Pastor's Letter

Dear church family and friends,

There’s no such thing as a perfect church.  There, I said it! 

No matter how much a group of Christians love God, one another, and their neighbors as themselves, they will still fall short.  We will still fall short.  Yet the sooner we can recognize this fact, the sooner we can throw ourselves upon the grace and goodness of God.  I think this is what our Pastor Emeritus, Bill Serjak, meant when he would begin worship services with words that went something like this: “We welcome you to a community of sinners.  If you look around you, you will find fault with everyone, especially the pastor, since he is most visible.  But our job is not to point you to ourselves, but to Jesus Christ, with whom man has yet to find fault.” 

(And all God’s people said “amen.”)

We will soon see this truth in Scripture on Sunday mornings as we turn from studying Acts 2 to the New Testament book of First Corinthians.  If Acts 2 gives us a picture of the church on fire in the best possible way – as God’s people, filled with the Spirit, lead thousands to faith in Jesus Christ – then First Corinthians gives us a picture of the church on fire in the worst possible way – as God’s people, ignoring the Spirit, fight and divide among themselves.  In response to this, the apostle Paul writes to set those Christians in Corinth straight not by pointing to himself, nor to others in their midst – but by pointing to Jesus, whose mercy meets them in abundance.

I want to invite you to read First Corinthians along with me and our church family for the next few months.  Read it and find empathy in the foibles and frustrations of these early Christians.  See what Paul says about the Holy Spirit, who is at work in the midst of (or, often, in spite of) the community called “church.”  And together, let’s keep walking the dusty road of discipleship, confident that the one who is the Way still leads the way in Sylva, Jackson County, the United States, and even to the ends of the earth.

See you Sunday,
Blake

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Join us for worship on Sundays as we give praise to God, study Scripture and learn about its relevance for our lives, and go deeper in life together. In-person services take place in the sanctuary at 11:00am. We are live-streaming for those who prefer to worship from home via our YouTube page.

Sunday Scriptures for July:

• 7/03 – Acts 2:42-47

• 7/10 – 1 Corinthians 1:1-17

• 7/17 – 1 Corinthians 1:18-31

• 7/24 – 1 Corinthians 2:1-16

• 7/31 – 1 Corinthians 3:1-11

Celebrating 80 Years

Dear church family,

It was eighty years ago that the First Presbyterian Church of Sylva was formed.  Up until this point, there had never been a Presbyterian congregation in Jackson County.  Those who were committed to this expression of the Christian faith had to travel elsewhere for worship and fellowship in the Reformed tradition.  That is, until a group of women, led by Elizabeth Cope and Roberta Hooper, starting meeting for Bible study in homes across Sylva.  The Lord formed within them an imagination for something new and different: a Presbyterian church in the town they loved.  Soon thereafter, with backing from the nearby Bryson City Presbyterian Church, they formally organized a congregation in the Legion Building.  The date was June 4, 1941, and there were 12 charter members.  Our church family, as a part of the larger body of Christ, was born.

November 1949

Over the next eight years, amidst the challenges of World War II, the church grew.  We acquired land and eventually built a sanctuary and Fellowship Hall in 1949.  Much has happened in the meantime, of course.  Folks have come and gone, our buildings have expanded, and our town has grown.  But one thing has stayed as constant as the Plott Balsam mountains: our commitment to love one another, to love our community, and to love Jesus Christ, who first loved us.

In honor of this eightieth anniversary, we will be holding a special celebration on Sunday, September 26.  The celebration will begin with a worship service at 11:00am, during which we will hear and respond to God’s Word as we have done every week for the past eight decades.  Following the service, we will move to the church pavilion for a barbecue lunch, in which we will celebrate our past and once again dedicate our future to the glory of God.  This celebration is being coordinated by a Session-approved task force, so please let us know if you have ideas or support you would like to contribute.

Celebrating is always important, but it seems especially necessary given the year we have all endured.  We hope this celebration will be a homecoming and revival of sorts, with friends new and old joining together in the name of Jesus and recommitting themselves to his way of life and love.  As Jackie Painter wrote in her reflections on our fiftieth anniversary, “The work of this church has not always gone smoothly, but each year has given the people blessings and strength.  Isaiah 40:31 tells us, ‘Yet those who wait upon the Lord will gain new strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles; they will run and not get tired; they will walk and not become weary.’”

Whether we wait, mount up, run, or walk (or all of the above), I hope you will join us for this celebration and other upcoming events in our life together.  God is doing great things in Sylva, Jackson County, and all over the world.  And like those who have come before us, we have a part to play.

See you Sunday,
Blake

What's Your Mission? (pt. 2)

Last month I reflected on the topic of “mission.”  I’d like to continue in that vein this month.  Fall is a season when so many of us go back to school, back to work, back to routine – so it’s an important time to buckle down on what we’re called to do and why we’re called to do it.  We’ve also just started a four-week study of our church’s mission statement, so I hope this topic is fresh on your minds already.  Truthfully, there’s never a bad time to talk about mission, just like there’s never a bad time to check your compass to make sure you’re headed in the right direction.

The mission of First Presbyterian Church is to make disciples who love Jesus Christ, love the church, and love their neighbors as themselves.  That’s what we’re all about.  This mission is rooted first and foremost in the good news of Jesus Christ, which is nurtured in the context of Christ’s body, the church, and which is expressed out in the world for which Christ died.  As your pastor, my deepest hope is that you would believe in this mission, live it out, and teach others to do the same by the power of the Holy Spirit.

As a concrete invitation into this mission-centered way of life, I want to invite you to recommit yourself to our church family for this fall season.  Maybe you have traveled a lot this summer and have been out of the swing of things; maybe you’ve been busy with work or hobbies or simply sleeping in on Sunday mornings; maybe you’ve been coming to worship but have been looking for other ways to serve and grow.  Regardless of where you are, let this be the beginning of a new season of ministry for all of us.  Come check out a Sunday School class.  Enjoy food and fellowship at Family Night Supper.  Join us on our campout at beautiful Smokemont in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  Sign up to help the hospitality committee bring a meal to someone in need (and join the hospitality committee – or another committee – while you’re at it!).  Give financially to support the “Cornerstone” campaign.  And, of course, come to worship and lift your voice to the Lord.  We need you and your gifts among us to fulfill this mission together, to the glory of God.

Yours in Christ,

Blake

What's Your Mission?

What's your mission? 

If you had to write a mission statement for your life, what would it say?

I’ve been reflecting on these questions recently for two reasons.  First, the latest Mission: Impossible movie came out in theaters last month, and I’m eager to see it. (Tom Cruise is a wild man!)  Second – and more importantly – I’ve recently returned from a continuing education trip that focused on this very topic: mission and the church. 

During my time away, I met with seven other pastors to read through the work of the 20th century missionary Lesslie Newbigin.  Newbigin was adamant throughout his ministry that mission is not tangential to the gospel, but at the very heart of the gospel.  Jesus, after all, came on a mission to rescue us, and Jesus has commissioned us to make disciples in his name.  The church, therefore, doesn’t have a mission; the church is a mission – a “joyful participation in Christ’s ongoing life and work,” as our Presbyterian Book of Order says.

So if you’re wondering what your personal mission in life is, look to the Lord.  Look to Jesus.  He already has a mission statement for you, and he invites you to share in that mission with other people in a community called “church,” for the life of the world.

Starting at the end of August, I will preach four sermons on the topic of mission, focusing specifically on our mission statement at First Presbyterian Church: “To make disciples who love Jesus Christ, love the church, and love their neighbors as themselves.”  This statement has its roots in Jesus’ conversation with a teacher of the law in Luke 10.  We will study Scripture and break the statement down week-by-week to consider how God is leading us on mission together in Sylva and beyond.  I hope you’ll join us.

Yours in Christ,

Blake

Keeping Time Like a Christian

This coming Sunday (Dec. 3) marks the end of "ordinary time" and the beginning of "Advent."  What in the world does that mean?

For centuries, the church (meaning the whole church, Christians everywhere) has kept time in a unique and particular way.  We Christians have our own calendar, distinct from the Roman calendar used throughout Western civilization.  This Christian or "liturgical" calendar reminds us of our identity as God's family and attunes us to the rhythms of God's salvation story. 

Here is how Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove explain it:

“If we in church are going to take our citizenship in heaven seriously, we must reshape our minds by marking our calendars differently.  We must remember the holidays of the biblical narrative rather than the festivals of the Caesars, and celebrate feast days to remember saints rather than war heroes and presidents.  Our inception as a church was on Pentecost, not on July 4... The point is to keep God’s story at the center of our lives and calendar.  And it is through the lens of Jesus that we read history and interpret whether an event is good or bad... When we look at the Christian calendar, we are reminded that we are in the world but not of it.  We are citizens of the kingdom that transcends time, but we sojourn on a time-bound earth.  Without liturgical time, we can easily forget our eternal identity.  We can get lost in the hustle and bustle of business and efficiency that shapes our culture and society.  Likewise, without the cosmic calendar, we can become so heaven-bound that we ignore the hells of the world around us.  And the glorious goal we are headed toward is not just going up when we die but bringing God’s kingdom down - on earth as it is in heaven.”

— Common Prayer

As a pastor, I don't consider myself a high-church traditionalist (for example, I don't regularly wear a robe and colored stoles and preach through the Revised Common Lectionary).  But I do believe deeply in the church calendar as a tool that that grounds us in the truth of the Gospel and unites us to all Christians everywhere.  I very much agree with what Lauren Winner writes:

“I want the Christian story to shape everything I do, even how I reckon time. I want it to be truer and more essential to me than school’s calendar, or Hallmark’s calendar, or the calendar set by the IRS. I want the rhythms of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost to be more basic to my life than the days on which my quarterly estimated taxes are due.”

— Living the Christian Year

So you will notice the church calendar being referenced this time of year at First Presbyterian Church.  The songs and anthems will all reflect the Advent season (and notice, it's not the Christmas season - that comes on Dec. 25!).  The banner and parament colors will change to purple as a reminder of the royal birth of King Jesus.  The Advent wreath will be lit each week as a reminder of the light Christ brings.  I will be preaching through the assigned lectionary Bible texts to help us remember Israel's hope for the long-awaited Messiah.  None of this is for the sake of rote traditionalism.  We don't do it because it's what we have to do to be good Christians.  Rather, we do it for the sake of a lived faith, learning from those who have gone before us so that we might worship the Lord with gladness today.  I hope you'll join us during this beautiful time in the life of the church, so that all of us may be shaped by the Spirit in rhythms of grace.

- Blake

P.S. - Looking for more resources on this topic?  Check these out:

• Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality Through the Christian Year
• Shane Claiborne & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals
• Bobby Gross, Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God
• The Calvin Institute for Christian Worship, especially their resource The Worship Sourcebook (edited by John Witvliet)
• What in the World is Worship?, a document I put together to explain our services at FPC

Live in Unity

You can't be a Christian alone.  We can't be Christians alone.  As Scot McKnight says, When it comes to the Bible, WE is always bigger than ME.  So how is God challenging us to go a bit deeper with our brother or our sister?  How is God calling us to expand our horizons and see his hand at work through our church, and not just in our individual lives?

Reflect on these questions, and on the quotations below, as we seek the Lord's blessing together.

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“I have come to feel that the primary reality of which we have to take account in seeking for a Christian impact on public life is the Christian congregation. How is it possible that the gospel should be credible, that people should come to believe that the power which has the last word in human affairs is represented by a man hanging on a cross?

I am suggesting that the only answer, the only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it. I am, of course, not denying the importance of the many activities by which we seek to challenge public life with the gospel– evangelistic campaigns, distribution of Bibles and Christian literature, conferences, and even books such as this one.

But I am saying that these are all secondary, and that they have power to accomplish their purpose only as they are rooted in and lead back to a believing community.”

— Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989), 227.

“Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. No Christian community is more or less than this…

The death and the life of the Christian is not determined by his own resources; rather he finds both only in the Word that comes to him from outside, in God’s Word to him. The Reformers expressed it this way: Our righteousness is an “alien righteousness,” a righteousness that comes from outside of us (extra nos). They were saying that the Christian is dependent on the Word of God spoken to him. He is pointed outward, to the Word that comes to him…

But God has put his Word into the mouth of men in order that it may be communicated to other men. When one person is struck by the Word, he speaks it to others. God has willed that we should seek and find His living Word in the witness of a brother, in the mouth of a man. Therefore, the Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth. He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation. He needs his brother solely because of Jesus Christ. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure.

And that also clarifies the goal of all Christian community: they meet one another as bringers of the message of salvation.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

“I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world. summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God...

I believe that the community-in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures-is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms. ”

— Wendell Berry, Health is Membership

Buildings and "the Church"

How should Christians think about damage to their church property? Here are my thoughts from our June newsletter.

 - Blake

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"The church is not a building; the church is not a steeple; the church is not a resting place; the church is a people."

I’m sure you’ve heard this old song. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently. As you may know, we had a significant leak in the church on May 12. A hose burst from the water fountain, spilling water throughout the Fellowship Hall and down the hallway to the new parlor, nursery and preschool rooms, restrooms, and choir room. ServiceMaster was quickly on the job to dry everything out with heavy-duty fans and wet-vacs, and most church events have been uninterrupted. Thankfully we have good insurance, and they will be covering the costs of replacing ruined drywall, vinyl flooring, and carpet as over the next several weeks.

Throughout all this, I’ve had that song in my head: "We are the church together"... Is the church bricks and mortar? Nope. Is the church sheetrock and carpet? Nope. The church is us. Think about that for a second. You and me, sinners and saints: the church is us! Isn’t that incredible?

Consider one of my favorite Bible passages, Ephesians 2:19-22:

So now you are no longer strangers and aliens. Rather, you are fellow citizens with God’s people, and you belong to God’s household. As God’s household, you are built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. The whole building is joined together in him, and it grows up into a temple that is dedicated to the Lord. Christ is building you into a place where God lives through the Spirit.

Much (not all) of the Old Testament depicts the Temple as God’s dwelling place, a physical structure that served as God’s footstool on earth. The Temple was destroyed twice, and God’s people were scattered to live in exile and diaspora. But when the time was right, "The Word became flesh and moved into the neighborhood" (John 1:14, The Message). Jesus was born.

Suddenly God was no longer believed to dwell in a Temple; God was believed to dwell among his people. As Jesus began his ministry, he alluded to himself as a new Temple, one which would be destroyed before rising again in three days. In doing this, Jesus laid the foundation for his church, the gathering of his people who share life together in Christ, the new Temple. We who call ourselves First Presbyterian Church are simply the living extension of that foundation and cornerstone: men and women and boys and girls who love Jesus, love his church, and love our neighbors in Sylva and beyond.

Does a physical building help our mission? Of course. But our mission doesn’t depend on it. Our mission depends on Jesus, who, by his Spirit, makes us his church. The rest is just icing on the cake.