community events we throw like our free holiday parties that have grown in leaps and bounds. We are now leading the way in getting a new seniors group going in the area, and are trying to put together a coalition to buy and use for the community the Cherokee Elementary school that has been closed, another source of abandonment just as is our recently closed postal service, the closing of another of our civic groups, the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
When we moved to the old church building we worshipped on
Sunday morning, though could also worship at the gardenpark or at our garden we
had put in at the nearby school, since abandoned, or wherever our mission might
take us. We had a main gathering that would start at 9:30 am with ingathering
and sharing of lives and news, then move at no designated time into a study and
sharing time often watching a progressive Christian video or discussing
selections from books or bible study, then also at no designated time moving
into worship time for communion and prayers, which might at times be interwoven
into our common meal time which always follows. This gave people options to
come into the group for any or all of the rhythms, including those who join us
from other churches after their worship or who come for the meal time together
only and may join us for worship or study if we are still engaged in it. Our
motto was worship is more party than program. Pretty much everything was
multi-generational.
By this time we had developed a series of ways to describe the vision we sought to live into, failing, but seeking.
By this time we had developed a series of ways to describe the vision we sought to live into, failing, but seeking.
Church is something we become, not something we attend. And Church has four pathways of
becoming: the first is growing mission, serving the least of these as
neighbors; the second is growing in community relationship with one another in
order to better serve others; the third is growing in discipleship, or personal
growth, in order to better offer our gifts to our community so it can offer
itself better in service to the world; and the fourth is worshipping, where we
refresh our souls for the service of the world. We also seek to follow and
promote the 3Rs of community development outlined by civil rights and missional
church leader John Perkins: calling us to Relocation to abandoned places,
Reconciliation work, especially ethnic reconciliation in our two mile service area
which is predominantly African-American, and in the
Redistribution of goods and The Common Good. To do this work in community we
look for Re-locaters, Returners, and Remainders, those who have stayed; each
has particular gifts need by the group.
For covenantal practices we have held out the vision of daily
prayer, weekly worship, monthly spiritual accountability, annual retreat,
lifetime pilgrimage, and daily acts of random kindness beauty and justice---small
acts of justice, as Mother Teresa said, done with great love. As a church we
don’t have a board, bylaws, budget or our own building space, and we ask people
to donate to the non-profit foundation whose board has both our members and
others.
Still, with so much accomplished for our community and much
to be done for our community by so few, still now at the 10 year turning point
we are going to be discerning again how to incarnate our vision of God's
movement in and for and with those in our neck of the world; what kind of
spiritual community does our community need that we can meet? How grow in
covenant and shared leadership and still stay small enough to make big change
in the world. How live in that tension of being “a church” or being a part of
“the church/the movement”? Can we still
offer the permeable boundaries of community worship and service and study that
welcome in folks who are either in other communities or are content with their
involvement with us, who might only want to be with us either during the week
or only at a more traditional Sunday worship time? Can we embody multiple
communities, our own broader bandwidth of being, connected together in a
radical way, and grow leaders for each of them? Can we in the next 10 years
start or inspire whole new missional communities in other places and ways?
What I believe is that whatever happens, the life and legacy of
The Welcome Table will like all of us ultimately live deepest in the
relationships we make, regardless of what form they take or how long they last.
Our goal is not self-perpetuation, but giving ourselves away and giving
ourselves back to that Great Love, in which we live and move and have our being
and share with others for others, especially those most in its need.
