Rancho Bernardo Community Presbyterian Church

It was three years ago that the elders came forward to join me on the platform as I read the infamous letter to our congregation. The city staff had concluded that we could not have a conditional use permit for construction of a family center on our second property on Pomerado Road. I read the letter. We paused for a closing prayer. That day was one of the worst in my years of ministry.

This weekend, three years later, I want to briefly review how we got to that fateful day and what has happened since then. Bottom line. The construction project is dead. But the vision of why we were going to build a family center remains alive.

Read 1 Corinthians 9:19-23.

Did you know that before we called our second campus “The Porch” we named it 9-22? The name 9-22 was a result of a brainstorm process of our youth ministry leaders. We explained that the vision of this new campus was to share Jesus’ love with people who would never step inside our current facilities on this church campus. We wanted everything about this family center to reflect that we as followers of Jesus care about and connect with the local community. The name came from 1 Corinthians 9 verse 22. “I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.”

The driving vision for building a family center was that we thought this would be a means to share God’s love. The reasoning was simple. Jesus told us to love our neighbors. Studies of our zip code area told us that our non-religious neighbors most wanted churches to offer sports and recreation activities. “We can do that.” We also knew from our own current campus that families are lined up on a waiting list to get into our pre-school. We knew that young people flock to this church for our youth music programming. So we put the pieces together and designed a campus that would use these various means to be a blessing in the community and help us share God’s love with our neighbors. The hope of this campus was that people, who would not feel comfortable on our current campus with stained glass windows, would feel comfortable developing trusting relationships with followers of Jesus on that campus.

The Porch is dead as a construction project. The 9-22 vision is alive.

Before I talk about that continued driving vision, let me pause to reflect on the shifts happening in our society that cause our current campus to be less effective for sharing the gospel of Jesus’ love. Last year I did a presentation on why our church has become a flagship church for a new kind of thinking in denominational settings. In a denomination that is dying, more and more congregations are looking to us for help in figuring out why their ministries are failing and what to do about it. Here are some statistics. In 1960 our denomination (Presbyterian) was an influential 2% of the American population. The population of the USA had approximately 200,000,000 and the Presbyterians were a denomination of 4,000,000: 2%. We would expect now that the United States has grown to 300,000,000 that our denomination has also grown to keep up its 2% ratio or about 6,000,000. Ready for the shock? Instead of keeping up, our brand name churches have dropped to less than 1% of the population: around 2,000,000. Not only have we not kept up, we are falling seriously behind as our nation grows quickly post-Christian.

Let’s make it more local. San Diego County statistics of the last decade. We finished the twentieth century with 19,500 (round numbers) in our Presbyterian name brand churches. Ten years later that number has dropped in San Diego County by about 25% to 14,500. We are still having the same worship services. We are still offering Sunday school classes for children. But people are not coming to church like they did in the twentieth century. This is true not only for our denomination, but for churches in general. The institutional church is not as effective as it was fifty years ago.

Jesus addressed times like this when he reminded his own disciples and us, that there comes a time when we stop repairing the old fabric and start over with new cloth. The old cloth keeps tearing even when new patches are sewn on. Likewise, the new wine of fresh grape juice needs room to ferment and must be contained in new wineskins where the gases can expand. If we put fresh grape juice into an old wineskin the fermentation process will burst the old wineskins. Nothing wrong with old clothes or old wineskins. We just need to be thoughtful for when they need to be refreshed and/or replaced with new fabric and new wineskins.

We have a choice. We can either live in denial and keep hoping the people will eventually come back to our style of church or we can explore how to create new approaches to share God’s love in meaningful ways with those who won’t come to church as it currently is. Ours is not the first generation to struggle with such questions. In fact, the reason Christianity is still alive in America is that previous generations made the hard choices to change. Many first generation refugees came to America and founded churches that worshiped in the languages from their homeland. Swedish Baptists eventually discovered that their children spoke English and were bored with sermons and hymns in Swedish. So they let their children form congregations who worship in English. The same happened with German Lutherans, Scots Presbyterians… you get the idea. They struggled with why their own children and grandchildren were not coming to their churches and then celebrated that at least the gospel of Jesus’ love was still impacting their loved ones.

Here are some of the cultural changes impacting American churches today. The twentieth century American church used a good part of its energy trying to address how faith and science can be reconciled. Some came down on the fundamentalist side of creationism and others reconciled Darwin and faith. For the most part that is no longer an issue. While these next generations still respect science and want well-educated surgeons, the authority for matters of faith is less about science and proof and more about authenticity and personal stories. Some of us are still trying to explain our faith based on science and the Bible, when young people are asking, “Okay, yeah, but what has God done for you lately?” “Tell me your story and listen to mine.” Such conversations most often happen in neutral places better than in church buildings.

Here is another shift in our culture that is drastically impacting the effectiveness of how institutional churches share faith with others. Our society has shifted technologically from being a reading-based information society to becoming a visual society. In the 1970’s a major shift happened that few noticed. For the first time more people checked out videos from video stores than those who checked out books from libraries. We moved from radio addresses by the President of the Untied States to televised debates to computers with YouTube videos. Yet in many churches the sermon still involves a preacher standing at a pulpit and reading a carefully prepared sermon manuscript. Are we surprised that some people’s minds wander?

Third example of societal change impacting the modern American church. The speed of information has shifted by becoming faster and faster. A few months ago we felt the house rock at about 6 A.M. Within minutes some people already knew that we had a minor earthquake. Online sources could tell us where it was centered and what size it was. Facebookers were comparing notes within minutes. When we can get our information online in minutes, why would we want to wait until the evening television news or read about 24 hours later in a newspaper? By the time the newspaper people can get it into print it is old news. Newspapers know they are in big trouble trying to figure out how to sell advertising for people who read less and access information in their own way faster. In such times are we a church that can throw together a prayer meeting in two hours or do we require a month of committee meetings before we can respond to a crisis?

One more example. We can no longer assume that neighbors are friends. The old twentieth century idea of neighborhoods is no longer the primary means of people connecting. People develop friendships, romance, and meet future marriage partners online. Social networking is looking way different today than it did fifty years ago. In those days neighborhood children played back and forth in each other’s yards. Neighbors hung out on their front porches and caught up with each other while mowing the lawn on the weekends. Today most of us have automatic garage doors that close as soon as we pull in. Some of us don’t even know our neighbors. What does that mean when Jesus taught us to love our neighbors and to use friendship to share his love with others?

We could let it depress us. I’ve heard some seniors ready to give up. “Our children don’t come to church. Our grandchildren don’t know even the basics of our faith.” Well, I refuse to give up the vision. Jesus told us to love our neighbors so we have to work the problem. The gospel requires us to share God’s love.

If our neighbors won’t come to our church, we need to get better at taking the love of God to them. In fact, that was how they did it at the start of Christianity. In those days there were no church buildings. They couldn’t invite people to a building so the pastor and church leaders could talk about God. They had to show it in their daily lives. Here is the irony. The more we see the direction of modern trends, the more the ancient ways of loving people makes sense.

The 9-22 vision lives. We showed that we could be a church caring for the community after the 2007 fires. A week ago we held prayer services for the whole community to respond to the recent tragedy. We are learning to follow Jesus out into the community to connect with our neighbors at their point of need and not wait for them to come to our church activities.

Some twenty years ago a formal downtown institutional church was very proud of their statue of Jesus on the front lawn. Then one Sunday they arrived at church to find that the statue had been defiled. Some vandals had broken off the hands so that the Jesus statue had outstretched arms with no hands. The morning of the vandalism the church leaders called for a special offering to quickly replace the hands. No sooner had they collected the money than someone had an amazing idea.

The next week when the worshipers arrived on Sunday they found the statue still standing with arms outstretched and no hands. But at the based of the statue was a new plaque. “I have no hands but your hands.” Our vision is to be the hands of Jesus in our community.