Thursday night, July 9, I experienced one of the most encouraging events in the brief history of my tenure and First EPC’s pastor—the program bringing a week of Vacation Bible School to a close. What encouraged me most was not the number of kids (about 150) or the performance of the kids (stellar), but rather it was the complexion of the kids.
As each class took its turn on stage, the image that popped into my head was that of chocolate Skittles. If you open a bag of chocolate Skittles and poured it out, in front of you would be candies ranging in color from creamy-white to dark brown. This was the complexion of VBS. What should encourage us is that this is also the complexion of our neighborhood. What should challenge us is that this isn’t, for the most part, the complexion of our worship services.
Why do I bring this up? Is it the result of church-mandated sensitivity training? Absolutely not. It is the outworking of my calling. My job as the pastor, of this particular church in this particular place, is to lead this congregation up, toward God, and out, into our community and in the past few years our community (Kent/Renton) has changed dramatically.
Only a few weeks ago, the Seattle Times published a story that said, among other things, “Kent — the state's fourth-largest district — has undergone the most rapid change among Puget Sound districts, from about one-third minorities five years ago to about 51 percent this past school year.” Wow. If the complexion around our church is growing more diverse doesn’t it stand to reason that the complexion of our congregation should be changing as well? It must. If we are “gathering and growing” in accord with our vision as we move forward, into the future, we will look different than we do now.
The challenge here, of course, is that this means—here comes a dirty word—change. Since I’ve been the pastor here at First EPC, many things have changed. Did you expect something different? I recently heard, second-hand, someone say “Is everything we did before [as a church, I assume] bad?” The answer is, of course not.
On the other hand, everything First EPC did in the past she did in a radically different demographic and cultural context than the one in which we currently live. Thirty years ago, the neighborhood around us was predominantly, if not completely Anglo and people couldn’t Google us before they visited.
As I look back at the history of First EPC, it seems that each generation of this church (since 1893) has been faced with, and made, extremely difficult decisions as to how to “gather and grow” in their particular context. The last generation made the difficult decision to leave the PCUSA and join the EPC and those of us here now constantly reap the benefits of their sacrifice.
The decision of this generation is whether we will make the changes necessary in order to best communicate the gospel to those whom God has placed in our communities and neighborhoods. In fact, even if we never looked outside our doors, we’d still be faced with the question of whether we are willing to change in order to reach our own children. Are we?
One of the battle cries of the Protestant Reformation was “ecclesia reformata semper reformanda” (the Church reformed and always reforming). We tend to forget the second part of that statement—always reforming. The only other option it seems is: ecclesia reformata quod mortuus (the Church reformed...and dead). Which will it be?
