Hilton Head Island, SC – July 1, 2018
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 9:1-6; Luke 10:1-12
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And he said to them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” Luke 10:2 (RSV)
The Chapel Without Walls is unlike any congregation I have ever attended or have served as a minister. I am fairly certain you feel the same way about it, if you stop to think about it.
For one thing, The Chapel is a probably a smaller congregation than most of us have attended during our lives. For another, it has fewer activities than most other congregations. We worship each Sunday, we have a brief time of fellowship after that, and a spirited discussion after that. We also have a study class which meets on Monday mornings for much of the school year. On rare occasions we have congregational social events, and that’s it; that’s everything we do.
Because we have so few activities compared to most churches, there are far fewer demands on people who attend The Chapel than on others who attend congregations with more activities. That may be good, it may not be so good, but it is true; it is a fact.
Furthermore, we have always gotten along quite well financially. You likely never worry about our finances, nor do I, except in one respect. I shall address that matter next Sunday, but I’m not going to tell you what it is; you’ll just have to come, breathlessly waiting to find out.
There is, however, one thing that does cause me growing concern. It isn’t a huge anxiety, but it is a mini-anxiety, and it is growing.
We’re an old bunch. Our average age is about my age. I’m seventy-nine, closing in on eighty. Anybody who thinks we’re not old has eyes that are too old to see clearly. If you have even moderate eyesight, and you look around, you see mainly gray hair, or little hair, or hair that if it isn’t gray probably has had some assistance for looking the way it looks. Before we began to hold our services at The Cypress two years ago, we had a small contingent of Cypress people who attended our services. Now we have a solid minority of Cypress people, plus others from all over the island, as was the pattern before the move. We have many old-time islanders and many newcomers to the island. But our move to The Cypress has definitely been a wise move.
Most people who attend The Chapel Without Walls have fairly liberal and tolerant personalities and outlooks. Because we don’t have walls, which means we rent space rather than own space, we deliberately do not attempt either to wall people in or out of our congregation. We agree to disagree with one another, if necessary, and we not only allow but promote everyone believing whatever each of us feels led to believe. We may try to influence what others think --- or at least I admit I try to do that every Sunday. But there is no litmus test for being associated with The Chapel. I trust you are pleased about that, or you wouldn’t be here.
So what is this gnawing concern of mine to which I have alluded? It is this: If our average attendance each Sunday is to maintain itself, in a congregation as small as ours and with the average age of ours, it is necessary to get a higher percentage of new folks attending each year than is necessary for the average congregation. Every year we lose from five to ten of our regular attendants. These losses are the result of three primary factors. People move away to be closer to their children, or they become too physically or mentally incapacitated to attend any longer, or they die. With our average age of eighty, all three factors are inevitable and predictable.
We have about sixty different individuals who attend The Chapel at least once every two months or so. About 40% of them attend almost every Sunday, another 40% on about 50% of all Sundays, and 20% once every six or eight Sundays. Those percentages for attendance, incidentally, are similar to every other church I have ever served as a pastor.
Throughout the year, we average between forty and forty-five in attendance each Sunday. However, as in every other church, the figures are higher in some seasons and lower in others. In most churches on Hilton Head Island, attendance is lowest in the summer and highest in the winter. That is true for us too. Our highest attendance is from January through April.
If no efforts whatsoever are made by anybody to increase our attendance, we can probably continue to exist for another ten years or so, assuming no new people ever become part of The Chapel. By that time, many of us, including yours truly, shall probably not be functioning very well, if at all. So we would just dribble into oblivion, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
I believe The Chapel Without Walls is too unique a congregation, and too vital in its own inimitably elderly fashion, for us to allow that to happen. No one who is part of this particular community of faith is required to engage in a lot of activities, but all of us should be committed to keeping this congregation going. And there is one thing in particular each of us can do.
Earlier I postulated that there are about sixty different people who come to The Chapel at least once every two months. Here is what I am suggesting that each of you can do to keep us a vital, if also inevitably an older, congregation. Invite three people of your acquaintance to join you for one Sunday here. When you invite them, explain to them why you attend The Chapel. Then, either bring them with you, or meet them here. Don’t bring all three at once, unless they are all related to one another. Invite each one separately in order to make it a special occasion for them, and for you. If they come back the next Sunday, we shall shout hallelujah and rejoice, although only figuratively, of course. People such as we do not visibly and vocally shout hallelujah or rejoice, for heaven’s sake. But you’re only asked to get them here once, not twice or more. And remember: Of people who attend a new church for the first time, the highest percentage come because someone invited them – not because of the building or the programs or the preacher or other such things, though those are factors, but because someone invited them to attend.
If sixty congregants each invite three people (and two of your people can be a couple), it means that a total of 180 people will have been invited to attend one service at The Chapel Without Walls. If just one out of five of those who are invited actually do attend only once, it means that 57 new folks will have attended because of your invitation. That is the profound influence that an invitation can have. And if only one out of five of those who are invited and who do attend eventually become part of this community of faith, that translates to a 30% increase in attendance for us. That likely means we shall continue for not ten but at least fifteen or twenty years into the future. At this point we cannot even guesstimate beyond that.
You may wonder who your three invitees should be. I can’t tell you specifically, but generally I will describe six types of people to you. The first group are the most likely and the sixth the least likely to respond affirmatively to your invitation. 1) Invite people you know. Don’t invite people you don’t know. Because it is you who will be doing the inviting to attend our church just once, people you like and know well and who like you are the most prone to respond affirmatively. 2) Concentrate on people you know who once attended a church regularly and no longer do so. Many people simply get out of the habit of attending worship. They also can get back into the habit, if they become motivated to do so. A few may become motivated just by attending here once, though probably not many. 3) If you have friends who once were active at First Presbyterian Church here on the island twenty or more years ago and are not active any longer, invite them. They know what they are in for if they come to hear me preach again on a regular basis. For some of them your invitation may be met with a swift “Not on your life!”, but for others it might be, “Why not? I’ll give it a try.” 4) Re-invite people you know who were once active at The Chapel and now are not. It may be harder to get them to return, but at least they once were active, and perhaps they can be re-ignited. 5) In general, invite people whom you know to be open-minded. They are the kind who probably would feel most comfortable here. 6) Lastly, invite people you know who have never attended any church in their life but are open-minded. Those who have never attended church are the least likely to accept your invitation, especially if they are older, which most of the people most of you know are. However, about ten years ago we had a nonagenarian lady who had never attended any services in any church anywhere except for weddings and funerals. She was invited to The Chapel by a chapel member who lived at The Cypress, and lo and behold, she came. She attended nearly every Sunday from that day until the day she died three years later. She was a very unusual, inquisitve lady, and that was a very unusual situation. Nevertheless, I advise you to spend most of your efforts inviting people who have had an active church background with any kind of church at some point in their lives.
Perhaps a couple of years after Jesus had called his first twelve disciples, he sent them out on a short mission. It was described in our first scripture reading this morning. According to Luke, Jesus told them, “Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money, and do not have two tunics” (Luke 9:3). In addition, Jesus told them they should stay in the homes of anyone who welcomed them, and then they were quickly to move on. If anyone refused to listen to them, they were to shake the dust off their feet to those people. (I doubt that Jesus actually said that, but Luke said he said it.)
This was, in other words, a practice run for what Jesus expected from the disciples after he knew he would probably be permanently separated from them. This commission probably occurred a couple of years after Jesus began his ministry in the Galilee.
In the very next chapter of Luke, after Jesus and the disciples had begun their slow journey up to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover, Luke (and only Luke) tells us Jesus commissioned another seventy disciples to do more or less the same thing that he told the twelve. His basis instructions were the same, but his preamble to them had more content. “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Pray therefore for the Lord of the harvest to send our laborers into his harvest. Go your way; behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves” (Luke 10:2-3).
This is pure speculation on my part, and I want you to know that. I suspect Jesus had been preaching and teaching for about two years when he sent out his twelve disciples on their mission. He had been at it for at least two and a half years when he sent out the seventy. We don’t even know who they were. But we can safely guess this: the twelve probably had an easier time than did the seventy. By the time the seventy were sent, Jesus had made many more enemies, which is why he warned them that they were like lambs going out among wolves.
Do not imagine that I am asking you to do anything like what Jesus asked of the twelve and the seventy. They, especially the seventy, had a tough assignment. You, on the other hand, have a relatively easy assignment, in keeping with anyone who is a member of the Christian community known as The Chapel Without Walls. We are a Low-Demand congregation, not a High-Demand congregation. The physical fact is that it is unrealistic to demand very much of people who average eighty years of age. We’re too old to cut much mustard anymore.
Inviting three people to come to church is not a great burden for anyone. You are not being asked to preach or heal. Almost none of you would happily engage in the former, and probably no one at all is capable of engaging in the latter. But you can ask three people to attend The Chapel, and that is what I am asking you to do. You have the advantage of nineteen centuries of seeds having been sown by previous Christians to make this an undeniably do-able task. Virtually everyone you know knows something about the Church of Jesus Christ, though not necessarily much if anything about The Chapel Without Walls. By comparison, how would you like to be a Mormon or a Jehovah’s Witness who is asked to go out into an essentially Christian culture to try to woo people into two religious groups which are anathema to most Christians?
You’re not being asked to do anything like that! The fields are white unto harvest for you because previous generations have planted billions of seeds! Asking someone to join you in church for a trial Sunday is not an odious order. It isn’t even an order; it’s a request. It certainly is not Mission Impossible. All of us know at least three people who are possibilities for becoming part of the unique community of faith known as The Chapel Without Walls.
Why should we do this? Why can we do this? We should and we can because this is a community of faith. Faith is almost always nurtured only in a community. Rarely is it nurtured individually. All of us need others off whom we can bounce our ideas and thoughts and doubts. It is very hard to grow faith individually. Faith almost always grows corporately, or not at all.
Community matters, because faith matters. Spiritual wrestling matters, and we best learn how to do that in community with others. Community and faith and spiritual wrestling matter most of all because God matters. That is the theme Jesus constantly preached. That is what Jesus taught. The kingdom of God matters. Ultimately, it is the only thing in this world that really matters, and God needs all of us to make the kingdom exist on earth as it exists in heaven.
Knowledge of God and a relationship with God are very difficult apart from a community of believers, because most individuals don’t discover God very well by themselves. They can’t. In its essence, the planting and the nurturing of faith is a community activity. Only faith communities can be the primary producers of faith, if even they can do it effectively.
The Chapel has been in existence for almost fifteen years. Two years and one month ago, we moved from Congregation Beth Yam, the Jewish synagogue, to The Cypress. For the fourteen Sundays prior to that move, we were averaging 31 people in attendance. The Sunday before we moved to The Cypress, we had 22 in attendance. On the first Sunday here we had 52. The next Sunday we had 49, and the next Sunday 57. We have never again had as many as 57 since the fourth Sunday in June of 2016.
We always felt very welcomed and at home in Congregation Beth Yam. However, I admit it was I who urged the Chapel Board of Trustees to consider requesting The Cypress to allow us to use Cypress Hall for our Sunday services. That has proven to be a very providential move.
Only in the last few months has it dawned on me that to remain viable, we need about sixty people who attend The Chapel with some regularity. If we don’t have at least that number, it is quite conceivable we will eventually die. That means we need five to ten new “regulars” each year to continue existing. YOU are the key to making that happen. The harvest is plentiful. I urge you to start harvesting. You never know how successful a farmer you are until you start to farm.