What are some things you count?
We count what matters to us–or to avoid something we don’t care for. My grandfather apparently knew how many panels there were in the ceiling of his Baptist church. Not a good sign for the quality of the preaching . . . Lots of us count our retirement accounts carefully. Will there be enough? We all know how many children we have (even if I find it difficult to remember their ages–they change every year).
At church we naturally count attendance and money. In the ministerial resume-comparing world they count butts, budgets, and bricks–adding buildings to our big two. But some of our most creative folks have been asking what else we can count. Surely there are other signs of faithfulness besides just those two. Our visioning committee came up with some questions to measure our faithfulness. This is a very Methodist thing to do–from the beginning we have counted signs of faithfulness obsessively. Kelly Broman-Fulks’ group wants us to ask these questions as we consider whether we are successfully growing as disciples:
What did I do in response to God’s leading this week?
Did I apply scripture to a decision this week?
Where did worship send me this week?
Have I walked with someone not like me this week?
Am I praying for my friends and enemies this week?
Am I connected to church beyond Sunday worship this week?
When did I invite/invest in someone into a life with Christ?
Hard questions, if we answer them honestly. And more granular, particular, than simply money or attendance. These questions ask about the depth of our discipleship. Positive answers show we’re being successful as a church. Or even better: faithful.
God loves to count. But he sure counts differently than us. He knows the number of hairs on our heads–so he counts more better than we do. He counts one sheep as more precious than 99. God counts the years of eternity–thousands times thousands. And in the book of Numbers (1) God counts the number of everything about the Israelites. We Methodists, when we count carefully, are only doing what the bible already does.
Our staff has brainstormed what we can count as signs of faithfulness. I love their answers. Colette suggests we count teachers stepping in on the Sunday School wing in a pinch. Jennifer suggests we count utility use (much up this year). Andy suggests we count midweek attendance at church functions, not just Sundays. Brandon and Lindsey suggest we count conflict and lament–in real community not all is rosy. Jeff suggests we count the kinds of prayer requests offered. Are we going beyond health ailments and asking for prayer for spiritual needs as well?
Some of my favorite lines in hymns include God’s way of counting. Matt Redman’s “Bless the Lord,” a contemporary worship song, includes this line, “For all your goodness I will keep on singing, 10,000 reasons for my heart to find.” And Amazing Grace’s concluding stanza includes these immortal words, “When we’ve been there 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise, than when we first begun.”
Friends let’s join these leaders of ours as we stretch what we count as marks of faithfulness. Money and attendance matter. So too do 10,000 other things.
One of the treasures of Boone is King Street. I love walking downtown, eating well, people-watching, seeing our folks who do business down there, hearing the music–even if hula hoops and drum circles are a bridge too far. Our downtown has a unique vibe and helps make our town a special place.
King Street used to be the hub of Boone’s churches. Now First Baptist remains, while we and First Pres have left, for good reasons. Memories of when our church worshiped downtown are still strong at Boone Methodist. The psychological space from the university is now light years away from the days when students and faculty could walk to church. It was right to move (a unanimous vote confirmed this in 1997), but we lost some things that were precious to us.
What if we worshiped downtown again?
For the past few months, Luke Edwards, our fantastic director of community engagement, has been meeting with interested folks to ask what worship downtown might look like. He is meeting with folks I think of as “Black Cat” folks (Espresso News, Bald Guy, Our Daily Bread–any number of other businesses would work too). Anytime I’m in Vern’s favorite burrito haunt I remember a restaurant slogan from my hometown of Chapel Hill: “A sunny place for shady people.” This is a demographic that is often aggressively anti-institutional, unsure what to do with their lives deeply in school debt, often socio-economically vulnerable, but full of ideals.
You know them. Some of them are your kids, siblings, friends, or baristas.
Wouldn’t you love to see them in church? Wouldn’t you love for our church to benefit from their worldview?
For all their suspicions of church, these folks are not uninterested in matters spiritual. Just look at the stores hawking spiritual wares on King Street. They are also not uninterested in Jesus. Truly, in their deepest selves, they want to be in relationship to him through his church. They just don’t always know that yet.
What would it look like if we offered worship they might like? Or even better, if we asked them to help us build a worship service that would appeal to them and their friends?
Luke, a new leader named Elizabeth Reese, and a handful of others have been meeting with their friends over food, poetry-readings, and worship at the chapel at the Wesley Foundation. They will invite others of us to join them at some point. They feel like God is doing something in their midst–they’re just trying to figure out what, and join in. Our Methodist district and conference have taken notice. The Appalachian District, with the strong support of our DS Lory Beth Huffman, has offered them a $10,000 seed grant. The conference will consider a pitch soon for a much larger grant.
We are tentatively calling the thing King Street Church. Similar efforts in our conference are in Winston-Salem (newstorychurch.org) and Asheville (haywoodstreet.org). Our conference recently reorganized to move money out of administration and into mission–we are the sort of congregation that has a capacity to lead that effort.
Our congregation has a deep history of responsiveness. We founded the Wesley Foundation and our preschool in the 50s. We started our contemporary service and relationship with Patzibal in the 90s. Crossroads and Blackburn Chapel emerged in the 2000s.
This may be our next step in responding to God’s grace. “Get ready to do something,” our value says. For now, pray. Soon, visit and offer input and advice and encouragement. Always, be on the watch for Jesus. He’s on the move.
Are we ready to follow?
One day last week I arrived at church to find it jammed to the gills with children. Hundreds of K-8 students from Hardin Park School had taken refuge in our church. There was a bomb threat in our county, and Boone Methodist is the emergency sanctuary for that school a stone’s throw from our door. Several teachers and administrators thanked us for being a safe place on a scary day. One child told our own Wendy Lawrence, a fourth grade teacher, “This is the safest place we could be.” I love that every child at HPS, whether religious or not, had a place that day to take refuge.
I hope you are as proud of that as I am.
This is just another example of what our visioning team is teaching the rest of us to call our responsiveness. We have a history as a church of seeing a need and then mobilizing to meet it. This is a recent gift–our Crossroads service recently celebrated its 5th birthday. We saw a need for a less intimidating church service for those put out with traditional church and responded. It is an older gift too: we saw a need for a preschool in the 1950s and are still meeting that need. The Wesley Foundation at Appalachian State began in our basement in that same decade. This gift of responsiveness is visible on multiple continents: our sister church La Esmirna Metodista in Pazibal, Guatemala can attest to it, as can recipients of our mission dollars around the world. So can other churches in our neighborhood: we helped launch FaithBridge in Blowing Rock and have taken Blackburn’s Chapel in Todd under our wing. Our own 8:45 contemporary service was a similar risk when we launched it. When it comes to planting new worshiping communities, we have been all action and no talk.
Well we need to talk about our responsiveness again. We have a value that names this responsiveness now, about which you’ll hear Vern and I preach on September 8: Be ready to do something. Faith requires a lively response from us. Are we ready?
Sometime in the past, before our present group of trustees, we agreed to be an emergency evacuation location for Hardin Park. My guess is it was an obvious decision, we probably didn’t even argue over whether it was a good idea. We all just knew it was. Years later, on Tuesday, the fruit of that willingness to be responsive was born. We were a good neighbor in our community. Others will remember.
What kind of responsiveness are we called to in the future? In one way we can’t answer that question. Who knows what our community’s needs will be in the future? In another, we can. We know our community will need the gospel preached, the hungry fed, entrepreneurial initiative taken, the lonely befriended. And we know we’re good at that. Some proposals on the table at present are for a worshiping presence back downtown on King Street under Luke Edwards’ guidance. We are certainly going to roll out a series of small groups in the fall under Pastor Vern’s leadership. Perhaps the trail we are digging up Howard’s Knob could, in the future, have a worshiping presence on it. We have invested in the Circles campaign to help our more economically vulnerable neighbors help themselves.
God is always doing a new thing. And it sure looks as faithful, as interesting, as good, as the acts of faithfulness God has always done in our midst.
have been pleased how much the visioning group has learned about our congregation during the last six months. You will hear a lot more about our mission, values, strategy, and measurables over the next months. Two of those values are these: “Get ready to do something.” Ours is a church responsive to the needs around us and willing to take risks. Looking back over the last 15 years or so, every 2-3 years we plant a new faith community. We began our own 8:45 service in the mid-90s when “contemporary” services were risky. We helped plant FaithBridge UMC in Blowing Rock. We took Esmirna Metodista in Patzibal under our wing. We launched our own Crossroads service. We made Blackburn’s Chapel part of our church. We found new communities well, we just don’t speak of ourselves as if we do it well. That is what visioning is for–giving language to who we are at our best.
Another example of this is our Faith Promise missions program. Dan and LaVonne Hill came from another UM congregation that did Faith Promise and helped introduce it here. It was a risk, high-demand and with some chance of failure, and it has worked beautifully to increase our church’s responsiveness to God.
Another value is this: “Everyone everywhere matters.” Every time we see another person we should bow.. That is an image of God, walking around, reflecting God just by being human. This is why local and international missions are not separable from one another. Everyone matters. Go on one of our mission trips elsewhere and see if you can ignore local poverty. You can’t.
Jonathan and Stephanie Allen embody these values beautifully. These friends of mine inspire me with their day jobs in school psychology and financial management. They chaired our mission committee and now they’re boldly going where they have sent others, in their case to Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world. It is also a place where the church is growing rapidly, as it is elsewhere in the Pacific rim. Below are the Allens’ words:
Boone UMC has a long standing partnership with the International Leadership Institute (ILI). You might remember that our efforts have been highlighted during our Missions Celebrations over the past several years, including visits from leadership staff such as Wes Griffin, Peter Pereira, and most recently Norival and Christina Trindade. ILI works to accelerate the spread of the Gospel through the development of leadership skills in local leaders from countries all over the globe. ILI conferences train and mobilize more than 10,000 leaders each year with the eight core values of the most effective Christian leaders. This year, BUMC is partnering with ILI to sponsor the first ever training in the nation of Indonesia. This particular conference is specifically designed for young leaders (18-30 years old) of churches in Indonesia and surrounding nations. Some of the participants in attendance will be traveling from closed countries. The opportunity for training, renewal, and fellowship with Christian brothers and sisters will be an incredible blessing for them. There are five national faculty and twenty-eight participants registered for the conference.
Your contributions to the Faith Promise Missions Account are making this event happen. BUMC will provide $8,000 to ILI, which will cover most of the cost for the conference attendees. We are very excited that our church can be a part of accelerating the Gospel in this part of the world.
Jonathan and Stephanie Allen will be traveling to Indonesia to assist with leading the conference. Here are some other ways you can help:
1) Pray daily leading up to the conference, and fervently during the conference, which runs August 13-18. It is being held on the island of Java, about two hours outside the city of Jakarta.
2) Remember your Faith Promise pledge. The gifts you give today will go towards future ILI conferences as well as many other mission efforts (such as the Justice family and Boone Area Missions) of our church.
3) Look for daily updates about how the Holy Spirit is impacting the progress of the conference on the church website or Facebook page.
Get ready to do something. Because everyone, everywhere matters.
One of the longtime values of our congregation is our deep responsiveness. When we see a need we move to meet it. We don’t make “the way things have always been” into an idol. We know we must change to stay faithful.
For example, every few years this congregation has helped start a new community of faith. In the mid-90s it was our own contemporary service–risky for the time. In the late 90s it was our move out to New Market. In the early 2000s it was the launch of FaithBridge UMC in Blowing Rock and of La Esmirna Metodista in Patzibal, Guatemala. In the late 2000s it was our own Crossroads service and our merger with Blackburn’s Chapel in Todd. We have muscle memory around innovation. In fact, we’re about due to throw off a new faith community or two again.
The thing is, we don’t often talk about this gift of innovation. We don’t speak of ourselves as a launching, founding, innovative congregation. But we are. When it comes to launching churches, we are all action and no talk.
A new opportunity for us to respond to God is in Amy and Blake Justice’s call to the mission field. The Justices are uprooting their family from Boone, selling their house, leaving a community where they have extended family, and moving to a new place, all because God has called them. They are using their gifts as educators and in health care provision and in building excitement for Jesus to lead in a foreign place.
Amy has a deep patience and joyful attentiveness about her. Blake has a frenetic energy that comes from a live wire to the Holy Spirit (he’s the kind of sermon listener who is nodding even before Vern or I get to our point). Their girls, Gracie, Heather, and Molly, have a fierce and tender openness about them. You may remember Molly giving witness in church to the fact that she had asked Jesus into her heart. Praying that prayer wasn’t enough. She wanted the microphone so she could tell the world about her new step in faith.
Blake and Amy will be going with TeachBeyond, an innovative missionary sending institution for educators. They will be teaching at the Black Forest Academy in Kandern, Germany (near Freiburg), a school whose purpose is to teach missionary children. Parents of these 280 missionary kids are serving in over fifty countries all over the world. In other words, without the Justices and BFA, hundreds of missionary endeavors around the world would come to an end, since missionaries, like the rest of us, prize the education of their children.
One difficulty of the Justice’s specific call is where they are going. Germany! A place where the church is 1000 years old and declining fast. If they were going to help starving children in the emerging world they would have tapped into a well of support already. If they were going to a risky place where Christianity is forbidden they would tap into another kind of support. But Germany?!
This is where we need to think more carefully. Missionaries helping the most vulnerable of the world’s poor have their kids in school in Germany. Others preaching the gospel at risk of life and limb have their kids in school in Germany. To support the Justices means we can support many kinds of missionaries at the same time.
As if that were not enough . . . Amy will be leading teacher workshops in the Central African Republic (CAR) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in her spare time. These are terribly fragile countries, filled with gifted people dragged down by institutions and leaders who have failed catastrophically. The CAR and DRC need countless hours of patient rebuilding from servants like the Justices.
This is the first time in memory our congregation has sent a missionary into the field. We support countless others through our support of the general church’s various boards and through Faith Promise. But the Justices have come from among us, responded to our preaching and served and led us and our neighbors and kids. Now they go forth in our name. We’re not used to digging deep to support a missionary from our own zip code.
Now is our chance to be responsive again. We’ve done it before. Let’s do it again.
