First Baptist Church Annual Meeting

Address To the Congregation
February 8, 2008
Prepared and Presented by Rev. John P. Dick
Senior Pastor, First Baptist Church, Midland

Just last week I had one of those life affirming experiences. Paula and I spent four days in Atlanta sharing in an experience called The New Baptist Covenant Celebration. It was literally the first time in history that Baptists across all denominational lines gathered in one place not to debate our differences, but to celebrate our common ground. And as the days unfolded, I found myself drawn more and more to the reality that we are a church for these times.

Let’s face it. We are living in a day when churches are having a hard time discerning their identity and defining their future. And the fact is this is a struggle that is transdenominational. But the more I am in multi-church or ecumenical gatherings, the more I realize how blessed we are with the directions we are moving. And I have to tell you, we are unique.

For example, we are a congregation that is open to change. Truthfully, most churches struggle to go there. By its very nature, a local congregation tends to be conservative… that is, it’s desire is to conserve the traditions of the past. Now obviously, we want and need to preserve the faith. There are truths that are eternal. They will never change. But the practice and the institutional structure that surrounds the faith does changes. We need to constantly find new ways to bring these truths to life in an effort to touch new generations, and when we’re not willing to allow that to happen, there’s trouble. The church experiences decline and the vitality slips away. All too many churches are discovering this the hard way.

I like the way Rob Bell puts this in his book, Velvet Elvis (pg. 11). He writes: “Times change. God doesn’t, but times do. We learn and grow, and the world around us shifts, and the Christian faith is alive only when it is listening, morphing, innovating, letting go of whatever has gotten in the way of Jesus and embracing whatever will help us be more and more the people God wants us to be.”

I think this is a great description of First Baptist. I love our church because we are open to change. And in truth, we always have been. This is not a new quality or characteristic of this congregation. It has always been on the cutting edge. So now, let’s see where this change is going to take us.

First, I want to affirm our new approach to governance and strongly recommend that this next year find us making our two year experiment a permanent change. George Bullard is a Christian strategist who studies major trends and their implications for local congregations. In a recent report written for the churches (dated Nov. 28, 2007), he talked about local church polity as we are now moving well into the 21st century. He says it is time to release the old (in his words) “command and control model of management”. This style grew out of the tremendous success of our military in the 1940’s and made its way into all of our organizational structures working very well. But we have come to a new day and this style is no longer effective. We have moved from this centralized to a decentralized system of organization which empowers the grassroots. Our new governance structure is designed to do precisely this. It frees everyone to be engaged in ministry in ways to which they feel strongly drawn.

We have seen the great success we are having toward this end. It took awhile, but slowly new ministries are beginning to emerge. As people are growing to believe we are serious when we say they are free to pursue new possibilities, it is happening. Just within the past week two new exciting ministries have been born. One of our Sunday School classes has determined to begin a new work addressing issues of poverty in our neighborhood. They talked about it, got excited about it, and now it is happening. It didn’t need layers of approval and wasn’t tied up in weeks of meetings to get the green light. It happened when people were drawn around the idea. A second ministry started just last Saturday evening when a number of young families from our church (notice I said young – Paula and I were part of the gathering) attended a marriage enrichment evening. They came away seeing new possibilities for our own church when two or three of these couples stepped up to say “we need to do something to enhance marriage in our own congregation”. They have a vision and a passion around this new possibility and it is going to happen.

We pulled the trigger on this new way of living together and doing ministry together when we chose to embrace The Kingdom Assignment. Someone entrusted to us a generous gift that has already multiplied itself many times over as new ministries have begun. Many of the ideas took root through the initiative of one creative person, and now they are going to continue into the future. From my perspective, beyond all the good that has already been done is the fact that the precedent has now been solidly set. What happened in the Kingdom Assignment, will continue to happen as we move forward for this approach stands at the heart of our new organizational structure.

Then as I look to the future, I see another seed beginning to germinate. We are with much more intention beginning to share with the community who we are. Have you noticed our Saturday ads? No longer are we a well kept secret. Now we are letting the city and county know we are inter-racial, multi-cultural and ecumenical. Baptist churches don’t do this friends… especially the ecumenical part. But we do and this makes us unique in our community. And the exciting part is rooted in the fact that we are beginning to recognize that about ourselves and talk about it.

Just last week we had a tremendous experience on Sunday morning, didn’t we. I have to tell you there wasn’t another church in this area who did what we did in celebrating the Chinese New Year. It’s not in the DNA of other congregations in our area. But it is in ours. And next Sunday we will be celebrating the African American heritage which is so much a part of our congregation. But listen to this.

This past Sunday was communion as you know. Elaine Poindexter always oversees the preparation of the elements and the recruitment of the servers for us. Because this is African American History Month, she recruited African American members of our church to serve. However, Jianwei was orchestrating the Chinese Worship Celebration and he did the same… except the folks he invited to serve were all Chinese. I learned about this just a few days before the service. What to do? I talked with Jianwei about this and this is what he said. “This will be no problem. Let’s just have some of our Chinese members and some of our African American members serve together. It will be a great sign of our diversity!”

When we can see ourselves through this lens, friends, we can be much more assertive in our desire to share who we are with the community. God is calling us to honor our unique integrity and at the same time to live with one another in the midst of our differences in this glorious Kingdom of God. Last week when I heard Jimmy Carter sharing his faith he said, “We must learn to live together honoring and respecting each other. Yes, we are different,” he said, “and this is the way God has created us. We must learn to live without criticizing each other and without excluding one another.” As we continue to move forward in our community, we must continue to embrace with even more passion this ability to welcome the stranger no matter who he or she may be.

Then there is a third affirmation I would like to make as we look to this next year and beyond. It has to do with leadership and its future. We are coming to an interesting time of transition in the life of our congregation. People who have been at the heart of our leadership structure for many, many years are beginning to do things like retire… and like relocate. Moreover, people are retiring earlier and earlier and spending more and more time away from their home base. As we look to the next five years, we will be experiencing these kind of changes so we must prepare for what the future is bringing. The good news is there are many new families who have come to First Baptist over the past couple of years especially, and it will be their turn to assume responsibilities for the life of this congregation. But it is our task to prepare them and encourage them to see the possibilities and to step forward in God’s good time. We have begun doing this with great intention, but it is just the beginning. Our new structure has a “Leadership Development Team” and its task will be to continually evaluate the needs for the future and to prepare a new generation for what lies ahead.

Worship is another area that demands our constant attention. We continue to be a congregation that makes the blended approach to worship and music work, but we are rare. We will continue to pledge to do everything we do to the best of our ability. Also, we have begun implementing a new approach to worship that is more and more focused upon spiritual themes that unfold over the course of weeks. To date, the response has been wonderful and many new people who have never been involved in the planning or leadership of worship have stepped forward to accept the invitation to serve. This year we had nearly 30 new people who have never experienced planning a worship service join us to become part of this new experience. This is phenomenal. We will continue to move in this direction because there are unique benefits to this approach. It allows a broad base of our laity to better understand the meaning of worship and the planning that goes into the experience each Sunday. It also allows us more time to develop a variety of ideas related to that theme. Instead of a one Sunday approach, we can pursue our thinking in greater depth.

Finally, allow me one more observation as we move into 2008. More and more we are taking seriously our call to serve the neighborhood in which we are located. We must continue to move in this direction but for “other directed” reasons. Our intention shouldn’t be based upon a desire to simply bring more people into the life of First Baptist. If that happens and when that happens, we celebrate with every decision of faith that is made. But beyond that, it must be our desire to serve these people simply because Jesus calls us to this responsibility and we dare do nothing less.

In Luke 4 (18-19), Jesus says, “The spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom and recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” This was essentially a blueprint of his vision for ministry and an outline of his call to discipleship. Put another way, as he was defining his own call, Jesus was giving clarity to our call too.

We know that in Matthew 25 he makes this clear when reminding us that as we serve even the least of those in our midst, we are serving Jesus.

For too long, the church has been segregated by race. Most churches still are. By the grace of God, we have discovered the will to move beyond these artificial barriers. But I am convinced there are other, even greater barriers keeping people out of the church and one of those barriers is economic.

We must always work to create an environment where all of God’s children are welcome. We’re well on the way but there is still so much to be done. May God grant us the energy, the vision and the will to more fully become a genuine representation of his diverse kingdom right here at the corner of Sugnet and Washington.