Second part of two-part sermon by Harold Vines and Dawn Longernecker. Click here for first part.
February 10, 2013
Shared sermon with Dawn Longenecker
Thank you for this invitation to join you today. I’m feeling a lot of joy being here, among you. When I first came to the Church of the Saviour community I was a broken person, with a lot of pain I was carrying from my past experiences with Racism. I took classes at the Servant Leadership School and was encouraged by individuals here to consider what my ‘call’ was. At first I had a hard time understanding what that even meant. As I prayed about it and talked with people, I realized my call was to work on the issue of Racism that has affected me so strongly in my life. This has been my focus these many years, here within this church community.
I learned here that church doesn’t just have to meet on Sunday morning and can be held in a coffee shop! You have gatherings on weeknights as well. I’ve been a member of Friends of Jesus Church since arriving here, most recently becoming a Covenant Member and now am Co-Pastor at this church. I shared my spiritual autobiography with them during this process recently. This was difficult to do, as I wrote about the pains and struggles in my life. Here within the Church of the Saviour, I’ve faced other challenges as well. There have been times when I haven’t felt comfortable in this community. But I was sustained by some of you here individually (I won’t mention names; you know who you are), and by my spiritual support group. In our group, we have a discipline of no cross talk. I shared my struggles and pain and people listened. This was what I needed. It helped me face the pain and move on.
I want to focus also on the Biblical story for today, as this is at the core for us as a church. The story is about healing and I relate to this, with the healing I’ve needed in my life.
Focusing on issues of Race has been my call and now I’m part of this new mission group. People ask me why I’m joining another group and I tell them that my hope is that we’ll be able to expand the work more, with more involvement of all churches in The Church of the Saviour community & the wider community. We’re inviting people from the various COS churches to join us in this call. We meet on Saturday mornings and invite you to consider coming. David (Dorsey), I want to thank you for allowing us to come to your home every weekend for these meetings. We’ve been taking time to get to know each other better and working on what we want to do together. It’s been good. I appreciate the gifts of each person individually and collectively.
You are welcome to join us, but if you can’t and I know that many won’t be able to, due to the many other things you are involved with here. Then pray for us. It’s very powerful to have people praying for each other in their various calls within this community. We would appreciate this. We would like you to consider making a monetary contribution, or contributing on a regular basis.
Also, at Friends of Jesus Church we are continuing to work on our church’s goals as well. We just spent a day together, all the Covenant members, working on this. We are struggling with the issue of money there.
Now I want to see if you have any questions.
Questions:
1. How have you sustained all these years, with this challenging work?
My faith has helped me sustain. I pray and receive guidance and support from God. I also receive support from others, like many of you here and this has been very important to me.
Also, when I make a commitment I make a commitment for life and stick with it. I do this even when things get hard. I’ve had my ups and downs but have gotten through.
2. What would you recommend to our church community, as we continue working on being more inclusive?
Continue working on this. What you are doing is good and I believe you are working in important ways to make progress in this area.
3. What are the membership requirements of Friends of Jesus Church? What do you think are important membership requirements?
I was part of a mission group with Carol Bullard-Bates and others, for several years. This was a very good experience. I learned a lot and feel it’s important that Friends of Jesus Church offers church disciplines to our members.
I always prayed before but now I pray daily and this has been a help to me in my spiritual walk.
I think people are members whenever they come regularly to church. We also offer classes to people to assist them in increasing their membership level within our church. When we only have one member ready to take a class, and wonder if it makes sense to teach a class for only one member, we either refer them to the Servant Leadership School or work creatively for how they can get that class.
I don’t believe the Church of the Saviour requirement to tithe gets in the way for low-income people. This hasn’t been my experience with people I’ve known. The people I’ve known tithe even when they only earn minimum wage and so I think this is a commitment that should remain.
4. What are the issues around money that you mentioned?
Friends of Jesus Church doesn’t have much money. Our church has a lot of poor people, along with only a few who have resources to give. We have some middle class people but no one with a lot of wealth. Out of our budget we give to ‘Tell the Word’, ‘Callings’ and to Kayla’s salary. This past year we weren’t able to give the amount asked of Church of the Saviour churches. We were only able to give half the amount.
David (Hilfiker) (who asked the question) – I’ve read your books and learned more about poverty from you. I think we need to go back to the Acts Gospel and look at what Jesus was telling the early church and what he is telling us today. We need to do more economic sharing.
5. Does your community do any economic sharing? What models do you use?
We struggle with how to meet the needs and with the requests for $ that people bring to us. For example what do you do if a person asks for cable TV? I’ll be honest; I don’t think this is a need. However, I think it’s important to give help to people with their needs and we do the best we can with the limited resources that we have.
Click here for first part of sermon by Dawn Longenecker