2023 EOY Pastoral Letter
As I have been reflecting on the past year and how to encourage our church, I started to wonder what a letter from the Apostle Paul to Saint Andrew’s Presbyterian church would look like if he were to write one today. He would have opened his letter with the familiar greeting calling us saints, which means holy ones, reminding us of who we are as the beloved of the Lord and that we are made holy in the eyes of God through Christ. Beyond that, I imagine he would commend us for the work we’ve done and the blessings that the Lord has bestowed upon us in the last few years.
But where would he press in and offer his pastoral rebuke? Would he call out our individualistic tendencies to treat church more like a mistress, than a wife? Would he notice something about the way we live with a tendency to clothe ourselves in the culture more than the righteousness of Christ? Would he challenge the way we live our lives and spend our money on ourselves more than on others? I think these and many other idols he would likely push into, idols that aren’t unique to us as much as they are pervasive within the western church.
But what would the heart of his message be to us? Perhaps he would challenge us to care for the poor and needy around us. I think we are getting closer to the heart of the matter. James, the pastor to the Jerusalem church and half brother of Jesus says:
““Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.””
I think the heart of Paul’s challenge to us might be to not settle where we are at but to continue to mature as a church, so that we grow in the practice pure religion. It is easy to “play church” and use the gifts that God has given us to go through the motions each week. But what might it look like for us to take this call to practice pure religion seriously? To use the blessings that we have been given to serve the needy and afflicted in our community? In the end, it seems that doing these things is what helps us stay “unstained from the world”.
My prayer for us as a church is that this is what we continue to grow into. We are going to need to be willing to mature and embrace the growing pains as this coming year has a lot of change coming: installing elders; losing some of our outside financial support as we seek to become a financially independent congregation; installing new members. For us to endure what lies ahead, we have to continually be thinking of others more than ourselves. We need to continue to learn what it means to practice pure religion.
May the Spirit continue to mature us as we learn what it means to practice pure religion.