Leadership Gathering January 2023

Welcome to the first Leadership Meeting of First Methodist Church Brownwood for 2023!

First of all, I want to thank you for saying YES!

We as a church have been through a lot over the past couple of years.

Looking back over the prior years,

2017, we saw 270 average in worship with 3 professions of faith.

2018, we saw 303 average in worship with 9 professions of faith.

Then, in 2019 we recorded the highest number average attendance ever at an average of 369 throughout the year. We were working toward seeing more than 400 in the building on average by the end of 2020. We had seen 17 professions of faith, and were planning to break 20 professions of faith and baptisms.

Then March happened… March of 2020, this little virus shut things down all over the world and changed the landscape of church and society.

After 2 years we were almost in the final stages of recovery from COVID, and March happened again.

March of 2022, this little thing called Disaffiliation and Affiliation came to fruition. It had been predicted, contemplated, and discussed in years prior, but we never knew what it would look like.

Today, we have a new name and a new focus, but the same theology we have had since 1875.

We have had and continue to have staff changes and pastoral changes.

But, as I look around this room… I see hope!

Actually, here is what I see:

Jerimiah 29:10-14a

I look at what God is doing, and I see that we have lived our 70 years. We have sojourned in the wilderness. I walk through here on a Wednesday night or a Saturday and I see people in this chapel praying for this church, for you – the leaders, and for this community.

I hear the stories of Bread Ministry and feel the presence of God going from this place into the community.

I read the cards from Turkey Take-Out and responses to our participation with Shop with a Cop and I am amazed at all that God is doing through your mission and ministry.

I am so proud to be a part of this community of believers!

And, so much of what is happening could not happen without the staff that leads our ministries.

I want us to take a moment to pray together, then I am going to invite each of the leaders to come up and say a few words. After they have shared with you, I’ll come back and say a few more words about where we are and where we are going, then you will break into your different teams. You’ll get your fancy notebooks that Kathy, our Church Administrative Assistant worked so hard to put together for you, and you’ll get to discuss a few minutes of business as you plan out your year.

I know, yesterday I said you would hear a lot more about Right Now Media, but I think we will roll that out in another way. Right now, I think we need to spends some time sharing together and praying together...

So, let’s pray.

Address to the 2023 Leadership

More.

That is the word I have for us today. More.

That is what we need today is, More – but not more stuff… not more money… not more of anything earthly.

We need more of Jesus.

We need more of the Holy Spirit.

We need more of the grace, peace, and hope of our God.

Amen.

I thought about giving you practical steps for how to be in your committees today. I thought about giving great vision and mission statements. I mean, the Global Methodist Church has a great mission statement, “Making disciples of Jesus Christ who worship passionately, love extravagantly, and witness boldly.” And a great Vision Statement, “Our Vision is to join God in a journey of bringing new life, reconciliation, and the presence of Christ to all people, and to helping each person reflect the character of Christ.”

But that isn’t what I want us to think about as we begin this year.

We are living in an historic time. Some of you were present physically, and other spiritually as we completed the first Awakening Gathering of the MidTexas Conference of the Global Methodist Church – the first official gathering of Global Methodists in the World!

Some of us may have children or grandchildren who will attend Bible Schools and Seminaries. The events we are living through are things they will learn about in their history books. You are a part of History!

But more that that, I believe we are a part of a new moving of God in the world around us. God is breaking through in a new way.

Where there has been division that distracted us from discipling, now there is simply a desire to go on to Christian Perfection and teach and share Scriptural Holiness abroad.

Grab your Bibles for a moment and turn with me to

Matthew 13:2 – 8

I think we have forgotten how to sow. I remember when I was a child – in church, and in school, and at home, planting beans. You know, we all got our Styrofoam cup of dirt, and some of us ate it and played in the dirt, and all that… but in the end, we planted our little bean, and we watched it grow, right. That was about my limit of gardening until later in life when I tried to have a garden and I planted rows of tomatoes, and peppers, and squash, and a few other items. We carefully planted each seed because we wanted to control where it is grown. Right… you don’t want to have your beans growing in the middle of your tomatoes and you don’t want your pumpkins growing amongst the peppers, right.

We have become that kind of gardener… we are trying to control the planting, control the growing, control the way the crops grow.

Now, there was a different kind of planting that I learned as a young man too. My dad and I would go at the end of each summer and some of his friends would show up with a tractor and some type of element: a disk, a rake, just something to scratch the surface of the dirt. Then we would sow wheat, oats, and rye seed onto the “deer plot.” With that planting, we didn’t carefully lay one seed in each hole in rows. No, we grabbed a handful of seed and let it sift through our fingers as we flung it out on the plot. Some of the seed landed in the broken up soil, some landed in the leaves next to it, some on the hard ground, but we didn’t care… we were sowing a lot of seed, trusting that the rains and the winds would put the seed where it needed to be.

That’s the kind of sowing we need to be about.

One more story.

There is an article in the December 2020 issue of National Geographic. It talks about this new phenomenon with geese, specifically Canada Geese. You see, I noticed when I lived in Corsicana that there were resident Canada Geese at the IOOF park. They never migrated. They were there in the ice and snow and they were there in the heat of summer.

This article talks about the fact that many geese don’t migrate the way they use to. There is an interesting phenomenon taking place. Some, not all, but some of the resident geese were once migratory. They would fly from the Arctic to the South and back each year, training their goslings how to fly in the formations and where to stop for food and rest on their 2600 mile journey…

The problem with the migration isn’t Global Warming or anything like that… it is complacency. They land on an urban or suburban pond in a neighborhood, and they find a discarded package of McDonald’s or Chic-Fil-A fries… families come and feed them bread… they walk around the perfectly manicured lawns of the neighborhoods and eat the St. Augustine and Bermuda grasses.

Why fly any farther South to get food, when there is plenty of food free for the taking? The problem with this complacency is that they are teaching it to their goslings. If the young ones don’t learn to migrate, they can’t pass that on to their next hatchlings.

As a church, we have forgotten how to sow our seeds! We have gotten complacent. And, as a result we haven’t learned from our parents, and we haven’t taught our children how to sow.

We have wanted to carefully sow a seed here and seed there, carefully controlling the garden,

But, I heard somewhere that “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (Jn 3:8)

We have forgotten how to sow broad and wide – sow the seed on the prepared soil, and on the hard ground, and among the weeds… because God is responsible for the harvest. We need to trust that the Wind of the Holy Spirit will blow the seeds where they need to be. We need to trust in the reign of God to fall upon us all and nourish the seeds where they land.

The work you will do in committees and teams we be to break the soil up to receive the seed.

The work you do will be to gather the seeds together for the seeder’s to have available.

The work you will do will be to be the very seeder’s for the Kingdom of God. (Yes, seeder is the word for one who sows… I had to look it up.)

Here is something I heard about sowing from JD Walt this week…

When you sow a thought, you reap and action

You sow an action, you reap a habit

You sow a habit, reap a lifestyle

You sow a lifestyle and you reap a destiny.

What are you sowing? What destiny are you working toward, and do you want your children to follow you through those actions, habits, and lifestyles.

We need to sow more!

That’s why I think God gave me that one word for today… More.

That is what we need today is, More – but not more stuff… not more money… not more of anything earthly.

We need more of Jesus.

We need more of the Holy Spirit.

We need more of the grace, peace, and hope of our God.

May the Holy Spirit give us more and more… until we are overflowing… until we are spilling out all over this community. May we be filled to the point that we slosh over the edges, spilling out onto our neighbors, and our acquaintances, and those we run into at the grocery store, and those we run into at work, and those we meet every where we go. May we slosh the hope, and the mercy of our amazing God. May we spill the grace, and love of our good good Father upon a community and a world in need.

Amen!