Swallowsrest

Pentecost 7 – 2023 (Thoughts)
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
Marian Free

In the name of God who brought all things from nothing. Amen.

A fear that has accompanied (but not dominated) me for most of my faith life is that the church is going to die. It is going to die because we (the churchgoers) do not do enough. To be explicit: apparently we don’t make worship attractive enough, we don’t sing the right hymns, we don’t offer morning tea, we don’t have enough entry points (craft groups, sports associations etc), or we don’t have a drum kit – the list is endless. From my mid-teens on, I have been party to discussions as to what has caused people to leave the church in droves and what it is that we who remain can do to make the church grow.

People of my generation and upwards are worried about church growth (or lack of it) in part because we have come from a place of complacency and privilege, a place in which church was a part of the social fabric of people’s lives. In the 1950’s and 60’s e7uuen those who were not regular attenders had some sort of connection to the church. They were baptised, married, and buried from a church. They were members of the Guild, took part in working bees, made cakes or cooked sausages for fetes and they sent their children to Sunday School. The wider community upheld a belief in the sacredness of Sundays which meant that there was no competition for people’s time on a Sunday morning.

A lot has changed and, tempted as I am to rehearse all those changes, I will leave it to you to revise all the arguments that have been made on the subject during the last 50 years.

Whatever the reason, we cannot argue with the fact that once full churches are sadly depleted. Churches have been closed, some can only afford part-time priests and some parishes have no priest at all but have combined with a neighbouring parish for priestly oversight.

As our numbers have declined, so our obsession with the situation has grown. Yet, for all our navel gazing and problem solving nothing has substantially changed. If anything, the situation has got worse and, with fewer people in our churches, there are fewer people to address the problem – at least if there is a problem.

By that I mean, that what to us is an issue, might not be an issue at all, that our worry might be misplaced and that our time could be better spent. I say this because it occurs to me that our collective response to decreasing congregations says a great deal about us and what it says is not good. Indeed, our anxiety about the state of the church reveals a deep-seated anxiety that without structures and institutions, God’s ability to act in the lives of those around us is impeded and that without churches to proclaim the gospel there will be no way for people to encounter the living God.

In other words, our fixation with the survival of the church exposes a belief that we feel that we are responsible for God’s presence in the world that we have come to think that without us (without the Church), God will somehow sink into oblivion. How could we be so arrogant, so self-assured, to have convinced ourselves that God’s survival depends on us! What an extraordinary idea! Over the centuries we have come to believe that the Church represents God’s presence in the world and therefore, without the Church God’s efficacy will be severely hampered. Somehow, we have come to the conclusion that God needs our help to exist, that God relies on us to such an extent that our keeping the Church alive (in its present state) is an absolute imperative?

I believe that the parable of the Sower speaks to this situation, relieves us of our sense of responsibility and helps to place things in perspective. Often, when we read the parable (and its explanation) we focus on the fate of the seed and worry about the way in which the word is received according to where the seed falls. However, if we focus on the Sower (whom we take to be God), we can see that the parable asks us to place our trust where it belongs – in God and not in ourselves. In the parable the Sower tosses the precious seed with wild abandon heedless of where it will fall. This Sower is not concerned where the seed will land or whether or not it will take root. The Sower is not troubled by such things as permanency, nor is the Sower trying to build something that will last for millennia. The Sower is simply anxious to spread the seed as widely and generously and possible – confident that what does take root will bear fruit.

In all this the Sower does not ask for help – in the sowing, the nurturing or the harvesting. The Sower does not seem to be concerned about locking in a fixed and unchanging future, but rather is confident that something will happen and relaxed as to how it will happen.

I wonder what would happen if we were able to let go of the burden of maintaining our churches – physical and otherwise – open ourselves to God’s careless abandon, and to see in what new ways God is being revealed in the world today.

Tags: church decline, church growth, Sower, trust in God

This entry was posted on July 15, 2023 at 7:33 am and is filed under Matthew. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.