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Interim Minister and President’s Message
A time to die and a time to be reborn
March 2001
By Erwin R. Bode
“The modern age has ended,” states Vaclay Havel of the Czech Republic. “We are going through a transitional period when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something is crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, is arising from the rubble.”
I believe we are living in an “in-between time,” a wilderness similar to the one Moses and the Hebrews encountered centuries ago. It is tough to be a Christian and in the Church these days precisely because there is simultaneous dying and rising going on. It is a time of uncertainty. It is a contemporary incarnation of the combined Lenten and Easter messages. Successes remembered from the past no longer hold true. My father, who was a United Church of Christ minister for 54 years, would often remind me that in the 1950’s he would routinely “take in” annually 100 new members without even considering an evangelism committee. New people simply came through the door every Sunday and joined the church.
What a far cry from what we experience today. In 1961 the churches in the Massachusetts Conference had a membership of 213,000. Our present membership is 101,000. It’s hard to admit this loss that has been going on in the past four decades. In the spirit of the Lenten pilgrimage, many of us have a confession to make about our own lukewarm discipleship. During the 40 days of Lent, let us prayerfully seek to cleanse ourselves of our own errant ways of contributing to the malaise. A Lenten ritual of my childhood was to attend worship services every Wednesday evening for just such a purpose of personal confession.
As we wander through our time of wilderness, we also discover a marvelously fertile and creative time for considering new life. Thank God, there is new life aborning at the same time we witness the decay. The 21st century is beginning with a great deal of promise. Large numbers of our existing congregations in the Massachusetts Conference are equipping themselves for ministries of transformation. The Easter story lives in our congregations where two things are foremost: First, there is a passion for sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ, where evangelism is a #1 priority; second, there is a comprehensive strategic plan to implement priority #1. And new congregations are beginning to emerge, as well.
Our Conference’s Vision for Renewal and Growth is unfolding in miraculous ways to assist local congregations. The four initiatives of Leadership, Youth and Young Adults, Evangelism and Justice, and Communications are taking on forms of life in ways we could not have imagined even a few months ago. We rejoice in the reality that we now have over 60 Evangelism Associates in the Conference being trained to assist congregations in their crucial ministry of evangelism. Events are being held to nurture clergy, church educators, and lay leaders. Youth are traveling to Appalachia on mission trips. The Conference web site is growing every day, and large numbers of congregations are coming “on line”. The list of new things is legion.
Jesus says, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” (John 6:35) We are indeed hungry and in need of spiritual nourishment, and our churches are increasingly recognizing it. We are seeking God’s guidance as we concentrate on the reality of experiencing and sharing the living Gospel in ways appropriate to our time.
Indeed, in this Lenten season in which death and resurrection are both realities, we pray for God’s guidance to accept the one and celebrate the other.