220th Annual Conference Des Moines, Iowa July 1-5, 2006

Index	Theme	Friday	Saturday	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Wrap Up

Brian Maguire, pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Xenia, Ohio. - photo by Keith Hollenberg

“Running Home”
Isaiah 57:14-19, Philippians 3:12-16
by Brian Maguire

Philippians 3:12-16

Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on towards the goal for the prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us then who are mature be of the same mind; and if you think differently about anything, this too God will reveal to you. Only let us hold fast to what we have attained.

Our bags are checked and we are ready to go, room keys have been returned, ground transportations arrangements have all been confirmed and now we sit in anticipation. Anticipation for an installation, anticipation of goodbyes, and anticipation of returning home to family and friends. These have been important days that we will carry with us, we have listened, we have witnessed, we have learned, and now we are bursting at the seams with new found wisdom, ideas, and hopes waiting to share them with our congregations back home. So here we are waiting at the courtesy shuttle drop off point, weary, but content, and then comes Paul. He bursts into our contented fatigue, into our fondest hope for a nap, and declares, the race is just beginning. Just when you thought you could go home the race is just beginning. We have not reached our goal Paul conveniently reminds us; we haven’t even made it to the airport security check in line. Not that Paul is any different, he admits he hasn’t made it very far either. So he stops us for just a moment between all our moments of busyness, somewhere between the e-ticket kiosk and the luggage check in he stops us to remind us exactly what kind of race we are in, how we can win, and where we’re going. That’s how I like to read Paul, an athletic trainer, an older brother helping us run the race to claim the greatest prize imaginable, the calling of God in Christ Jesus.

Paul reminds us that this is a race, and not an easy one. Paul knew something about running a hard race. He would have seen the athletes train on the starting blocks at the gymnasium in Tarsus. He himself had considerable experience avoiding the troops of the urban cohorts when his preaching disturbed the sensibilities of the great and the good. And in the end, Paul paid the ultimate price for his witness to Christ crucified and raised. Paul knew all about the hardship that Christ’s church would encounter. It is a great lie of our culture that the central theme of the Gospel is how to be happy. If you don’t believe me look up the number of times happiness is mentioned in the New Testament and then look up the number of times suffering is mentioned. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the church throughout the ages has strayed furthest from Christ’s teachings when it is most secure, wealthy, and powerful. Like Paul, the Church of the Brethren, this part of the body of Christ on Earth has shared in its common witness to our risen Lord for nearly 300 years and in that time has faced hardship, persecution, isolation, rejection, hostility, stares, incomprehension, doubt, and suspicion, but you’re still here. And today in a land of tolerance and relative prosperity we face still more dangers like relevance in a nation where most people choose churches in the same manner they choose underarm deodorant: which one has the best packaging and makes me feel good about myself when I’m done using it? We look around us as old values and assumptions are swept aside by a see of relativism, deconstructionism, postmodernism and other foes, all ending in “ism” that we are told threaten the very foundation of our communion. No one, least of all Paul, ever said the race would be easy.

Despite all these difficulties which for Paul include hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, and the sword, Paul remains a faithful athletic trainer and has some concrete advice on how to run this race, how to lay claim to the promise of God in Jesus Christ. First, he says, forget what lies behind. Forget what lies behind. Now that might sound kind of scary. Does that mean we have to forget our traditions, forget where we have come from? Surely not! That’s what keeps us grounded. And indeed if you read the rest of this chapter you’ll notice that Paul really is thinking like a marathon runner, you don’t look back over the ground you’ve already covered or as Paul said, “whatever gains I’ve had I’ve come to regard as loss.” If you look back, you’re only going to trip. It’s very tempting to look back, to turn around and gaze wistfully at the “good old days” when the pews were packed and the preachers’ socks were permanently damp from all the baptisms. We long for those golden days in the 1950s and 60s when churches were all growing and our classrooms were filled with young children. Nowadays you hear a lot of grief, where are our brothers and sisters, where are the children? Some suggest out of grief that we have lost our way, but then . . . but then there’s Paul on up ahead reminding us, don’t look back on what we have already achieved.

History will not tell the Church of the Brethren how to run today. Let’s face it; history does not speak with one voice. Forty two years ago, the church commissioned a big symposium on its role in a changing world. They consulted some of the best minds in the church and this was the report, and I quote: “Donald Durnbaugh, Allen Deeter, and Dale Brown gave us a tour of our Anabaptist – Pietist heritage in the morning session. Durnbaugh thinks the Anabaptist element is dominant in Brethren beginnings; Deeter wants to weigh the scales more on the Pietist side; Brown wants to reconcile the two. All three speak with but differing accents about the need to understand and reappropriate this heritage in the present day. . . We are quite articulate about our past, but we don’t quite know what to do with it. Can’t go back, can’t stand still, can’t go forward.”1 I wonder what those participants 42 years ago would say if they were in this hall today? It is not that we are confused about a past that was clear, we are clear that the past was confused. There is no single magic set of answers waiting to be discovered. This is compounded by the fact that for much of its history, the Church of the Brethren was defined by what it was not. That works great in the face of dominant established churches but not so well in our pluralistic post-Christendom era. If you tell somebody on the street that the Church of the Brethren is not confessional, hierarchical, established church, you’re only going to get a blank stare. The past is our common foundation upon which we stand today, but it cannot tell us which way to run next.

While the past cannot tell the church how to be the body of Christ in the future, it would be a mistake to ignore the past. Paul reminds us to hold fast to what we have attained. Our chapter in the story of God’s work in and through God’s begins after the stories of one hundred generations sharing in common witness and ministry with our risen Lord. If we see further or find ourselves in a new and unfamiliar place it is only because we stand on the backs of giants who lived and loved and died for Jesus’ work in this world. Think about the wealth they have given you. In your sense of community, your transformative tradition of song, your understanding faith as a way of life, and your tenacious witness to peace making and service to the world that have reminded your brothers and sisters of Christ’s call to discipleship in the service of the Kingdom. You are the heirs to a great treasure.

One part of that treasure upon which you stand is your tradition of sharing. From eight people standing by a brook outside of Schwarzenau to this room this room today you have embodied the principle that the Holy Spirit moves through people today and that means, if we want to listen to the Holy Spirit, we need to listen to each other. Perhaps that is why Paul in urging us onward reminds us, “Let those of us then who are mature be of the same mind; and if you think differently about anything, this too God will reveal to you.” Notice there is no judgment here, no critique by Paul, just a recognition that other folks have part of the plan too. As Fred Craddock paraphrased it, “The whole truth is not pulled through the knothole on one person’s experience. God may lead the church around, beside, beyond, or even in spite of its leaders and the mark of a great leader is to be able to say just that.”2 That’s why you need rooms like this auditorium. An auditorium is literally a listening room, a place where we can listen to each other and through each other, as confusing as it might sometimes seem, listen to God. Now listening really listening is hard, it requires discipline, focus, and if you’re really going to do it right, it makes us vulnerable. In all honesty it is hardest for people who, like Paul, have been gifted with great verbal intelligence. Such people feel a compelling need to speak, and often have important and prophetic things to say, but our first task is to listen. We worry so much in our culture about saying the right things getting the right answers, that’s what counts in this world. But in our rush to be right might we not ignore the quiet voice coming from a forgotten corner of our world speaking the Truth to us, even when we dare not admit it? If our ancestors focused first on being, would they have ever heard the stranger wonderful words of prophet preaching repentance by the Jordan, or a young teacher from Nazareth teaching us to love God and one another? Listening comes before speaking, because God speaks first and God is always speaking if only we stopped to listen.

Many of you are now involved in Together: Conversations on Being the Church. Together is not an answer, it is not a plan, it is not a manifesto on the future of the Church of the Brethren, it is simply a disciplined way of listening, together as a community, to what God is calling this church to be. As each of us hears only in part and knows only in part we can only do this together. It is a practice of communal holiness, a discipline of discernment, not just for individuals but for entire communities rooted in way God’s people have always receive God’s word, in our communities together. It is not for the impatient or the faint of heart, it will be maddeningly frustrating for people who already know all the answers, but for those who want to press on in the race, for those who want to find what God is calling the Church of the Brethren to become it is the only way forward. You see the conversation is itself the answer.

Hold fast, let go of the past, and listen, good advice from Paul our personal trainer. He reminds us how to run, how to press on despite all the difficulties we encounter, but the best advice he gives is simply this: press on toward the goal, press on toward the goal. We press on as individuals, as a church not because we think that our endurance, our skill or our speed will somehow change the world. We do not run as one’s seeking glory as a possession, it’s not something we can achieve or obtain. No matter what we do, we will never be, as Paul says, perfected. No matter what we do, we will never be as a perfect church. That is not our calling. Our calling is to be faithful and to run on together: to listen, to learn, to heal, and to grow together as a community. Jesus after his resurrection promised that if we go out into the world to do that, then that is where we would find him, and do find him to this day. You see as we listen and learn and share more and more together as a body of his followers, we begin to be more and more like him. There will be stumbles and backsliding, failures and confusion along the way; he never said there wouldn’t be. But if we are faithful together, we will one day find that as we have grown to be Christ’s body in this world he has embraced us and made us his own and on that day the race will be over. We will be home.

--Brian Maguire is pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Xenia, Ohio, and served as a leader at the 2006 Annual Conference for “Together: Conversations on Being the Church.”

Members of the 2006 Annual Conference news team, a ministry of the Church of the Brethren General Board, contributed to the Annual Conference web pages: Jake Blouch, Cheryl Brumbaugh-Cayford, Kathleen Campanella, Eddie Edmonds, Karen Garrett, Clara Glover, Amy Heckert, Keith Hollenberg, Jill Kline, Sarah Kovacs, Frank Ramirez, Jesse Reid, Regina Roberts, Frances Townsend, and Becky Ullom.