tHE ePISCOPAL aDDRESS IS AVAILABLE IN WORD FORMAT OR pDF FORMAT

2008  Episcopal Address

Blessed be the Name of our Lord Jesus, who gathers us together in His love as brothers and sisters for the Sixth National Conference of the Evangelical Congregational Church. I have come to appreciate more than ever what it means to be part of a larger family of faith, in this year of transitioning from the ministry of pastor to Bishop.

You have mourned with me in the loss of my earthly father, encouraged me with your prayers, and honored me with this opportunity to serve. The tasks God calls us to are always too big for us, but not for Him. By stretching us beyond our inability, He compels us to rely on His complete ability. He is awesome.

The verse I shared at my ordination as a Deacon from 1 Timothy 1:12-13 is still special to me. “I thank Christ Jesus our Lord who has given me strength, that He considered me faithful, appointing me to His service. EVEN THOUGH I was…” Paul goes on to recall his blasphemous and violent past as a persecutor of the way. He remembers the ignorance and unbelief of which he was capable. We are but flawed tools in the hands of the Master Craftsman. And it is what the Lord is going to do despite me, rather than because of me, that I am most excited about!  I am so deeply grateful to Him.

I am thankful also to those who have readied me for this step; my wife Debbie and children – Sarah, Peter, John, and James; the people of Boyertown Trinity E.C. and the Church Center Team who has so warmly and willingly embraced this “new guy.” I’ve been in far enough over my head to have drowned without them. I can’t honor Bishop Michael Sigman enough for the time and energy he has invested in my extended orientation to this role. Others have been better gifted for this office, but none as well prepared. Thank you Mike! You’ve had an exceptional impact as a turnaround leader on the life of our church. You have been an extraordinary blessing to me in your mentoring.  I treasure the friendship that has grown between us.

One lesson I’m learning from you is to be more observant. It wasn’t until about two months after my election that it dawned on me that I had to give the Episcopal Address this year. I thought, maybe hoped, you had one more to go. It still seems strange that having been “in office” only a little more than twelve hours I am speaking to the state of the church. Yet I see the wisdom in this. I’ve no past in this post to look back on, only a future, and that’s where a leader must live. I don’t claim to be a prophet or the son of a prophet. I am employed in fact by a “non-profit” organization! I’ve heard that there’s one spot on earth where you can literally see tomorrow, Attu Island, Alaska. From it you can look across the Bering Strait to the eastern most outpost of Russia on the other side of the International Date Line. We aren’t there, yet with God’s help we can glimpse what lies ahead for the E.C. Church. Ours is a future of:

Pursuing Christ’s Priorities

 We are a missional people with a missional purpose. Our Lord says so. “As the Father has sent Me, so I am sending you.” John 20:21  The term “mission” has become so much a part of our Christianized jargon that we forget it dervies from the Latin “mittio” which means to send. God is a missionary God. Sending is a central theme in the Bible; a repeated description of God’s action in human history. He sent His Son to save the lost. He sends His Holy Spirit to sanctify the found. He sends His people, His church, into their world to bring His salvation to others. We are sent ones.

The Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20) is our great commissioning or sending. Through it the Creator calls us to join Him in seeking and saving the lost and reconciling them to Himself. We are to be in co-mission with our Maker who’s already present everywhere in this world reaching out to His creatures. And the mission we have from Him is not to make converts or decisions, but to make Disciples. This is the heart of God, to disciple people to have a heart for God.

What is it to be missional? In the simplest sense it is when a church or individual Christian organizes their life around disciple making…the mission of God. It’s keeping God’s main thing the main thing to us. How we spend our time, energy, and money is oriented toward discipling. What a congregation does or doesn’t do isn’t decided by what we like or what’s in it for us.  What we ask is “does it turn non-believers into fully devoted followers of Jesus?” Everything aligns with the goal of producing Christ-like Christians.

Another way to put it, is that being missional means thinking and acting like a missionary to our own community. It’s adopting the practices classic “missionaries” have used for centuries - and without crossing an ocean to do so! We find ways to translate  God’s good news into the “heart language” of all the sub-cultures residing in our neighborhood. We humbly and lovingly serve the different tribal groups who live next door, yet in another village of a contrasting worldview or religion. Like the missionary heroes of the ages, we give of ourselves to adopt and adapt what we can of our pagan host society, as far as our loyalty to Christ allows, so that we remove as many unnecessary obstacles to our witness as we can. The gospel has enough non-negotiable barriers built into it…the offense of the cross that confronts men and women with their sin and need for God’s mercy…that we needn’t build extra fences of our own. Missions doesn’t exist because there is a church. The church exists because there is a mission. Mission isn’t what the church does, but what the church is. It should be nothing exceptional for someone to stand up on Sunday and say “Today we have a real live missionary with us.” Our reaction should be “Well of course, what did you expect? It’s true of every believer, every day.” It’s what we all are.

God has laid such a burden on my heart for this that I must unpack this concept further. Becoming missional is a matter of intention. Missionality results from intentionality. Disciples are  poorly made by accident. Most of us work hard in ministry, but what are we accomplishing? The aim of our Father isn’t just to hold worship and meetings. It is to disciple pre-christians to trust Christ, and Christians to grow up to be Christ-like. Jesus, the “Master Disciple Maker” didn’t rely on sermons to disciple multitudes. He trained His followers to become like Him a few at a time – in small groups of twelve, triads of three, and in one to one apprenticing. Discipling can’t be completed from the pulpit. It must be face to face, life to life. Too many churches lack a clear path for new converts to follow to maturity. We just hope it happens or that they’ll figure it out alone. Because we have forgotten how to disciple, most people do not feel prepared to witness, serve, or lead. Jesus deliberately made discipling the primary objective for His church because everything else depends on it.

For that reason I continue to rejoice over our Intentional Disciplemaking initiative and the partnership God has forged with the Navigator’s. It is “the quiet revival” that is stirring the foundations of our church. You need not work with them or use their resources, but dear friends you must disciple. Christ commanded it. Across our denomination churches are finding their way back to the basics of discipleship and evangelism. Several of our Latino fellowships have embraced a discipling process based on small groups and monthly retreats. Since the start of the year, not a week has gone by at Vida Nueva in Reading where there has not been at least one person responding to the invitation in worship to receive Christ. If you’re not yet discipling, at least explore what is being offered. It may not be a perfect tool, but what is? Surely what many are doing to make disciples is preferable to what some are not! Be intentional.

To be missional is a matter of incarnation. God sent His Son into our world as one of us. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” John 1:14 (NIV) We are sent into the worlds of those around us. The Message paraphrases that verse this way. “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son…” Missional Christians move out into their neighborhoods, where they live out the Christ-life before others. The church incarnates Jesus for all to see. We don’t just tell the Good News, we become it. The Great Commission assumes we will be going into our communities to build bridges between them and Christ, not waiting for pre-christians to come to us. Missional people are not content to rely on attractional strategies of trying to get un-churched people to come to us. It is an active rather than passive mode. Rather than separating we are infiltrating society, engaging instead of avoiding culture. We are blessed to be a blessing and strive to live out the Lordship of Christ in every arena of life. Missionality means finding ways to go out and be among unbelievers, befriending sinners like Jesus did. By truly loving the lost, we enter into caring relationships from which an authentic invitation can be extended to them to start on the road of being discipled to Jesus. A feeling of belonging among the people of God prepares the seeker to take the step of believing in God’s son. One missional church planting church urges its members to interact with non-believers by this principle. “Treat them like they are one of us, until they realize that they are not.” Exposure to the kindness of God incarnate can lead the lost to repentance.

Missional is also about transformation. The church must be more than a vendor of religious goods. It is important to be “seeker sensitive” -- attuned to the cultural context of those you are trying to reach. But when a church becomes more concerned about being seeker friendly than God friendly the truth can be compromised, and a consumer mentality fostered among those who gather only to have their own needs met. Discipleship is not just being served, but learning to serve. And while a church must relate to the society in which God has planted it, it cannot afford to resemble it identically. The way of Christ will always be distinct and in many areas countercultural in belief and behavior. The church is called to be an alternative community modeling another option to the mainstream. It is this Christ-like difference as ambassadors of Jesus that draws others to our Father in Heaven. This transformational aspect of what is to be missional knows that words alone are not enough. Witness is incomplete until coupled to godly deeds. Changed lives change the world.

The evangelical church is recovering its societal conscience again. Concern for the restoration of this world should never have been surrendered entirely to those often referred to as “mainline liberals.” The gospel both saves and serves. It seeks justification and justice. Spiritual and social transformation are of equal worth. They are the two wings that enable the airplane to fly, neither can achieve takeoff apart from the other. “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven,” should be more than a prayer. It needs to be a passion. As we wait for our King to come again with His Kingdom in its fullness, we honor Him by seeking to make this fallen world more heavenly. Transformed people leave behind transformed places. A missional church isn’t here just to make noise but to make a difference. The body of Christ wasn’t meant to be just a big mouth pointing out everything  wrong, but hands and feet moved by God’s heart to put things right.

          Another key dimension to missionality is multiplication. A church empowered by prayer and employing the gifts and graces of the Holy Spirit will reproduce itself. Healthy things grow and growing things multiply. That’s a pattern inherent in Creation. It’s meant to be reflected in the church. Our commission to disciple the nations depends on perpetuating the process ordained by God through which disciples make disciples who make disciples, and by planting churches, that plant churches, that plant churches.   This self replicating strategy is assumed in Paul’s counsel in 2 Timothy 2:2 “And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others.” That’s four generations of disciplemaking, ministry to the 4^th power.                

          The motto “Each one reach one” is flawed. We’ll never witness to all the world that way. Explosive population growth has put us so far behind that we can’t catch up, let alone get ahead through a one at a time “addition” approach. The church isn’t keeping up. We’re not even winning a majority of our own children right now. We have a “second-birth” rate of less than one! People are being born faster than we can evangelize. That means they are dying without Christ in greater numbers. Only by becoming a multiplying movement can we stop the slippage. Only by learning to reproduce Christians and congregations exponentially will the gap narrow. One disciple discipling several who each disciple several more. One church mothering several churches that birth several more each. These are ripples we must set in motion. This is the wave we want to ride. By far the best mission statement I’ve ever heard is “making disciples who plant churches.” That’s faith that cuts to the chase, the kind of vision that is called for in a time such as this. It is why we will continue to keep disciple making and church planting high on our priority list. They are high among God’s priorities. A missional God deploys a missional church. We’ll be motivated to do so by:

Rediscovering Our Identity.

          A large part of this is remembering who we are and who’s we are. “Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God,” teaches Ephesians 5:1-2 (NIV) As much as we talk about God’s love I’m not sure that we really believe in it enough to live in it. Perhaps we imagine His love to be too much like our own, unreliable and situational. One of the richest moments in my devotional times this past winter was to come across this counsel in a book entitled Abba’s Child, “Define yourself radically as one beloved by God.” I’d like to have that done in calligraphy and hung on the wall opposite my desk where I can see it repeatedly each day.     

It’s a true statement, you know; as outrageous as it sounds. “God so loved the world that He sent His son.” He loved us before He made us. He loved us enough to give a Savior able to save all who will receive Him. You might even say there are no unloved people in hell. His love was there for them to know. He accepted them, but they did not receive Him. “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” Romans 8:32  Nothing I do can change that, make Him love me less or more than He already does. We evangelicals know we’re saved by grace, but then forget that we’re also sustained by it. A few weeks ago a big eighteen wheeler rolled by as I drove on Interstate 77. There was a large picture almost as long as the trailer of an engraved sword on a blue background. The inscription read “Earned, never given!” USMC That’s great for a Marine, but it’s heresy for a Christian. The grace that saves and sanctifies is just the opposite isn’t it? – given, never earned!

It is living in the certainty of that gracious love that compels us to serve the Lord. It’s knowing how much the Father loves me that makes the thought of me hating Him by sinning that causes me to want to be holy. It is the joy that pleasing Him brings that motivates me to obey. It’s love perfected that casts out all fear and replaces it with faith. Our District based prayer gatherings sponsored by the Prayer Mobilization Team will challenge us on learning to enjoy God. Will you join me in a quest to put aside a good works driven, performance based, I’m so worried about what others think about me mentality, to foster a fellowship where we live in the fullness of His love and freedom of His grace. Will you partner with our efforts to raise up healthy pastors to lead healthy churches? As a result we will be all the more loving, freeing, and courageous in dealing with each other and engaging our world. Let us remember who each of us is, and be sure to apply that in our interaction during National Conference and all our encounters thereafter.

The other piece of this identity puzzle involves returning to our beginnings. It’s ironic that change is what most Christians don’t do very well, because God is on a mission of changing us day by day to more closely resemble Jesus. Yet I assure you that being missional in our approach is nothing new. It is in fact very ancient, as old at least as the church itself.  Now the past is a bad place to live but a good one to learn from, provided you look back far enough and to the principles rather than the methods our ancestors used. It’s not uncommon for people to have a sense that the good old days were better than the “bad new ones,” even though scripture warns us not to. It’s human nature to be nostalgic.  Most movements eventually institutionalize and even fossilize.  If there was a “golden age” for our denomination, I think it was in an era much earlier than any of us here were around to have lived through. It was not a time in the memory of anyone in this room. Suppose we accept the challenge of Isaiah 51:1 “Look to the rock from which you were cut and to the quarry from which you were hewn…” Can’t we see the missionality of Jacob Albright and the Evangelical Association?

It’s almost amusing how “domesticated” we have become since our origin, how we’ve tamed the missional impulse within. When Albright grew burdened for the salvation of his Pennsylvania German peers and launched an outreach that translated the gospel into their heart language and culture he didn’t know that he was contextualizing his approach. But that’s exactly what he did. He launched a multiplication ministry that reproduced disciples in the life to life setting of small groups or class meetings as Wesley called them. Then these classes became church plants, which in turn multiplied preaching places and planted more churches. As the movement grew Albright sought to pursue the larger interests of God’s Kingdom by partnering with the Methodists. But when their lack of passion for evangelism to ethnic German’s threatened to block that vision, he and his associates declared themselves a church and ordained their first Bishop. That’s over the top, out of the box, on the cutting edge, no fear determination isn’t it? If some other group did that today we’d suspect them of being heretical wouldn’t we? Where did that attitude and outlook go?

          It didn’t disappear. It just went dormant. We allowed our once dominant trait of missional love for God and people to be bred into a recessive gene. I believe we stand on the verge of seeing that quality burst out into the open again as the defining characteristic it was always meant to be. Our uniqueness must be more than a belief that a believer can lose his or her salvation.  We should be known as a place where people find the Savior. A reputation for abstinence from alcohol isn’t nearly as important as one for being intoxicated with a love for God and the power of His Holy Spirit. What potential we have. I love a thought Jim Ehrman shared with me.  The word “congregational” in our name represents not only the authority of each local church, but it’s ability to shape itself for effective outreach to its community. We are the “Evangelical Contextual Church” possessing the freedom and flexibility to be Jesus to those around us wherever He has called us to go. The past strength of the E.C. Church was not a matter of cherished customs but a passion to be on mission with the Lord. Our future strength will be found in that very same place. Finding it again means:

Understanding The Urgency

I am convinced that a season of massive change and challenge lies ahead of us. We have participated in a wonderful renaissance of our denomination. We truly have. We’re growing healthier, getting stronger, moving in the right direction, but we aren’t “there yet.” Until the day Jesus returns there is no “destination” where we finally get it all right just to kick back and watch the machinery run. It’s a journey we’re taking.

On the next leg of that trip we’ve reached a critical crossroad for the church in North America. We are blessed to have the leaders of this international church with us at this conference. A baton is being passed. It may be that a new starting team is taking the field. In almost every place except the “western” nations the church is expanding rapidly. The gospel is pioneering new territory. That is not the case here. The vital signs of a vibrant Christianity are weakening in the U.S. We do not notice it when cloistered among ourselves. The presence of mega-churches and the existence of Christian broadcasting and marketing masks the fact that we have been marginalized as influencers of culture and shapers of lives. We sadly overestimate the number of people who attend church each week. We just as severely overestimate the percentage of people who really are Christian.

Growth can be exponential, but so can decline. In fact things usually deteriorate far more quickly than they improve. Unless we learn from our brethren in other parts of the world, how to be missional, North America could become the next Europe, a continent with vast areas virtually devoid of a strong gospel witness, a society filled with cultural strongholds aligned against Christianity. The example of Old Testament Israel suggests that spiritual vitality is always but one generation away from extinction. We must repent of the sin of preferring our traditions over the salvation of our own children and our comfort over the redemption of our communities.

We have also arrived at a crucial threshold for us as a family of churches. It’s a choice between missional multiplication or attrition. If we will not expand, we will wither. Our concern about having enough participants to sustain a group health insurance plan is but one reminder that we are operating just above the critical mass needed to make a denomination viable. If I thought my job was about nothing more than maintaining an organization, I’d want nothing to do with it. I want to do God’s will. I want the E.C. Church to play its part in fulfilling the Great Commission and the Great Command. I want to make a Kingdom difference.

 I don’t know yet all the specifics of what it will take and where it will take us to accomplish that. One of things the Director of Global Ministries, Randy Sizemore, and I will be calling our church to, is the next phase of prayerful visioning and strategic planning…the successor to Vision 20/20. Being so new to this role I feel it unwise to lay out an ambitious list of goals that could have no relationship to reality. But I would put forth this second modest objective for the next five years knowing it will still stretch us -- to birth seven new churches (that’s one for every two districts assuming we create a 14^th). At least four of them should be parented by another church or district(s) not a denominational commission, with at least one new start in each of our three regions.        

In an era of quantum change, that’s been described as “post everything” – post modern, post Christian, and even “post denominational” we’ll be confronted with obstacles and opportunities we haven’t yet thought of. I’m committed to this, wherever the Lord leads we must follow whether to explosive growth, merger, or dissolution. And whatever choices we make must be based on what is missional. The path that keeps us on course with that which is closest to God’s heart, His glory through the redemption of human kind is ours to take.

I feel about this church what Paul did when he wrote about his confidence and affection to the Thessalonians (1 Thess. 2:11-12) “For you know that we dealt with each of you….encouraging, comforting and urging you to live lives worthy of God, who calls you into his kingdom and glory.” Encouraging – we can become missional. Comforting – we will become missional regardless of setback along the way. Urging – we must become missional. A lost world depends upon it. A loving God commands it. I can’t foresee every step on that road, but what a trip it will be.  The landscape of ministry will look very different at the end of the next ten to twenty years than it does today. It could be anything from total revival to full persecution. Let’s be ready for it.

Southern Baptist missionary Karen Watson was killed with three others will serving in Iraq in 2004. She wrote and sealed this letter the year before just prior to her departure.  “Dear Pastor Phil and Pastor Roger, You will only be opening this letter in the event of my death. When God calls there are no regrets. I tried to share my heart with you as much as possible…my heart for the nations. I wasn’t called to a place. I was called to Him. To obey was my objective, to suffer was expected, His glory my reward. The Missionary Heart (is to) care more than some think it is wise. Risk more than some think is safe. Dream more than some think is practical. Expect more than some think is possible. I was not called to comfort or to success but to obedience…there is no joy outside of knowing Jesus and serving Him. In His care, Salaam! Karen.”

It all comes down to this. How missional are we willing to be?

 

Respectfully submitted,

 Kevin Leibensperger -- Bishop