Feeding Hills

I just received a new year newsletter from friends who served at the church where I first made my commitment to Christ way back in 1972.  He was the pastor at this little, very fundamental, Bible church in a town called Feeding Hills.  His wife was the church organist and a wonderful “helpmate.”  I was fifteen at the time and he and his wife were probably what I considered much older twenty-two or twenty-three year olds; fresh out of a little Bible institute in New England that ceased to exist a few years later.

We have kept in touch over the years.  They have continued to worship and exercise their faith in that fundamentalist tradition and I have “grown” more ecumenical in my faith expression.  It is interesting to look back at how formative the couple of years that I spent in that tradition were for me.  They gave me an appreciation for the scriptures and for what faith means when you say that God is in control.  Also, that tradition celebrates the conversion of sinners to saints with a gusto not found anywhere else.  In fact, their recent newsletter gave readers the conversion statistics for the summer vacation bible school program held at their current church in upstate New York.  It is sort of like sports statistics; they mean more to those already initiated.

Don’t get me wrong, I still rejoice when I hear of someone coming to faith in Christ.  There is a wonderment about that moment when you realize that you were not created a screw up and that there is hope for renewal and change in your life.  It is marvelous when you realize as C.S. Lewis puts  it in The Weight of Glory that there are no ordinary people; that we are either eternal horrors or eternal splendors (sorry, my paraphrase).  The decisions we make actually do count in some more significant and eternal way.  I guess, in many ways, that it does begin with that simple conversion scoreboard.

Of course, I began to move “beyond” that fundy paradigm in college.  I attended a Christian liberal arts college where the faculty challenged me not to keep God in my small box.  I am still working on that lesson.  I remember going back to Feeding Hills during a semester break my sophomore year and being asked to “testify” as to what God had done in my life while I was away at college.  I remember naively standing at the pulpit thinking that I might illuminate my “home church” with the new found truths from college.  The only response following the service was sincere thanks and good wishes for me.  As a church family they would sporadically send me checks for $25.00 to help with my college expenses right through my senior year.

It was that same pastor who offered the Feeding Hills Church yellow Sunday School bus to transport twenty-five of my Italian Catholic relatives along with a handful of church members to my wedding in the neighboring state at a Baptist Church a few years later.  What a sight that was!  But, that is a story for another day.

God speaks

This morning at church the guy who has been youth pastor for the last eight years gave his farewell sermon. I never really liked him. I found him superficial and had a disagreement with him when he recruited a volunteer to work with the high school youth several years ago. This particular volunteer thought that she had the corner on all of God’s truth and she was on a mission to teach each high school student the right way to view God. Within two weeks my daughter came face-to-face with her bigoted and narrow view of the world. Following several candid conversations with the youth pastor and finally one with the senior pastor this person was retired from her position with the senior high school youth group. Unfortunately, she and her family moved on to another church soon after. Back to the youth pastor; he does not listen well and hides behind his position when others ask questions or challenge him with new ideas. In fact, these are a few of reasons that this was his last Sunday at the church.

So, what could I expect to get out of his sermon this morning? Again, I was taught that God has a way of using even those that I consider most simple and inferior to get His message across to me. The youth pastor talked about “Killer Sheep.” His point was that when Jesus talked about sheep he was talking about one of the most non-communicative and stupid animals in the world; an apt image for how we humans relate to God. We, like sheep, must be led, even to drink water. Because sheep fear moving water a pool must be made for them of “still water” before they will drink. By the end of the sermon I knew I was the dumb sheep that God had in mind when he decided to use sheep as the image for his followers. The pastor’s sermon title “Killer Sheep” was his challenge to all of the dumb sheep in the congregation to stop acting like victims of the enemy. Instead he asked the congregation to turn the paradigm around and hunt down the enemy. He was saying that because of our association with the Shepard we have all that we need to hunt rather than to be hunted.

The paradigm shift was good for me. Too often I feel like the victim and like most victims just lay there and bleed. Instead, the sermon this morning challenged me to get up and chase what I have always considered the hunter. So, I decided to start a blog and begin to “chase the hunter” with words and thoughts. My hope is that through this process I will cease to be a victim of evil, challenge others to do the same and bring glory to my savior who bleed once and for all.

Maybe I should have listened better to what the youth pastor had to say long ago rather than waiting until his final Sunday.