Pastor's Message

July 2006

After months of very diligent and effective work the Self-Study Committee has concluded its work. It has surveyed the congregation and met with numerous groups from the church. It has participated in a retreat designed to look at the way personalities affect our work together in the church. Most importantly, this committed group of church leaders has spent considerable time visioning the future and assessing the mission and needs of this church in the search for a new pastor. I want to commend the way in which the Self-Study Committee addressed its tasks and moved toward a consensus agreement about the charge they would give the Search Committee in their next task of finding a new pastor to meet this vision of leadership. I will have little involvement with the Search process but we all need to offer prayer and support to those who will now enter this important time of discernment. It is a time for the congregation to continue its discernment about the future of the congregation. I would like to offer some thoughts from a book entitled: The Missional Church, edited by Darrell L. Guder. In this book he highlights the shift in understanding of the church in ways that challenge some of our long held assumptions about the role of the church as institution. I hope these thoughts stimulate some discussion about the future of St. Paul’s UCC in the context of the larger developments of mission and identity facing all churches in the 21st century in America.

A Place? Or a People? From a lecture by David Bosch of South Africa.

The churches shaped by the Reformation were left with a view of the church that was not directly intended by the Reformers. Those churches came to conceive the church as a place where certain things happen. The Reformers emphasized as the “marks of the true church” that such a church exist wherever the gospel is rightly preached, the sacraments rightly administered, and sometimes church discipline is exercised… Over time these “marks” narrowed the church’s definition of itself toward a “place where” idea… Popular grammar captures it well: you “go to church” much the same way you might go to the store. You “attend” a church, the way you attend a school or theater. You “belong to a church” as you would a service club with its programs and activities.

In the twentieth century, Bosch went on to say, this self-perception gave way to a new understanding of the church as a “body of people sent on a mission”. Unlike the previous notion of the church as an entity located in a facility or in an institutional organization and its activities, the church is being reconceived as a community, a gathered people, brought together by a common calling and vocation to be a “sent people”.

One of the things that I shared with the Self-Study Committee was the dynamics of the growth that has occurred at St. Paul's UCC in the last 5-8 years. We had deep discussions about the change from a Pastoral size church where average attendance is at between 50 - 150 members weekly to a Program size church where average attendance is between 150 – 350 members weekly. This change in size over a number of years occurred slowly and without significant recognition of the staffing and institutional changes that need to support and accompany a change in size. They have incorporated the discussions about this dynamic in the new job description for a pastor and in the qualities of leadership they will look for in a new pastor.

While it is good and necessary to address the ways in which a congregation in the Program size must function with a different form of leadership, I think some reflection by all of us needs to address the changing identity suggested by David Bosch in the above quoted lecture. As with many things we must balance the image of the church as a “place where” with the identity of a “missional body of Christ”. We are called to be Christ’s body in the world, the voice of God, the hands of Christ, the wind of the Spirit in society. But we are also a place where others may seek out the truth, find comfort, be shepherded by caring and compassionate Christians who come together to worship God, be fed by His word and Sacraments, and empowered to be His people.

I call on us all to keep the Search Committee in our daily prayers. So too I ask that we keep all who may inquire about St. Paul's UCC in this Search process that a mutual discernment may bring together a clear Call to ministry for the future pastor of St. Paul's UCC who is even now being guided by the Holy Spirit to serve in our midst.

Pastor Cluley