The Great Ends of the Church:

The shelter, nurture and spiritual fellowship

for the children of God

by Parrish W. Jones, Ph.D.

©2005 All rights reserved.

 

Ephesians 2:11-22
1 John 1:1-4
Matthew 11:28-30

If we were to choose one of the six Great Ends of the Church that most churches have been doing reasonably well it is the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship for the children of God. Most churches fulfill this part of our mission better than we do the others with the exception, perhaps, of the maintenance of divine worship about which we will talk next week. If you notice, this end and the maintenance of divine worship go with the aspect of Servant Leadership of being with a faith community.

If we listen to the readings from this morning, we hear the scriptures speak of the three aspects of today’s end. Psalm 84 speaks of the longing of humans and animals for shelter in the courts of the Lord. This notion of sanctuary plays a large role in scripture. We casually refer to the place of worship as a sanctuary without considering the meaning of the word.

In the Older Testament when the people of Israel entered the promised land they were commanded to establish cities of sanctuary where persons who had killed another person could flee and find safety from any avenger. Part of the purpose of such sanctuaries was not to subvert justice, but to end the cycle of violence caused by what was called blood right. Blood right was the right of the family of a person who had been killed to kill the killer. The cities of sanctuary were a place of hope and redemption, a place that brought peace to the land.

For centuries it was understood in Christendom that anyone who fled to the sanctuary of a church and surrendered him or herself to the care of a priest could not be arrested for crimes. As long as the person remained in the sanctuary of the priest, he was safe from prosecution. There were many monks who came from this practice and who served the church well.

That is the meaning of sheltering. The church is the shelter, the sanctuary for those who come to it from the trauma of the world that threatens our safety as God’s children. The church is here for those who are broken in body, mind or soul. We succeed at that as churches in various ways and sometimes we fail. We do much better with those who are our own than with those who are not. Many of us gathered here today, including me, are here because we experienced this sheltering care of the church.

Our text from Ephesians suggests that the people whom we fail  to shelter most often are those who are very different from us. One of the things that drew Mary Ellen and I to New York Ave. Presbyterian Church was that this church with its gilded history seemed quite pleased to have homeless men and women using their bathrooms on Sunday morning for bathing, shaving and grooming. In worship these men and women, who did not always look or smell the best or behave as expected, also were welcomed and treated as if they were one of us.

I honestly believe that when we approach that mark, we have begun to fully accomplish this end. Until we have sheltered—provided safe haven for—people, we cannot nurture them. The priest provided safety for criminals, but the expectation of that protection was that the criminal would submit her or himself to the priest’s nurture, teaching and mentoring. We are here to provide a safe haven from a world that consistently attacks who we are as the children of God.

That haven is also a place for nurture in faith. Too often we have provided that nurture as if one size fits all. We have begun in this age to understand that people come to us with different spiritual needs: one as a teenager in what seems like a death struggle with a parent; another comes addicted to drugs, alcohol, money, excessive life style, prestige, success, and so forth; others as the victims of a complex economy that chews people up as readily as it enriches us; others as victims of wars and rumors of wars; others as parents in need of guidance; others as migrant strangers in a foreign land broken down by an inhospitable culture; others as seniors in need of a family to support them emotionally and spiritually in their latter years; others as persons of physical and spiritual energy seeking their call; and so on. We are called as the church to take them where they are and nurture them in faith in a way that they will experience God’s provision for them.

The lesson from 1 John speaks numerous times of “we”, a collective term. The church is not a solo experience. It also uses a word that is translated, “share” from the Greek “Koinonia.” We also translate this word as “fellowship” or "communion". We would be mistaken to think that it refers to cookies and punch after worship or dinner once a month with a church group. That can be fellowship. It can be “koinonia” but it is not necessarily so. “Koinonia” is a richer notion. It is what this second Great End calls “spiritual fellowship”. It is an aspect of sheltering and nurturing as sheltering and nurturing are an aspect of it. The meaning of “koinonia” is not accomplished among us unless we feel God’s spirit in our midst through building relationships that build up and strengthen the body of Christ and each of its members.

In her book, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith , Anne Lamott begins with an account of her conversion: “My coming to faith,” she writes, “did not start with a leap but rather with a series of staggers.” She was raised by parents who were hostile to faith, so she had little contact with religion except through grandparents. When she was grown, things came apart for her—her alcoholic father was dying of a brain tumor and her best friend started dying from cancer. Burdened by drugs and alcohol herself, she reached out to an Episcopal priest, the only Christian she knew whose presence she could stand because he did not act as if he were “saved” and she was not. He gently asked her to let him pray for her when she could not pray for herself.

She was in the habit of spending Sunday mornings at an outdoor market. She began to notice a little ramshackled, miserably run down, Presbyterian church on the corner. She decided to go and check it out and to listen to the hymns. The choir was five persons and the congregation 30 persons of various races. She visited weekly standing just inside the door so she could escape prior to everyone else. Her heart was warmed by the music and the consistent offerings of these poor people who faithfully brought baskets full of food for the poor.

Eventually, she found a chair so she could sit just inside the sanctuary. This move symbolized another movement in her life, she found herself giving up drugs and alcohol for faith and , then, baptism and church membership. She testifies that she “would not be alive today if not for the people of St. Andrew Presbyterian Church, Marin City, California.”

Her salvation came to her through the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God in a small very poor church. Some of you remember such a church in your life, except it may not have been poor. You have a romance with that notion which is all right. However, there is really only one thing that is different about a small and large church. One is small and one is large. If they follow their call, people will find faith and grow in their faith through their ministry. A large church can fulfill the Great End of “the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God” as well as a small church can. Neither is necessarily better at it.

I raise a simple caution to those who want Summit to be a small church. a beautifl picture of how we call others with the words of Jesus: "Come you who are weary and heavy laden!". Summit is already way bigger than a small church. By all accounts it is a large church. It is not a mega church just a large one. Unless we decide to stop being the church and fulfilling the great ends, Summit will remain a large church and perhaps grow into a mega church. To do otherwise is to fail in our mission to be the church. Our greatest challenge is to discover how we can remain a large growing church and still live out our call to provide “the shelter, nurture and spiritual fellowship of the children of God” so that when broken people come to our doors, they find Jesus an dhear him saying through us, "Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest."