spinning the wheels (full of sound an fury, signifying nothing)

"hilldale baptist church is a community of changed lives changing our world by connecting to God, to people, and to ministry"

so goes our mission statement. our statement of what we value and pursue most. and i guess it is not, in and of itself, bad. a little wordy maybe. but it reflects, i think, our churches sincere desire to do something or be the right kind of church. what gets me are the questions that lurk somewhere in the background and force us to evaluate ourselves in light of the statement.

why, in the last 10-15 years, have we grown from 700-800 to less than 200?

why do we constantly have to worry about meeting budget?

when we claim to be about changing the world, how is it that we are irrelevant to our own community?

why is there such a disconnect between the lofty claim in our statement and the day-to-day grind of trying to stay afloat? i don't think it is a lack of trying. i don't think it is a lack of good people. so, what is it?

i have heard it said that to do the same things and expect different results is insane. but maybe, in this case, it is not. because we do the same things we have always done. but it ain't helping. what worked, and led to a desired result, 15 years ago, is leading to the opposite result now. why?

because the game has changed.

the more i am a part of church, the more i feel that it is, by and large, a relic of a past way of thinking. at least in its current forms. hilldale is a micrcosm of this. we are an almost all-white church in the middle of an almost all-black community. the folks that used to come? they all followed the other white folks to the trendy church (or churches). so, i at least admire our people for wanting to stay in the community, even if it is leading to our demise. we could move out to the outer edges of the suburbs and maybe become the trendy church ourselves. it would almost be easy. but, for now, we have chosen to stay. the problem is we are stuck in a form of being the church that is past its sell-by date. too many times, we think that doing the things we have always done harder and with more gusto will lead us back to the promised land, but i think we are wrong in that assumption. i believe we have to reimagine what it means to be the church in our context. and to dare to do what it takes. to do something. indeed, this is what the Church universal must do constantly in order to matter. i want the church to matter. but it must change.

back in the glory days of HBC, it was the people, not any program or lesson or song or anything like that, that made it special. it was a rag-tag group of Christ followers just trying to do the right thing and be the church. and there was a certain beauty to that. and once we got some momentum, it was hard to stop. if we are ever to move forward into any kind of future that matters, it will again be the people, and not the programs, that take us there. Jesus never needed the right curriculum or song or program to change the world. he just needed people. so maybe the most important words in our statement are the first ones.

"hilldale baptist church is a community..."