For our 2018 congregational annual meeting Sunday, we shaped worship around our mission statement. Rather than following the lectionary readings and a “normal” sermon, I selected three passages from Luke 10 and preached three mini-sermons. I also wove the prayers of intercession into the sermon segments.
As our special joint worship service also served as the opening devotions for our meeting, I also sought to highlight a number of our congregation’s ministries and take this opportunity to thank all of our volunteers for their ministries.
Later in the service we showed a highlight video of what God has been up to in and through our congregation in 2017. Worship then led directly into our (very brief) congregational annual meeting, and then a brunch provided by the church council.
Here’s our mission statement:
St. Peter Lutheran Church
WELCOMES people into a relationship with Jesus Christ and His Church,
EQUIPS people with a faith that works in daily life, and
SERVES in the world to make a difference in Jesus’ Name.
First Reading: Luke 10:1-12
Welcoming God’s Children
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
As you’ve likely noticed, we’ve arranged our worship service in a little different order this morning. With our annual meeting today, we’re going to reflect on what our mission is as a congregation, and give thanks for work God has been doing among us this year.
For our texts, we’re going to use three passages from the 10th chapter of Luke to think about the three parts of our mission statement.
The first line of our mission statement is St. Peter Lutheran Church “welcomes people into a relationship with Jesus Christ.”
As the church, we have been given the good news of God’s love for the world revealed in Jesus Christ, and our job as church is to share this good news. In the first part of Luke 10, Jesus talks about how the harvest being plentiful, but the laborers are few.
In our world, we see a spiritual hunger every day for the good news of God’s love. School shootings, threats of war, scammers preying on our vulnerable neighbors, stores going out of business, technology making it easier for people to become more and more isolated from each other – God has something to say about all these issues.
I suspect we all know people who have gone through times of questioning why they’re here, what their purpose is in life. Perhaps you’ve asked those questions too. We Christians are certainly not immune to wondering if life is worth it, why there’s so much suffering in the world, even wondering if God is really out there.
But as followers of Jesus Christ, we’ve been given hope, the good news that God is really out there – and not just out there, but here in our world, living and active, longing to be in relationship with each of us. Life has a purpose. You have a Creator who loves you.
For reasons I don’t think I’ll ever quite understand, God has trusted this good news, this hope, to us as the church, and we are called to welcome people into relationship with Jesus.
There’s a lot we do as a congregation to fulfill this commission. One great example in our congregation is our children. If you were here last week, perhaps you noticed the posters around the building that the third and fourth graders made to invite people to come to the worship service last week when they sang.
Another example is that this year, we’ve added more ushers to all of our worship services, so that everyone who comes in is greeted and welcomed to the service.
Many of our events are about welcoming people into church, often people who aren’t here every week. Two of the biggest ones are Country Time and Vacation Bible School, both of which get people in the door of our church building.
The goal, of course, is not to get people in the door, but to connect people with Jesus, to remove the obstacle of that voice that whispers, “Maybe I’m not welcome at church.”
Lots of our physical projects for our building fall under this category of welcoming too, things like repairing the sidewalks, the elevator project, and the discussions we’re having right now on council about redoing our sign.
If you have served this year on a ministry related to welcoming, if you helped with VBS, or Country Time, or served as an usher, or sang in the Christmas Cantata, or worked on building improvements, or baked bread, or served at an Advent or Lenten supper, I invite you to stand.
Thank you for serving this year.
[applause]
You can sit back down.
Two other things about this passage I want to point out.
First, while I’ve mostly talked about making people feel welcome when they come into our building, in this story Jesus isn’t waiting inside a church building for people to come in. He sends his disciples out.
You are I are sent out to proclaim the good news that the kingdom of God has come near. Welcoming people into relationship involves going out and inviting, sharing the good news with our friends and our neighbors. This mission isn’t limited to worship services and special events.
Second, Jesus doesn’t send out his disciples alone. He sends them in pairs, to support each other. Following Jesus isn’t something any of us do alone. Our culture tells us to be self-sufficient, to rely on ourselves, but Jesus calls us to gather in community, and to go out into the world together.
Please join me in prayer.
Gracious God, we give you thanks for the ways you have welcomed us into relationship with you. Thank you for parents and friends who introduced us to church, even sometimes when we weren’t sure we wanted to be there. Help us to both welcome and invite our neighbors into relationships with you.
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
God of love, so many in our world need to hear a message of hope. We lift up those people we know whom you are pursuing, our friends and neighbors who don’t know yet how much you love them. Thank you for the gift of your son Jesus, who shows us your love.
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
In the name of our Savior Jesus, we pray. Amen
Second Reading: Luke 10:21-24
Equipping with the Eyes of Faith
The second part of our church’s mission is to “equip people with a faith that works in daily life.” We’ve been given this good news that God loves the world enough to die for it, and the good news that the power of death has been destroyed. Knowing this good news allows us to see our neighbors the way God sees them, as beloved children of a heavenly Father.
Seeing the world with the eyes of faith changes everything. We’re called to serve others rather than putting ourselves first. We’re called to love and forgive as God has forgiven us, rather than judging other people.
Being a Christian is like putting on a whole new set of glasses, changing our perspective. Our default position in life is to put ourselves at the center of our story, because we’re sinful, selfish people. But following Jesus means realizing this is really God’s story, realizing that our whole existence is rooted in God’s love for us, in the love of the One who has created and claimed us.
The thing with seeing the world this way is that it’s not obvious. As Jesus says, even the wise and the intelligent have trouble understanding faith. We’re called to have faith like children, to have the trust of children in their parents.
This kind of radical shift takes practice. A life of faith takes learning and teaching, encouraging one another, and living as a community. As our mission statement says, our faith is not just about what happens in the church building or in worship, but about daily life, about seeing the whole world through the eyes of faith.
Lots of what we do as church is about building up faith, helping to shape and form the kind of faith that impacts daily life. This is why we do Sunday School, and confirmation, and junior high ministry, and Luther League for high schoolers, and send kids to summer camp.
Sometimes I think it’s tempting to imagine that teaching faith and learning is something that’s mainly for kids, that when you’re confirmed or graduate high school that you’re done. But seeing the world God’s way is such a dramatic difference from the way our world sees that there’s always plenty of room to keep learning and growing in faith.
In fact, I think it’s even more challenging to have faith like children when we’re adults. Faith doesn’t mean checking your brain and reason at the door of the church; it means studying and engaging and bringing our questions, helping each other wrestle with how faith connects to our lives.
This is why we have sermons in worship, and WELCA studies, and men’s breakfast. This is why we do things like study the catechism as adults, or get together on Sunday evenings or afternoons to discuss spiritual practices.
If you’ve been involved this year in teaching children or youth, or in one of those adult activities or groups, or gone on a mission trip, would you please stand?
Thank you for your commitment to growing faith!
[applause]
You can sit back down.
Please join me in prayer.
Holy God, it’s hard to see the world your way. Thank you for those who have taught us to see through the eyes of faith, those who have stretched us to recognize you at work around us. Keep on opening our eyes and helping us to see you.
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
Mighty Lord, you are with us in the good times in our life and the bad, on the mountains and in the valleys. This morning we pray for those who are in special need of your healing touch in our community, [names], and whoever else we name in silence or out loud…….
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
In the name of our Savior Jesus, we pray. Amen
Third Reading: Luke 10:25-37
Serving in Jesus’ Name
So far, we’ve talked about welcoming people into relationship with Jesus, and about how we’re called to see the world differently. In this third section of Luke 10, Jesus tells us to get to work. Our relationship with God makes an eternal difference, but it also makes an earthly difference in the way we live.
In some ways this story of the good Samaritan is the most straightforward, but I think it might also be the hardest. So often, we want to look for loopholes like the lawyer in the story, don’t we?
We want to figure out who exactly our neighbor is, where the line is on who we’re supposed to serve. We want to serve God on our terms.
In Jesus’ story, it’s the most unexpected person who is a neighbor. The example we’re supposed to follow is the Samaritan, this person despised by the good people, the dirty, rotten, probably dangerous foreigner.
As the church, we are called to show mercy, to serve our neighbors without an ulterior motive, not to recruit them to join us, but because serving is how Jesus tells us to respond to God’s love. And our neighbors are people we don’t expect them to be too.
Our neighbors, Jesus says, are the people who live here in Greene, next door to us, and they’re also people living far away, in places like Waterloo, and Chicago, and Hungary, and Nigeria, and even in places where the world tells us people couldn’t be our neighbors, like South Korea and Syria.
Some of the ways we serve our neighbors are local, like raking on Make a Difference Day, the food pantry, $10,000 of flood relief in our county through our synod, and meals for farmers.
Some of our ways of serving are tangible, like making literally hundreds of quilts, school kits, baby kits, Christmas boxes for children far away and here in our Greene, and care packages for soldiers.
Often though, the most effective ways we serve our neighbors far away is through sharing the wealth God has trusted to us by giving money to causes like world hunger, our missionaries, Lutheran Disaster Response, the world day of prayer, LSI, and Bremwood.
If you contributed to any of the $28,000 we gave away this year beyond our walls, or if you filled a shoebox, or bought school supplies or food, or worked on quilts or prayer shawls, or packed boxes, or were involved with any of the other ways we served this year, would you please stand?
Thank you for answering the call to make a difference in Jesus’ name.
[Applause]
You can sit back down.
Finally, it’s also important to remember the last three words of our mission: “In Jesus’ name.” One of the traps that churches can fall into is focusing on serving people so much that we forget why we’re doing it.
We’re not a service club; we’re a church. We serve because God has welcomed us into a relationship with Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit has equipped us to see with the eyes of faith.
We serve because Jesus Christ has set us free to love as God loves. We love because God first loved us. Thanks be to God!
Let’s pray.
Loving God, thank you for all the ways you have used the gifts of this church. Help us to continue finding new ways to serve you in our world. Send your Holy Spirit that we may do your work with our hands.
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
Good and gracious God, watch over us throughout this next year and always. Stir us to work for your justice and peace. When we stray, bring us back to the mission to which you have called us, in Jesus name.
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
All our prayers, spoken and unspoken, we bring to God through our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen