Sunday, August 21, 2022 | 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.

Church as Project, not Product, Part 1

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 16
Galatians 5:13–25

Before we turn to scripture, I must tell you that it is good to be back after my summer sabbatical and to see you again. I know I will find a variety of ways to speak with you about some of the things I learned over these last few months about myself and my ministry, but for today, just know that I honestly experienced a restoration of my soul and my heart.

Now I admit my physical self is not restored just yet because I ruptured my Achilles’ tendon on day 3 (I don’t recommend it). but I do believe that in my time away, God brought me back into being more fully who I am as a person, a mother, a wife, a friend, sister and daughter, and as a pastor. So, thank you for offering me that gift of time. It was incredibly freeing to have the space to just be rather than always needing to do, to experience nothing less than pure grace.

And that insight about the gift of grace leads us into this passage from Galatians today. Now if you don’t mind, let’s set the stage a bit, because we are about to read someone else’s mail. That can feel awkward, especially if we don’t know what is going on. What we want to remember is that Paul wrote this letter to a small church that he founded probably in a geographic area known as Galatia.

Now I say “probably” because there is some scholarship that claims the name Galatians is less about a people in a particular land called Galatia and more of a term used to signify a group of people seen as the “quintessential barbarians” from the perspective of Roman imperial power (Nancy Bedford, Galatians: Belief Commentary Series, pp. 2–3). From Rome’s vantage point, the Galatians were nobodies with no influence, no power, and, therefore, no need to be acknowledged or appreciated.

Yet it was to this nobody kind of group of outsiders that Paul had traveled and, fueled by the Spirit, formed into a congregation. And then, because Paul was never one to sit still, he moved on to the next gig until he heard about some troublemakers who were whispering in the Galatians’ ears that Paul’s version of the gospel was somehow incomplete.

Those outside agitators claimed that if indeed the Galatians really wanted to become a part of the people of God, really wanted to be saved, then, contrary to what Paul preached, they actually did need to follow all the dietary guidelines found in the Jewish tradition, even if they were not Jewish. And if they were men, they actually did need to be circumcised, those agitators claimed. It was the opposite of the freedom in Christ Paul had proclaimed.

Therefore, Paul wrote them this letter in which he took those outside preachers to task. He reiterated that people are saved through the faith of Jesus Christ alone. Salvation, being made whole in Christ, is pure gift. We cannot earn it. We do not have to do anything for it. We simply trust it is so and receive it. And that freedom of grace radically reorients our lives and our life together.

And one more thing: in this part of the letter, we will hear the terms flesh and Spirit standing in contrast. In Paul’s theology. This is not the kind of body/soul duality we often think about. For now, let it suffice to say that Paul is not arguing that physical nature is bad and spiritual nature is good, but for Paul, flesh refers to the world determined by human abilities, resources, and values; Spirit refers to the world as defined by God. It is about where we ultimately place our trust—in our own human (flesh) abilities, or in God’s abilities (Spirit) (Jessica Tate, paper from The Well clergy group, 2016). That is what is going on behind and in this letter so let’s listen in on the conversation in Galatians 5:13–25.

· · ·

One of the things I did over my sabbatical was to reconnect with a variety of different friend groups as well as with family. One of those friend groups is composed of me and three other clergywomen. Though I was not working, while we were all together we talked about church, of course.

We discussed how much more complicated it felt to come out of COVID than it had been to be forced into it. We spoke openly about lower attendance for in-person worship; a lack of engagement and connection within our congregations; struggles with church budgets and lagging giving; and the sheer number of people who had just plain moved away from wherever our church is located.

All of us acknowledged that none of our congregations, including this one, is the same now as it was before COVID began. Furthermore, the honest truth is that we are not going to just get back to the way things were before, because that old reality is gone. Something new awaits us, yes, but it will not look exactly like what was. And that truth about our change does not mean that somehow we have failed. It simply means that the world in which we now live, one that is still enduring a global pandemic, has been made permanently different. There is no going back. There is only now and moving forward by God’s grace.

In the middle of one of those conversations, one of my friends told us something her clerk of Session said in a recent Session meeting. My friend recounted, “In the middle of a debate about how many services of worship we should or should not bring back, our clerk stated, ‘I think many of us have forgotten that church isn’t a product we consume, but a project we work on together’” (Clerk of Session, Georgetown Presbyterian Church, Washington. D.C.). Let me say that again: Church is not a product we consume, but it is a project we work on together.

What a countercultural statement of ecclesiology that clerk of Session made! Think about it: If what happens here is not about producing something for you to consume but rather that you have a responsibility in what happens here, in the creation of the project called church itself, that claim makes the church radically different than many other organizations in which we are involved, organizations that charge a fee for services rendered or goods purchased.

For example, no one here pays $9.99 a month for a subscription and unlimited access to stunning music and powerful prayers. The church does not charge you a fee to baptize your baby and to help nurture and raise her in the faith through Sunday school, family camp, confirmation, etc. We do not have dues. Even the offerings we receive each week that go to the ministry and mission of the church are not so that those of us on staff can do all the work to offer you some product for passive consumption whenever you are ready for it.

That is not what it means to be a member of the church, a part of the living body of Christ. Rather, all of us are a part of a big, unwieldy, fueled-by-the-Spirit-of-God, oftentimes chaotic, group project. That elder’s insight reminds me of what Kierkegaard once wrote regarding worship. He claimed that in this time of worship, the chancel isn’t a stage, and you are not the audience. Rather, God is the audience for what the Spirit is leading us all to create together.

And in God’s reality, you, the people gathered, are the primary actors on the stage. Those of us up here are more like stagehands and producers. Even this service of worship is a group project in which we all participate in one form or fashion. Again, our ecclesiology (what we believe the church is about) claims we all have a contribution to make towards the group project called church. And without even one of us, the project won’t be complete, because we are missing from the act of creation. Our participation in the project is vital, for it not only changes us but changes the project called church itself. So how are we all participating or not? For the church is not a product we consume, but a group project on which we all work together.

Because I was on sabbatical, I missed the May meeting of the Princeton Seminary Board of Trustees. But Camille Cook, the pastor of Georgetown Presbyterian Church in D.C., relayed a conversation she had with another fellow trustee. He is the pastor of a 60,000-member congregation in South Korea. In between meetings they were swapping COVID stories, and he told her that his church has 70 percent of its membership back in person and more people viewing online each Sunday to account for an increase in membership. He also said that giving has increased since before the pandemic and that they are more involved in outreach than ever before.

She let him know that was not their situation in D.C. and then asked how he did it. He said, “Well things weren’t going well, and people weren’t coming back or staying involved and were holding back on their giving. And so I had to yell at them and tell them they were being lazy.” “And that worked?” she asked. “Yes,” he responded, “because they knew it was true.”

Now, I am not going to take his advice and yell at you, nor am I convinced his conclusion exactly fits with who we are, but I do think there is some healthy challenge in his words. When we are not together, we don’t have the chance to catch up on each other’s lives in off-track conversations. When we are not together, we miss the cues of body language—when someone’s shoulders seem a bit slumped or a tear shows up in their eyes. When we are not together, it is less likely we will laugh until our cheeks hurt or until we lose our breath. We have done what we needed to do during the pandemic and in some ways, still need to do. But as a group project called church, how can we come back to each other?

So to those of you who are primarily online, let me begin by saying if you have not come back in person because of health reasons or location reasons or any of those things, I get it. Please do what you need to do to take care of yourself and to stay connected. But if you haven’t come back yet in person because it is more convenient to stay home and worship online, or you have gotten out of the routine, or you find you just don’t have the energy to be around people anymore, I want to invite you to come back and see how it feels. Volunteer, come to worship, take a class. Try it again.

For we are an incarnational faith. An embodied faith, where even our flesh shines with the light of God. There is something about being in the gathered presence of each other whenever possible that makes a difference. Being reconnected with each other, or newly connected with each other, makes the group project called church feel more vibrant, more authentic, more joyful.

That theme of interconnectedness, of interdependence, runs throughout Paul’s letters, including this one called Galatians. As Frances Taylor Gench has written, when we read Paul’s letters, we need to notice that the “Christian existence is essentially corporate in character. To Paul’s way of thinking, there is no such thing as a freelance Christian. To be a Christian is to be incorporated into a community of faith” (Frances Taylor Gench, Interpretation, 1992). As you have heard me preach before, most of the “you’s” in scripture are usually better translated as “y’all.”

The truth is we need each other in order to live out our baptismal identities in this world. For just like the struggle that was going on in Galatia, there will be days on which we have a hard time trusting that all this is true, because of all the other voices whispering in our ears telling us we are not worthy, or good enough, or powerless to make change.

There will be days on which it is difficult to trust that God really does love us just as we are, regardless of what we have done or left undone, and that God loves us too much to let us stay just as we are too and calls us forward. There will be days on which it is difficult to trust that in Christ we were given salvation, freedom, wholeness; or that God really is at work reconciling the entire world back to God’s self; or that God’s goodness and mercy will have the last word, rather than hate and evil.

Yet when we find ourselves in those spaces of wrestling and doubt, there is something about being in each other’s presence, about being an active part of the group project called church, that holds promise, that reminds us we are participants in a much bigger story than the fleshy one we easily see all around us, the story of the Spirit, the story of God.

For when I cannot believe for myself, I know that you will hold my faith for me until I am able to hold it again. And when I am feeling renewed and hopeful and experience the warmth of the light of my own baptism, like I do today, then I will hold your faith for you until you are able to hold it for yourself again. Part of what it means to be church is to know that in Christ we are bound together in love and in service, both to God and to one another as siblings in faith.

We hear that truth in Paul’s words to the Galatians. Throughout this snippet of the letter, Paul goes out of his way to talk about the truth that we are bound together in Christ. “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters,” he writes, “only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become enslaved to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

Paul claims that because of who Jesus is, we have been freed—freed from our own narcissism and selfishness—in order to be bound together as parts of his living body on earth. Therefore, we live not to indulge ourselves, but we live to love and to serve one another, for by doing so, we are loving and serving God. Again, that claim runs so counter to what we see all around us. Yet the church is fundamentally countercultural. It is not a product we consume, but a project we work on together.

So, thank you again for the time and space you offered me for my sabbatical. But do know how glad I am to be back with you, my fellow participants in the group project called Fourth Church. For this programmatic year promises to be quite an interesting one and, undoubtedly, a challenging one, as we all discern anew who we are as a congregation, here and now, not in 2019 but in 2022. We are not what we were pre-COVID. We do not yet know for sure who we will be. But the good, grace-filled news is that we will get to figure that out together, fueled by the Spirit, as we all work together on this group project called church. Amen.