The LPC e-pistle is designed for the friends and families of Langhorne Presbyterian Church and any others who happen by.  Pastor Bill Teague shares weekly comments on the world, the life of faith and Langhorne Church.  A weekly e-mail, sent by request, keeps members up to date on news and prayer concerns within the congregation.  Langhorne Presbyterian Church is a warm, Christ-honoring congregation, and we'd love to have you stop by for a visit if you're ever in our neighborhood.  You can get directions to LPC here.

For those on the “Home Team” it may be just another Saturday morning and another week full of the things you always do.  But that, too, is the work God has set for you to do.  Many of you will use the Prayer Guide we’ve distributed to guide your prayers for the Away Team. Please know that your week will be covered by the prayers of those of us in Guatemala.  We set aside specific prayer time everyday and are committed to praying for God’s work for you this week just as you are committed to praying for God’s work for us in Guatemala.  Thank you.

Most of the members of this year’s Away Team are returning veterans. We sometimes kid ourselves into thinking we know what to expect. We don’t. But San Luca Toliman is a familiar place and we know the tasks necessary to set up a clinic and a make-shift pharmacy, what games the kids like and how to adapt to what is available and “how they do things” as we help repair rain-damaged homes.

But this year we have been challenged as a team to do something else. We’re going to be on a treasure hunt. Paul’s words to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 8:1-9, have instructed us to break out of any notion that we rich North Americans are being sent to help those poor Guatemalans. Rather, we are looking for ways that we who have been so richly blessed by God may share some of those blessings and to look for the riches with which our brothers and sisters in Guatemala have been blessed.

In the 2 Corinthians passage, Paul reminds his rich readers in Corinth of the ways the poor Macedonians have shown “abundance of joy in their extreme poverty that has overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part.” Each of us on the Away Team has an assignment: look for wealth in the midst of extreme poverty.

This is no exercise in rose-colored vision. The gospel demands nothing less than our sharing from our wealth. It calls us to consider our bondage to things and our obsession with having. It requires that our hearts be broken by the injustice and greed that leads to too much poverty in our world. It forces us to face into the reality of just how hard life is for many who have so little.

But the Gospel also demands our acknowledgement that its riches are beyond circumstance, that our impoverished brothers and sisters may have an overflowing wealth that eludes so many of us in the midst of our material abundance.

So we’ll be on a treasure hunt, each of us looking for the riches of the Gospel in unexpected places. When we return next week, we hope to be able to tell stories of the treasures we found.

Of course, this treasure hunt, this looking for Gospel wealth, is not limited to the shores of Lago de Atitlan. There are riches of Good News to be found in the days filled with the things we always do.

Jorge, our Guatemalan partner, has sent us a photo of the house some of our team members will help repair and improve. He tells us that we will be setting up a clinic right next door and that the kids from the neighborhood are already eager for the games and crafts we might bring. It is not a great photo, but I keep looking at it. I’m wondering where Gospel treasure might be hid. I’m going to keep looking. We’ll tell you where we found it when we return.

Of course, we all know that many children’s sermons make their points more clearly to the parents in the pew than to the kid on the steps.  I think I was guilty of one of those children’s sermons last Sunday.

If you were with us during the 9:45 service, you may remember that after calling the children forward and asking about snowmen and sleds, we began to talk about missionaries.  One of the older girls had the perfect conventional wisdom definition of a missionary, “Someone who goes to a far-away country to tell the people about God and Jesus.” Precisely. And then they come home with three carousels of slides to show us after the potluck dinner.

I asked the kids if any of them knew a missionary and none of them could say that they did.  One of the members of next week’s Guatemala Mission “Away Team” was sitting in the front row and I pointed to her as being a missionary and asked her to stand. Then I asked if there were any other missionaries in the room and, if so, would they stand as well. It was a shameless moment of manipulation and it worked perfectly.  About a dozen or so of you were on to me and dutifully stood up.  With a little bit a cajoling I got the rest of you to stand and finally the children, too.

In the missional church, we are all missionaries.  Our mission field is the workplace and the campus, our neighborhoods and family circles.  We share the gospel in what we say and show the gospel in what we do.

“Missional” is the most overused and misunderstood word in the North American church today. In fact, the word is less than 20 years old, having been coined as a way of describing a gospel-shaped reality the church had forgotten. Because we had limited missionaries to pith helmet-wearing, savage converting, slide show presenting saints – and usually a little odd – we had forgotten that Jesus knows nothing about such a definition of mission.

Our English word “mission” comes from the Latin word for send or sent. Followers of Jesus are always sent, all of them are always sent.  They are sent to share and show the gospel.

They are sent by Jesus, which means we must listen for his sending voice.

They are sent to share the gospel. That is, they are sent to put the gospel into words. That means that words like God and Jesus, love and grace must be a part of our everyday vocabulary. It means that we must learn how to ask and invite.

They are sent to show the gospel.  That is, they are sent to put the gospel into action. That means that actions like feeding the poor and visiting the sick, insisting on justice and practicing holiness must be a part of our everyday tasks. It means we must learn how to care and love.

The followers of Jesus, every one of them, are called to be missionaries.

The missional church is not a church with a large mission budget or a compelling mission program.  It is a church full of people who know they are sent every day, every one of them, to share and show the gospel.

Next Saturday a group of sixteen of us will be sent by Jesus to share and show the gospel in the highlands of Guatemala. One small particular piece of mission.

Today every single one of us is being sent by Jesus to share and show the gospel in the workplaces, schools, communities, families and friendship he has given us. That’s the missional church.

I won’t see you Sunday as I will be on retreat with the LPC men.  Lewis will be preaching on “Come into My Job, Lord Jesus.”  Sounds kind of missional.

The captain of the ship says the rocks were not on his chart. (Here is a BBC update on the story)

The Costa Concordia tragedy comes to mind as I travel to Orlando tomorrow for the “Covenanting Convention” of the Fellowship of Presbyterians.  Some links that may be helpful are posted below.

In anticipation of the gathering of 2,100 PCUSA Presbyterians in Orlando, the Moderator and Vice-Moderator, the two highest elected officers of our denomination, have joined six other teaching and ruling elders in issuing a letter to what the official denominational news service calls members of the “dissident” churches.

To say that the letter was clumsily written and tone deaf to the mood of  many in the denomination would be an understatement. To the extent that some in Orlando will have read it, it will serve only to galvanize the determination of those who seek to differentiate or even separate from the PCUSA.

For those who care to read it, a link to the letter is posted below along with a selection of responses. I have little to add  to what the commenters have said. It seems, though, as if our ship has gone off course. We are in dangerous waters.

Annie Dillard has great insight into the life of the church.  In her 1982 book, Teaching a Stone to Talk, she writes, and it seems somehow applicable:

Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?

The tourists are having coffee and doughnuts on Deck C. Presumably someone is minding the ship, correcting the course, avoiding icebergs and shoals, fueling the engines, watching the radar screen, noting weather reports radioed in from the shore. No one would dream of asking the tourists to do these things. Alas, among on the tourists on Deck C, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts, we find the captain, and all the ship’s officers, and all the ship’s crew. The officers chat; they swear; they wink a bit at slightly raw jokes, just like regular people. The crew members have funny accents. The wind seems to be picking up.

Pray that the wind we feel is the wind of the Spirit.

BT

Website of the Fellowship of Presbyterians

The “Eight Elders” letter to the PCUSA

A Response by Dr. Mateen Elass, First Presbyterian Church, Edmond, OK

A Reponse by Dr. Mark Patterson, Community Presbyterian Church, Ventura, CA

My Letter to the People of LPC on the eve of our departure for Orlando

More FOP resources.

I love my time with the confirmation kids, and if I hadn’t said this almost every other year, I’d say this year’s class is my favorite yet.  Let’s just leave it that it’s a great group of kids. Eleven of them this year, all ninth graders except for one wonderful eleventh grader. They are smart, lively, engaging, fun – I like Sunday evenings with the confirmation students.

Our topic this past Sunday was worship and we were trying to figure out how any of our students might explain Christian worship to their (many) friends who never attend church, let alone are active in it. All on its own the conversation wandered into a discussion about what our kids like about LPC.

They don’t just like LPC, they love LPC.  They love their church because it is their church.  They love a church that cares about them and has provided a second-to-none youth program for them. They love the adults who call them by name and ask how they are doing.  They love opportunities to care and serve whether it is a work day at the Rescue Mission or a work week on the Gulf Coast or in Appalachia. They love the fact that they are beginning to understand worship and sermons and are asked to participate in the life of the church.

They really do love their church and I loved hearing about it.

And they are coming to love the Jesus who is the Head of the Church and is calling them into a deeper relationship with himself.

No wonder I love my Sunday evenings with the confirmation kids.  They love Jesus. But will they still love Him tomorrow?

Sunday set the tone of an entire week that was a good week.  Lots to do and too much left undone, but it was a good week. Yesterday afternoon I met with the Philadelphia leadership of an organization called the Coalition for Christian Outreach, or the CCO. The CCO is a ministry organization that has been called to reach out to college students. I first heard of the CCO while I was in Western Pennsylvania. They are headquartered in Pittsburgh, but in recent years they have sensed a strong call to grow their ministry in Philadelphia.

The CCO folks tell us that other than the possible exception of the Boston area, there is no place in the country that is more college-rich than Philadelphia.  There are over 100 campuses in our area and 300,000 college students.  A good case can be made that college students are the largest “unreached peoples” group in the United State in terms of Christian outreach and ministry. Someone once said something about the fields being white unto harvest.

The CCO is one of the mission causes supported in our Mission Budget and we will be telling your more about their work.

But there’s something the CCO folks told me that really bothers me. They cited the statistic that 70% of Christian students fall away from the Christian faith while in college.  I had heard the number before, but it still bothers me.

I am thinking about those eleven wonderful confirmation students I meet with one Sunday evening a month. I am thinking about their joy and exuberance, their energy and enthusiasm, their eagerness for life. I am thinking about their love for the church and the growing love for Jesus who calls them into the family called the church.

Will they still love Him tomorrow?  Or in ten years?  Statistically, we can realistically expect no more than three, maybe four or those bright young disciples to be following Jesus ten years from now. Most of them will have finished college and found a job. Some may be married. But will they still love Him?

Statistics are simply what’s left after all the numbers are crunched. They may not lie, but they don’t always tell the truth, either. The truth of the matter is that we can help make a difference in the lives of our confirmation students and their brothers and sisters older and younger. How?

• We can support the efforts of ministries like the CCO.
• We can support the nurture and discipleship that happens in our own LPC ministry with youth and young adults.
• We can remember to call the kids of the church by name and ask them how they’re doing – and listen to their answer because we care.
• We can encourage our parents as they seek to make their homes Christ-centered and places where Christ is honored as he is increasingly dishonored in the world of campus and mall.
• We can, we must, pray for our students that they will still love Him tomorrow. And in ten years.

Will they still love Him tomorrow? Pray that they do.