Time to Rebuild: Nehemiah 1

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Four years ago, I was teaching through a series of messages that I entitled, Under Construction. It was a series that covered my vision for what a church really should be. We discussed the core values that should be present in every church and also in the life and heart of every believer.

Worship

I shared how Worship had to be the starting point for everything that we do. Life is not about us, it is about God and God alone. Everything else either derives from God or it is worthless.

Community

I shared how Community needed to be the second major value present in our church and in our lives. God himself lives in the community of the Trinity—Father, Son and Holy Spirit living in perfect love with each other. Likewise, we should be living in community with each other. God has built us together into a family, and his will is for us to love each other like family.

Growth

I shared how Growth needed to be constant for our church and also for our personal lives. None of us has attained perfection, which, I’m sorry to say, is obvious to anyone who knows us. (Turn to your neighbor and say, “I’ve known for a long time that you aren’t perfect.”) But if we haven’t reached perfection, that means we have room to grow, and since God’s will for us is to become like Jesus, we have a LOT of growing to do, and since God’s will is for the whole world to come to know him, we have a LOT of growing to do as a church.

Ministry

I shared how Ministry needed to be the final core value for us. I shared that each one of us has gifts and talents that God has given to us for the express purpose of positively impacting the lives of others with the love of Christ.

My congregation has heard me talk about these four things time and time again in the years I have been here, and honestly, we aren’t all that different as a church from where we were four years ago. There are many different faces, but as a church, we aren’t that different. I think I know why, but I’ll get to that in a bit.

Crossroads

Anyway, as a church, we are at a major crossroads right now. Jen and I are raising support to plant a church in Indiana, and we will be leaving in six to nine months. We have just adopted a new set of Bylaws and a new governing structure complete with a new leadership team that is set to discuss what the transition of the church will look like.

I’m convinced that it’s time for us to do a little re-evaluating and rebuilding as a church, and the good news is that there is a book in the Bible that directly addresses the issue of rebuilding. Nehemiah tells us the story of a man named Nehemiah who got a passion and a vision to rebuild the wall of Jerusalem. By considering that book, we will get a better sense of the kind of rebuilding that God might want to do in our midst.

Things Are a Mess

This is how the book of Nehemiah starts out.

Nehemiah 1:1-3
The words of Nehemiah son of Hacaliah:
In the month of Kislev in the twentieth year, while I was in the citadel of Susa, Hanani, one of my brothers, came from Judah with some other men, and I questioned them about the Jewish remnant that survived the exile, and also about Jerusalem.
They said to me, “Those who survived the exile and are back in the province are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been burned with fire.”

Some History

Let me give you a little background on what’s happening at the point this book is written. In order to understand this book, you only really have to know that Israel had originally been the people God chose for himself to be a holy nation worshipping him, blessed by him, and blessing others as a result. The problem was that Israel consistently rejected God. The people continued to play around with the religious systems of their neighbors and didn’t ever really take God seriously.

Eventually, the northern part of the country split off from the southern part and went completely off the religious deep end, while the southern part stayed partially committed to God. There came a time, though, when God decided he wouldn’t put up with it all anymore. He had the Assyrians come and conquer the northern half of the nation and then later had the Babylonians come and conquer the southern half. The northerners were wiped out, but many of the southerners were taken into exile to live in the land of the Babylonians.

Many years passed, the Babylonians were conquered by the Persians, and we now find ourselves listening to Nehemiah in Susa, the capital city of the Persian empire.

Nehemiah’s Situation

So here’s this fellow Nehemiah, and at this point in the book, we don’t know anything about him other than his dad’s name, his city, and the name of one of his brothers.

Now, we don’t know how this came about, but somehow Nehemiah’s brother was given the freedom to go back to Judah, the name of the southern part of Israel. When he got back, Nehemiah asked him how things were.

The report wasn’t good: The people were dealing with trouble and disgrace, and the walls of the city were burned down.

The walls were burned down! This wasn’t any city. This was Jerusalem! This was God’s chosen city. In the whole earth, God had chosen only one location for a temple to His name, and that location was Jerusalem. To think that the walls were broken down was a completely demoralizing thing for any Jew. It was the ultimate symbol that God had given up on his people. What a terrible thing to realize.

Now, I want to take a little break here to ask you a question. If the report given were not about Jerusalem but about our church, what would it be like?

Over it’s past 60 years, this church has gone through some really interesting times. I still don’t know the entire history, but I’ll share just a couple things that I do know.

Our History

• The church started with over 400 people in attendance and had vibrant ministries for many years, however, as the neighborhood continued to change, as the environment of the city began to change, and as people began to move to the suburbs, the membership of this church declined gradually and steadily.
• One pastor, Ralph Gade, went to great lengths to reach out to the Jewish people in the area and to open the eyes of the congregation to the spiritual needs of Jewish people, even leading trips to Israel. However, some people got so frustrated with the amount of time that pastor was spending on things outside the church that he eventually resigned and a number of people left the church. Some still don’t talk to each other even today.
• Two pastors ago, during the leadership of Duwayne Lee, the church restructured itself to have a small leadership team called the elder board and composed of men only. However, that team was given so much responsibility that there soon began to be tensions between them and the other ministries of the church. The ministry leaders would complain that they were being micro-managed by the elder board. There was also a lack of trust between the ministry leaders and the elder board. At times, the elder board was even accused of being a “good old boys club.”
• There was one man who repeatedly got on the elder board and was consistently made the chairman of the board even though a number of people realized that his gifts were not in line with such a level of leadership. That man, however, continued to pursue greater levels of responsibility and when pastor Lee left, he attempted to get the church to start paying him for all the work he was doing as the chairman of the elder board. In response to that, he wasn’t reelected, and he left the church.
• Then, during the leadership of Dave Clark, the church restructured itself to remove the elder board and put the leaders of individual ministries in collective leadership of the church with a separate board to concern itself with pastoral matters.
• By the time Dave Clark retired, the regular Sunday attendance was below 100.
• The first three years of my ministry here (2001-2004) were a mix of great things happening in our church and also the sadness of a number of people leaving out of frustration. Attendance was growing steadily each year so that during 2004, we had 170 in attendance for Easter and 144 as our non-Easter high. Our financial situation was soaring. We had a budget surplus for both 2002 and 2003.
• However, things sort of crashed last summer when our summer attendance dropped all the way to 45 on one Sunday, our financial situation plummetted, and a key leadership family was asked to step out of leadership.
• This past year, the leadership of the church concluded that great changes are needed. A new governing document was adopted, a new leadership team was formed, and God has led us to believe that his future for this church includes a new pastor as well.
• So now, we exist as a church that has big financial issues, some big concerns about leadership, a struggle with attendance, very few ministries, discouraged and tired volunteers, and a questionable future.

Times are Tough

Things are not going so well. I want to be honest with you about this.

Now, I have a reason for sharing all this stuff with you. I’m not complaining. I’m not whining. I’m not trying to get you all depressed and sad about our church. In fact, I’m really optomistic. Of course, I’m almost always optomistic, but I mean it that I really believe with my whole heart that God has great things in store for this church. I think that if we could just look around the corner, we would see the that the glory days for this church are not in the past but in the future.

It’s Not All Bad

Nevertheless, we need a fresh move of God.

Today, there are big issues to deal with. Today, something’s wrong. So, what is it? What’s wrong and what are we going to do about it?

Well, you know, I don’t think we can really answer that question yet. Just for a moment, I want to ask you to deal with another question. If the report given were not about Jerusalem or our church but about your heart, what would it be like?

Let me ask you to just take a moment to ask yourself and reflect upon the state of your heart. If someone were to ask you for a report on your heart, what would you say?

Seriously, now. Take a few minutes in silence and write down on your note sheet the report on your heart.

What are we going to do?

Now, let’s get back to Nehemiah. Check out how he responded.

“When I heard these things, I sat down and wept. For some days I mourned and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven…”

Nehemiah 1:4

Based on his example, there are a few things that I think are important for us to do as a prerequisite for any rebuilding that God might want to do in our midst. Primarily, the rebuilding will be a spiritual process and we need to do some spiritual preparation. Here’s what we need to do.

We Need to Mourn

For the past year, I have been really struggling with how to talk about our church with people. When talking with other people, I am regularly tempted toward one of two extremes. Either I want to talk about the frustrations that we as a church are dealing with so to win the sympathy of others, or I want to talk about the great things God is doing so to give God the praise he deserves for our church.

I have been struggling with those two things for more than a year now. However, there is one thing that I haven’t yet struggled through and this passage is teaching me about it. I haven’t personally mourned. Now, I’m not talking about wallowing in pity or discouragement. I’m talking about a holy mourning.

Nehemiah was mourning because he knew that God’s will for the city of Jerusalem was a city that reflected his name and glory, a city that was a central point for the gathering of his worshippers, and a city that would welcome the poor and broken with open arms of blessing. But the city was anything but that in Nehemiah’s day. The city was a broken down relic of its former glory.

What does mourning mean for us then?

This is my assessment of what Christian mourning should look like and how to do it.

Recognize the distance between God’s will and our reality.

The truth of the matter is that God’s will for his church is something far greater than anything we have experienced. Jesus tells us that his church is to be the kind of place where people’s hearts are captured with the truth of his love, and the kind of place where the power of hell can never take root. Jesus speaks in Revelation 1-3 of a church populated with people who are known as overcomers.

However, as I look around the congregation on Sunday mornings, I see a church building that is four or five times larger than the number of people who actually come. I see a church building that is in the most strategic location of any church on the North Side of Chicago, but has failed to reach any of those in its neighborhood. Most of all, I see a group of people who are discouraged, disappointed, and frustrated both with life and for some, with the church itself.

That is not the way God wants it to be. He wants the church to overcome. He wants people to live abundant lives. He wants the neighborhood to be transformed with the love of Christ, but we aren’t experiencing that.

That’s a reason to mourn.

Feel what God must feel.

Once you realize the distance between reality and God’s will, try to enter in to the way God must feel about that. He is certainly not pleased, but more than likely, he is not angry either. His language in the Bible is consistently more along the lines of a Father or Mother aching for the wayward child than it is like an angry judge who must work justice. God mourns the fact that we are not where we should be, and it’s okay for us to enter into that emotion too.

We don’t need to put on some kind of show or act like things are all perfectly swell around here. It’s okay for us to mourn. In fact, we need it. We need to realize that we aren’t where we should be and that’s a bad thing.

It’s not just us one church either. It’s pretty much the church in all of the Western Industrialized World. North American churches are declining faster than ever, and Europe isn’t doing much better. Is Christianity suddenly irrelevant or is something else going on? Truthfully, it’s something else.

We Need to Repent

I have recently come to realize something, and the truth is that I need to apologize to my congregation. In fact, that’s what I did last Sunday. I stood up in front of them and told them I was sorry.

You see, I was taking some things for granted when I first came to my church. I addressed the four core values of Worship, Community, Growth, and Ministry, as the building blocks of the church, but I was taking some things for granted in my own life and I was taking some things for granted in the life of the church. In fact, for four years, I have been taking these things for granted in my life and in the life of the church. I was taking for granted that we all had vibrant and healthy spiritual lives.

I have allowed my emphasis to largely be on what we were doing as a church and not who we are as believers.

The truth is that if we keep focusing on the things of the world like marketing tactics, leadership structures, and whatnot, then the church will cease to be anything more than a social club with a unique set of guiding principles. The problem is that the kind of guiding principles the church tends to follow make for a social club that is irrelevant. The only way the church becomes relevant is if it speaks to a universal human need to find connection with the God who Created us. If the church loses its connection with God, if the church loses its spirituality then the church is irrelevant and will die.

Our focus has been on the wrong things for too long, and we need to repent.

We Need to Pray

In light of this, and realizing this church is at the beginning stages of a pastoral transition, I see it as my primary responsibility for the remainder of my time at my church to be an advocate for passionate spirituality in our hearts.

On Sunday, I shared with my congregation a challenge to join me on a journey of passionate spiritual rebuilding. Now, the problem is that I can’t do anything to rebuild my own spirit, and neither can you. The truth of the matter is that the only one who can rebuild our spirits is the one who built them in the first place—God himself. In other words, to do some spiritual rebuilding, a person needs to simply give God the time to do it.

Therefore, I challenged my congregation, and I’d like to challenge you too, to join me in a process of spiritual fasting and prayer to let God begin the work of rebuilding us. This is what I’ll be doing:

30 minutes a day

For 30 minutes each day, I will engage in mini-fast by giving up something that I’m doing and devoting a special 30 minutes to prayer and reflection. I don’t plan for this to be my “quiet time” or my time for daily Bible Study and devotional reading. This is a special time for me to just journal and reflect on my day. I’ve been doing it for the whole week so far, and I’m still not sure if I should add my journal entries as entries to this blog. I’m leaning toward doing it, but I don’t want the blog to be my motivation for doing so.

3 hours a week

I will be devoting 3 hours each week to prayerful relationships on this topic. Our Sunday morning service is going to be shortened some to just about 60 minutes, I am inviting people to join me at 7:30 pm on Wednesdays at the church for an hour of prayer, and I’ve encouraged people to come 15 minutes before and leave 15 minutes after each gathering. That would be 3 hours of fellowship centered on prayer for the church and for God to renew us.

1 day a month

My wife and I both have committed to join the rest of our denomination in a First Tuesdays Fast. Basically it means that we will set aside the first Tuesday of each month to be a day of fasting and prayer. A person might fast for just one meal or the whole day. It doesn’t matter so much as devoting the whole day to a time of prayerfulness.

Now, I know that not everyone can do all this stuff (although I’m not really sure why), but I want to ask you to join me. Take the time to mourn, repent, and pray. Pray for yourself, and seek for God to reveal himself freshly to you, and if you think of it, would you please pray for Northwest Baptist Church in Chicago, pray for me and my family, and pray for our new church planting efforts in Lafayette, Indiana.