April 2008

Through my almost thirty-five years of ordained ministry, preaching the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus to his disciples has been among my all time favorites. At the top of that list is the Emmaus Road experience in Luke 24.

I can easily visualize Cleopas and the other disciple trudging up the path from Jerusalem like they’d lost their best friend in the world…because they had! Their disappointment is obvious to the “stranger” that happens to join them on the way. The depth of their despair emerges in those powerful words uttered in response to the stranger’s inquiry about Jesus, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.”

Hope is such an important, but fragile, part of life. Most of us who have lived long have experienced the disappointment and disillusionment of dashed hopes in some form. From the disappointment of not getting that job for which we thought we were the perfect candidate, to the loss of a loved one after a long and meaningful relationship, to the tragic loss of a child in a senseless act of violence, to the agony of coping with an adult child with serious mental illness, I believe most of us can resonate with those words of the disciples…”We had hoped. . .”

For you see, the verb is in the past tense. It is the experience of feeling like all hope is lost. The future appears to be not life… but mere existence.

Yet that’s just part of the story. The “stranger” began to talk with them about the reality of hope…“that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory.” The words of Paul in Romans 5 echo through to me here “. . . suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.” I actually despise those words because they can sound so “pat.” But they are consistent with the experience of the disciples on the Emmaus Road…and I also find them true to my life experience.

Many years ago Roy Fairchild wrote about the distinction between optimism and hope. He wrote:

“Hope is generated out of the tragic sense of life. . .The Christian believer cannot simply focus attention on the positive in life, since there is a cross at the heart of the Christian faith preceding any resurrection. . .Unless a person passes through the meaningless, 'valley of the shadow of death,` can genuine hope be born."

In the passage from Luke much has been made of the verse that “their eyes were opened and they recognized him” as the Risen Lord in the breaking of the bread. My sense is that the real turning point happened when they invited him in to spend the night with them.

A couple of years ago, I put out a challenge to the churches of Northeast Georgia Presbytery to work to increase average worship attendance by 5% in the coming year. That year we fell short of that goal even though statistics showed that we did increase average worship attendance by 3.5% and we were one of eight presbyteries in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) that experienced a net increase in membership for the year 2006.

I awaited with anticipation the completion of the 2007 annual statistical report. But last month when Joe Berry and Kathy Gunter shared with me the results, I was disappointed. Our average worship attendance and total membership decreased in 2007. Membership went from 9, 087 to 8,994 and average worship attendance went from 4,898 to 4,776. I couldn’t understand it. The overall population growth in our area continues. In the past year we have focused on the concepts of what it is to be a missional church, a vital church, and an inviting church in multiple ways. We have been providing resources to our congregations to embrace these concepts…and yet the numbers go down instead of up!

However, the more I read about the missional church, the less I see it related to numbers and the more I see it related to practice…that is the renewing of the classic practices of prayer, revisiting our baptism and the power of communion, and becoming a reconciling, discerning community of hospitality (See The Missional Church, by Darrell Guder and The Practicing Congregation by Diana Butler Bass).

Cultivating the spiritual discipline of prayer and discernment, recovering the lifelong significance of our baptism, reclaiming the power of the Lord’s Table that sends us out into the world in the power of the cross and resurrection hope, becoming truly reconciling communities, and developing an intentional approach to hospitality, are practices that cannot be developed overnight in a congregation. But it is well-documented that vitality, energy, and authentic Christian community happen where these practices are cultivated. Where these things are happening, growth happens, both spiritual and numerical. To my way of thinking, developing these practices is parallel to the experience of those disciples on the Emmaus Road inviting the “stranger” to spend the night with them.

As Diana Butler Bass has written:

“The ideal of the Christian congregation as a pilgrim community provides powerful moral and spiritual ballast in a radically fragmented world.”

This has been the mission of the church since that experience of the disciples on the Emmaus Road. This is the mission that lies before us in Northeast Georgia Presbytery.

Ken Meeks, Jr.