New Year; New Challenges; New Blessings

This is an excerpt from a letter Bishop Riley sent to ministers in the New Jersey Synod. It’s important to note how God is teaching us again that church is God’s people. Being church is being part of God in action in our world today.
… We are in a very important time in our life and ministry together. The Lutheran Church on this territory has been in membership decline for over three decades. Many of our congregations have been aging in place with little serious attention to evangelical outreach. Over the solid foundation of the Gospel and its imperative to go into the world and preach, teach and baptize, we seem to have created an infrastructre of constitutions and committees, building and endowments, traditionalism and tradions, and a lementing-memory of when-didn’t-work-when.
In an earlier time, the best parts of that infrastructure facilitated our participation in God’s mission. Now, instead of opening doors and windows to the world, our accumulated stuff has more often sealed us into buildings and practices that keep us comfortable on a floor well above the gospel-foundation. It’s time for a visit to the basement.
When our Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson preached at the beginning of last summer’s Churchwide Assembly in Chicago, he called us to decide “whether we were going to be a settled church or a sent church;” a church lodged in its own stuff or a church leaping off of its gospel-foundation into the world. I think we know what it is that we want and need to be and do. When we see examples of the church leaping off of its gospel foundation into mission in the world, the adrenaline begins to flow and the music of mission begins to sing in our hearts and minds and souls. …
The challenge that we have before us is bigger than any program could solve. Our challenge is to change the culture of this church from settled to sent, from pre-disposed existence to reengaged missionary journey. What makes this a particular challenge is that together we have responsibility for this culture change beyond our local ministries. If we can together change the way we approach mission in the wider contect, I believe that we will both strengthen the places where mission is the center and reorient for mission the places where we are struggling to be the church for the sake of the world.
E. Roy Riley, Bishop