By Pastor Kerry Nelson
Spiritual Orphans, Prodigal Children and the Blessed Rest
In Part 1, I lifted up the possibility that planning around a “target audience” might in fact be a key for us in discovering what it takes to be more evangelistically effective in our ministries. In Part 2 below I describe three “spiritual types” that might find a home in our congregations, if we are prepared for them. And then in Part 3, I will list some possible changes and adaptations we might consider in worship and ministry that are specifically targeted at these three target audiences.
If I was to look at the community surrounding a local church building, I could seek to better understand it sociologically. That is what we usually do. So we turn to demographic studies as noted above in constructing Saddleback Sam. But I think it might be – in our day – more helpful to look at that same community spiritually.
Doing this well requires thinking deeply about the faith. Often re-thinking the faith.
We need to realize that God is “out there” in the world just as much as God is “in here” in the church. Evangelism isn’t what we do in isolation of the movement of God’s Spirit but rather it is what we do in cooperation with that Spirit in the world around us. The faith wasn’t simply incarnated in Jesus but, in fact, continues to incarnate in and through us as we move into the world – and in and through the world as it comes to us. We will ever be both saint and sinner, we will ever be both evangelizer’s and the evangelized. This gives us humility.
We need to realize that faith means more than intellectual assent to doctrinal and biblical assertions – faith means following Jesus. We need to understand that “sin” is a meaningless word without making a theological term real using synonyms like brokenness, alienation, meaningless, and shame. Especially shame for that is the feeling of deep unworthiness and separateness that plagues people. Recognizing this in ourselves and others is the source of our passion, and of our compassion.
We need to rethink “justification” beyond simply the declaration of forgiveness toward actually being transformed by God’s love. And we need to think of “salvation” as healing, as wholenss, as restoration, rather than as “getting our ticket punched” to heaven.
Re-read and think more deeply about the previous three paragraphs and you will quickly realize that this re-thinking is actually what we have hoped for, longed for, and maybe even experienced all the way along in our faith journeys.
Now we bring such thinking to the world around us. Who do we see out there?
Spiritual Orphans
For example, some of the people in our community are spiritual orphans. At some point in their past they were brought into a spiritual community. Among Christians, they might have been baptized Lutheran or Roman Catholic or Episcopalian or any other among the communities of the Christian faith. But, simply put, their parents didn’t keep their promises. They were introduced to their Heavenly Father but not raised in God’s family. Through neglect or other forces beyond their control, they were orphaned. Now they are drifting through their lives, still hungry for that sense of connectedness, of belonging, represented by “family”.
Like physical orphans, they struggle with the push/pull of abandonment issues. They look for love in all the wrong places. They are susceptible to anyone who comes along, who loves them, who helps them with a sense of belonging. But they are fickle. At the first sniff of rejection or relational difficulties, they bolt. And travel on, unconsciously or not, looking for another place to land.
Prodigal Children
Another group of people surrounding our church buildings are prodigal children.
Prodigal children are people who were raised in the Christian faith, often but not always with families who were deeply dedicated and committed to congregational life. Among Lutherans, these were kids who were baptized, who went to Sunday worship and Sunday School, were confirmed, participated in youth group, went to summer camp, sang in Christmas programs – and then, in high school for many of them, in college for the rest of them, either actively bolted or casually drifted away from participation in Christian community.
Emancipated from their parents, they self-emancipated themselves from the Christian faith. Like the prodigal son of Luke 15, they went off with the heritage of faith that had been given them and squandered it by doing their own thing.
For a long time, people believed (and enough people did it to secure the belief) that young people would drift off to sow their oats but, once they had children of their own, they would be back at church. Increasingly, that is not the case. Ask any long time gray-haired member of any Lutheran Church about the faith lives of their children and grandchildren and you will hear about prodigal children that have wandered off to far countries.
The good news is that life continues to happen for prodigal children. The bad news is that life hurts. Like it or not, crisis moments come into the lives of prodigal children and sometimes those crisis moments are enough to open them to the possibility that help is available back home at church.
These crisis moments might include painful experiences like sudden illness, the death of a friend or family member, the loss of a job, moving to a new city and feeling alone, or even something like the cultural shattering of a 9/11 or an economic meltdown. There are also “good” crises like deciding to get married or the birth of a child or some kind of surprising spiritual awakening.
Regardless of the cause, one day the prodigal child makes a decision to go back home. In our case, that most likely means visiting a Christian congregation on a Sunday morning for a worship service. They are looking for help, healing and hope. Some – but certainly not all – of that will begin for them in a worship service.
The Blessed Rest
And then the final group that lives around our congregations I call the “blessed rest.” That includes everyone else – strangely enough, agnostics and lifetime mature Christian disciples end up in this same boat. The blessed rest look to the church for meaning, ministry and mission. They expect the church to be doing things to improve the world. They want to know that the church is making a difference.
In the last congregation I served, we refurbished the homes of low income African American senior citizens by working with a program called “Rebuilding Together.” Each time we tackled a new project, someone would bring along a friend or a co-worker whom we had never met. Sometimes these were people who had nothing to do with the church. But after spending a couple of weekends working alongside the mature Christians who showed up to serve others, relationships began, conversations happened, and then we would see those new faces in worship.
The blessed rest are intellectually curious, socially conscious, and are not interested in congregational ministry that is turned in upon itself. They want to make a positive difference in the world and they hope that their congregation will lead them in discovering ways to do just that.
Further Thoughts
1. Do you personally “fit” one of these three spiritual types?
2. As you look at your congregation, do you see people who fit these three spiritual types? Where do most of your people fit?
3. As you imagine the community around your church building, do you see signs of the spiritual types living among you?
4. As you assess how you do ministry in your context, which spiritual types are you now best prepared to receive and engage?
