IV. Seven Mini Meditations For Your Lenten Reflection: What Should Christians Be Up To Today?
Welcome to this series of seven short meditations for the seven weeks of Lent – these Mini Meditations. This represents a departure from my practice of several years now: issuing occasional blogs. I plan, the Lord willing, to return to that practice after Easter.
Here, in a Lenten mode, I’m attempting to do something orderly – and something that anyone can handle, however busy you may perceive yourself to be this Lenten season. A once-a-week reading!
Thank you for tuning in – and I look forward to hearing from you in response, should the Spirit so move you. If things work out as I hope they will, you will be receiving one of these Mini Meditations each week in Lent.
—Paul Santmire, Ash Wednesday, 2025
I. Coming to Terms with an Era of Apparent Church Decline
II. Understanding Our Post-Christian World
III. Attending to the Signs of These Times
IV. Spiritual Discernment or Looking Before You Leap
V. Reclaiming the Child Within
VI. Revisiting Your Local Church
VII. Growing Up Into Christ: But Really Growing Up
Mini Meditation Four: Spiritual Discernment or Looking Before You Leap
In the late eighties, my denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, sent me from my home base in Hartford, CT to visit the great Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, CA. At that time, that magnificent structure was touted as the largest glass building in the world. All the more of note, it housed the then nationally renowned evangelistic ministry of Robert Schuler, also a writer of numerous best-selling spiritual self-help books. Why couldn’t a conventional parish pastor of a small inner-city, racially mixed congregation like me be able to learn lots of stuff about how to grow a congregation from that eminent Church leader who ministered in that preeminent “cathedral”?
Sure. My own little church at that time, stationed between Hartford’s great insurance companies and that city’s major Black neighborhood, ought to have been able to grow in numbers, right? Growing in faithfulness to Jesus was, of course, important. But growing the number in attendance on Sundays and meeting the congregation’s budget – didn’t you need to do that in order to be in a position to take up your cross?
It didn’t work. Turns out that the people in my congregation’s low-income neighborhood, most of whom were African-American, were more interested in finding jobs and affordable housing than they were in joining a predominantly white, mainline church with an up-tempo liturgy, however progressive and in touch with things that church might have happened to have been. At that time, moreover, had there been any congregation like the Crystal Cathedral nearby, those neighborhood folks would probably have regarded going there as a kind of trip to Disney World: amazing, but now we need to get back to figuring out how to pay the rent.
Then consider preaching. By the time I arrived in Hartford I had had a lot of good feedback about my preaching. And, being a card-carrying Lutheran, I of course took it for granted that preaching, when it’s inspired by the Spirit, can elicit faith that can move mountains (!). Be that as it may, I discovered that the people whom I was getting to know in my neighborhood wanted something else from me, in the first place. Could I help them find a way for some affordable housing to be built? And so, like some Jonah who had his own ideas, I was swept up into the belly of a huge neighborhood organizing project focused on affordable housing and, it turned out, jobs.
The challenge of that public ministry then got me fired up. Eventually, I found myself as a kind of godfather of that new community organization, whose members sometimes stormed into City Hall meetings, instructed by the methodologies of the great Saul Alinsky. Had I focused, as any good Lutheran pastor would have been trained to do in that era, on my preaching primarily, I can well imagine that my ministry might well have fizzled.
The lesson I learned then, which I think is transferrable to any church mission situation today is this: Yup, the leap of faith (Kierkegaard) is important, but look before you leap. The technical theological term is: practice spiritual discernment. Not that every or even most Christian congregations should be involved in community organizing (although that recommendation has crossed my mind): but that every local church should adopt the practice of reading what the Scriptures depict as the signs of the times. Keep asking: what door or doors is the Lord opening up for my congregation’s ministry in our neighborhood? Look before you leap.
(to be continued)