When Bishop John Spong came to Kansas City a few years ago, he suggested rather forcefully that the church doesn’t really need people to be born again.  We need people to grow up!  In other words, the world needs mature Christians.  His comments were intended to focus in a very emphatic way on the need for people of faith to mature, to grow up in terms of our faith and our living.  But maturing does not just mean growing older.  To become mature in faith is to take the solid values we received as children, to examine them honestly, and to find ways of making them our own.  This is a vital process – absolutely essential to our being able to contribute to the dream of transforming this world in terms of God’s love, justice, and peace. 

Our society both loves and hates youth. We crown young idols, make them stars, and inundate with adulation, money, and fame.  Then, we take a perverse delight in watching them crash and burn.  We are media-fed and anxiety-driven.  Young people, not-so-young people, businesses, and even many churches are caught up in destructive patterns, image wars, and the judgment of popular opinion.   We need more adults. 

Being an adult means some very concrete things:  It means standing up to what is wrong and for what is right.  It means exercising both compassion and tough-love; leading by example, and taking the risk of not being popular.  It means teaching our children not only information about our faith’s values, but also offer them the value of trustworthy adults.   It means interpreting for our own time what it means to follow Jesus now:  to take faith seriously and the Bible seriously without taking ourselves too seriously.

Being a mature Christian Church means making some challenging choices: 

• to be inclusive, as radically inclusive as we can possibly be
• to participate in our neighborhoods so that the buildings in which we meet become outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual commitment to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbors as ourselves
• to promote freedom with all its dangers and to be community with all its restrictions
• to worship dynamically and interactively – to celebrate joyfully and to sit quietly
• to focus on asking and inviting honest questions – ones we ask out loud right in church. 
• to invite, encourage, and challenge the whole Church to move toward living together in peace
• to work, as communities of faith, to lead the whole world toward God’s Shalom.

I pray each of us will take the challenge to become and live as adults in our society, and that the growth our congregations seek first and foremost is growth toward maturity.  Without mature Christians, how can we be full partners with God in the bringing of God’s Shalom?

Thanks for continuing to bless me as we journey together.

--Jack Price