The Church Has Left the Building

Below is an article I wrote that will be appearing tomorrow in the local Press and Sun Bulletin. (Update: you can find it here.) It can also be found on the Wyoming Conference Web site.

The Church Has Left the Building

If you intended to attend Sunday morning worship at Park Terrace Community United Methodist Church on Sunday September 23, you arrived at the church to find that worship had been canceled. Large signs in the church’s front lawn informed you that the Church had left the building. What? They just painted the choir room. Nursery school just started. The bills are paid and pews are comfy—why would they leave the building? You turn into the parking lot and notice it is full of cars. Maybe the signs are a joke. As you walk through the open church doors you find a lady in a bright red shirt sitting behind a table in the entryway. You hear sewing machines humming and dishes clinking in the fellowship hall. Babies are making noises down the hallway. A group of people are leaving the church. Noticing your confusion, the lady in the bright red shirt explains to you that instead of worship, the congregation has decided to spend the morning out doing community service. The church is still being used, but the Church has left the building.

On her table are a list of projects: yard cleanup, handicap ramp building, home rehabilitation, child care, sewing walker bags for a local nursing home, visiting nursing homes, feed-the-hungry, planting a flagpole garden at a fire station, baking cookies for soldiers, painting, and a bottle drive to raise money to help train landmine sniffing dogs. So much for remembering the sabbath and keeping it holy.

But wait—aren’t these services holy too? Does holiness occur in only church sanctuaries? The Pharisees confronted Jesus with a similar question regarding proper observation of the sabbath, to which he replied, "Suppose one of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the sabbath; will you not lay hold of it and life it out? How much more valuable is a human being than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the sabbath" (Matthew 12: 11-13, NRSV).

One hundred and one Park Terrace congregation members tried to help pull sheep out of a pit on Sunday September 23. From 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. the Church, in bright red shirts, was cooking breakfast or pounding nails or sorting bottles or listening to an elder’s story. The Church was sawing wood or removing brush or painting a shed or cleaning out gutters or watering plants. The Church was mixing dough or threading needles or washing dishes. The Church was earning its capital C, out in the world as Jesus had done. Jesus never went to Sunday morning service at a Christian church.

Each group began their project with a common devotional, focusing on Matthew 25: 34-45. Pastor Nick Keeney asked the groups to focus on missions being about people, not production, asking how our work would focus on people, how does reaching out to neighbors affect our relationships with God, why were participating.

The ramp and home rehab projects began the Saturday before. Along with the yard cleanup, these opportunities for service were discovered through Tioga Opportunities, Department of Aging Services. Roger Kinney, team leader for the ramp building, explained that Tioga Opportunities has an unlimited number of projects available for the service-minded, but that most of all they are need of funds. So if nail gunning is not your thing, a monetary donation is just as welcome. Tioga Opportunities Department of Aging Services is located at 9 Sheldon Guile Boulevard, in the Countryside Community Center in Owego, NY. Their phone number is 607-687-4120.

Cooking at First Methodist in Endicott, NY, began at 7:30 a.m. Breakfast was served at 8:30. This is a free breakfast that is offered every Sunday morning to the community. According to Jan Borrows, weekly organizer and member of First Methodist, about thirty to fifty people a week attend the meals. Most people who attend work full time, but the income they earn is not enough to support themselves or their families. Jan hopes that breakfasts such as First Methodist's will help people realize that the divide between the haves and have nots is still a large one, and it’s not because the have nots are not doing nothing to better their situation. People who receive breakfast on Sunday morning are not required to attend worship services, but they are welcome. Jan sees the breakfasts as a chance to put words into actions. She said her aim was to “feed their souls and feed their stomachs.”

The yard cleanup project took place a few miles from the church, and was being done for a lifelong firefighter who, due to health problems, could no longer perform maintenance. This was the task of on grandest scale of the day, with brush removal, gutter cleaning, tree limb removal, and general lawn care. When I asked seventh grader Stephen Lewis, who was helping with the yard cleanup, what he thought about canceling worship, he said he was okay with it, explaining, “I got to skip church to cut stuff up.” But he returned to heart of the matter by also saying, “I think Jesus would be proud of us.”

Back at the church groups were busy baking cookies for soldiers and jailed youth, sewing walker bags for local nursing homes, and sewing potholders for Sky Lake Camp and Retreat Center. Others were donating their time offering child care. Another group was sorting bottles collected from a bottle drive. Not only were these bottle drivers raising money to train landmine sniffing dogs, they were raising awareness. The group handed out flyers to those who, after hearing what the bottles were for, asked “huh?” The flyers explained that landmines currently litter the Angolan countryside, an estimated about one to eight million mines in an area the size of Texas. Angolans live at constant risk of losing limbs and lives. This project is supported by UMCOR, and you can get more information by visiting http://gbgm-umc.org/UMCOR/emergency/landmines.stm.

Two groups went to nursing homes during the day, organizing worship services and visiting with residents. Another group painted a rundown shed in Owego, NY. Another group helped serve dinner at the Salvation Army in Binghamton, NY. The night ended with a gathering at the church at 7:00 p.m., during which the day’s stories were told, hymns were sung, and ice cream was eaten. At the day’s end, calluses nursed, cookies packaged, structures built, Park Terrace went home knowing they kept the Sabbath holy.