First Presbyterian in Argenta

Over the next few Sunday mornings (at our new 10 a.m. start time), we’re going to be looking at the parables of Luke. Some of these stories only appear in Luke. Some appear in other Gospels as well. We won’t get through all of Luke’s parables in this series, but we’ll be looking at some that deal specifically with faith.

So as we look at faith through the parables of Luke, I’ll be posting some back story on our Web blog each week. We can learn a little more about Luke, think a bit more about the stories and hopefully, along the way, deepen our own faith.

It is believed that the writer of Luke also wrote the Book of Acts. In fact, if you read the Gospel of Luke, skip over the Gospel of John and head right in to Acts, you get a nice narrative that begins with the birth of Christ and moves through the founding of the Church. Try it some time. It’s a great read.

The Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms defines a parable as “a short story based on common experiences that contains a meaning.” I like to say that a parable is a story with a meaning greater than its content. In other words, a parable is about much more than it claims to be about. The parable of the barren fig tree and the parable of the mustard seed aren’t actually about trees and seeds. Parables use simple images to help us understand larger concepts.

Jesus didn’t have the market cornered on parable. We still use them today in all sorts of settings. My husband is working on an MBA and recently did a case study on what the industry calls quick serve restaurants and what the rest of us call fast food joints. A professor explained why these quick serve restaurants tend to clump together in one location rather than seeking out separate and distinct spaces.

Suppose there is a beach with a finite length and a guy wants to open up a frozen daiquiri stand. He sets it up in the middle of the beach so that he can get traffic from both sides of the beach. Now say you want to open a daiquiri stand on the same beach. You don’t want to put it on the far west end, because then the people on the east side will have too far to go. You don’t want it on the east end for the same reason. So where do you put your stand? Right by the other guy.

That’s a parable. The parables in Luke use images that, understandably, are more familiar to a first century Jewish peasant than they are to a 21st century bus driver or banker or daiquiri stand owner. But I think we can get the gist just the same.

Our series starts this Sunday with the Parable of the Mustard Seed. Make plans to join us at 10 a.m.

As a younger church (at least by PCUSA standards), First Pres finds itself in an odd situation. Our handful of older members who do not use e-mail and Facebook and Twitter are often excluded from a great deal of what goes on in our community of faith. Sure, we print out and mail hard copies of the weekly e-newsletter to those who request it, but our “offline” members still miss out on all the celebrations and conversations that the rest of us learn about and engage in on the World Wide Interweb.

Our oldest members are even further removed from our community since most everyone they “grew up” with in the church has moved on. And since about 85-90% of our membership joined the church in the last two-and-a-half years, there isn’t anyone around to remember the days when our elderly members were the ones who taught Sunday school and kept the books and helped the homeless and the hungry who came to the door. While we love our older members, we love them for who they are now, but don’t share in the memory of who they used to be.

There are folks in our church who are committed to keeping in regular contact with our elderly members and some who make sure that those who need a ride always have one. But we can all be a part of making sure the people who stuck it out (even when it was dangerous to come into our neighborhood at night) feel loved and appreciated. What our octogenarian and nonagenarian members would really like is a call, a visit or even an actual handwritten note or card sent by snail mail. When was the last time you wrote a thank you or get well note that required a stamp?

Perhaps those of us who live our lives online can set our calendars to remind us once or twice a week to pop a card in the mail, make a phone call or stop by to say hello. You can even get Siri to send you a reminder. “Hello, reminding you to make contact with someone who is 80 or older today.”

New Hours

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Music from Christine Kane’s Rain and Mud and Wild and Green

I’ve just seen one too many articles on why people aren’t coming to church. Admittedly, there are some good reasons. But I’d like to share my top 10 reasons why you should be coming to church. Others will have different reasons and some may disagree with the ones I have listed, but here they are.

10. Coming to church doesn’t mean you have no doubts about God or faith or religion. It means you have a place you can share with people who have their own doubts.

9.  Bad stuff is going to happen in your life. It just is. A church community cannot be everything to everyone in times of crisis, but when the bottom falls out of your world, it’s great to have a community to lift you back up.

8. Bad stuff is going to happen in your life, part two. The time to build a relationship with God is not when life turns ugly, and you’ve run out of all other options. Attending worship regularly helps build a relationship with God and others that will give you a solid foundation when the winds blow and the storms come.

7. Not all churches are anti-something. Most of us are for people, for acceptance, for hospitality. Really, we’re out there. We just don’t get the good press.

6. Any church worth its salt has really good food on a regular basis.

5. Churches offer paint-by-number opportunities to serve. Many people would like to help the poor, the hungry and the homeless, but they don’t know how to get involved, how to make the time to be involved, or what they can do to really make a difference. Churches offer you ways to plug in to help those who need it most.

4. You’ve got a gift. Probably two or 10 of them. Becoming involved in the ministry of a church will help you discover and use gifts you never even knew you had.

3. Not all churches are after your money. Good churches want you have a healthy relationship with money. Sure, churches need to pay the electric bill and the pastor and the youth director, but money and the church is more about you than it is about the church. It’s about your own relationship with money. World events have proven that it’s much better to put faith in God than in a bank account. Church can help you with that.

2. Taking a break from our hectic lives to come to church is accepting the gift of Sabbath. Wayne Mueller says “(Sabbath) dissolves the artificial urgency of our days, because it liberates us from the need to be finished.” We don’t take Sabbath and come to worship because we have time and have finished up everything that needs to be done. We take Sabbath because it is time to stop, and we are designed to stop, rest and reflect. Those don’t are destined to crash and burn.

1. Jesus is really cool. Even if you don’t know if you can believe in the whole Son-of-God thing, even if you refer to the resurrection as the Zombie Jesus event and even though those of us already in church often do a lousy job of following him, come to church to get to know Jesus. The more you get to know him, the more you’ll understand why people call his way The Way.

–Rev. Anne Russ

Thanks to all who have sent gracious notes about this article. Feel free to repost or reprint this article in other newsletters or sites. Just please include attribution. Thanks

10 Things I Want to Tell Parents

Right now, we don’t have an active Sunday School program at First Pres. In an effort to better serve our members, friends and neighbors, the session is trying to find out the interest folks in having a regular Christian education program on Sunday mornings. Please take some time to fill out the survey.