The Abundant Church: Creating a New Future

A number of weeks ago now, I joined a small group of clergy who are part of a planning team for a conference that will be hosted in Los Angeles. As part of our planning, we began with a very open, wide-ranging, exploratory, and hope-filled conversation about what we think might be important for people doing the work of church planting (starting brand new churches from scratch) or the work of mission redevelopment in longstanding parishes. It was a beautiful conversation in which people brought themselves to the table with the hopes that God’s wisdom would flow through us as we sought to discern the path forward for colleagues from across the country.

As our conversation unfolded, we tapped into one truth that our church is, at times, struggling to grapple with: how to become a church in which the “isms” of the world are left behind to the extent that we are able to do so. The challenge with many of the “isms” that are operative today is that they are baked into systems and codes and structures that many of us do not have the direct power to change or shift. Instead, we have to find ways to diminish those felt structures within the life of the church, and it means that because many of these “isms” are baked into structures bigger than the church then the church will continue to participate in them - even when we do not want to do so. It is a struggle to find a way to live out a life of discipleship that is shaped by the teachings of the Beatitudes as a community and then to carry that wya of life out into the world that is very different than we would want it to be. Of course, this is the plight of the Christian: to be a witness to a different way of life than is operative in the dominant culture.

And it is here that I think I stumbled into something in that Zoom call several weeks ago. As I listened to our conversation, I offered that our church had to recognize the abundance of gifts within humanity and that we are missing many of those gifts in our church because we continue to be a predominantly white institution. We need the voices of people who are different than we are so that we can know the depth of God’s abundance in a very real way. We also need those voices in our midst to help us hear the Gospel message from a new angle, with new insights, and to help us know the power of God’s love made known in Christ Jesus. The future of our church is not dependent on growing through attracting the exact same people we have always attracted; while we can certainly go down that road, we will continue to be missing the gifts that will help the Church to realize new insights, reach new people with the Gospel, and to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a whole new way. The future of our church is dependent upon us becoming an ecosystem that is overflowing with abundance through the diversity of people who are present within each and every community.

So, the question becomes what does it take for us to become that kind of community that welcomes and celebrates the abundance of diversity? The fullest answer to that question is probably not something that can be offered in the space of a blog post, but we can begin by trying on new habits within our church life and attempting to invite others into our parish through those new practices. Though we may not see the fruits of those practices immediately, an ongoing commitment to creating worship services that are creative, that include many different options for expressing faith and thanksgiving, and that invite us to hear the liturgy differently might be a good place for us to start as we seek to grow and build a community that is ready to celebrate the future of the church: an ecosystem of diverse people with a multitude of gifts being offered on Christ’s table.

In Christ,

Hunter+