Senior Pastor Annual Report 2007
The Church of the Nazarene in Mid-City, English-Speaking Congregation
Dear Friends and Members:

The polity of the Church of the Nazarene requires that the senior pastor, each year, present to the congregation an “Annual Report.” In this report our Discipline requires that the pastor “report[s] on the status of the local church and its departments, and . . . outline[s] . . . areas of future needs with recommendations for reference by the church . . . for study and/or implementation in future steps for growth or progress” (413.15). The Annual Report allows me to reflect over the past with you, and engage in the pastoral office of teaching. It is appropriate that we do this on this Third Sunday of Easter. We have heard Moses overlooking the Promised Land at the end of his life. Moses prayed, "Let the LORD, the God of the spirits of all flesh, appoint someone over the congregation who shall go out before them and come in before them, who shall lead them out and bring them in, so that the congregation of the LORD may not be like sheep without a shepherd." God gave them Joshua (Jesus in Greek) “so that all the congregation of the Israelites may obey.”

“How paternalistic!” our culture has shaped us to say! Obey? Obedience implies authority. Authority, especially within the context of the church, sends up all sorts of warning flairs. Many of us come from “conservative” church backgrounds where authoritarian pastors quote Scriptures to justify nationalistic jingoes, moralistic judgementalism, and oppressive social causes from which some of us have experienced personal hurt. Obedience to the church? It scares us to death. Benedict XVI writes, “It is felt that . . . churches are part of the establishment and collaborators in the conspiracy of power. Confronted with the increasing anonymity and uniformity of the world, people seek refuge in small groups, whether they are called ‘base communities,’ ‘the Church from below,’ or whatever. Here they experience sympathy and good will; here mutual understanding rules, not laws. A little oasis of humanness in the spirit of Jesus seems to open up, but unfortunately it is constantly being disrupted by the unreasonable demands and manifestations of the larger Church, which exercises her power and, with her ancient ideas, mercilessly rides roughshod over the group’s beautiful world. The result is group against Church, . . . community against institution. Where the community represents the place for hope, the institution stands for the threat of the powerful” (Benedict XVI, A New Song for the Lord, 1996, p. 65). We struggle with the whole idea of instituted authority within the church.

When we think of the status of the local church this past year, internal struggle marks our year. Yes, God still does marvelous things in our midst; we are visible in the world as the body of Christ. The witness of the congregation literally spans around the world. Weekly the Scriptures are read, the Gospel proclaimed, and the Lord’s Supper celebrated. Because Christ has commanded us, we feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked, bury the dead, oversee the sick, find Christ in and among the poor – and we must never forget that we are the poor. Many of us don’t have homes or struggle with inadequate housing. We care for the stranger in our midst – often those in our multicongregation who, as we should, find this society bewildering and confusing. Like Jesus breaking bread in the presence of the hungry, bread literally continues to multiply and be distributed to the neighborhood from our building.

Yet this past year we struggled again with unity – as we have in the past; we struggled with authority – as we have in the past; we struggled with a common understanding of mission – as we have in the past. We struggled with the polity of the “institutional church” when we can build a polity as a “community” – as we have in the past. We struggle to share a common understanding of the faith given the saints – as we have in the past. “The result is group against Church, . . . community against institution.” It is hard to enter the Promised Land, to fulfill our witness unless we as a people are united in obedience.

Why have we so struggled? I have thought, prayed and agonized, reflected, listened, read, and gone through long hours of introspection and self-examination. I am convinced that we have been locked in a great struggle with theological liberalism. What do I mean by “theological liberalism”? For us it has appeared as a conviction that our local context, our own perceived needs and the perceived needs of the neighborhood and the world, should determine our mission. Gary Dorrien argues that the tradition of American liberal theology attempts to

"reconceptualize the meaning of traditional Christian teaching in the light of modern
knowledge and modern ethical values. It is not revolutionary but reformist in spirit and
substance. Fundamentally it is the idea of a genuine Christianity not based on external
authority. Liberal theology seeks to reinterpret the symbols of traditional Christianity in
a way that creates a progressive religious alternative to atheistic rationalism and to
theologies based on external authority.

Specifically, liberal theology is defined by its openness to the verdicts of modern
intellectual inquiry, especially the natural and social sciences; its commitment to the
authority of the individual reason and experience; its conception of Christianity as an
ethical way of life; its favoring of moral concepts of atonement; and its commitment to
make Christianity credible and socially relevant to modern people" (The Making of
American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion 1805-1900, 2001, p.
xxiii).

Mid-City, different from the conservative Protestantism of many of our backgrounds, has been seen as a place where committed persons could create “a progressive religious alternative to atheistic rationalism and to theologies based on external authority” and therefore, “make Christianity credible and socially relevant to modern people.”

Much like the Roman Catholic Church in Vatican II, we speak of the congregation, not as a static organization to meet personal needs, but as a “dynamic entity, as the people of God undertaking a pilgrimage between ‘already’ and ‘not yet’.” It is not surprising that we have experienced the same tensions that our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters do today in that some have “misunderstood [us] as a progressive movement in which the deposit of older traditions is felt to be outdated and is discarded in the name of a so-called progressive understanding of the faith” (Cardinal Walter Kasper in Searching for Christian Unity, 2007, p. 21). A progressive understanding of the faith misses the point that like Israel entering the land, we too function in obedience to external authority – particularly to Joshua, Jesus Christ, as witnessed to in the Scriptures, in whom we participate through baptism and the Eucharist by the Spirit, and confess through the Ecumenical Creeds of the Church. The church ordains and congregations call elders to preserve the faith given to the saints through the proclamation of the Word, the celebration of the sacraments, and the oversight of local congregations. We are a people under authority.

In late July, early August of 1996, Rev. Dr. Ron Benefiel stood behind our home having just moved to San Diego from LA First Church. As I flipped burgers, he told me of his desire to plant a congregation, anchored in the creedal tradition of the church and committed to live with and among the poor. All along our prayer was never to make the faith relevant, to bring in the kingdom of God through our works. With William Stringfellow, we affirmed that we must understand our congregational mission from the perspective that “the Christian, and the whole company which is the Church, need not worry about what is to be done. The task is, rather, to live within the victory of all that has been done by God. For the Christian the issue is not so much about what she/he does in this world but about how she/he is in the world. There is no serious distinction between who the Christian is and what he does, between being and doing. These are virtually the same” (quoted in Stanley Hauerwas, Dispatches from the Front, p. 112). God has defeated sin, death, and Satan in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and called believers together in worship of the Triune God as the church. By vibrant, personal faith in Jesus through Christ’s presence in the Eucharist by the Spirit, we participate in this victory, freeing us from the powers that would enchain us so that the Spirit might cleanse us from inward sin and make us holy. Freed by the Spirit, we thankfully learn to live in the obedience of faith that requires witness in the world in a life lived with and among the poor, engaging in the works of mercy. With Stanley Hauerwas, we affirmed from the beginning that “The question was not whether we were going to accomplish much, but whether we were going to live faithfully” (Stanley Hauerwas, Dispatches from the Front, p. 112). As William Abraham states, “human response does indeed matter in the life of faith, but the emphasis is not on our efforts to fix the church and the world or on our schemes to usher in a new era of withdrawal and renewal. The primary emphasis falls on the provision God has made in the church for the constant renewal of grace in every generation and in every nook and cranny of the universe. . . . the life of the church depends crucially on the life of the Holy Spirit working in and through her divinely inspired canonical heritage” (from forthcoming book on Canonical Theism, Eerdmans Press).

We need to commit our next year to understanding how the liberal culture in which we live (remembering that this is most manifest often in “conservative churches”) has profoundly shaped us, learning to live as one’s under authority, learning to live “the mystery of our faith, that Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again . . . in unity and constancy and peace.” We must commit ourselves to the faith given to the saints, to commit each and everyone to become engaged deeply and personally in the works of mercy in accordance with the saints who have gone before us. We must remember that pastoral exhortations from the pulpit are not sharing of personal convictions, but, by God’s Spirit, the proclamation of the Word of God that leads to experience thanksgiving at this Table for the gifts of God given to the people of God. We need to engage in the task of evangelism, pulling others into the worship of the Triune God through repentance and faith in Jesus. We need to give from our financial resources regularly, to tithe, so that our witness as a congregation may continue. We must recover the joy of serving God, knowing that we can be obedient to God in moving into the Promised Land, for God has led the way through God’s Son, Jesus, by the power of the Spirit.

What is our end, our goal? We have one and only one end. It is to find ourselves ultimately as participants in the vision that we read from the Apocalypse. See the “great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, "Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!"

Who are these donned in white? "These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes."

We live amid the great ordeal; life is often a struggle, personally, congregationally, globally. We don’t run from the struggle; we place ourselves right in its middle, enfolding our sufferings into the sufferings of Christ in hope of the resurrection of the dead. We don’t seek a safe place to withdraw – God calls us forward into the world as witnesses amid the poor, the hungry, the sick. We don’t seek to live invisible to the world, but to live fully visible in solidarity with the body of Christ throughout the world, not only geographically but also across time. We do not base our activities on a calculated basis whether our practices are immediately effective or not; we live the obedience of faith – submitting to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, witnessed to in Scriptures as transmitted in the life of the saints across the ages as we await the culmination of all things in and through Christ. We engage our lives in hope to witness to the kingdom that God has brought about in Jesus.

Our end, our goal, our lives are to be enfolded now as a sign of this heavenly image to come, “to wash our robes and make them white in the blood of the Lamb.” Come to this table in faith, to hunger and thirst no more, to come before the throne of God. For salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the Throne and to the Lamb! Onward, church, into the future that God has already made present to us! Rejoice! Be encouraged! Be faithful! Live as part of the body of Christ that is this congregation. And above all things, be thankful!