The boys of summer can remind the church of what’s missing.
As I type this, baseball’s Blue Jays are winning big again. But when you read this they will be, like news of the decline of The Presbyterian Church in Canada, old news. Right now stadium seats are packed and older fans can remember 1993 when the team was once before on top of the sports world.
Our church seats were emptying long before 1993 and no home run is going to make us stand on our feet or bring the crowds back. We have played by our own rules. We tried to make the God of the Bible more attractive and are seeing the fruit of it. We claimed to be reformed but neglected to lead our people to be so. Church ‘attendance’ sufficed. I grew up in a contented and dutiful form of Christianity where, apart from one hour a week, few talked about let alone cheered about Jesus.
Returning home from Knox College in Toronto one summer I had occasion to be in the West Vancouver home of Dr. Robert L. Taylor. Two years previously in 1969 he had been Moderator of The Presbyterian Church in Canada and had just now retired. He knew I was studying for the ministry and confessed to me something that enlivened me personally and has been my essential focus through three pastorates. He said, “I feel like my whole ministry has been a waste.” I was shocked then puzzled. ‘Why?’ I asked. He said, “I have just discovered Jesus.”
Can the Blue Jays help us discover what had been missing for him in over 30 years of ministry? Perhaps, but only if we do some translation: Home plate in baseball is where all eyes are glued. It’s where the first and final action takes place. It’s where the game starts and especially where it finishes. It’s where one scores – or is finally tagged out. Think of home plate as the end of life, or Heaven. But first we have to get to first base. Getting to church is first base – but it’s not home plate.
The PCC’s peak membership year was 1965 and since then 17 national studies were done to discern reasons for its decline and to promote change.
I like to see crowds in church. I even counted! But how does one get to first base? Often very easily. You can show up just by being ‘walked’ ie: by having done nothing yourself. That was me. I showed up as a kid with my family. Better though to get there on a ‘hit’, i.e. by seeking to know God or fill an empty life, etc. When the church offers home plate for merely being on first base we end up with religion and with nice people content to believe in our domesticated God. Jesus’ parable of the wedding banquet (Matt.22:11-14) tells us that something more is required of us than merely showing up and believing in God. Anthropology confirms that all humans have the capacity to believe in a god. God made us believers so we could start seeking him!
But there are two more bases before home plate. Can we skip second base and still land on home plate? Doing so has emptied our pews. Second base is to step out beyond ‘attendance’ beyond ‘belief’ to seek new life in Christ through obedience to Scripture. It’s Acts 3:19-20. It’s 2 Cor.5:17, It’s to John 3:16. It’s to seek forgiveness for sin, it’s to desire to know and love Jesus, it’s to now want to pray and to now want to read your Bible. There is no one way people discover Jesus, as Dr. Taylor did, but it has to happen and opportunities to do so have been offered in too few of our churches.
The PCC’s peak membership year was 1965 and since then 17 national studies were done to discern reasons for its decline and to promote change. In 1979, I attended the General Assembly in Sudbury, Ontario. Inspired by Dr. Bill Klempa’s morning devotions from Esther and convicted by the example of the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan, I moved that the PCC double its membership in the 1980s. With great enthusiasm and hope, significant funding and staff were put into our national church office. Evangelism and church growth resources were thrust into the forefront of church life for 10 years. The results were congregational at best. Nationally, we had long ago skipped second base (Luke 24:47) as illustrated in the following paragraph.
In the 1980’s I received a letter from one of the faculty at Knox College who had been asked to teach a course on evangelism. Could I provide some input or suggestions? I was elated. (Dozens and dozens of people had been coming to faith in Jesus in my first congregation on Vancouver Island. For years I offered people on the fringe of the church a once-a-week in-home small group opportunity to discover Jesus. No pressure, no expectations, eight weeks duration.) I sent off several pages of notes on what I was doing to help people find and follow Jesus. Apologetically, he replied that the course was to be on the history of evangelism!
Teaching and training opportunities in how to follow Jesus are essential at a congregational level to equip people in life skills for living the Christian life.
There is yet a third base in baseball and in Scripture – unless we play by our own rules. If, at second base, we have truly discovered and committed our life to Christ as Saviour and Lord, it will be evidenced in some form of discipleship. (In my first church six people went into full time ministry in the PCC, plus a further individual who is still teaching evangelism and training disciples out of Latvia with Greater Europe Mission.) The role of the church is to spread the good news about Jesus’ death and resurrection, to call us to find forgiveness and the new life and then to “go and make disciples” (Mat 28:19). Is one who believes correctly but remains on first base a disciple? It’s a start. Is one who ‘accepts Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour’ but remains on second base a disciple? Dare we stop short of God’s call to us? The task of the church is to “make disciples”. Jesus makes an offer of life to us in John 3:16 which calls for correct belief – but it is clear this is not the final step for Jesus included the phrase, “should not perish” (ESV), “May not die” (GNB). Teaching and training opportunities in how to follow Jesus are essential at a congregational level to equip people in life skills for living the Christian life. Third base.
It takes more than a field to identify a baseball diamond and it takes more than a steeple to identify a church. Especially today, The Presbyterian Church in Canada at a national level is on track to create its own self image using ‘house rules’ free from what are seen as Biblical constraints. This penchant has been imported from our secular culture. It seduces us by telling us we are free to believe what we want apart from God’s truth. Being free to believe what we want apart from the objective truth of Scripture is to live a rootless and lost life. Satan convinced Eve she was free to believe what she wanted about God’s Word: “Did God really say…?” (Genesis 3:1). The church is being sifted today by the people of the world just as God used the Assyrians and Babylonians to sift Israel. When God sifts it is always purposeful and ultimately good. God once sifted me and deprived me of the scaffolding of my religion so I too could “find Jesus”.
How this nomadic and frequently money-less upbringing has impacted me personally I have never fully figured out. I do know that personal integrity now means much to me and I have no secrets apart from those I still carry on behalf of others. What has greatly impacted me from my formative years is that my family upbringing was markedly church oriented. For this gift of gifts I thank my parents. We always went to Sunday School and church. Always. Dad was an accomplished organist and also led church choirs. For brief periods of time he sold organs and pianos for department stores, played for funeral homes and in the summers repaired reed and pipe organs. My mother was a Julliard trained singer who evidenced her faith. It’s not hard to assume how they met. Dad played the organ in Anglican churches for my first 11 years and then on moving to Burnaby got the organist/choir position at Gordon Presbyterian Church in Burnaby – which he held for a short time. It became my spiritual home through my teens and we finally became a settled family.
At 16 I was teaching a Sunday School class of nine years olds in the church kitchen and increasingly active in the youth group eventually giving it leadership. Two years later I was president of its provincial executive. Church camps were also significant for me spiritually in my teen years. I was popular and appeared religious. I was active in the church and enjoyed it. My friends were there. What more did I need?
When I was about 15, the minister asked me if I had ever thought about becoming a minister. I said, “No” – as in ‘NO WAY!” Having been brought up in the church, I had the best of reasons for not wanting to become a minister: seven long years of university, preacher’s kids tended to be unruly and I did not want that for mine, then there were the long hours and low pay, plus I had become aware of inherent hassles with people. No thank you! I was going to do carpentry or drafting. I wrestled with God over this until I graduated high school. I did my best to keep God at arms length, all the while exercising leadership in the youth ministry of the church. By grade 11 I quit the track team to try and keep my marks up but still failed math and biology so had to repeat them in grade 12. By graduation I gave in. ‘OK, I’ll do it.” After all, at least I knew the ropes having become so familiar with the church and its people. That summer my marks arrived and I added my GPA up. Not enough to get into university! “Oh well, I guess I’ll do something else.” Being bored one day I decided to peruse my report card again and behold I had 63 per cent! This math major had made an adding mistake. I only needed 60 per cent to go to SFU! I realized later the hand of the Lord in having me fail those two subjects. I received good marks in them the second time around and THAT brought up my GPA! Off I went to be part of the very first class at a brand new university. Off I went to SFU – very nonchalantly.
I immediately got involved in the Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship group, making and posting the advertising on campus for the weekly meetings and for the first semester I also joined in with Campus Crusade for Christ. It was in these groups that I met people my age who read their Bibles with desire and talked about answers to prayer. I only said prayers and read my Bible if I was teaching a class, or for some event I was leading. But did I read for myself? No. Everyone knew I was studying to be a minister but did they know of my newly discovered spiritual poverty? I began to be anxious. When I had my own church, people would soon find out just how little I knew of the Bible and how shallow my faith was. I was spiritually hollow and was locked into a process that would eventually expose me. But I couldn’t just quit. So, sometime before my third semester, I started, in my usual half-hearted way, to pray along these lines, “God, if you really want me to be a minister, you have to do something to make me really believe.” I fully expected a miracle of some sort would intrude and convince me about God – perhaps a voice from the clouds, lightning hitting the tree next to me but sparing me, or some such event, would be sufficient.
The church is being sifted today by the people of the world just as God used the Assyrians and Babylonians to sift Israel. When God sifts it is always purposeful and ultimately good.
But God knew what I needed. I recall very clearly one morning in my third semester waking up and feeling different inside. I didn’t know what it was until later in the day when I discovered to my surprise that I no longer believed in God or the Bible! And I didn’t. I actually felt empty and cleaned out. I kept up my church attendance, leadership in the church and at IVCF. No one knew about my inner change except Lilias, the young woman with whom I had become very much attached, to the point we had informally covenanted to marry. It was a very unsettling time for her as well. At the time, I never connected this cleansing to my earlier prayer. It just didn’t fit! I didn’t like the empty feeling and, as well, now I was now a pre-maturely washed up ministerial candidate. What I had feared would happen had happened already! So, I started to pray, no longer rattling off prayers but praying in deep groans, “God, if you are there, I want my faith back.” And, I started to read my Bible for myself, probably for the first time in my life. The Bible stories I had been so familiar with began to have deeper meaning. I started to understand the Gospel of the cross in a personal way. To say that I discovered Jesus and the work of the Holy Spirit in my life would be the only way to express it. The initial turmoil receded as I grew in the Lord over about six months. In the end, I never got my ‘faith’ back. It was only religion. My marks shot up and I had a passionate desire to go into the ministry to tell people about Jesus. This experience was to later help me effectively relate to those who are merely religious and it compelled me to point to all the necessity of spiritual rebirth in Christ.
Who in Scripture is a good example of the kind of reformed person we are called to be? Who was it that clearly made it to ‘home plate’? The thief on the cross! First base for him was a cross! His dialogue with his fellow thief reveals he accepted the just consequences of his sin. But, as is obvious from other Scripture, Jesus doesn’t care much about those kinds of sin. He accepted this man as he found him – and must find us: honest, repentant and above all desiring Christ’s rule in his life. “Remember me, Jesus, when you come as King.” (Luke 23:42-43) The last words of Jesus offered to him are also held out to us: “this night you shall be with me in paradise.”
Home plate.
Photo Credit: Chris Young – The Canadian Press
