Life On Fire Harrisburg, PA Sermon: Living Missives of the Sacred

Life on Fire: Sermon at First Unitarian Church, Harrisburg, PA, Nov. 9, 2013, Rev. Ron Robinson

 Reading: from Isaiah, chapter 58

Is not this the fast that I choose:  To loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?  Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see them naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly;  If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, You shall be like a watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.

Sermon:

 

There is a story being told in many churches around the world today. It seemed appropriate for my themes so I want to share it too.

It comes from the Gospel of Luke in the Christian scriptures when “some Sadducees, those who sald there is no resurrection, came to Jesus and asked him a question, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. ²⁹Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; ³⁰then the second ³¹and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. ³²Finally the woman also died. ³³In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.”

          ³⁴(After probably a long withering look of disbelief and shaking of head at how people can get so many things backwards about what matters in a spiritual life, how we can get so distracted from our mission and try to substitute for it all manner of things in a literalistic and legalistic fashion, and with a little frustration), “Jesus said to them, according to the story and in my version, don’t bother yourself about such things; some things happen here that won’t happen there, because we will be all changed there; don’t get stuck in your default mode of one world when that world will be no more. And for the coup de grace, he adds the sound bite: ^38”Now God is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to God all of them are alive.”

And so are we all to be, alive, and on fire with passion, with love for others, and commitment to and for the living.

 This was an important scriptural story to our faith tradition’s founders; it conveys one of the cores of our witness about the Holy: that it is to be found ultimately not in what is dead and gone, as informative and inspirational as that might be, or in the finer points of speculative argumentation and reasoning, nor in the deadness of the status quo and how we have always done things and complacency in the face of injustice; but in the messy fired-up always imperfect lives of struggling people and in the unfolding continuing revealing changing spirit of life itself that keeps manifesting in new ways. To draw near to the Holy we say is to draw near to that experience; as Isaiah prophetically reminds us still, it is in solidarity and familiarity with those without that we truly earn the name of religious community.

          And often, particularly these days in the cultural wormhole of much change, moving between dimensions, that means changing radically our community, our sense and purpose and actions of community to keep it in the land of the living. It means getting out of ourselves, and over ourselves to become our deepest selves; striving to be the best church not IN the community but FOR the community; seeing ourselves as “a people” (not “a collection of religiously oriented individuals” [Conrad Wright, Doctrine of a Church], a people to be Sent to listen and learn from others and, together with them, to love the hell out of this world. Sent. That is where the word missional comes from, out of the Greek word missio. We are to be not members of a religious club, but living missives of the Sacred. That is what will make our lives catch fire, make them into sacraments.

 

I remember a time about five years ago when some of the church leaders from Boston came to Tulsa and were listening to me try to describe how we were doing inside-out micro-church in the far northside area of abandonment and poverty and I could tell from their blank gazes that none of it was sinking in, our unwillingness to have members for example or our decision to give our space away to the community, or not having the name of our church on the front of the building, or how we put service before worship, but to their credit they kept listening from afar, and in the past few years, especially after being on the cover of the Unitarian Universalist World magazine, I have been privileged to be a frequent preacher and lecturer and workshop leader of what is called the missional movement catching fire among us, a movement I must emphasize that is really more about changing the wider community beyond; where necessary, changing the church in order to do that. I want people to know more about, or at least primarily about, the zipcodes their churches are located in then about their bylaws, buildings, budgets, board procedures, or the like. Good thing we are a home for heretics.

 

The title of the sermon comes from the gatherings some of us have started to share and explore together of the church that is radically focused outward to and with others, so radical that for some it might even mean living covenanted community lives of service beyond any congregational or organizational structures, while still being deep within a tradition or faith movement.  In part this falls under the beyond part of the “Congregations and Beyond” recent conversations of the UUA. But These gatherings of missional-driven folks are also for those who are remaining part of established churches and want to help turn them more toward counting people served than people in pews or as pledges. 

After a few years of workshop gatherings and online communities we had our first Life on Fire meeting in September at the UU church of OakRidge Tennessee and we will have our second one Feb. 28-Mar. 2 at our place, The Welcome Table in Turley and far north Tulsa neighborhoods in Oklahoma. In good UU fashion, and missional fashion, even though mostly we UUs have started the Life on Fire events, we have been enriched by the presence  and leadership of those in other churches and faith communities and welcome and need them too.  

 

When we planted our faith community ten years ago, we began in a fast growing suburb. The intent was not to become what we have become, but to be an established church that would look and feel pretty much like other churches and like what churches both UU and otherwise have looked and felt like since the 1950s and even the 1850s and even before. The intent was to start one that is focused on gathering people together around a message of religious freedom, one focused on how people relate to one another and support one another in the gathered community, one  where communal worship is the primary and central act of and for the gathered community as it sends out a message to the wider community.

 

Now here is where I say that there is nothing wrong with any of that; it is just that it is now only one way, one manifestation possible of the church and that we don’t any longer live in a one-size-fits-all world, and that includes church; and we certainly are moving into a landscape where we need “a bigger bandwidth” of church in order to meet people where they are in their new diverse expectations of community and faith. Our wider culture has become like the cell phone that is only minimally a phone, if that, but our churches are too often still like the 1950s phone my father still has in his house and only recently was forced to stop using: one size, one color, attached to a wall you had to go to use, and where you had to dial and wait for each number. That is more like what we call the modern Attractional Church, focused on getting people to “come to us and be like us” But that kind of organization  is one that takes more and more resources in this highly competitive culture; it is why the large are able to pull it off and are getting larger, and yet at the same time even they are still losing their overall market share, shall we say,  of the general population.  

Church researcher and consultant George Barna in his 2005 book Revolution captures well the post-modern, post-denominational, post-Christian, and post-congregational world coming at us quickly. He predicts, and all predictions are dubious but this one continues to be borne out,  that in 2025, in just a dozen years, that 30-35 percent of Americans will get their primary spiritual community connection and experience and expression in local institutional or organized churches, whereas in 2000 it was 70 percent; 30-35 percent will be in a wide variety of alternative faith-based communities from house churches to marketplace gatherings to new monastic communities to missional communities to recovery groups to pilgrimages to places and events, just to name a few venues, compared to just 5 percent who were connecting this way 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.

 

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—But it is also why the small and very small groups, with a big vision, and large risk-taking, can thrive by changing the competition, changing the scorecard of success(as missional church author Reggie McNeal describes it). Why maybe instead of working on ways to grow larger, many of us should be working on ways to grow smaller in order to relate to more. Why success should be found in how grand and how many times we experiment and fail and learn from it to shape our next response. Our task: How can we become church anywhere anytime and with anyone? That question itself challenges so much of the reigning model or mindset of why so many of us have “come to” church in the past—to “find our home, our people” and to create a center for distinguishable religious ideas. In a deeper cultural framework, we are talking about the shift from a modernist focus on fixed places and identities and centers to a new post-modernist focus on fluidity and margins and edges.

 

Once upon a time: There was a young man who had grown up having a hard time, as a sufferer of ADD, sitting still in worship every Sunday in the spectator-manner of his church, and so when he became a young adult he decided that he didn’t have to keep “going to church” and so one Sunday he followed the invitation of a friend to join others who had being going out on the lake in a boat; while out there, in a lull from swimming, his old habits reared up and he felt guilty for not “being in church” and so he asked his friends if he could say part of a psalm he had memorized and then say a short prayer, and his friend said sure, and he asked his friends if there was anything he could include in his prayer for them, and he did so. And they went back swimming and partying. Next Sunday the same thing happened, but this time he had also brought a Bible with him for just a short time of reading and saying the prayer and then they kept on partying. Gradually as more friends joined in, soon they were also spending time at the lake helping tow boats that had broken down, and were cleaning the park, looking for other ways to do random acts of kindness. They even set up elements for communion on some picnic tables (next to ice chests of beer I imagine), but mostly though they kept partying before and during and after the time of prayer and communion and service. And all the while his worried family back in the pews kept bugging him to “come back to church.” (Exiles, Michael Frost).

They thought church is something you attend or go to; but it is something you become.  Imagine if we inspire and turned small groups of people loose to go places and do things like this intentionally.

 

In my missional community, we haven’t gone quite as organic and spontaneous as in this story, but about six years ago, after we had failed at first trying to be an attractional church in the suburbs and had relocated to the lowest income lowest life expectancy zipcode in the Tulsa area, it became clear we needed to change to change our area, believing that churches or any groups should not get healthier and wealthier while the communities around them become poorer and sicker. As one missional leader has said (Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution) we risked becoming smaller to do bigger things.

We learned that the numbers we needed to be concerned about were not the numbers in worship or that might join as members but the numbers of the poor and sick and oppressed in our zipcode area where people die 14 years sooner than they do just six miles south of us. (Levin study, OU).  

So In January 2007, with a core group of just six to eight people and about a dozen in worship on a good day, 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 especially because there was an absence of any other nonprofits or government and the other churches were only interested in their shrinking memberships. We were already shrunk so didn’t have to worry about that. (Note that even if you are in a zipcode without such dire basic needs, there is still much to be done where you are; I would love to not be focusing on the basics of food, water, clothing, homes, and instead be serving our neighbors in other ways.)

We talked among ourselves, and with our neighbors, about what the community 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. A church that helped that to happen is what was needed.

With fewer people and less money than when we started, 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 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 of our own, and we also worshipped during the week and travelled to other churches to worship with them on Sundays, UU churches and others.  Lately we have been more of a roaming worship group to build relationships with others around us and to experience the kinds of dynamic worship we don’t have the resources to do week in and week out.

 

One of my take-aways of our many radical changes as a group is that As we failed at what we thought we wanted to be, we became what the world needed us to be.

In doing this We were shifting from church as a What to church as a Who. Church in the new and ancient way that didn’t require it to be a 501c3 organization, with a building of its own, bylaws,boards, budgets. Those may be deemed helpful, but they aren’t what makes a church a church; that is its mission. And Church doesn’t have a mission; The mission has, and creates, church. The mission is the permanent; the church form is the transient. That is borrowing the words of Theodore Parker who reminded us that the church of the first century did not do for the fifth century, and the church of the fifth century did not do for the fifteenth century, and the church of the fifteenth century did not do for the 19^th century; and we can update him to say that the church of the late 20^th century will not do for the 21^st.

Even as far back as the Cambridge Platform of 1648, the founding document of our radical American congregationalism formed by the oldest churches in our Association, church was grounded in its covenants, which is a way of saying its mission to and with others, and not just with those who joined a particular church, or became its leaders; for a church to be considered whole and healthy, then and now, it needed to be in covenant with the world around it; in fact, the more it struggles with its internal covenants with one another and its leadership, the more it needs its core identity of a people on an external mission, to and with those beyond its own circle. 

 

In our zipcode, in what has been described as “an abandoned place of the American Empire” [The New Monasticism, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, et al]…by 2009 we completed the first transformational missional move by creating the separate non-profit A Third Place Community Foundation to connect  more deeply 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 block of abandoned homes and trash dump and transformed it into a community garden park and orchard. Then in 2011 the nonprofit bought the largest abandoned building at the time, an old church building, for our community center. We called both the center and the park The Welcome Table. And so our church/missional community that had started as Epiphany Church then became The Living Room Church then Church at A Third Place became The Welcome Table. Four location changes and four name changes in 8 years, not mentioning how we started in living rooms, in a hotel meeting space, in the back room of a Panera Restaurant, and how we still look for ways to worship in the garden or at our service sites or places we partied like a bowling alley. And we may be morphing in a major way again very soon.

The impetus is to keep turning the church inside out, keep responding to those in need, and letting that need shape what the church becomes.

Our reason for being, what calls us together, is to be sent out to make visible in the world that Sacredness of Life that compels us to love the hell out of this world. To discern who our heart breaks for, and let that guide us into how we become church.

          Now we have been expanding our food pantry into a free corner store for our area where 55 percent say they are unsure if they will have enough to eat, where 60 percent say they can’t afford healthy food, and we have a community art space, and crafts space, and free clothing and more space; we hold community events and community organizing meetings and put on free holiday parties and throw open the doors to the community, because no one else in our area is; we are now leading the way in getting a new seniors group organized, and we have the lofty dream of trying to put together a coalition to buy and use for the community the recently closed school across from us. Meanwhile the community garden park and orchard is growing and becoming an award-winning site for events itself. And we do all this and the last time we worshipped together this past Sunday we had five people, a good turnout. I never say “just” five people, or two people. We embody a theology of enough. We are a church of enough-ness.

Of course we do this living like our neighbors, going from cut-off notice to cut-off notice juggling bills, and knowing that it all could be cut back, curtailed or especially if we don’t get some more regular $5 and $10 or more a month donations from online and face to face supporters to offset those who have died or moved from our community, that one of these days we could close much of what we do, just like so much else has closed in our neighborhood. (One of the things I say when I am often asked, especially  by our  partners, the graduate social work students, about what is the most successful thing we have done, is to say, “Just still being here” because so much else comes and goes and people don’t expect a good thing to be able to last in our neighborhoods.) We face that reality with each break-in, each vandalism, each broken heart or hurt feeling, as people and finances come and go. We find we must grow deeper in radical trust, and the spirit of abundance in the midst of scarcity, in order to keep making leaps into the missional abyss.

Which is why we need to keep stoking the fires burning within our own lives without becoming burned out, following that ancient image of the Divine as the bush that burns but doesn’t burn itself out, so we can be a spark for others. It is why mission to others is always mirrored with refreshing the spirit—why I hope you are here this morning, but as a Spiritual Departure point not a Destination Point.  It is why in our place we say we aren’t really giving out food or information as much as bearing witness to life in our neighborhood, giving relationship, community, connecting the disconnected, starting with what’s disconnected within us. Partnering with people of peace, modeling a way of non-violent response instead of drama and anxiety, this is more important than all the programs I have mentioned or that we might begin. And this is missional work that is needed I believe in every neighborhood no matter its means, though I do remind people that some neighborhoods have more resources to bring to bear for healing than others do, and some of the best healing work we can do in some neighborhoods is to get them liberated from the possessions which possess them, and help them to find ways to relocate in part or whole to be where those with the least are located.

Now While my faith and particular theology undergirds and guides all that I have done and seek to do, in our new unchurched and dechurched world it isn’t where I personally, or in community, seek to first connect with people. Not with shared ideas, not even with shared spiritual practices such as worship, but it is first in shared mission, something I can do with practically anyone. As a Christian, then I don’t ultimately need, or think ultimately the world needs, more Christians. As a Unitarian Universalists, then I don’t ultimately need or think the world ultimately needs more Unitarian Universalists. Those are not my missions. What I need and I think we need and the world needs more of are neighborhoods and lives of an abundant and serving spirit. If that results in more people coming to adopt my specific faith perspective, great; but if not, if the specific communities and organizations I am connected with were to die away as the world changed from adopting their ways, then that is a legacy of radical love for the ages I will embrace.

What I believe is that whatever happens in my community or in our wider church movement, the life and legacy of what we have done 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 growing our soul, and we do that by giving ourselves back to that Great Love, in which we live and move and have and find our being. And it is in sharing that Love with others for others, especially those most in its need, that will set our lives, our churches, on Fire, with a sacred mission into this bruised and blessed land of the living.

 

Life On Fire

 

Presentation at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Bartlesville OK

Oct. 27, 2013 Rev. Ron Robinson

Reading: from Exiles, by Michael Frost

Let me tell you a story from the book Exiles by Michael Frost, a book of stories of people being church in different ways. There was a young man who had grown up having a hard time, as a sufferer of ADD, sitting still in worship every Sunday in the spectator-manner of his church, and so when he became a young adult he decided that he didn’t have to keep “going to church” and so one Sunday he followed the invitation of a friend to join others who had being going out on the lake in a boat; while out there, in a lull from swimming, his old habits reared up and he felt guilty for not “being in church” and so he asked his friends if he could say part of a psalm and then say a short prayer, and his friend said sure, and he asked his friends if there was anything he could include in his prayer for them, and he did so. And he went back swimming and partying. Next Sunday the same thing happened, but this time he had also brought a Bible with him, and after a short time with him reading and saying a prayer they kept on partying. Gradually more and more friends were joining them. Gradually the prayers had more things mentioned. Soon they were spending time at the lake helping tow boats that had broken down, and were cleaning the park, looking for other ways to do random acts of kindness. They began to take time out for communion set up on some picnic tables, and they kept partying before and during and after. And all the while his worried family kept bugging him to “come back to church.” They thought church is something you attend; but it is something you become.

Sermon: Life on Fire

 It is good to be back in the pulpit here more than a decade after serving as student minister with you; a decade of a lot of change for me, for you, and for the larger culture and religious landscape of which we are a part. I could not have guessed when I left you in 2000 near the end of my seminary years that 11 years later I would end up on the cover of the Unitarian Universalist World Magazine for being involved with a new, but really rather ancient, approach to being church, and that what seemed like being a lonely voice in the missional wilderness just those couple of years ago would now be tapping into a wellspring of passion and risk that is one of the emerging ways of living out faith.

 I remember a time when some of the leaders from Boston came to Tulsa about five years ago and were listening to me try to describe how we were doing church on the northside and I could tell from their blank gazes that none of it was sinking in, but to their credit they kept listening from afar, and in the past few years I have been privileged to be a frequent preacher and lecturer and workshop leader of what is called the missional movement catching fire among us, a movement that is really more about changing the wider community, and changing the church in order to do that.   

Before I talk much about it this morning, I just want to say that looking back I can credit some of this to my time with you here, to seeing what a small group with a large vision could accomplish, and to the power of mere presence not only IN the wider community, but FOR the wider community. Those are some of the main hallmarks of the missional church, the word missional coming from the Greek word missio meaning Sent.  

 The title of the sermon comes from the gatherings some of us Unitarian Universalists have started to share and explore together of the church that is radically focused outward to and with others, so radical that it is even for and with some of those who want to live lives of service beyond any congregational or organizational structures.  But it is also for those who are remaining part of established churches and just want to help turn them more toward counting people served than people in pews.  After a few years of workshop gatherings and online communities we had our first Life on Fire meeting in September at the UU church of OakRidge Tennessee and we will have our second one Feb. 28-Mar. 2 at our place, The Welcome Table in Turley and far north Tulsa neighborhoods. In good UU fashion, even though mostly we UUs have started the Life on Fire events, we have been enriched by the presence of those in other churches and faith communities and welcome and need them.  

 When we planted our faith community ten years ago, as I was winding up my time as hospice chaplain in Bartlesville, we began in the fast growing suburb of Owasso north of Tulsa. The intent was not to become what we have become, but to be an established church that would look and feel pretty much like other churches and like what churches both UU and otherwise have looked and felt like since the 1950s and even the 1850s and before. Pretty much like what the church I started in 1991 in Tahlequah looked like. One focused on gathering people together around a message of religious freedom, one focused on how people relate to one another and support one another in the gathered community, one  where communal worship is the primary and central act of and for the gathered community.

 Now here is where I say that there is nothing wrong with any of that; it is just that it is only one way, one manifestation possible of the church and that we don’t any longer live in a one-size-fits-all world, and that includes church; and we certainly are moving, even here in our churched neck of the world, into a climate where we need a bigger bandwidth of church in order to meet people where they are in their new diverse expectations of community and faith. That modern model of what is called the Attractional Church, focused on getting people to “come to us and be like us” is one that takes more and more resources in this competitive culture; it is why the large are able to pull it off and are getting larger, and yet are still losing their overall market share, shall we say, at the same time.

Church researcher and consultant George Barna in his 2005 book Revolution has captured well the post-modern, post-denominational, post-Christian, and 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 the then 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).  

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 younger 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—But it is also why the small and very small groups, 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.

 That is what we started doing about six years ago. We had failed at trying to be an attractional church in Owasso and had relocated to the lowest income lowest life expectancy zipcode in the Tulsa area. There it became clear over the first few years that our mission was not to become the best church In the community but the best church For the community, that churches should not get healthier and wealthier while the communities around them become poorer and sicker, and that as one leader of the new monastic movement has called it (Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution) we in fact become smaller to do bigger things. We learned that the numbers we needed to be concerned about were not the numbers in worship or that might join as members or even any of those numbers I just mentioned about our percentage compared to the population at large, but the numbers we became concerned with are the numbers of the poor and sick and oppressed in our area where people die 14 years sooner than they do just six miles south of us. (Levin study, OU). We were located now in an area of great abandonment and decline with few to none nonprofits or churches or government present and working on renewal. But there is no place where there is not deep disconnection and great suffering, though the resources to meet those varies greatly from place to place, and is why even though there is much to be done anywhere, there is a particular moral imperative to be among what society creates and considers the least of these.

 

 

So In January 2007, with a core group of just six to eight people and about a dozen in worship on a good day, 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. We had talked among ourselves, particularly with the growing percentage of people who lived right around our space and who 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.

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 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 of our own, and we also worshipped during the week and travelled to other churches to worship with them on Sundays, UU churches and others.  Lately we have been more of a roaming worship group to build relationships with others around us.

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. First place is your home; second place is where you are paid to be or where you gather with people in shared affinity; third place is the common ground where differences meet.

In doing this We were shifting from church as a What to church as a Who. Church in the new and ancient way that didn’t require it to be a 501c3 organization, with a building of its own, bylaws,boards, budgets.

One of my take-aways of our many radical changes as a group is that 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 now have the beginnings of 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 the nonprofit 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 that had started as Epiphany Church then became The Living Room Church then Church at A Third Place became also just The Welcome Table. Four location changes and four name changes in 8 years, not mentioning how we started in living rooms, in a hotel meeting space, in the back room of a Panera Restaurant, and how we still look for ways to worship in the garden or at service sites.

The impetus is to keep turning inside out, keep responding to the needs of others and letting those shape what the church becomes. It is the first axiom of the movement that The Church Doesn’t Have A Mission; The Mission Has A Church. And our reason for being, what calls us together, is to be sent out to make visible in the world that Sacredness of Life that compels us, as we say, to love the hell out of this world. To discern who our heart breaks for, and let that guide us into becoming church.

In our new space, we have been expanding our food pantry that started in a closet space then one room and now into what we call The Welcome Table Corner Store, and we have a community art space, and crafts space, and free clothing and more space; we hold community events and community organizing meetings and put on free holiday parties; we are now leading the way in getting a new seniors group organized, and we have the lofty dream of trying to put together a coalition to buy and use for the community the recently closed school across from us. Meanwhile the community garden park and orchard is growing and becoming a site for events itself. It has won an award from both state and regional park and recreation societies and we are a finalist this year for a statewide Keep Oklahoma Beautiful environmental excellence award for our blight to beauty, despair to hope projects.

Of course we do this all on a volunteer basis, and we do it living like our neighbors, going from cut-off notice to cut-off notice juggling bills, and knowing that it could be cut back, curtailed or especially if we don’t get some more regular $5 and $10 or more a month donations from online and face to face supporters to offset those who have died or moved from our community, one of these days we could close just like so much else in our neighborhood. (One of the things I say when I am often asked, especially  by our  partners, the graduate social work students at OU, about what is the most successful thing we have done, is to say, “Just still being here” because so much else comes and goes and people don’t expect a good thing to be able to last in our neighborhoods.) We face that abyss with each break-in, each vandalism, each broken heart or hurt feeling, as people and finances come and go, and we have to grow deeper in radical trust and the faith to keep making leaps into the abyss.

That is why we need to keep stoking the fires burning within our own lives without becoming burned out, so we can be a spark for others. It is why mission to others is always mirrored with refreshing the spirit—why I hope you are here this morning. It is why we say we aren’t really giving out food or information as much as giving relationship, community, connecting the disconnected, starting with what’s disconnected within us. Partnering with people of peace, and promoting a sense of abundance instead of anxiety, is more important than all the programs I have mentioned or that we might begin.

My faith and particular theology undergirds and guides all that I have done and seek to do, but 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 it is in shared mission loving the hell out of this world, something I can do with practically anyone. As a Christian, then I don’t ultimately need more Christians. As a Unitarian Universalists, then I don’t ultimately need more Unitarian Universalists. Those are not my missions. What I need and I think we need and the world needs more of are neighborhoods and lives of an abundant and serving spirit. If that results in more people adopting my specific faith perspective, great; but if not, if the specific communities and organizations I am connected with were to die away as the world changed from adopting their ways, then that is a legacy of radical love for the ages I will embrace.

I would rather have more serving community with us than worshipping with us (and that’s been a difficult concept for a preacher to grasp).

What I believe is that whatever happens in my community or in our wider church movement, the life and legacy of what we have done 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.  

That is what sets my Life on Fire.

 

Morning Prayer at The Welcome Table: Wednesday and Saturdays at 9 am

Morning Prayer at The Welcome Table

Invocation

Today is the day which God has made...Let us rejoice and be glad therein.

Call to Worship

The Lord be with you…And with thy spirit. O Lord, renew our hearts within us…and grant us peace…For what does the Eternal require of us?...But To live justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God… Let our souls rise up to meet you...as the day rises to meet the sun… Come into God’s presence with thanksgiving. Awake our spirits to love and life and liberation.

Prayers for the Day

O God, who dividest the day from the darkness and turnest the shadow of death into morning, drive far from us all wrong desires, incline our hearts to keep thy law, and guide our feet into the way of peace; that, having done thy will with cheerfulnesss while it was day, we may, when the night cometh, rejoice to give thee thanks. Amen.

Make us worthy, O God, of the morning that will not pass away, of the light that will not fade, and of thy world that will have no end…Amen.

Almighty and Everlasting Spirit, who safely hast brought us to the beginning of this day, grant that this day we fall not into forgetting you, but if we do we beseech thee not to forget us. Amen.

God be in my head and in my understanding. God be in my eyes and in my looking. God be in my mouth and in my speaking. God be in my heart and in my thinking. God be at my end and at my departing. Amen.

Silent Meditations on Scripture

Behold, the tabernacle of God is open to all, and God will dwell with them, and they shall be the people of God.

Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of God has dawned upon you. For behold, darkness covers the land; deep gloom enshrouds the peoples. But over you the Spirit of God will rise, and God’s glory will appear upon you. Nations will stream to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawning. Your gates will always be open; by day or night they will never be shut.  Violence will no more be heard in your land, ruin or destruction within your borders. You will call your walls, Salvation, and all your portals, Praise.

And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,for God has looked with favor on the lowliness of this servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is God’s name.God’s mercy is for those who are in awe from generation to generation. God has shown strength, scattering the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. God has helped servant Israel, in remembrance of God’s mercy,according to the promise made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the realm of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil. Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.

O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it. Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me and the light around me become night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.

Community Prayers

Eternal Spirit, we come with hungry hearts, waiting to be filled: Waiting to be filled with a sense of your presence; Waiting to be filled with the touch of your spirit; Waiting to be filled with new energy for service; We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.

Loving Creator, we confess what seems always with us: broken things within us that seem never to mend, empty places within us that seem always to ache, things like buds within us that seem never to flower.

God of everlasting hope and forgiveness, help us to be open to your Presence within us, mending and tending to our aching hearts and to our hurt and wounded land. Help us to listen to others, and empower us to be your hands of action and healing, sowing seeds of compassion and justice into our families and communities and to support all those in need in our one world which you made and called good.

Let us pray for those who weep even in the morning, and for those who cause their weeping. Hear our prayer, O God. For those who are without food, clothes, and a place of shelter this day and everyday. Hear our prayer, O God. For those who live without hope and meaning. Hear our prayer, O God. For those who live in fear or sickness. Hear our prayer, O God. For those who make gods of things and of themselves, Hear our prayer, O God. For those who are working to serve others this day, Hear our prayer, O God. For those travelling today, Hear our prayer, O God. For those in harm’s way, in homes and on battlefields, Hear our prayer, O God. For those who are finding their way again to love and laughter, Hear our prayer, O God. And for the great mission of God to bless the poor, to pardon the imprisoned, to bring sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed, to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to provide hospitality to the resident aliens, to clothe all, to visit the sick, and to proclaim the year of the Lord and end all debts, Hear our prayer, O God.

Lift Up Names For Prayers

Eternal Spirit of Life and Love and Liberation, may we be open to your presence in our lives, in all our joys and sorrows, fears and faith, dreams and disappointments, hurts and hopes, those shared openly with others, and those shared only with You.

Everlasting Hope that holds us up, so that we may go hold others, we give thanks for all that has blessed us, and all that has brought us to this day of Life’s Celebration.

Universal Love, continue to show us the way home to our own true hearts, our duties, and to the service of creating a better world for all. Help us to see anew the sacredness placed right before us, right beside us, right within us.

Deepest Source of All, may our prayers be times of listening as well as speaking. May we be open to what Life yet speaks to us of truth, joy, and goodness. And as Jesus taught to all those who would follow in his radical, inclusive, compassionate and transforming way, we pray with him: Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day, our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation. But deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen

Benediction:

Draw us ever closer into your community, O God, that we might love one another and work with one another in ways that mirror your care and unending love.

Let us go out into the highways and byways.
Let us give the people something of our new vision.
We may possess a small light, but may we uncover it, and let it shine.
May we use it to bring more light and understanding
to the hearts and minds of men and women.
May we give them not hell, but hope and courage.
May we preach the kindness and everlasting love of God

Amen. 

The Welcome Table, a sermon preached at Pathways Church, in the DFW area, June 9, 2013, on our 10 Years of Church in northern Tulsa

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

Welcome tables, where the theology of enough and the ministry of mere presence are the meals that sustain us, are both the easiest tables to set, to set up, and the riskiest to set at. But I believe they are also a blessing, one we in our tradition are gifted and called to offer.