Every week I publish my sermon notes so that you may read them for yourselves. For my parishioners, this could be a good review from the weekend before. And it gives you a chance to see what I intended to say! For other pastors and ministers, feel free to borrow and use any of this material. I'd love for God to be glorified by you incorporating these notes into your own worship.
How God Provided Us A New Church Home - 12.02.12
Matthew 22:9 / Psalm 40:1-5 / 1 Chronicles 21:24
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Introduction: God is so good! God is faithful. God answers prayer. God has provided Church Requel a new church home at St. Luke’s! Yay God!
This sermon is not so much a teaching time as it is a celebration time. No fill-in-the-blanks. Today let’s just sit back and relish in what God has provided. Today I want to tell you the story from a very personal perspective. We all have ways that we have interacted with and responded to the good news that Church Requel will begin Sunday morning worship services at St. Luke’s. Today I want to tell the story from my own perspective. I want to tell you about my own doubts and struggles in faith, and how God answered so powerfully.
Admit my own struggle. I need to start with the hardest step of faith I think I’ve ever taken. I want you to know about it, not to honor me - but to honor God. I want you to know about it because I know that many of us struggle with our faith and with taking tough steps of obedience forward in faith.
November 4th - just 4 weeks ago - was the beginning of this step of obedience and struggle with faith. That Sunday night we had only 24 people here for Church Requel at the beginning of the service. I went home that night and knew that after 3 years of working as hard and creatively as I knew how to work that the Sunday night alternative just wasn’t working. Sunday night just flies too much in the face of our culture. You ask anyone - church person or unchurched - when the best time would be to go to church, and they’ll tell you Sunday morning. Even our most core group struggled with family conflicts on Sunday evenings.
I’ve told you of my ice cream binge. That was really just a symptom. I felt disappointed. Let down. I thought we were doing what God had called us to do. Why wasn’t He drawing more people? What more should we have done? And even more personal, what was my own future? There was never a plan B. I had never given consideration to the possibility that Church Requel wouldn’t eventually thrive. We’ve used up most of our savings over the past 3 years. In short, for 3 days I carried a heavy burden of failure, of feeling abandoned, and of great uncertainty.
In prayer and in my thought life I knew the Sunday night time frame was no longer a viable option. To continue doing something the same way and hoping for a different result was just crazy. I met with our leadership team 3 days later, November 7th, and told them my conclusions. Our treasurer added fuel to my worries by telling us that based on the current financial trend, we would be out of money by the end of December.
But where to go? The decision was obvious. We needed to stop renting OCF for Sunday evening services. We needed to start conducting Sunday morning services. I told you, the congregation, of our decision on November 11th. We began Tuesday morning breakfasts on the 13th. I received calls from many of you about potential places that we might be able to meet. I spent 3 weeks driving all over the county looking a possibilities. Some of them - the places we might be able to afford - were horrible. Because we wanted to be together, we might go to some rotten, out-of-the-way building - but no one else would. This led me to the even harder decision of faith - our new location would have to be someplace that would attract a new audience. God gave me Matthew 22:9 MSG as His direction: “Go out into the busiest intersections in town and invite anyone you find to the banquet.” I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but the busiest intersections tend to also be the most expensive! God began telling me that I was thinking too small, too cheap, relying too much on my own vision. He challenged me to think in terms of His resources and not my own. Never have I felt more “out there” and “exposed” than I have these last 4 weeks.
Call Paul. Meanwhile at our Tuesday morning breakfast on Nov. 20th several asked me if I knew a Pastor Paul Lintern. Saturday’s newspaper carried a small article about him purchasing St. Luke’s Lutheran church at the 5-way light where Marion Avenue meets Park Avenue West. I responded that I have known Paul for many years. That we have attended many pastors’ brown bag lunches together.
I also tried to be realistic. “Let’s not get our hopes up. Paul is a Lutheran pastor. He just purchased a Lutheran church building. I’m sure he already has plans for church in his new building.” But everyone told me to call him. What did we have to lose?
This was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I had 2 days to get everything done that needed to be done for Sunday. I made a list of 11 things I needed to accomplish so that I could enjoy Thanksgiving with my family. “Call Paul” was the 11th thing on the list. Every time I crossed something off, there it was: “Call Paul.” Yet, I did all other 10 things first. So long as I didn’t “Call Paul,” there was still the possibility that he wouldn’t say “no.” The longer I put off contacting him, the longer I could keep some small hope alive that St. Luke’s could be the answer. Looking back on it now, I realize I really had no faith at all. I had become so accustomed to the news being bad, I hadn’t really considered the potential of his response being good!
Finally, Wednesday afternoon came and everything else was crossed off my list. Only one thing remained between me and Thanksgiving. “Call Paul.” I found I couldn’t even do that. To call him and hear him tell me on the phone that we couldn’t meet there was too sudden! So I “Facebooked” a message to him! It was brief. We were looking for a Sunday morning location. Was St. Luke’s a possibility?
That evening I received a message back from Paul. It was short and to the point. All caps. With exclamation marks. “YES! YES! YES!” You have to come and see this place! When can you come? I was so focused on Paul being the answer to our prayers, I never ever considered the possibility that in God’s grand economy, we were also the answer to Paul’s prayers!
What’s Your Dream? I met with Paul on Monday morning after Thanksgiving - November 26th - just this past Monday! After he showed me around, we sat in one of the pews of the 126-year-old sanctuary. Our conversations were between two pastors. Really, it was like a scene out of the Bible. Where we were both realizing that God had brought each of us to this exact moment. It was as if God was watching and waiting for us to “get it!”
Paul was already the Lutheran pastor of two different congregations - and they both had existing locations. Paul had made many missionary trips with teenagers over the years to inner city locations in the U.S. He described churches that met the feeding and clothing needs of people inside the city. He had a dream to do the same thing with St. Luke’s. St. Luke’s had fed people in Mansfield every Saturday night for 3 years. Paul’s dream was to continue that. He had no plans for Sundays.
Then he asked me: “Mark, if you and Church Requel had this place on Sundays, what would you do with it? Tell me your dream.” For the next hour we talked. I told him about you. I told him about the motley crew of people that are attracted to CR. I told him we were a second chance church for many people. I told him about God’s grace and how it had changed people. I told him about your love. I told him about the greeting times. I told him about feeding a hundred families at Thanksgiving. I told him about taking Christmas presents out to the News Journal families.
Then Paul told me that his biggest concern for any church that came to St. Luke’s was that the church had to be open to welcoming the Saturday night meal crowd into the church on Sunday mornings. In short, it had to be a church that was focused on loving the motley crew that God brought in. We didn’t have to be different than we were. We just had to be who we already are!!!
Thursday afternoon we signed a one-year lease that will allow us to use the entire sanctuary and downstairs levels of St. Luke’s, on one of the busiest intersections in town where we can invite anyone to the banquet! Consider what all this means to us...
- We can meet on Sunday mornings!
- No more setups and tear-downs!
- Permanent signage (on one of the busiest street corners!)
- A place to call home!
- The ability to partner with Paul to feed the hungry on Saturdays.
- An affordable place - our rent will be less for so much more!
Many are the wonders... This past week God has laid two more passages on my heart. The first comes out of sense of just how much God has accomplished. [Read Psalm 40:1-5.] “Many, Lord my God, are the wonders you have done, the things you planned for us.” This goes so far beyond anything that we could have accomplished on our own. This is just like a story out of the Bible. We are living in a moment where we can see God’s active hand making it possible for us to continue in ministry. We can see that God has planned all along for us to have a place to meet.
At exactly the same time that I was preaching to you 2 weeks ago about how impossible it would be for us to find a Sunday morning church location (after all churches use their churches on Sunday morning, I said) St. Luke’s was conducting their very last service after 126 years of ministry.
How should we respond? The other passage that God has laid on my heart is the response of David, when God directed him to build an altar at the location of Araunah’s threshing floor. When Araunah saw the angel and then saw King David, he offered to give the space to David. David refused to accept the free gift. “No, I insist on paying the full price. I will not take for the Lord what is yours, or sacrifice a burnt offering that costs me nothing” (1 Chronicles 21:24 NIV)
God has provided us a great gift in St. Luke’s. We could never have afforded it ourselves. No amount of our own smartness, cleverness, resources, or wealth could have secured this solution. We can never ever take credit for it. This is so big, so incredible THAT WE WILL ALWAYS SAY IT’S ALL GOD! YAY GOD!
Yet I think God is waiting to see what our response will be. Will we just walk in and think we got away with a cheap church? Or will we acknowledge what God has accomplished and then do all we can to sacrifice for it? Let’s not worship in a church that costs us nothing. Let’s take what God has given us and make it truly Church Requel.
Next weekend - for the first time in our history - I am asking every man, woman and child of Church Requel to bring a one time special offering. This should be (1) a sacrifice; (2) more than you think reasonable, a step of faith; (3) over and above your normal financial support. We will raise the money to:
- Install the largest, brightest sign we can on the busiest street corner!
- Install a screen and purchase a projector // other wiring permanent
- Install a baptistry tub
- Paint and fix up bathrooms and nursery (toys).
Christmas Eve and Mike’s Story. Our first service will be Christmas Eve, a time when many visitors might come. I’m praying for at least 150 people, enough to fill up the sanctuary. Every one here should invite everyone you know from far and wide.
This morning at the restaurant I talked to Mike. He’s a truck driver who regularly hauls 18-wheelers to Texas and back. I invited him to Christmas Eve at St. Luke’s. He has no church. He told me that he is afraid of taking a step toward God, but he knows he should do it. He’s been waiting for the invitation. And he might just come!!!
Who are the Mikes in your life that could be in the kingdom of Christ some day because of your sacrifice and because of your willingness to invite them?
Let’s pray.
