What Will Your, What Will Our, Legacy Be?

This month I’ve been spending a lot of time with our United Methodist history. I visited the United Methodist Archives one afternoon at the beginning of the month. Everywhere you looked, there were pictures, artifacts, and papers about who we’ve been. Tomorrow, I am preaching at John St. UMC in NYC, which is the oldest United Methodist congregation in the United States, begun in 1766, thanks to Barbara Heck, an immigrant who noticed that her fellow Methodist immigrants were

growing laxed in their spiritual disciplines. Upon coming into a room where some were playing cards, she seized the cards, threw them in the fire, and told one of them he better start preaching! The meetings commenced and Heck designed a simple chapel for them to meet in.

Besides the sanctuary, John St. has a small museum of Methodist memorabilia. They will be bringing into the sanctuary a chair used by the first bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Francis Asbury, for me to sit in. All of this makes me, being such a Metho-Geek, simply swoon!

But I’ve been thinking a lot about our local churches. Each one carries a rich history. Not just baptism and funeral records, but stories of turning points in the life of the congregation, when discipleship helped everyone grow more faithfully as followers of Jesus. There are also difficult stories, when disagreements and tensions caused the cord of fellowship to not just fray but break.

What stories does your community tell? What objects help communicate the power of the story?

Our churches, however, are not merely museums of the past. It is important to know the past, so that we can understand how we are impacted by it and learn from its lessons. But churches are a living, breathing organism known as the Body of Christ. You are making history together, one that will be told by generations to come. Will they speak of a group that was willing to take risks of faith, sharing the Gospel’s Good News to those who have never heard it before? Will they hear of a wide and generous hospitality, that spilled out into the surrounding neighborhood? Will there be some who, when they were children, will speak lovingly of a nurturing community that put its resources into the generations that were still in grade school and high school, because they knew that a healthy future for the church was dependent on how they cared for the children of their day?

And as we ponder our denomination, what will we leave behind for archivists to sift through? Will there be testimonies of individuals and churches that boldly dreamed of a church that dared to live out the Gospel mandate to love God and neighbor so deeply that divisions melted away, releasing God’s love in tangible, transforming ways throughout the world? Will future scholars note how the Holy Spirit descended upon the denomination, and hearts were on fire as never before to share the Good News of Jesus Christ so that a broken world was made whole because the people called Methodist made this Good News visible? Will they speak of a time of tension in the life of the church over human sexuality that was overcome because people dared to see in one another the image of God, and chose love over division?

What will we leave behind? Each of us has a role to play in the future direction of our church, and the unfolding of Beloved Community. What is God asking of you?