Talking about New Hope

“God is good.” “Maybe the word is getting out.” “We are not a typical Baptist Church.” I heard these three statements from three different members of New Hope this past week.

Lois Cox, our Church Clerk and head money counter, emailed the news to me about our $4480 offering last Sunday. She wrote, “God is good.” Last Sunday was a special day in the life of New Hope Church. One hundred thirty four people attended our two worship services and gave that great offering.

I told our John Burlingame about the high attendance and the offering when I visited him at Sandlewood rehab facility on Wednesday, and John said, “Maybe the word is getting out!” That stayed with me. I thought, John is proud of his church, and he wants people to know about New Hope and join us as we try to do good work for God.

I overheard Judy Hutchinson say to another member of our Tuesday Grief Support Group, “We are not a typical Baptist church.” She is so right.

Let’s get the word out. If you are a member of New Hope, how about telling anyone who needs God and a good church that we are alive and serving. What could you tell people about us? How about these things for starters?

· We are learning to live by what Jesus said is the most important thing in the world. "'Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.' This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: 'Love others as well as you love yourself.' These two commands are pegs; everything in God's Law and the Prophets hangs from them" (Matthew 22:37-40 The Message).

· In our small groups we walk beside each other and care for each other.

· We are a thinking church as opposed to one in which members are supposed to hew to a strict list of “official” doctrines.

· We are aware of the wideness of God’s mercy and try to show that mercy in the ways we relate to each other and to people who are not like us.

· God’s Spirit is working in our lives as we learn how to love each other as Christ loves us.

Healing the World

Our Minister of Music Dennis has inspired me to think about my favorite hymn on love: “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee,” number 7 in The Baptist Hymnal. It begins, “Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee, God of glory Lord of love,” and ends, “God our Father, Christ our brother, all who live in love are thine. Teach us how to love each other. Lift us to the joy divine.” The words are by Henry van Dyke, a popular Presbyterian preacher, poet, and writer in the last half of the nineteenth century. His meditation on First Corinthians 13 is a powerful little book titled, The Greatest Thing in the World. Learning to love each other is the greatest thing in the world.

One of van Dyke’s most popular stories, The Story of the Other Wise Man (1896), is a parable about loving people. He adds Artaban, to the story of the three Wise Men in the Bible. Artaban sells all he owns to bring three precious jewels to the newly born Christ child. All along his way to meet the baby Jesus, however, people who need his aid delay him, and as a result, he finally uses up all his precious jewels to help people and never gets to see the baby Jesus. In the end, Arbatan has a vision of Jesus Christ telling him that in helping others, he has seen and helped Christ himself.

The scenes of violence in Cairo, Egypt are hard to watch. Our hearts go out to the people who are caught up in the chaos. We pray for the people of Egypt and hope that the violence will stop before more people are killed and injured. How can we make a difference?

As people who follow Christ, we want to be part of healing the world. Jesus’ words apply to us: “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the children of God,” and “You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.” As we learn to respond in compassion to people in their needs and fears, we become peacemakers, salt and light in the world. Since we can’t change the whole world, we concentrate on learning to love. Henri Nouwen wrote, “All people, whatever their color, religion, or sex, belong to humankind and are called to be kind to one another, treating one another as brothers and sisters. There is hardly a day in our lives in which we are not called to this.”

The Joy of Preaching

As we begin the New Year, what are you most thankful for and most excited about? As you might expect, my heart gets beats faster and my gratitude flows for the opportunities I have to preach. Each week, I get to study and listen to a passage of the Bible and then tell you what I think I have heard. It is my privilege and responsibility to try to bring a word from God to a congregation of people who listen and try to be shaped by truth from the Bible.

Preparing to preach is a daily, continuing job. Most days, if anybody asks me, “What are you doing today?” I can honestly answer, “Getting ready for Sunday.” But, to be open with you about how I get ready, I have helpers. I remember, when I first started learning what preaching was all about, I realized that I need lots of help. My help comes in the form of commentaries, books, and other preachers’ sermons. My challenge is to keep you, the people of New Hope in mind as I prepare. The message is not a general message for everybody. It is for a specific audience: you, the people of New Hope.

What I hope will happen when I preach is that someone will hear and learn something about how to live knowing God’s love and wanting to do God’s will. So when you pray, ask God to use the sermons that are preached here at New Hope to change lives. Ask God to speak through me. When you come into our sanctuary on a Sunday morning, take a moment to ask God to use the whole worship service as well as the sermon to get truth and assurance of God’s care into all of our hearts and especially into those who have been far away from God.

Following "In His Steps"

When Jesus said, “Bless those who curse you and pray for this who mistreat you” (Luke 6:29), he gave us a challenge we will not be able to meet if we think that other people are in control of our emotions. What do I mean? Have you ever said, “He makes me mad?” When you said that, without intending to, you gave control of your emotions over to another person. You can’t bless anybody if you believe they are making you angry or sad.

The good news is that anger is a choice. Joy is a choice. Corrie Ten Boom and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, spent years in Nazi concentration camps. She survived Ravensbruck. He was hanged at Flossenburg just before World War II came to an end. They both chose not to give in to hate and curse their captors. They showed us that we are free to choose love in the midst of an atmosphere of hatred.

Henri Nouwen described our freedom to choose our perspective and our emotions. “Strange as it may sound,” he wrote, “we can choose joy. Two people can be part of the same event, but one may choose to live it quite differently than the other. One may choose to trust that what happened, painful as it may be, holds a promise. The other may choose despair and be destroyed by it. What makes us human is precisely this freedom of choice.”

Jesus is our clearest image of what God is like. Jesus is also our clearest image of what a human is meant to be. Because he knew that we have freedom of choice, he could teach us to bless those who curse us. Peter, who saw firsthand how Jesus responded to cursing said, “He is your example, and you must follow in his steps. . . . He did not retaliate when he was insulted, nor threaten revenge when he suffered” (1 Peter 2:21-23).

We can choose love over hate, joy over despair, and blessing over cursing.

Henri Nouwen on Gratitude and Being God's Beloved

A couple of you asked me for copies of the devotional thought I read last Wednesday night to begin our time for giving thanks. I want more of you to have it. So here it is. It is by my favorite devotional writer, Henri Nouwen. He titled it, “The Spiritual Work of Gratitude.”

To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives-the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections-that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only truly grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for.

Let's not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God.

Here is another of his reflections titled, “The Still Small Voice of Love.”

Many voices ask for our attention. There is a voice that says, "Prove that you are a good person." Another voice says, "You'd better be ashamed of yourself." There also is a voice that says, "Nobody really cares about you," and one that says, "Be sure to become successful, popular, and powerful." But underneath all these often very noisy voices is a still, small voice that says, "You are my Beloved, my favor rests on you." That's the voice we need most of all to hear. To hear that voice, however, requires special effort; it requires solitude, silence, and a strong determination to listen.

That's what prayer is. It is listening to the voice that calls us "my Beloved."

If you would like to receive Nouwen’s Reflections as a daily email, visit HenriNouwen.org.

Our Giving in 2010 and 2011

Let’s make 2010 the last year we finish in the red. In 2010 we gave $144,757 toward our expenses, which amounted to $171,868. We fell $27,111 short, but we are going to make a healthy turn in 2011.

New Hope made two decisions last year that will help us a great deal this year. First, by conducting a “Pay Down the Debt Campaign” and adding some money from savings to reduce our mortgage principle, we reduced our monthly mortgage payment from $3100 per month to $326 per month. Second, we adopted a realistic budget. Last year’s budget was $180,108. This year it is $149,186.

With our monthly mortgage payments reduced by more than $2000, we are going to give enough to support our 2011 budget

In our Long Range Plan we said “our first objective is to pay off the existing debt of $70,000 before the expiration date of October 30, 2018.” We will do that by making monthly payments of $926.81 and by making an additional quarterly payment on the outstanding principal as cash flow permits. We also plan to become able to pay off our existing debt by increasing the number of church members who are giving 10% of their income to the church.

If you can give 10% of your income to support our ministries, I am asking you to do it this year. If you cannot give ten per cent, decide on a percentage of your income you can afford to give and give it regularly. We will have a good year of giving and stop our long-running practice of spending money out of our savings in order to pay our bills.

God has worked through our Church Council, our Budget Committee, and our Long Range Planning Committee to lead us to the place where we can begin to pay for our ministries, support missions, and put some money into savings. “Great is the Lord! He is most worthy of praise!”

"Thanks and Yes"

This is a prayer that I heard long ago attributed to Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary General of the United Nations. “For all the has been thanks. To all that will be yes.” That prayer expresses the way I feel about the past and the future of our church.

As I look back over 2010, I am grateful to be pastor of New Hope. There is nothing like the local church when it is working the way it is supposed to work. When I hear members say that our church feels like their extended family, I believe we are doing what the church is supposed to do. When I saw the church members who came to Ben Baiiley’s Memorial Service, I was glad for the support his family is receiving as we “bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). When Sharon Bailey told me that she looks forward to being in our Grief Support Group, I was glad that we are a church learning some new ways to expand its care.

As I look forward to 2011, I am enthusiastic and aware that there is a lot to be done to keep our church working the way it is supposed to. Here are a few things we will do this year.

_ A new Real Love group will teach participants the nature of God’s love and how to make loving choices.

_ Our Long Range Plan calls for the beginning of a Sunday School Class for young adults. I am working on it and hope to begin the class in February. It also calls on us to recruit and train enough new leaders of children and youth to achieve a ratio of one leader for every four students.

_ We want to increase the number of church members pledging to give a tithe (10%) or more of their income to support our ministries.

_ We want to do training that helps members discover how they can best serve Christ in or through our church by using S.H.A.P.E. materials to show members their Spiritual gifts, Heart, Abilities, Personality, and Experiences.

When you pray, thank God for all that has helped us see God’s love for us and say yes to the truth God will teach us in 2011.