Hilton Head Island, SC – January 5, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
I Corinthians 12:12-20,27
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Now you are the body of Christ, and individually members of it. – I Cor. 12:27 (RSV)
Our Decadiversary — And Now What?
On January 4, 2004, The Chapel Without Walls held its first service of worship. Today, on January 5, 2014, we are celebrating the tenth anniversary of our existence as a congregation. That first service represented the second largest attendance we ever had in our ten-year history. There was a long story about our inaugural service in The Island Packet a week before we started out, which explained that I had been the pastor of another congregation on the island for seventeen years, and that I had resigned from that church and gone off and served as the interim pastor of four other churches. A hundred people came on that first Sunday just to see how much I had aged or whether I had grown a beard, or horns, or who knows what. The largest attendance we ever had, incidentally, is when the Rev. Dr. John L. McCreight, who has been one of our stellar attendants through these years, and also a guest preacher for us, preached the last sermon of his 60+ years as a minister. Nearly two hundred people came to wish him a hearty hail and farewell. He still comes to The Chapel on a regular basis, having survived a serious bout with cancer, and also my preaching.
On that first Sunday, and on other occasions since then, I made it clear that the reason I organized this congregation was that after I had completed my last interim pastorate, I was 62 years old, and I could not get a job in any church anywhere, either as permanent pastor, which is what I hoped for, or as an interim pastor, which is what I would gladly have accepted. So I had to take the early retirement benefits from both my Presbyterian pension and Social Security, but there was not enough income for Lois and me to keep our heads above water financially. I didn’t need a big salary, but I needed a salary. And that is the way it has been ever since.
In ten years, here is what the pattern of our regular attendance has been, setting aside those two “big” unusual Sundays. For the first six years, we averaged from 40 to 60 people each Sunday. We had 40 in the summer and 60 in the winter, when some snow-birds from elsewhere were on the island for the winter months. In the past four years, however, out attendance has been 25 to 40. That may not seem to be a very big drop numerically, but proportionally it is an alarming decline. If we continue that trend, we won’t exist in another ten years.
Who comes to The Chapel Without Walls? Well, in general, old folks. Or at least older folks. I am less than a month short of 75 years of age, and I am slightly below average for the average age of those in attendance on any given Sunday. In fact, all by myself I probably lower our average age by one to three months. We have a handful of regulars in their sixties, a bunch of regulars in their seventies, a sizeable chunk of octogenarians, and a surprising group of nonagenarians. A couple of years ago a young man in his thirties discovered us, and he has stayed with us. All by himself, he dropped our average age by one to three years. In order for you to be familiar with the nomenclature I am using, by my definition a regular is anyone who attends at least once a month, and an irregular is someone who attends less frequently than that, but at least occasionally, as compared to once in a blue moon. We happily celebrate the regulars, who are more regular than in most churches, and also the irregulars, who in my experience are about as regular in their irregularity as other irregulars I have known in other churches.
Why are we an older congregation? In truth, most of the mainline Protestant churches on Hilton Head Island are older in average age than the island evangelical churches. But we probably are slightly older an average than the mainline congregations. And why? I think it is because our very traditional style of worship and my liberal style of preaching appeals mainly to older people. Most people in their twenties through early fifties don’t go to church at all, and those who do tend to go to more conservative churches, because they are more conservative than geezers. Those who were young in the Sixties are now old in the Teens, and those who survived the Sixties are more likely to be liberals than those who were not born when the Sixties erupted.
I have personally met with almost everyone who ever came through these sacred portals into this sacred space for worship on any given Sunday in the past decade. I know the circumstances of those folks. So who, in general, are we? We’re an eclectic bunch. In the first place, we’re a group who basically understand the meaning of the word “eclectic,” and that’s something in itself. We’re a mixed bag of people. We’re unusually open-minded, or we wouldn’t be here, especially because of what everyone has to put up with in the preaching of our primary preacher. No one who is a strictly orthodox Christian could abide being here for very long.
Furthermore, three-quarters of the people who were ever regulars or regular-irregulars are no longer here. They have either moved away, or faded away, or are no longer in sufficient health to be here regularly, or have joined the Church Triumphant, the great panoply of people who have died and now are with God in heaven, “whatever and wherever that is,” as I often say. But you need to take stock of that number; three-quarters all of the folks who ever attended The Chapel regularly or irregularly, in just ten years, are gone.
Who are the irregulars, and why are they irregular? Well first, there are a few folks who come every now and then from First Presbyterian Church, where I used to be the pastor for seventeen years, up until seventeen years ago. However, some of those irregular-regulars were not there when I was there, and you’d have to ask them why they come. I have my suspicions, but I won’t tell you what they are. We have had a few people from other local churches who come occasionally or rarely, and they too have their reasons, but I don’t know what those reasons are. If you’re an irregular-regular or a regular-irregular, I want you to know we’re happy you come whenever you come. In that regard, every church I have ever served has had an identifiable contingent such as you represent. Nonetheless, it is the regular-regulars who carry the main load of whatever it is we carry, and that is true of every church, and that shall always be true.
Last Sunday I preached a sermon entitled The Perils of Pauline Theology. In it I suggested that I am very skeptical of the apostle Paul’s primary theological doctrine, namely that Jesus died on the cross to atone for our sins. However, despite what I said last week, whenever Paul talks about the nature of the Church of Jesus Christ, he is usually right on the mark, in my opinion. In his first letter to the Corinthians, he refers to the Church as “the body of Christ,” and he says that each of us individually is a member of that body, like a hand or a foot or an eye or an ear. It is wonderful metaphor for what Christ’s Church really is.
First, let me say something about THE Church of Jesus Christ, and then something about how inevitably we are part of it. The universal (or worldwide or ecumenical) Church consists of all Christians of all types who live everywhere. That means all Roman Catholics, all Eastern Orthodox, all Protestants of every variety, and all people who ever were affiliated with any of those Christian branches and still believe in God and Jesus Christ. They may call themselves “spiritual but not religious,” and they don’t attend worship anywhere anymore. At least that is my definition of what comprises Christ’s Church. It is those who believe in God and Jesus Christ.
Those who decree that only Roman Catholics or only Eastern Orthodox or only Protestants or only certain kinds of Protestants or only very particular types of believers are truly members of the proper Church of Jesus Christ have misunderstood the nature of the Church. It is a very complex, complicated, and sometimes confounding institution. With over two billion Christians worldwide, there is no way there can be personal, theological, or cultural unanimity among such an enormous and disparate conglomeration of human beings. In Paul’s words, “For the body does not consist of one member but of many” (I Cor. 12:14). And remember this: philologically and linguistically, everyone who is a member of anything is, by definition, a member of a larger entity. A member logically is smaller than that of which he/she is a member.
Well then, how is The Chapel Without Walls connected to THE Church of Jesus Christ? We are non-denominational, and are not aligned with any particular denomination. We are Protestant, sort of, and more liberal than many if not most other Protestant congregations, although it might appear that institutionally we are not a member of THE Church. But we are. And we are because, like it or not, every Christian congregation anywhere is a member of the universal Church. That is not an indisputable fact, but it is my strong conviction. Again, to quote Paul, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ” (I Cor. 12:12).
Perhaps if I give you some personal observations, you will understand better what I am trying to say here. For the first 62 years of my life, I was a Presbyterian. To paraphrase Paul from I Corinthians 13, I spoke like a Presbyterian, I thought like a Presbyterian, I reasoned like a Presbyterian. But, as I Corinthians might say, when I became 63, I did not give up Presbyterian ways. Denominationally I am still a Presbyterian far more than anything else. But, if I may change the analogy of the Church from being like a human body, it is also like a tree. The Church must have many branches, or it cannot either exist or thrive. There must be many kinds of Christians, or there won’t be Christians at all. And that means that the people who are part of The Chapel Without Walls are, inevitably and by God’s grace, members of the gigantic tree represented by the worldwide Church of Jesus Christ. Institutionally our congregation is not a member of any denomination, but existentially it is, and must be, a member of the Church.
However, if we don’t attract some more members to The Chapel, The Chapel will eventually die. Every year in this country and around the world, thousands of new Christian congregations are inaugurated. And every year thousands of congregations die. Most of them were never large, but some had many hundreds or even thousands of members at one time and they simply fizzled into non-existence for a whole host of reasons. The neighborhood changed, the town died, the ecclesiastical landscape altered, the people moved away, the culture transmogrified. It happens. The Church continues on, but some churches don’t make it.
If we don’t gain some new members for our particular church body, we will no longer be a member of the bigger church body, the immense universal ecclesiastical tree. We all need to understand that. If we should fail as a congregation, the world certainly won’t end, but we will end, and is that what we want? Or, stated differently, are we willing to allow that to happen? These are not among the most important questions ever to be asked in the long history of the human race, but they are very important in our short ten-year congregational history.
Furthermore, if we are to continue, either the level of our financial commitment to The Chapel must grow, or the membership must grow, or, preferably, both. We have always managed to pay our bills, but we have never given away very much to community or world mission, and that has always grieved me. Now, seven years or so after it happened, I will divulge one of the main reasons why we have survived financially. Seven years ago a long-time friend of mine, who was a member of First Presbyterian Church here on the island, gave us $25,000. He never attended The Chapel even once, but he thought we could use the money, which was certainly true. Ever since, that one-time-gift has helped us move forward with fiscal confidence. Half of it is now gone, but the rest is our cushion. And at the rate it has been utilized over the past seven years, it will probably last for another seven years. If you wonder why we never divulged this before, we didn’t want to give you an excuse to give less than you currently give, and as a congregation we currently don’t give quite enough anyway. We don’t need a lot, but we need something, and each of us needs to feel that what we personally contribute is important and vital and life-sustaining to our particular little branch or twig or leaf of the Cosmic Church Conifer.
I have openly publicized for a few years that I plan to retire from being the full-time part-time pastor of The Chapel Without Walls at the end of 2014. On December 19, 2014, I will have been ordained for fifty years. Had we previously been able to find a viable candidate to take over as the full-time part-time pastor, I probably would have retired a few years ago. But we didn’t find that person, so I decided to keep going until I have been a parson for half a century. Because of extraordinarily good health, a strong Miller constitution, and probably pure orneriness, I could keep going indefinitely. But I won’t, because I do not want to be committed to being the pastor who preaches 45 to 48 Sundays of every year. Lois and I hope to travel some, and to be able to flit hither or yon whenever the spirit moves us.
The Chapel board of trustees has identified the only three viable options we believe are available to us. They shall be explained in greater detail in the discussion which follows our closing hymn, but here they are:
ONE) We conclude, for whatever reasons, that either we disband soon or we disband at the end of 2014.
TWO) We put on a full-court press to find a minister, probably an early retiree or a retiree in his or her mid-to-late-sixties, whom we all believe can take over the full-time part-time responsibility represented by this pastorate. Maybe you know a minister who fits this description. If so, you can promote that idea in the discussion --- not the name of the minister you know, but the potential availability of that person you know. It takes 20 to 25 hours per week to prepare the sermons, get the information ready for each week’s bulletin, to do a little other administrivia, and to visit present, future, or past members of The Chapel in their various situations and/or afflictions.
THREE) We establish a “ministry team” of two or more co-pastors of The Chapel who will provide leadership for the foreseeable future. I am willing to be one of the members of that ministry co-pastorate, and we have possible candidates for the other team members
.
By 11:00 AM or so this morning, we hope to have a fairly clear consensus on what we think we should do. It doesn’t have to be carved in stone, but it would be very helpful if collectively we can agree on a plan for our future: now, in the next year, and then beyond that.
The Chapel Without Walls has been the most pleasant, pleasurable, and pleasing pastoral experience I have had in almost half a century as a card-carrying parson. As far as I can discern, the expectations of the pastor are not excessively lofty, and everyone seems to get along with everyone else. We’re too small to have serious factions, thank heaven. Very honestly, I have greatly enjoyed these ten years. Paraphrasing Mr. Churchill, never have so few done so much for just one. Whatever else you are, in my mind you are an outstanding congregation.
To conclude, using the words of Paul: “Now you are the body of Christ, and individually members of it.” So --- shall we continue to be part of Christ’s body, and if so, what shall we do?