Fellowship of Presbyterians
Pastor asks ‘If your church disappeared tomorrow, would it matter?’
By Paula R. Kincaid, The Layman, January 19, 2012
ORLANDO, Fla. — The opening worship service of the Covenanting Conference of the Fellowship of Presbyterians began in the style of the Taize Community, consisting of prayer in the form of singing and Scripture reading and the message was based on the first chapter of Nehemiah.
“Think about your church,” Hope Italiano Lee, pastor of Kirkwood Presbyterian Church in Bradenton, Fla., challenged the approximately 2,100 in attendance. “If your church disappeared tomorrow … honestly, would it really matter? Would it make a difference in your life, other than going to a different location on Sunday morning? Would it make a difference in your neighborhood?”
Lee said that her church was located in Bradenton, a town full of churches of all denominations and sizes. “So on Sunday morning, then it should be a ghost town because everyone is in church,” she said. But that’s not so. Instead she sees a line of people wrapped around Starbucks and a line of cars headed to the beach.
“There are many churches in Bradenton that are dying,” she said. “Churches all over this country are dying as well.” Some of those have simply lost their way and a day of redemption will come. Others, she said, have given up and given in to what they may think is a more palatable worldview.
“When we have the opportunity to share Christ and we walk away, we are effectively telling people to go to hell,” she said. “And the troubling part about that is it doesn’t seem to bother us a lot.” Christians have been given an incredible gift, Lee said, “and we want to keep it under wraps.”
In Nehemiah, God used an “incredible, ordinary man” to rebuild His temple.
Related Bible study:
Nehemiah study from 2006 NewWineskins Convocation
“Right away — in verse two of the first chapter”– is an important message, she said. It reads, “Hanani, one of my brothers, came from Judah with some other men, and I questioned them about the Jewish remnant that had survived the exile, and also about Jerusalem.” (NIV, emphasis added.)
“If you want to know what is going on in your church or town, you ask. You don’t assume. You don’t stereotype. You don’t get online.” Lee said that if “you want to know what God is doing in your church or town, you ask; and if you are going to ask with integrity, you have to be prepared for the response.”
“Elders — teaching and ruling — you have to ask the hard questions of your people, your community and your God.”
Nehemiah’s people knew the answer to the question about what happen if the church wasn’t there.
Verse three says the people were “in great trouble and disgrace.”
“You can replace and repair property, but people are irreplaceable in the eyes of God,” she said. “Don’t deceive yourselves, you have people that sit in your pews every single Sunday, and people you pass at the grocery store, school and work who are in great trouble and shame.”
Lee said she’s heard people say that if people are in pain or in trouble they will go to a church. “Will they? Have we given them a reason to think there is a reason to find hope or joy in the church?”
According to the fourth verse of chapter one, when Nehemiah heard of the pain and suffering of his people he cried and wept. Lee said “that is what happens when you actively engage in the world around you. You leave your heart wide open to be broken.”
Lee said that if she could lock the door to her office and only come out on Sunday’s to preach, then “I would never have my heart broken … [but] someone should make Jesus big in the lives of those who are in trouble and shamed and dying … and for all the navel gazing and staring, those ‘someones’ are us.”
Lee said that Nehemiah wept and fasted, and that the fasting went on for three or four months, and here is what made it so fascinating, she said. “He was fasting and weeping about something that happened 140 some years before.”
“It wasn’t the first time he had heard about it,” she said, “but the first time he heard it with an open heart.”
Nehemiah did something interesting here, she said. He fell to his knees and prayed. Lee said that Nehemiah prayed no less than nine times in a book that is 13 chapters long.
In his prayer in chapter one, Nehemiah admitted that both he and his family had sinned. “Amazing stuff,” she said. “He looks at the world around him … and he admits he was a part of it. … He was willing to cop to his fair share … that is a call to repentance to all of us.”
Lee asked the crowd, “How many times have you had a chance that would radically change or improve life in your church or neighborhood and you just walked away?”
“I have had opportunities to share the Gospel, but I just stay back and waited for someone else to do it,” she admitted.
Lee said that American churches are “all about preaching repentance to non-Christians, but we do not want to hear about it in ourselves.”
Nehemiah spent an “extraordinary” amount of time in confession and repentance. “He gets all of the ugliness out of himself,” Lee said. “He is empty, then he falls heavily into the grace of God.”
In spite of everything that has happened, Lee said that Nehemiah was not angry or bitter, in fact “now that he has seen and heard what has happened, he has felt called to do something about it … He asked God to help him and lead him along the way … He simply said I am here. I’m sorry, and I’m ready to serve.”
Lee then highlighted the last sentence of chapter one “At this time, I was the cup-bearer of the king.”
Nehemiah was a faithful lay person, not a pastor, Lee said. “If we are willing to ask questions, to really seek hard after the movement of God in the world and ready to pursue that with action, then God takes even ordinary people and uses us for His glory for the sake of His kingdom.”
She asked, “Are you willing to confront that brokenness? … Jesus came to bind up the brokenhearted and bring hope to the hopeless.”
“Now many of you are here because you feel among the brokenhearted … I’m hoping your heart is broken for the kingdom, for those who do not know Jesus,” she said, “If you are really serious about changing the church — and I believe that you are — then you need to step back and take a kingdom view. Change the conversation, confess, repent, and get on with it.”
Lee graduated from Eckerd College and holds a doctorate of ministry degree from Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. She came to know Christ personally through the ministry of the Beth-El Farmworker’s Mission in Wimauma, Fla. The Scripture that defines her life is Romans 1:16: “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it holds the power of salvation for all who believe.”