March 30, 2023 Speech to NMI Convention by Dr. Boone

Well, it’s good to, good to be here with you. And I want to try. This is new. I’ve never done this with anybody before. But when Chuck started to tell me what this was supposed to be about, I thought, I really want to take a stab at that because I’m interested in it. 
I’m intrigued by people movements, that something happens, and all of a sudden, people who were never connected or never knew one another come together around this thing that happens. And like each person is a single string, but their life gets woven into the lives of other people in ways that there’s now a fabric. Sometimes it’s a product that does that. Sometimes it’s a team that does that. Other times it’s a practice or a trend, or a cause, but for some reason, human beings decide to gather and coalesce and be woven together into a particular kind of people. And I’m fascinated by that because that is what the Church of Jesus Christ is. When you stop and look at it, God has brought people from every nation, language, tribe, and color together and has woven our lives into something we call the church, the fabric of the church. And we’re extremely different. I mean, we are rich and poor, black and white, young and old, liberal and conservative, cheap and generous  loud and quiet, big and little, right and wrong, fancy and plain. I mean, we’re just really, really different. These threads that God brings together are dramatically different. And yet, the tapestry that is woven by what God does, is something that only God can do in the world. I love the, I love the letter to the Colossians where. Paul was writing, and he talks about how all things cohere in Jesus Christ. He literally is using a word that’s kind of like the word glue, that in Christ, all things come together. All things are brought together. There is, in God, these woven people. These people that were once individual threads out here running our own way, that is brought together and woven into the body of Christ. 
But as we have watched this church over these last couple of decades, I have to confess to you, we’re unraveling. We’re coming apart at the seams. And sociology has now developed two interesting terms to discuss this coming apart at the seams. The first term is the term “Nones”.  No, I’m not talking about the Catholic women who wear the garbs. I’m talking about “Nones”. Because in all the surveys that are there, people used to check I’m Baptist, I’m Nazarene, I’m Presbyterian, I’m Catholic and on and on. Finally, there’s that one at the bottom that says, “None of the above”. And very slowly across the last two or three decades, all of these categories have lost people into the category of the “Nones”. Those who say, I don’t know what I am, and I’m not sure what I believe, but I will tell you, I’m none of these. And that category has been growing significantly. They might still drop by from time to time, but they have in essence, pulled their string from the woven fabric of the church, and have declared, I’m not part of that anymore. 
Now I just have to ask the question, do you know anybody that’s done that in your local church in the last 10 years? I mean, if you would say, I know somebody that used to be a part of us, woven into the fabric of who we are. Just, you know, part of the glue that God lives together. They were the woven people and now they pulled the thread, and they’re out there somewhere. How many do you know someone in your local church like that?  Would you just raise your hand? And how many of you know more than five people like that? Would you raise your hand? Far too many hands still. They are our former brothers and sisters, who once belonged to us, with us, for us, and among us, and now they don’t and they’re called the “Nones”. 
There’s a second psychological term, or sociological term, it’s the “Dones”, the “Dones”. They’ve just started measuring this. And I read a research report coming out of the Pew Research Center on to hear recently. But “Dones” are one-step past the “Nones”. These are the people who are saying, “I am done with Christianity”. And that group is now growing significantly in our world. What I was interested in, though, were the four top reasons why that particular group of people who were “Nones” and had turned into “Dones”. Why that group of people left the church, but not only the church, but left their Christian faith and said, “I’m done with Christianity”. 
The number one reason was they intellectually outgrew their faith. Their faith became insufficient to help them reason or understand their life and the world that they lived in. Their faith could not withstand the scrutiny or pressure of a world that required answers. And they said, I came to the place in my life, where that, that I had come to believe in, was no was no longer sufficient to support the life that I felt like I needed in the world. They left, because they intellectually outgrew their faith. I was surprised at that. I would have guessed that would have been on the list, I would not have guessed that would be the top reason. We’ll talk about that a little more in a moment.
The second reason was religious trauma. These folks walked away because of things like sexual abuse by religious figures, hypocrisy, hatred, slander, abuse of power, in other words, they experience something in the weaving together of their life with other Christians lives that caused them a level of trauma. They looked at that. They could not rationalize that. They could not figure that out. And that religious trauma, harmed them to the point that they started pulling on the thread, until they pulled it all the way out of the fabric, and they walked away and said, “I’m done. I’m done with this”. 
The third reason was personal adversity. They lost a child, and their faith was shattered, or a marriage ended, or a suicide impacted them, a depression set in, an unhealthy relationship wounded them in some way. In other words, what happens in life happened to them and they began to realize, out of this adversity, they did not find within their faith that which was capable of supporting them and helping them through that and in that. In other words, in the words of one “Done” person who said, “I came to the point where the people that I had belonged to were no longer able to help me get through what life was throwing at me. And I walked away, and I’m done”. 
The fourth reason, the social reasons. Their circle of friends drew them away from the faith. Their job drew them away from their faith. A sports league on Sunday became more important to them, or their own family, just kind of revolted said, “I don’t go anymore. I don’t want to go to church anymore. You can go by yourself if you want to, but I’m not with you”. And their social network of people that they were doing life with at work, recreationally, their own family, their social network of people said, I’m done with this, and they followed them out the door. The people in their lives, the ones that they say matter, weren’t believers, and the choice was made to separate from the church. For all of these reasons, people decided they were done with the church. 
Now granted, Covid, has increased our isolation from one another and made it easier and easier to pull our thread out. I mean, when we’re no longer sitting on church rows together, but we’re looking into a screen it becomes easier to turn a screen off than it is to walk away from a friend who we sit next to in church. So Covid, it has exposed what I think was already happening in terms of the unraveling of the woven fabric of the people of God and the church. And this challenge is not necessarily a new challenge for us. In the letter to the Hebrews, the writer deals with the reality, that Christians are abandoning their faith in Jesus. If you study the book of Hebrews carefully, you’ll see that a lot of it is written to people who are reverting back to Judaism. They’re finding that Christianity was falling under levels of oppression and persecution and they think, well, it probably a lot easier to be in a safe religion, so they move back to Judaism. It’s why, in the book of Hebrews, you have so much of Jesus being shown as the better sacrifice, the better high priest, the better temple, the better alter, the better life. The writer to the Hebrews, is trying to reason with these “Dones” about them going back to something else. The other thing is, we’re just beginning to see in the letter to the Hebrews, the wheels falling off in people’s lives as they come under pressure, and they decide to renounce the faith in Jesus that they once clung to so carefully. We get all the way over to Hebrews, Chapter 10. And the writer then writes this for us, “Therefore my brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh. And since we have a great high priest over the House of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith with our heart sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies wash with pure water. Let us hold fast to the confession of our oath, without wavering, for He who has promised his faithful, and let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another all the more as you see the day approaching. You may be seated. 
Let’s unpack this just a little bit. That first verse, “my brothers and sisters we have confidence in and sanctuary by the blood of Jesus’ newly living way be opened up throughout the curtain that is the body of Jesus. We have a great high priest over the House of God. You know, this is phenomenal news, this basically says that our God has worked in the flesh of Jesus Christ to open up a new and living way between where we are and where God is. That God has created for us access to God by coming to us in the person of Jesus. And we can live our lives in the presence of God. This is a possibility, made possible by God in a wonderful way. So the writer says, because God has made this possibility true for all of us, there are three things we ought to do.
Number one, you see it there in verse 22, “Let us approach with a true heart and full assurance of faith with heart sprinkle clean from an evil conscience. In other words, since God has opened up this way into his presence, let’s go there, let’s travel this new and living way that has been opened up for us. Let’s move from where we are in this present existence into the very presence of God that we may live in the fitness of his sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, where the blood of Jesus has been sprinkled. Let’s go to this intimate place of holiness. 
The second thing he says is in the next verse. Let’s hold fast with the confession of our hope without wavering. In other words, what we have believed and what we have come to believe in Christ. Let’s throw or arms around that, let’s hang on to that. Let’s so root ourselves in that, that it gives us hope, that gives us great hope, deep hope, unwavering hope in a world of “Nones” and “Dones” let’s find a way that what we must deeply believe becomes the very core and the ground of our being and it grants to us hope in this world. So let’s go to where God is. Let’s live in his presence, and let’s hang on to what we believe. 
And the third one there is verse 24 let us considerate how to provoke one another to love and good deeds. And the word provoked there really is the word provoke. In the Greek it’s the word irritate. Let us just get under one another skin about loving each other. Let’s pester each other about doing good deeds. Let’s not let a person rest. Let’s needle them about this life of loving service to other people that we are to be woven together with in this. 
So this is a wonderful text and you come all the way down to verse 25. And a place I want to let down a little bit of weight tonight, is that negative statement that we find in verse 25. “Not forgetting, to meet with one another”. You see that? “Not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another. Not neglecting to meet. Don’t stop meeting together in the ways that knit you together as the fabric and tapestry of the people of God. Don’t stop meeting together in the ways that grounded you in what you believe. Don’t stop meeting together in the ways that allow you to love one another and provoke one another to do love and good deeds. Don’t stop meeting together in the way that sustains the fabric of the local church. 
Let me do a little bit of religious history with you. Early America, the largest church in America was the Methodist Church. It was a church that swept the country. They were located in every county. It was a movement that had revival attached to it. And at the core of the early Methodist movement was a gathering called the class meeting. That’s what they called it. Lot of times it was on Wednesday night, but there were all different times. They called it the class meeting. 
Now the class meeting was not a prayer meeting where everybody who wants to comes. The class meeting was a part of Wesley’s bands and cells of small groups of people that came together to study the scriptures together, pray for one another, confess their sins to one another, give accountability for their life and to plan and practice the doing of deeds of love and mercy to other people that were around them. And the class meeting was as normal to a Methodist congregation as a potluck dinner is to a church in Nazareth congregation. It’s just like they did this. This is what they did. You didn’t have a Methodist Church if you didn’t have a class meeting. And the class meeting became this network of groups within these Methodist churches that knit them together group by group by group by group by group. 
When you look at the dramatic decline of the United Methodist Church over this period of time that has been my lifetime here in the United States, a lot of religious historians point to the neglect of the class meeting as the beginning of the decline of Methodism in America. 
Something really interesting began to happen at that point. They used to count the attendance at all the class meetings, the bands, the cells, the groups, and they stopped counting that, and they started counting the worship service. And very slowly in Methodism, what happened was the large Sunday gathering began to replace the small gathering of believers through the week. 
Now Methodism continued to grow for a while, but even as it was growing in that Sunday morning gathering, it was beginning to unravel in its relationships within the congregations, because they neglected meeting together in the kind of ways that had knit their lives together and woven them together in these great ways. And that my friends was the beginning of what happened in Methodism that is so sad, these Methodist churches growing larger and larger. Their Methodist churches may have been growing larger in Sunday worship attendance, but the fabric of their church unraveled as people neglected to meet together in the way that they historically had. And once that fabric is gone, it only takes a little bit of something to cause someone to say, I’m none of this anymore, or I’m done with this at this point. 
This is what I think is happening to us in the Church of the Nazarene. I think the discipleship fabric of our denomination has been unraveling now for a few decades. The strength of our Sunday school classes, the strength of our small groups, the strength of our men’s gatherings, the strength of our women’s Bible studies, the strength of and you could just name a ton of them. And all these have weakened. While we may have been able to sustain our worship attendance for a period of time, people who began to be associated with the church primarily through the thread that connected them to a worship service, instead of the thread that connected them in a body of friends who met consistently and knew one another, loved one another and cared for one another. And when that happens, a church becomes less strong because it does not have the kind of interwoven lives that we have known and we’ve had before. When that fabric is gone, it only takes a little bit to cause a person who’s been hanging by the thread of a worship service alone to become a “None” or a “Done”. 
The morning worship service, I don’t like the music anymore, I’m done. We got a new pastor, I don’t like him as much as I did the one that we used to have, I’m done. They missed a hospital visit on me when I was in the hospital, I’m done. Somebody said something political in the sermon today, and I don’t agree with it and I’m done. My kid likes the youth group two blocks away better than this youth group, we’re done. Ah man, a bad thing happened to me, and there’s nobody in this church I can talk to about this, I’m done. The traumatic experience, a personal adversity, or my friends just aren’t here anymore, they’re somewhere else. You see what slowly happens here? 
A movement who’s strength is actually in the linkage of its people’s lives together and weekly, supportive gatherings of love and study and prayer and confession and accountability, when that unravels the threads that hold us together are the threads of I attend that church. And we’re not talking about our best friends anymore. We’re not talking about the people who will be beside us when we are in adversity. We’re talking about a looser connection, a looser affiliation, and the world shakes a little bit, and you get “Nones” and “Dones ”who are coming out everywhere. 
I think this is happening to the Nazarenes. Our Sunday schools, our small groups, our gatherings are not what they used to be. We don’t even go over to each other’s house on Sunday nights or Friday nights, or whenever, and sit around and eat pie and drink coffee together and tell stories while the kids are playing out in the backyard. We’ve given up the habit of meeting together in these kind of ways. 
What’s even sadder is the number of our Nazarene churches that I have watched shrink to a small group. Let me just say that again. It breaks my heart to see that as this happens, what slowly happens is that the church that used to be 50, 60, 80, 120, and had 10 or 12 vibrant groups in it. Now it’s not much more than one small group, who happens to just also worship together on a Sunday morning. 
I was with some of our denominational leaders recently, and they’re talking about the dramatic decline in the sale of Sunday School curriculum. They said, “Churches just aren’t doing it anymore. They’re not buying it anymore.” With this unraveling of the fabric of our togetherness, there comes a time like you and I are living in right now. You take a denomination who is weakened in its fabric in this way, and then you introduce the most divisive, angry, hateful, arrogant judgmental mood in culture in our lifetime. 
We have never lived in a meaner age than the one that we live in America today. And when suddenly that gets injected into the mainstream, the ability to hold people together, to weave people together, who may be dramatically different and have very different opinions and see things differently, the ability to do that becomes even more and more fragile. And we end up even in our church’s stereotyping one another, abusing people, impugning motives, attaching labels to people, calling each other names, judging each other, and for some crazy reason, we think that what we’re doing is defending the Gospel of being true to the gospel when we do that. But what we’re actually doing is we’re rending the fabric of the body of Christ and if we keep doing this, there will be no Church of the Nazarene. 
Chuck, aren’t you glad you brought me down here to share all this really good news with folks? 
We’re gonna turn a corner here, Okay folks. I do want to say this to you; I’m really not given to the survival of the Church of Nazarene. I don’t spend any time thinking about it. I’m not actually working on it. I don’t think it matters that much to God if our denomination survives or not. 
I think what matters to God is that disciples get made in all of the nations. I think what matters to God is that people of faith are having their lives woven together, and they are meeting together in the kind of ways that builds them up in love, encourages one another, deepens them in their faith, and sends them into the world as a loving people. I think what matters to God is that the world knows that we are Christians, by the way that we love one another. By the way, that groups of people from communities come together and take care of each other in the hard parts, in the difficult times, in all those moments. I think this is where God wants us to put our focus and our function in all of these ways. Let me just say this about it. 
If the Church of the Nazarene falls flat on it’s face and disappears, I don’t think it is, matter of fact, I think God’s doing some reviving among us these days that’s quite beautiful. But even if we did, God would take all of us threads and He would weave us into something else.  Something that would glorify Him, something that would be holy, and beautiful and good. So God is not gonna quit weaving our individual threads into a body of Christ of some sort. The big thing that excites me is we’re over here saying, “Lord, How about us?” Could we be your people in this culture that does something radically effective enough to make a major difference in the lives of human beings? I don’t think that we need is a strategy for survival. I think what we need is a strategy to save the world that we live in. The data that I’m seeing is very, very clear about this. We are living in the loneliest age in America. 
People are more afraid, more confused, more angry. They’re hurting. They’re hopeless. We see it in so many different places, like mental illness and suicide’s, addiction to smart phones, isolation. We see it in all these ways.  I get to see it close up with every new generation that shows up in college every year. And I look at generation Z carefully, I mean these are kids thrown into an ocean of information and their lives are busier than I’ve ever thought about trying to be. I mean, frenetic energy stuff going on all the time, everywhere. So they’re swimming in this ocean of information where they can know more than anybody else could ever know. And they’ve got all this stuff to do, and at the core of their being is a hollowness that they do not know what to do with all of this information. They do not know how to knit together all of this activity that they’re involved in. There is no cohesion because our culture has said to them, you better get out there in the world and mark yourself, brand yourself, create your identity. You better go out there and show them who you are. You gotta go be somebody. So build your own identity, and they’ve tried to do it, and they realize it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because human beings weren’t ever created to create ourselves, to create our own identity, our identity is a gift from the God who said, I’ve made you my image and likeness. God tells us who we are. God doesn’t tell us go figure ourselves out. He says, God tells us who we are. 
And so all of this stuff is going on. I’m watching men in America today. You know the new problem, you know the new problem in men’s restrooms in airports, this is just really crazy. You can’t get a stall anymore. Why? Because men who are so isolated from one another go in a stall and sit down and turn their smartphone on, and they will sit in there for 20 minutes waiting on the next flight to take off. It’s a signal of loneliness, of isolation, of looking for four walls that will separate me from everybody else.
I said back there a few minutes ago and listened to this talk about a men’s retreat. The men of America need a men’s retreat. The men of America need the ability to sit in a room with other men and worship. Young moms in America today, the mental illness and depression were beginning to see in that group of people, because they are locked away from relationships with others, trying to care for little children, or balance a life of work and care for little children at the same time. And that weight has become oppressive in their life. 
The church is this unique body of God that is able to look out across the horizon of our community and see all of these individual threads that are in trouble. They’re lonely, they’re depressed, they’re anxious, they’re fearful. They don’t know what to do about this. They don’t know how to make meaning of their life. They’re busy, but there’s nothing-good coming out of it. They have all the information they need, but they have no wisdom about what to do with it. The church has the ability to look in our community and say, I think we can pull these threads together, and we can create the kind of groupings in our church that addresses the kind of needs that are in the world where we live today. Men’s groups, young moms groups, widows groups, youth groups, seniors groups, singles groups, serious Bible study groups, marriage therapy groups, eating disorder groups, alcoholics anonymous recovery groups, you know, the list is forever. And you already know it, because you do a lot of these in your church. If you multiply the groups that are in your church in tandem with the need that is in your community, you would find yourself a healthier body, a more varied body, a more diverse body than what you are. But you would find yourself a different body than what you are when the Sunday morning worship becomes the last thread that holds all of us together in this time. 
These groups, I think, need to deal with the four topics that I was talking about just a moment ago. And I’ll close with these. Just look at these again. Intellectually, outgrew their faith. You know, we, we’ve gotten afraid to talk about the hard stuff. Um, because it’s politically charged, and people get mad and they leave, or because they have a different opinion, and they get mad and they leave, or because they already have their mind made up, and they make everybody else uncomfortable so we get tired of them, and we leave. Yeah, but there is a hunger in America today for the for the head of the human being, the logic and reason and thinking of a human being to be connected with what we most deeply believe. 
I spent my life doing this. God called me as a young pastor into the college arena. And I pastored in college arenas for 20 years, and now I’ve been a president and one for 18 years. And what I found is the generation that comes to college, if they do not find a church that will talk with them about the hard questions that they are asking, they will leave, and they will go somewhere else. They will find a place where they can talk about what they need to talk about. And if they get into conversations where they get shut down and cut off before they can even get started asking their question, they will know this is probably not the kind of place that’s going to help me explore this. 
In the writing that I’ve done across the years, I’ve tried to address this stuff. The book I’ve done, called “A Charitable Discourse: Talking about the Things That Divide Us”, I chose seven really easy topics to start with, politics, sexuality, religion, the emerging church at that point, women preachers, I’m trying to remember the others, alcohol. So just don’t write in on those, because what I realized is, these are the questions that we’re asking. The second version of that, and now, and that one was on war, and immigration and other kind of issues that are out there. Because I think in our disciplining intent, people are looking for a place where their faith grows right alongside their intellect. They’re looking for a place where they feel more and more grounded, where they can talk biblically about the things that they are experiencing, where they can look at the evening news and say, this is that, and this is that, and this is how sin is on the move, and this. People are looking for that in remarkable ways. We try to do that in college. 
What’s really interesting to me is the Christian College may be the last university site where that is happening. Secular university presidents in our state say to me all the time, we cannot have the conversations on our campus that you have on your campus. Because the moment we do, there’s going to be political pressure from both the right and the left, and they’re going to be coming after our jobs, and we can’t do it. We cannot imagine how in the world you can have conversations about immigration law and war in Russia and Ukraine and human sexuality, how you can have conversations about these things and not get killed. And I say there’s one simple reason we have something you don’t have, Jesus Christ is the glue. 
Jesus is the one who matters so much to us that we’re willing to look at someone that we are diametrically are opposed to their position and say, you are my brother in Christ, you are my sister in Christ and our disagreement is not going to unravel our relationship with one another. I’m not going to stop loving you, even though your politics are really messed up. And on a college campus, we feel called to raise a generation of students who have such high respect and regard for one another, that these kind of conversations can happen. We talk about racism and CRT and politics. I mean, just go down the line of all of it. We talk about these things because we believe that God is interested in us loving him with our heart, soul, mind and strength. The conversion is about the conversion of the whole person and when we get so afraid that in our disciplining, we can never try to address the intellectual questions that are being asked, in the world that we live in, hard questions, questions that I’ll confess you, I don’t have the answer to half of them yet. 
I mean, I thought, as I would grow older, I would have more and more of this stuff figured out, as I’ve grown older and older my list of questions keeps growing. It’s just a part of what it means to be a developing follower of Jesus Christ in a world like this. So in the kind of work we do in the church, we gotta tend to that. Religious trauma, I’ll put these two together, religious trauma and personal adversity. I mean, we need groups that are specializing in how to deal with sexual abuse and addiction and suicide and the loss of a child. All of these kind of things, they become critically important in a world like ours. We look at the needs that are there. 
I remember the year that the junior high school in the town where I was pastoring had about seven suicides in that one year. I just remember going over to the principal’s office and walking in and said, “I don’t have a solution, but this is breaking my heart. How do we come alongside you and help?” And, I mean, that principle threw the doors of that school open for our people to come and just be talking points. You know, if you’re depressed today, if you’re discouraged today, there’s some people that are going to meet you in the cafeteria, and there, you know, they’re wearing a white shirt or whatever, just go over to the table and talk to them. And we began to have our people who cared about this issue in our community begin to step into those spaces and help people. We got to deal in our group life with trauma and tragedy and the kind of adversity that comes to people’s life. 
And then the last one there, social reasons, friendships that are cultured and nurtured and maintained on weekly basis. It was interesting to me another study, I love to read studies. I’m a research nut. The churches that recovered fastest after Covid, not the ones that had a slick online service, the ones who were able to keep their group life going. The ones that had groups of people, Sunday School classes, groups of moms, groups of seniors that set a time and every week, they got on zoom together and said how are you doing? Well, I’m tired of eating this. I really can’t wait for Wendy’s to open back up again. You know, they got together, and they did that. The congregations that kept group life moving through COVID when the walls opened up in the all the doors came down, all of a sudden, here they come. They’re back in worshiped again together. It’s that relational strength. 
So I want to close out with some homework for you tonight. How has God placed you and wired you to start some kind of small group? I don’t care what you call it. Call it a Sunday school class. You can call it a small group, a band, a cell, a class meeting, padres, partners or posse. I mean, call whatever you want to call it. But how is God placed you and put interest in you, or broken your heart over something, or given you a hunger and thirst to know something. How has God wired you? To gather 6, 8, 10 people every week and say, let’s study this together. Let’s do this together. Let’s work on this together. Let’s figure this out. Let’s just talk together in this way. 
Our lives, I was thinking about it on the plane coming down, our lives have been so enriched by the groups that we belong to. Denise and our first pastor in Raleigh, NC, she started, well, she didn’t start it. I mean, she didn’t even try to start. This was never an organization of any kind. She invited a couple of moms on a Thursday morning to meet her over at the McDonald’s that had an indoor playground. So that all the little kids could play in the playground while they sat and had coffee together and just talked. And three or four joined her. And over the period of about six months, it just grew and grew and grew and grew. And moms came and brought their kids to play with one another and began to talk about life and what they were experiencing. And before long, somebody was bringing a devotional to each one. Then after that, they were inviting some older moms in the congregation to come and talk to them about different topics of child rearing and family life. And you know she didn’t try to start a group. She just did what seemed to be helpful and natural in that kind of moment. 
I pastored, a woman named Marilyn, who lost her husband, Louis, they had a rich and wonderful relationship. She went about six months, and one day she told me, she came to me at the end of a service, and she said, I’m sick and tired of it, and I’m doing something about it. And I said, “What Marilyn”, she said, “I watch everybody head out to the restaurants after Sunday service. And nobody ever invites us widows to go along”. She said, “I’m starting a ministry called Widow’s Might, and we’re going to have lunch together every Sunday”. And from that, it became a Tuesday night gathering for Widows all over that community. They brought in auto mechanics to teach them how to change oil in their cars. They brought in tax people to show them how to do their own taxes now. They brought in retirement benefit people to help them to, I mean, she was going out and collecting all of these people, and these widows came. They needed to know this stuff, but what they needed more than anything else was to be woven together. So that their single thread that widowhood had left them with, who would now be joined with others, and they would live in a fellowship where they would love and be loved and serve one another. 
For about six years of my life, I met every Tuesday morning; I think I remember right, Tuesday morning with Don Dunnington and Dan Sprouse on the campus of Trevecca Nazarene University. I was a pastor at that point there on the campus. And the three of us met early, early in the ungodly, early in the morning. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything, because those two men became my brothers. And Don came down with Parkinson’s, with not Parkinson’s, not Leukemia, Hodgkin’s. During that time, and we almost lost him, I mean, almost lost him. He was the chaplain of the university. And the three of us walked through those days and wasted and found our lives together. And it doesn’t take 2 minutes to being together again, until the richness of the depth of that fellowship is real. 
Denise and I, when we were pastors of the Olivette College Church, we started ministries called home groups. We said to college kids, if you want to place hang out on Sunday night, where you can just talk about what’s going on in your life, we’ll find your home. If you, if you’ll find the leader and gather the kids. And for, I think it was six consecutive years, we had about 20 college kids on our living room floor every Sunday night. And they talked about everything, everything. I don’t mean to be gross or anything like that. But they, you know, can you cuss and not go to hell? That was one of the topics that we talked about one night. Sexual relationships, and, I mean, they, their questions were as crass as you want to imagine them being. And they would just ask it right out loud. 
One of our group members was killed in an accident, and it set our group into a deep, deep sadness. And we talked for, I think, 5-6 weeks in a row on where is God when a friend dies in a tragic accident? What if you marry the wrong person, what do you do then? God, I just, you know. Scott Creamer was back through Nashville two weeks ago, and we had dinner with his family, and we sat there and we talked all across dinner about everything that being in that home group had done for him in his life. And he said with tears in his eyes, “I don’t know if I would be here today, if it weren’t for that home group, because there were times in there when I was so lost, so lost. If it had not been for that group of people I would have walked away from my faith.” These are the kind of things that we do that knit the fabric of the church together. 
So I want to encourage you. Work on what you might do about this. Be a weaver within your community. Find a way to find those loose threads that are out there and bring them together into something that would be a fabric that is beautiful in the ways of God and expected God will be at work in your life, even as you do that.

Can pray with you? Let us pray! God I marvel how you do it. I look at the people that are gathered in groups under the name of Jesus. And there’s literally nothing that could happen on the face of the earth that would bring that group of people together and bind them together in love and caused them to be devoted to one another and to you, other than the glue that we find in Jesus Christ. You give the world a mosaic masterpiece of human threads, different colors and textures and fabrics and thickness and length. You give the world this woven assortment of people and when the world sees that, they know that these are usually the kind of people that only like the people that like them and hang with the people that think like them. And the world sees us at work and knows that a miracle of divine proportions is it work, in the way that we love one another. And it causes them not to be “None or Done”, but it causes them to be won by the kind of love that they see demonstrated. Would you take us as Nazarenes back to our roots in some keyways and help us once again to know how to weave the fabric of threads that will knit our churches together more tightly and expand their influence more broadly. Because we trust in you to be able to do that.  In the name of Jesus. We pray. And all God’s people said, Amen, Amen.