WLSU: Growing In Love

A few months ago, we moved the baptismal font closer to the entrance, and I have to tell you this just didn’t work at all for this baptism. Somehow, we managed to create a situation where half the congregation couldn’t see what was happening during one of the most important events of our shared life! I’m looking over my notes and I’m pretty sure that was my fault. Anyway, the morning was so beautiful that nobody even complained about this – the joy was palpable in the room and carried us through the rest of the service and into the week.

I always love baptism. It feels like each one brings something new into my consciousness about how God is actually real and present and working in our lives. This time was no different. Surrounded by this life and love, I asked the children’s sponsors the question, “Will you by your prayers and witness help this child to grow into the full stature of Christ?” And they dutifully answered, “I will with God’s help.”

Usually during this line of questioning, I’m taken by the phrase “with God’s help,” because it always reminds me that if we’re at all serious about rooting our lives in love, we will not be able to do it alone. But that Sunday, it was something in the question that lifted me up: “To grow into the full stature of Christ.” What does it mean for these children to grow into the full stature of Christ? What does it mean for us to do the same?

I wrote in a recent blog post that historically I have been obsessed with numbers as a church leader. Many of us are. We talk about church growth, and we are almost always talking about literally increasing the number of people associated with our community. And I understand that. I can’t totally disown it. If we believe that what we’re doing matters, that it makes an impact, and that our community can transform people’s lives, why would we not want to increase the number of people who experience that?

But this is not the growth we are talking about in baptism. In baptism, we are talking not about numerical growth, but about our maturity, our development, our spiritual growth alongside and towards one another as we see more clearly how to love like God loves. It is totally fine to love baptism because it means new members of our church. But I hope we can see past that as well and recognize that these babies, these nascent humans, these brand-new Christians, are pushing us to grow, to develop, to mature. God put them in our lives on purpose. How will we respond to that? How will we let them shape us? What will we learn from them about Jesus? How will we grow together?

We talk about growth in our Vision Statement. There’s a whole bullet point dedicated to it, and we will be focusing on that bullet point throughout this program year. In it we say that we envision a church that is “Growing with people of every age, race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic situation, and political persuasion.” We wrote that four years ago, and I will freely admit that when we wrote it, I was thinking about numbers. I was thinking about increasing the number of people that are connected to Church of the Redeemer. But the language we used pushes us beyond that. When we say we want to grow not only in number but in the type and age and experience and perspective of our membership, we are saying we want our understanding of who we are to grow. We are talking about the growth, development, and maturity of how and where we see love.

Communities are generally built around similarity: Similar interests, similar life experiences, similar histories, similar bloodlines and perspectives. Historically, human cultures have not encouraged people to seek connection and relationship outside of their prescribed circle. Church is meant to counter this. We don’t always get it right, but this is what church is supposed to be about.

The first churches experienced conflict in large part because they were made up of people that historically had not been encouraged to connect: The churches described in St. Paul’s letters were made up of Jews and Gentiles, rich, poor, and middle class. Both men and women were put into positions of leadership, and Paul insisted that servants had as much a voice as the Roman nobles among them. They had one thing in common: They believed that Jesus Christ had opened them all up to the power of God’s love, and they believed that sharing life with each other was how they could grow into the full stature of Christ.

To really be Christian their understanding of where God is working and whom God is blessing had to grow.