We did an exercise in team meeting this week that I’d like to have us do here, too.

Think back to when you first came to NFC. Maybe you can remember your actual first day in worship; or maybe just a collection of memories from the “early season” of your time here.

What stood out? What did you notice? What was unique? [ASK]

I love Newberg Friends.

I really do. I’m absolutely sure that God’s Spirit has guided this group of people from the beginning, and every step of the way for almost 130 years.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve taken some time to reflect. Time to think about myself, and about our church, and mostly time to pray and seek God. I’ve had some new leadings, and I’ve been reminded of some things. I feel like today, I’m supposed to share some of those things with you.

As part of some work I did for the elders, I re-read my application for the position of senior pastor here at NFC, written just over 6 years ago.

My sense from God, and my calling to this position was that God was bringing change; it oozes out of every paragraph of what I wrote. Change; not because things were bad; not because I don’t like what we do.

No, I felt God’s call to bring change to NFC because God had been (and still is) doing a new work in me. Thomas Kelly, in “A Testament of Devotion”, describes what God had been and is doing in me, with these words:

“He plucks the world out of our hearts, loosing the chains of attachment. And he hurls the world into our hearts, where we and he together carry it in infinitely tender love.”

Those are two of the most powerful and beautiful sentences I’ve ever read. Having the world hurled into my heart is why I felt God’s call to bring change. I can’t any longer help but look at our town and see all the faces and lives and people who are deeply loved by God but have not yet chosen to be a part of God’s family.

I can’t help doing simple math: Newberg has doubled in size since 1990, and our church has stayed the same.

I can’t help carrying with God in infinitely tender love the ones outside our church, dreaming and praying and wondering how we can introduce them to Jesus in a way they can hear, comprehend, and embrace.

But I know that change causes a lot of fear and wondering, too.

Mark McMinn has said to me several times, “Change is always perceived as loss.” For some people, things like our “Next Steps” group that has been looking at our worship services and trying to hear from God about what’s next, things like Next Steps can cause a lot of wondering and maybe even anxiety.

Are the very things that I love about NFC going to change? Sure, we all want more people to come to know Jesus…but aren’t I important too? Are we going to just throw away all the good things about our church just to chase something “out there”?

Tonight, at our business meeting, you’ll have a chance to read a recommendation from the Next Steps group to the elders. It’s relatively minor, actually, with much more still to be figured out together as a church. I hope many of you will bring your wondering and even anxiety, your curiosity and your longing tonight.

I want to say something really clearly.

I would consider it a failure, a personal failure and a corporate failure, if change led to our church just turning over, just replacing those who have been here with other people. That is not at all my goal; that would be a failure.

From the time I began as senior pastor five and a half years ago, I have considered myself to have a dual responsibility: a responsibility to serve the church, the people who are actually here and have been here for a long time; and, a responsibility to serve our community, the people whom God loves deeply but aren’t here yet.

We would be foolish to throw out how God has shaped us.

Our Next Steps team has had that in our minds and hearts all the way through our journey. And it led to a shift as we talked, a shift away from what we do together in worship, what songs we sing or “style” of worship we had; it led us to community. How can we make space–both time space and physical gathering space–to deepen our community with each other?

That led to the first recommendation–that we change from three services to two on Sunday morning. We don’t want to be like a movie theater, moving crowds in and out as quickly as possible. We realized the ticking of the clock on Sunday morning with three services hurts our relationships with each other.

A two service schedule frees us up; it gives us a little more time in the service, to perhaps worship in ways that are more community oriented, and it gives a block of time between the services for community and fellowship.

There aren’t any recommendations about changing the music or the style; there are still many details to be worked out about Sunday School and other issues.

The group recognized that one of our historic strengths, and also something that right now needs improving, is our community with each other. We want to be a growing community, not just in the “new people” sense, but in the “know each other” sense.

But I’ll tell you what has been most moving to me.

You might remember Elizabeth Sherwood talking about this last summer.

There are some people in our body who have an ache, a longing, a strong desire for God to move within our church. At times, the ache causes a sense of frustration, but God is also using that ache to create a deeper love and respect for each other.

Do you remember Elizabeth saying, “What if we bent over backwards for each other, laying aside our preferences so that God could truly meet the needs of others?”

I felt at the time, and it’s only grown since, that she was speaking God’s words to us.

A little over a month ago, two of the people in the Next Steps group were drawn to the same passage, Isaiah 58.

My ears perked up immediately, because our friends at Godsong community have been praying the words of Isaiah 58 for us at NFC for over two years, especially verses 8-12. Can I read those verses for us, and the hope that lies in them?

“Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I. ‘If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday. The Lord will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail. Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age-old foundations; you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls, Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.’”

What a picture! What a reality! What a longing, a longing that I know so many of us have.

I believe with everything in me that the people of NFC want God’s light to break forth, want healing emotionally and spiritually AND physically. I believe we want to live faithfully and justly and serve the broken in our world. I believe we want God to guide us always and meet our needs, to change from a sun-scorched land to a well-watered garden.

And I want this too. I pray for this. I long for this. I don’t want to put this church on a junk heap and start fresh: far from it! No, we are called to build on age-old foundations, to rebuild and repair and restore.

We are not people who want to go through the motions, who want just the forms of religion. We want God to guide us to living with justice, joyfully worshipping our Savior, free to live and love and celebrate!

This is our heart cry. It is what God has done among us from the beginning, almost 130 years ago. Our church has been deeply passionate about loving God and loving each other and reaching out to the world.

How do we live into this picture together?

How do we live to see God make this a reality?

These are the same questions that are asked, and answered somewhat harshly in the first verses of Isaiah 58. God challenges Israel to live what they believe, to practice what they preach.

God challenges their rebellion, their longing for God, but also their wrong and evil actions of selfishness and oppression.

When Isaiah 58 came up in our Next Steps group, the women who brought it to our attention longed for us to come to God in our brokenness and our need, to “seek the Lord while he may be found”, to confess and fast and pray and repent.

We all read and prayed this chapter over a period of weeks. And as I did this, something began to come clear in my mind and heart.

As a whole, I don’t believe NFC is in rebellion towards God.

I believe, as a whole, that the opposite is true. We are longing for God to work in us.

My assessment, as a whole, is that we are individuals and a community that are too overcommitted to follow God with a whole heart. We are too busy.

How many of you, in the last week, said something like this to yourself or even out loud? “Life is just CRAZY right now!” Would you be willing to raise your hand?

Do I mean every single person at NFC is too busy? Of course not. Do I mean that no one has taken the time to listen to God and obey him because each one is too busy? Of course not.

But as I’ve listened to our pastors over the years talk about the various ministries and leaders in our church; as I’ve listened to many of you myself, and as I’ve asked God to give a “diagnosis” to our condition as a church, this is what comes to mind. As individuals, we are committed to too many good things.

It starts with our children and youth, who are committed to sports and music and drama and church and dance class. It goes all the way to our retirees who tell me of too many good options for their time, people who need to “retire” from retirement.

When we are juggling all those different balls, trying to keep them in the air, we can’t spend a lot of time making careful evaluations about which ones are the right ones to juggle.

And even when we do, each ball is often a very important ball. We look at the many commitments we have in our individual lives, and each one is often a good thing. We can’t let that one drop…or that one…or that one. We know we’ve got too many, but how do we know what to let go of?

Just as that’s true for many of us individually, I think it is also true of our church as a whole. The tiredness of some of our leaders, the difficulty to staff some of our ministries, points to a church that is trying to do too much. It’s all good; it’s hard to look at any one ministry and say, “That’s not helpful, that’s not needed any more.” But all of them together are too much.

As the Next Steps group begins making recommendations, there’s a danger that it all just becomes more good things to do, more balls to juggle and keep in the air.

There’s a danger that we’ll think it’s in our forms of worship or our ministries or our actions that we get to the “God break-through” of Isaiah 58:8-12.

We can’t fall into that danger.

Somehow, we need to seek God together, with a seriousness and a humility and a sense of brokenness before God.

But it doesn’t have to be heavy or hard or anguished! I think it can be a rest, a stop, a Sabbath, a pause…

I want to invite us to a corporate fast.

What might it be like if we stopped? What if we waited for Jesus? What if we called out to God, and had the time and the space to examine and listen and celebrate and dream?

Isaiah 58 has a lot to say about fasting, and it’s probably what has sparked this idea. What does a corporate fast look like? In the Old Testament, God’s people would go without food, they would fast, on special occasions like Yom Kippur, to repent and receive God’s forgiveness. Sometimes in a time of crisis or danger they would fast to humble themselves before God and ask for his leading and protection.

In the season of Lent, the Christian church throughout the ages has expanded the idea of a fast to include giving up good things in order to remind ourselves of our need for God, in order to free up time and space to listen to God.

This could be what a corporate fast would look like for us this summer.

As individuals, we can’t just up and stop everything we do very easily. We have commitments to work and family and all kinds of things. But there probably are a few things we could set aside for six weeks, as God leads. And for six weeks, we definitely could carve out some time to examine the commitments we have, and ask God to show us which ones he really has in mind for us, and which ones it is time to say “no” to. Sometimes, we have to say “no” in order to say “yes”.

As individuals, we can’t cut out everything. But, as a church…what if we got serious about a fast? What if, for six weeks, we took a break and fasted from every church activity except for worship on Sunday mornings?

That might really give each of us the space we need to reflect and examine and seek God. No church committee meetings for six weeks! No preparing to teach Sunday School, or to lead a small group. No ministry commitments for six weeks.

Instead, we could give our full attention to worship on Sundays all together, our children and youth in here with us. Before we begin, we could intentionally celebrate everything we’re doing in ministry, thanking God for how he’s worked in us and through us in so many ways.

During the fast, we release the ministry commitments we have to God. We wait for God to direct us. Then, we consider what to pick up again at the end of the fast.

Maybe we pick up the same things again, with a renewed energy and leading from God!

How amazing to have a church full of people doing the same things we’ve been doing, but out of a sense of God’s leading, calling, and power! Many of us are already doing just that; but think of us, corporately, going through a process of stopping, fasting, listening, and then picking up as God leads. There is something worthwhile in that, don’t you think, even for those already doing the right thing for the right reasons?

Maybe some ministries continue, but not with the same people.

Some may feel God’s call to end their commitment to a ministry, while others feel a new call to join. A corporate fast, a break in order to seek God as a community, leads to the right people in the right ministries.

Maybe some ministries end.

Not because they are bad or not worthwhile, but because we recognize together it isn’t what God has for us.

And maybe God births new ideas for ministry out of the fast.

Maybe, as we seek God, we find new ways God is calling us to feed the hungry and break oppression, new ways for God’s light to shine in the darkness!

We’ll talk a lot more about this in the weeks to come. We still have stuff to figure out, and I’m sure there are a lot of questions.

What’s clear in my mind is that we need this time of laying aside in order to join together to listen to God. This corporate fast would definitely include times of actually fasting from food, times of corporate prayer, times to gather and celebrate and enjoy each other!

How great to agree together to give ourselves a rest, a break, a time to seek God together and as individuals so that our lives and our church reflect our choice to follow God with a whole heart!

Let me close with another quote from Thomas Kelly:

“Religion is not our concern; it is God’s concern. The sooner we stop thinking we are the energetic operators of religion and discover that God is at work, as the Aggressor, the Invader, the Initiator, so much the sooner do we discover that our task is to call people to be still and know, listen, hearken in quiet invitation to the subtle promptings of the Divine. Our task is to encourage others first to let go, to cease striving, to give over this fevered effort of the self-sufficient religionist trying to please an external deity…too many well-intentioned people are so preoccupied with the clatter of effort to do something for God that they don’t hear him asking that he might do something through them.”

The power of God is waiting for us in a new way…he’s seeking us out, waiting for us to open the door to him. Whatever stays the same, whatever changes, must be God’s endeavor. I’m looking forward to this journey together!