Before reading this sermon, watch this video of the text it’s based on:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOm1DMZJITs

On this Pentecost Sunday, the congregation was given colourful streamers of red, yellow and orange and instructed to wave them joyfully whenever they heard the word “Spirit” – whether in a prayer, a song, or the sermon. No matter how upbeat the music, nor how quiet and soulful the prayer, they were encouraged to wave the streamers. This happened probably about 20 times before the sermon began.

Today’s sermon is aimed at the over-40 crowd. So if you’re under 40, you may just want to talk amongst yourselves…

The day of Pentecost arrived
The disciples were sitting around wondering “what do we do now?”
They had seen Jesus crucified, come back (mysteriously), and leave again (mysteriously)
Now they were faced with the insurmountable task of spreading his message to the world.
How could they do that when they couldn’t even communicate with the rest of the world?

Scripture tells us that the day of Pentecost arrived they were all waiting in one place. The Holy Spirit [streamers are waved] came to them like a rushing wind or a raging fire. And when they were filled with the Spirit somehow, miraculously, they were able to speak and understand other languages.

People under 40 today speak a different language, and we need to be able to speak it and understand it both.
Communication is different for all of us, at the end of the 21st century’s first decade.
It’s faster, and it’s mainly via computers.
Knowledge is accessible to everyone (not just the educated) and it’s instantaneous.

The phone in your hand will give you the weather in Whitehorse, Toronto or Tokyo, tell you if the plane’s landed on time, tell you where you are in latitude and longitude, tell you what your friends are doing right this second, tell you what the flight pattern of a North American snowgoose is, take pictures or let you watch a video shot half-way across the world just moments ago.
In SECONDS.

Today is the day of iPhones, Google, Facebook and Twitter.
Community is formed electronically, in discussion forums and Facebook status comments ~ not through potluck suppers anymore. Yes, it’s impersonal. Yes, it’s “not as good” as face-to-face community. You’re right about that but it changes nothing.
Electronic community is here to stay.

Let me give you one example from this past week. It seems that most of the young people who don’t darken our doors ever, but grew up here, are happy enough to add the church as a “friend” on their Facebook pages. One young woman, in particular, surprised me. I didn’t think she wanted anything to do with us anymore, and she doesn’t have much use for me either. She came on Facebook late at night last week and wrote simply “nobody seems to care about the new Terminator movie anymore”. I quickly opened a new tab, googled “Terminator movie” and saw immediately it was called Terminator 3: Salvation. I went back over to Facebook. Hesitated. Wondering if I made a quip whether she’d engage me, ignore me, or just delete us as a “friend”. I took the risk and typed, in response:  “I know how you feel. Nobody seems to care about Salvation anymore either.”

Funny, ya. If you don’t think I’m an idiot already.
I waited with some trembling, but within moments my fears were abated.
She came back with those three little letters you wanna see:  “LOL”

It means “laugh out loud” and implies that she did just that, but also her writing of it showed that she was willing to engage me, engage us in a new way.

The United Church of Canada’s 10-million-dollar “Emerging Spirit” campaign taught us a lot about communicating with people under 45. Just the fact that all of our advertising pointed toward an electronic community, wondercafe, speaks volumes. Emerging Spirit taught the church, through its extensive research done by Environics, that people age 30-45 generally hold the same core values as the United Church yet they don’t know about, and do not even believe that such a church exists in Canada. These 18 attributes held by both the United Church and 30-45-year-olds in Canada are:

• Builds deep personal relationships
• Offers the possibility of personal transformation
• Engages both emotion and the intellect
• Offers new ways of looking at faith
• Values all ages
• Reaches out to the needy
• Translates personal faith into action
• Is welcoming to everyone
• Works with the poor to improve their situation
• Emphasizes helping people
• Respects all people
• Works for justice in the world
• Respects the earth and the environment
• Encourages questioning
• Respects personal freedom and choice
• Builds relationships with other traditions
• Is open to change
• Celebrates all, including gays and lesbians

You can read the full report here:  (Pages COM-11 to COM-37)

Thankfully, these 18 attributes sound like they belong to Gilmore Park. But if we cannot communicate them to a whole generation, what will we do?

Emerging Spirit has also taught the United Church something else over the past 2 years and that is: our ministry is not necessarily inside church buildings anymore.

Definitely going out THERE
and bringing people in HERE
is not the future, nor even the “now” of the church’s mission.

Making disciples will not necessarily mean more people here.

Last weekend at BC Conference general meeting the director of Emerging Spirit, Keith Howard, got up and shocked the heck out of all 500 of us by saying this:
In 5-7 years 2/3
Of the United Church of Canada
WILL NOT EXIST

That’s a fact, not an exaggeration or a guess.
TWO THIRDS.

I also heard at Conference that there are more ordained clergy over 100 years of age than under 30. Our own Alex Bois is a huge exception.

50% of our clergy are set to retire in the next 5-7 years. Our theological colleges do not have the next “generation” of clergy to fill those slots – not even close.

What does this mean? According to Howard it means that the United Church will exist in the very near future as about 1/3 the size, and yet those congregations that survive will be vital and dynamic. Will we be one of them?

We have to speak new languages. We’re gonna need the Holy Spirit.
[streamers wave]

The solution is NOT to increase the number of people coming to church – Emerging Spirit taught us that. It’s not even to try to increase the number of times they come to church in a month or a year.  The solution is to learn to speak new languages.

Here are some examples of the “old” language, the language of the 90s or even 80s:

• All the parents of children need to “step up” and help with nursery and Sunday school. We did when we had young kids.
• We should advertise in the newspaper
• We should drop of flyers or direct mail to advertise our church
• My children/grandchildren don’t come to church. We need to do x or do x better, to get them to “come back”.
• We need some of the under-40 folks on our committees
• We need a different:
• Minister
• Musician
• Youth worker
• Sunday School program
• Governance structure

to “attract new/more/younger” people to our church.

This is the old language of the 80s and 90s.

Learning a new language is hard. It requires effort and it’s scary. But we can only go FOREWORD because the world only turns in one direction, and evolution only moves us in one direction, and that’s foreword. We can talk all we like about how people “should” be (the way we were when we were younger) but that’s all it is – talk. It’ll get us nowhere.

Letting go of the old ways, the ways of the 1990s, is frightening. It’s like stepping into a black hole or an abyss of darkness. It’s risky. It’s scary. It’s new. We stumble around. We can’t find our way.

We need some light.
We need some air.
We need some help.
We need some power.
We need a gale force wind and the fire of a hundred illuminating flames. We need the HOLY SPIRIT in here!
[streamers wave wildly]

We get stuck in the past and we get stuck in today, afraid to step out of the box because of one thing:  NOSTALGIA:  remembering the good ol’ days of the 1980s.  The days when community meant potluck suppers and everyone socializing on committees and coming to church every Sunday and advertising in the newspaper to attract new members.

We have to give up that language.
Or any language that begins with “people should”; “they should”; or “we always used to”.
“They” are not going to speak our language!
We must learn to speak theirs or die.

We must learn to speak a new language or die.

Allow me to let you in on some interesting facts. I printed off the website statistics for our church website, www.gilmoreparkunited.org, for the month of April. The word “hits” means the number of times someone has gone and visited our website. For the month of April, does the number 634 sound like a lot?

[People nod agreement]

Well 634 is the average number of hits we got in ONE DAY.  The total for the month was 19,299. That’s low. Most months it’s over 20,000.

The months of July and August are the highest – those months when people church shop but none of us are around and none of our programs are running.

We can tell a lot about the people who come to our website.
For instance, 4 pm is the highest time of the day, and 6 pm is the second-highest.

Here are the specific pages that people go to, in order:

1. Main page (we update it weekly)
2. Worship: What to expect. (That page was hit 86 times in one month. WOW.)
3. Personnel bios
4. Programs
5. Spiritual gifts
6. Preschool link
7. Location
8. Rentals
9. Sermons

The sites that people have been to before coming to us are, in order:

1. Google
2. gpucnews blog
3. urbanwedding
4. Richmond food bank
5. wondercafe

38% of people searched for us by our name. 6% searched for Blue Whale preschool. 10% found us by searching for “churches in Richmond”.  That means about 4000 people in the month of April alone searched for “churches in Richmond” and found us.

People found our website from all kinds of other countries as well. Here are those stats:
Italy 35
Pakistan 29
USA 22
Australia 18
Russian Federation 14
Malaysia 12
Turkey 12
Belgium 6
UK 6
Germany 5
Japan 2
South Africa 2
Ireland 1
New Zealand 1
Thailand 1

And all of that, makes up 19 THOUSAND hits…in the month of April alone.  It’s a new world out there. It’s a new mission field. It’s a new ministry. And we need not be embarrassed any longer when our attendance is poor on Sunday mornings. Cuz we’re learning a whole new language.

Learning this new language is going to be hard. It’s gonna be hard and it’s gonna be painful because

it’s not just about learning Facebook and Twitter.
Or worse, paying someone to do that for us

it’s about giving up our dreams and visions of a church full of people and a Sunday School brimming with kids and lots of young folks sitting on our committees, and the offering plate full to overflowing and remaining for generations in this lovely new building.

Learning a new language means letting that go.
Grieving the loss of it
And stepping out into the darkness, the unknown, with faith and with vision and with new life.

How are we gonna do that?
How are we gonna do it?
Not with our OWN power, that’s for sure.
Not with human hands nor human intellect.

You know the answer, and it’s not in a spoken word.

[First a few timid souls, then more, then everyone began to wave the colourful streamers, indicating “The Holy Spirit”]

Thank you, God, for the day of Pentecost.

[A burst of applause.]

¹ You are welcome to use, copy, edit or reproduce this sermon with copyright attached. Publication is prohibited.