Sailing

In February and March we will be having new officer training during the Sunday school hour, and one of our resources for that class is going to be Joan Gray's Spiritual Leadership for Church Officers.  in this book, Gray, who is a former moderator of the PC(USA), describes the importance of the spiritual life of church leaders if they are to guide God's people with integrity and wisdom.

She uses the image of a boat to describe the church.  This is actually an ancient image, often depicted in chrismons and hung on evergreen trees in the winter time.  Gray discusses the contrast between understanding the church as a rowboat versus a sailboat. 

The rowboat church understands that they are the workers in the church, charged to tug and pull on the oars, fighting the current, adjusting to the waves.  Uniformity is encouraged over creativity, because that is what is necessary to effectively propel a rowboat through the water, everyone stroking to the same rhythm.  Gray writes,

The bedrock reality of life in the rowboat church is that God has given the church a basic agenda and then left it up to the church to get on with it.  The dominant attitude in this congregation is either "We can do this" or "We can't do this."

The image of the church that hangs on our chrismon tree, however, is the sailboat.  In this image, the church is propelled forward not by the efforts of the members but by the power of the Holy Spirit, that wind that moved over the watery chaos at creation (Gen. 1:2) and swept through the apostles on Pentecost (Acts 2:2).

The dominnt attitude in a sailboat church is that "God can do more than we can ask or imagine."  Its leaders know that what they have or lack in the way of human and material resources is not the decisive factor in what they can accomplish as a church.  Rather, they look on church as a continuing adventure with a God who leads and empowers them to do more than they could ever have dreamed.

My father-in-law is a sailor and has on occasion given me a tutorial in how to operate a sailboat, and it is by no means an easy job.  There are ropes to be pulled and tied down, you have to be constantly aware of the rudder in relation to the wind, the boom must be pulled from one side to the other (we have some members of our congregation who are sailors who can share more of the complexities of sailing that I certainly can!).  There is hard work involved in operating a sailboat, but in the end the sailor is ultimately reliant on the wind to move the boat anywhere.  The sailor prepares the boat as best he can, but without the wind he just bobs on top of the water.

Gray reminds us that a sailboat church is not a passive church; there is hard work to be done.  Without God's guidance and power, however, all our work will be for naught, and are left bobbing on top of the water.  We certainly put out our best effort, but we also serve with a humility and an expectancy that with God we can achieve what seems impossible.  Our job is to lick our fingers and hold them in the air to see where the breeze is blowing and then raise the sails to see where God will lead.  For this adventure we must trust God's guidance, we must be ready to adjust our ship to harness the wind, and we must remember that while we have a role to play we do not control the path. 

Let us be a sailboat church, who serves in humility, who seeks God's will above all else, and who raises our sails to catch with wind of the Spirit into many new adventures.