I think I’ve mentioned that I don’t sleep well on Saturday nights, especially when I’m preaching the next day. I don’t expect to, so I’m not surprised when I have bad dreams on Saturday nights. But this was a particularly bad stretch, and all I can say is that it felt like Christ himself was pursuing me through the dark hallways of my dreams. He seemed to be asking me to justify what we were doing at Saint Nicholas, and I kept repeating, “Love God, Love others, Do ministry.”

As it turns out this is the mantra, the very simple distilled message of a book I’d been reading, a book called “Simple Church: Returning to God’s process for making disciples.” The authors are Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger. This is a book that our Council and Ministry Sponsors will be reading in preparation for our leadership retreat in February. It’s a book that you’ll be hearing about a lot in the coming weeks and months.

The idea of the book is stunningly simple: Every congregation should be organized around a central process, the process of making disciples, or more abstractly, a “straightforward and strategic process that moves people through the stages of spiritual growth.” (p. 60) Everything we do should relate to this process and we shouldn’t do anything that doesn’t relate to it.

One way of describing this process was the one I was reciting in my dream defense – “Love God, Love others, Do ministry.” The order is important. When people first come to Saint Nicholas, they usually come to worship – that is, to love God. As time goes on, they may start to meet people and begin to come to fellowship events like Fabulous Fridays or WISC or youth events – that is, to love others. Finally, after a while, they may become involved in one or more of our outreach ministries like Project ECHO meals or Tree of Angels or one of our other ministries like Stewardship or Youth and Family Life, and so on – that is, do ministry.

Now, this is the usual progression, but the book points out a problem – in many congregations (including Saint Nicholas, I’m afraid), this process is not intentional, not explicit and not well thought out, so people can miss out entirely. I know even in my short time here, I’ve seen a few people come to Saint Nicholas, join as members, but just slip through the cracks, never make friends or get involved in ministry and just drift away. I think highly enough of the congregation and the ministry we do here that this makes me sad, as I hope it does you as well.

Think about this for a second – our young people go through a well-thought out confirmation process in which they learn worship practices, do bible study, learn about our larger church, meet the bishop and our congregation’s officers, learn our history and our involvements in the local community. By the age of 13, most of them will know more about the bible and creeds, ELCA and Saint Nicholas than many of our adult members. But then we stop teaching. It doesn’t make sense! I see why I thought Jesus was angry at us.

All of us want to become better people, better Christians, more generous, more thoughtful, more connected to God. It just makes sense that we put our minds and hearts to an intentional process for spiritual growth among our adult members that is at least as good as our process for our young people.

So that is what we are going to do. Beginning with our leadership retreat in February and for as long as it takes, we’re going to be working to flesh out a process for encouraging spiritual growth among our members, a process that will guide us in designing and evaluating our congregation’s programs and initiatives, a process that is true to who we are and who we want to become. Join in – there’s a job for everyone!

Pastor Greg