Between Sundays
“And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.” — Ephesians 3:17-18
This week your pastors, along with some of our retired clergy and our lay delegates Karen and Ray Gebhart, have been in Baltimore for the 242nd Annual Conference of the Baltimore Washington Conference.
Annual Conference is where the big church gathers. We celebrate the mission and ministry happening across our entire region. We discuss and vote on the legislation that will guide our common life in the year ahead. We review the conference budget, and we commission and ordain new servants who are answering God’s call into ministry. We also worship together. We fellowship. And I will be honest with you, the fellowship piece is not exactly a hardship. There is something about gathering around a table on the Baltimore Inner Harbor, good food, good conversation, and the Orioles playing just across the way in the evenings, that makes this week feel like a gift. We may have kept one eye on the game a time or two.
This morning in Bible study, Bishop Gregory Palmer presented the theme scripture for this year’s conference, Ephesians 3:17, and it has me thinking and asking some important questions that I want to bring home to you.
This year’s theme is Rooted and Love Boldly. Bishop Palmer talked about what it really means to be rooted in Christ, not just as a personal spiritual practice, but as a community. “Roots give stability so that we are not blown away,” he said. “To be rooted in Jesus Christ is to affirm and acknowledge my connectedness not only to Christ, but also to you.” And then he said this: God asks the church to live before the world what God intends for the whole world. We are, he said, small working models of new creation.
That is the phrase I am bringing home to Calvary. Small working models of new creation. Not perfect. Not finished. But intentional. Purposeful. Rooted in something bigger than any one program or tradition or preference. And it leads me to a question I want to put before this congregation, not as a criticism, because we do so much good, but as a genuine invitation to reflection.
In each ministry, in each act of service, in each mission we undertake and each decision we make as a congregation, are we doing it for the glory of God? Or are we doing it out of habit, tradition, obligation, or something we haven’t quite named?
Our missions are real and they matter. Our ministries touch lives. Our people show up again and again with generous hearts and willing hands. I do not want to diminish any of that. But there is a difference between a congregation that is busy and a congregation that is rooted. Bishop Palmer’s words have me asking whether we are clear, in each thing we do, about why we are doing it and who it is ultimately for.
So that is my invitation to you this week. Bring that question into your Sunday morning. Bring it into your committee meetings and your volunteer hours and your conversations in the halls. In this ministry, in this moment, are we doing this for the glory of God? It is not always a comfortable question. But it is the right one.
We are coming home to you this weekend with full hearts and a good questions. Bishop Palmer said it simply and I will leave you with it: if you’ve got a purpose bigger than yourself, you can never finish the job. You only get to the end of one sentence, but you’re still in the middle of the paragraph.
Calvary, we are in the middle of a very good paragraph. Let’s make sure every word counts.
Until Sunday, and all the days between,
Dr. Hutton