August 17, 2025
Tenth Sunday After Pentecost
The sermon this morning is meant to continue our community conversations about the Seekers September 14 Day of Prayer and Conversation. I am a member of the four-person planning team for that day, together with Ellie Benedict, Mary Mehala, and John Morris. We meet regularly to give shape to the time we’ll have together that Sunday.
Seekers Church is coming up on our 50th Anniversary. There is always reason to celebrate when important anniversaries like this one comes up. And at the same time, big anniversaries are good opportunities not only to look back, but to look at where we are now, and what we can envision our future could be. As Erica Lloyd captured so well in her sermon last month, planning this retreat has been a response to our awareness of this threshold year:
“Although much has changed in our world, in our city, and in our own lives, what values do we continue to hold dear? Is God calling us in new directions? How will our inward and outward journeys continue and evolve? These are deep questions that get at the very heart of who we are as a community. This event will give us the chance to reflect on what we’re about – and what we want to be about. This is an opportunity to dream.”
This morning, I’ve been asked to say more on the topics or the kinds of discussions that sessions on September 14 would be. Just to begin: we want to reiterate that this retreat isn’t for making any big decisions. It’s not designed to do that. What we are planning is something different: we are creating an extended period of time together, enough to have conversations about our values; about how our shared understandings; about how our practices reflect those values. We can speak about what in our life together we hold most dear,– and why. We can share our leadings around what the future may ask of us.
For today, our thought is that one way to convey a sense of the tone and the topics that might appear on the 14th, could be sharing a personal witness to how the practices and life of Seekers shaped a life personally. This could then serve as an invitation to others to link individual thoughts and insights as a way for the community to consider the structures and practices of our life together. What can our experiences, lived individually but shared in community, tell us about what is most vital about our collective understandings and practices?
Thinking about about how to proceed with this venture, I vaguely remembered a sermon I gave in what seemed a long time back.. I found it: and it was a LONG time ago. The title was “The Genius Of Seekers”, and I gave it 25 years ago, in the year 2000. By “genius” I didn’t mean someone which extreme intelligence: but I meant another meaning of the word: the special essence or character of a person, or of a people or a culture: that gives them a unique a special flavor that makes them recognizable. Since I haven’t found any other word that works better than “genius,” I’m going to stay with it here.
The first thing that makes this 25-year-old sermon seem worthwhile now is that it’s a testament to my own early experience with Seekers. I wrote it when I was only a few years in, and it speaks from that time of closeness to the experience of growing into the church.
When I landed at Seekers in the mid-1990s, I was at a nadir of my life. Our family, with our two kids, had come to Silver Spring from Texas a couple of years earlier, and the change of environment and culture from a laid back, modest small city to a churning ambitious big city was more challenging that I could have imagined. I wasn’t coping well emotionally– not that I admitted that to myself, of course.
But finally, I was too depressed to be able to ignore it, and started on medication, which in turn made it impossible to continue the studies I had been doing. When I first landed at Seekers, I was too depressed and anxious to actually show up for Sunday mornings: Sunday mornings were simply too intense, especially coffee-hour after worship—which, at that time, was in a bright good-sized room, but crowded and alive with dozens of spirited conversations.
The first thing I thought I could handle was attending a series of classes in the School of Christian Living. (now Growth).I no longer remember anything about the classes: but the important thing is that I chose to show up, in person, each week. I could do this the first week because I had enough of a felt sense after the first class that I was coming into a space that could be trusted because I felt that other people there had at one time come to the table as vulnerable as I felt.
After two or three months, I ventured into worship, and even into coffee hour, the ultimate intensity. I came to be aware of a profound longing within me for a strong spiritual community; but I had no idea how to live creatively in that kind of way: I was still very much a work in progress.
There is a second reason this sermon from 25 years ago seems valuable. I was coming to see that being around Seekers was strengthening me and healing me over time, and was curious to know why and how it worked. I was hungry to learn and understand all I could about the community.
I became more focused on my questions about why Seekers’ did the things it does, when I was preparing to co-lead an 8-week class on Seekers practices and values at the School of Chrisian Living with Marjory that summer.
In the year 2000, the Church was facing into just acquiring a building of its own and the changes in community life that would entail. That was another moment in time that felt ripe and fitting for revisiting the community’s values, understandings, and practices, and to discern what was most essential. Each Tuesday from mid-June through mid-August, between 20 and 25 Seekers came together in person, for dinner and time spent together celebrating and exploring the genius of Seekers.
We looked at the Seekers written documents like A Guide to Seekers’ Church, and Mission Groups in Seekers Church that the community originally formed around. These core statements have carefully been considered and re-considered over time, and so continue to shape our life together.
But we also considered writings from the broader Church of the Saviour community that those written by Elizabeth O’Connor, whose work has tried to capture the genius of Church of the Savior, the tradition in which we locate ourselves. Her writings about call and gift, about mission groups and about the creative potentials that reside in the messiness of community remain both illuminating and challenging.
In both large group and small groups, we considered questions like: What happens in mission groups that each of us cannot get anywhere else? What’s the role of shared spiritual practices in building Christian community? What does it mean when we say we’re a gift-evoking community? How do we best help support each other in the calls we have outside this community?
It was then that I first really got attached to this one particular statement in the Seekers Call statement: “The Seekers community sees itself called into Christ’s ministry of deliverance from bondage to freedom in every personal and corporate expression.”
For me, even today, that one sentence is like a 10-second explanation of what I think is the essence of this faith community.
There is another statement I learned then: it’s from the Introduction of a piece called Mission Groups in Seekers Church. this passage isn’t a 10-second answer, but instead, it leaves us with some really big questions. Here’s the statement:
For us, mission groups carry the seeds of the destiny of humankind.
That is a pretty bold assertion! If we believe that it points to something really true, then we’ll want to know what it is about these groups to warrant such a statement! I have experienced life in enough mission groups now to know that there can be periods of mission group life that don’t feel anything like having this transcendent significance. So I wanted to learn what O’Connor knew about mission groups.
O’Connor refers to mission groups as “small initiating centers of life” that move out into the world. I love that image for what they are meant to be. But how do they become those ready-to-roll initiating centers of life”? And what are their strategies once they move out?
The answer to both questions for O’Connor is that mission groups simply call forth gifts: they evoke the treasures of personality in oneself first of all. This means becoming the persons that we are intended to be: we cannot become true to ourselves unless we are true to our gifts. When we ask to know the will of God for our lives, we must realize that God has written into our very beings—in the gifts given to us.
This, for O’Connor, is the essential work of mission groups: to help someone discern their own gifts, to do what is possible for helping them evoke, and call them forth. Part of this is to hold the person accountable for his gift. How does another person know that we have taken what they have said with any seriousness if we do not ask what they are doing with their gift?
This was also the wise understanding of Gordon Cosby, the founder of Church of the Saviour as well: in our Guide to Mission Groups, there is a wonderful quote by Gordon:
When all is said and done, the discovering and nurturing of the gifts of its members remains the primary work of the mission group. The teaching of St. Paul is clear (1 Corinthians 12:1-31). Each person confessing Christ as Lord, living within the Body of Christ, is given a gift by the Holy Spirit for the upbuilding of the Body. We can even say that the person himself, as his essence unfolds under the power of the Spirit, is gift. ……If every member has discovered the unique treasure of his or her own being and it is being received by the others, there is tremendous fulfillment and power.
Another important learning, I believe is from O’Connor was: “The only way we can free anyone else to claim God’s gift to them and be uniquely themselves is to have some understanding and excitement about our own uniqueness. As long as any participant in a mission group does not feel that their gift is essential and making a contribution to living out the call of the group, there will be problems.”
From my own experience, I can witness to the transformative role that a group process of gift-evoking in each other has had in my spiritual life. I remember so clearly times when that process was clearly a “thin place”—a space and time where the holy infinite has seemed so especially close to worldly space and time.
So today, I’m seeing a mash-up of the two pieces of wisdom I came away with 25 years ago: We are called to Christ’s ministry of deliverance from Bondage to Freedom in every personal and corporate expression. But maybe that call is also the call to, again and again, person by person, group by group, help others discern and claim the beauty of their gifts, and support them as they come into themselves.
Anyway, we can talk about it on the 14th.
Last week, everyone on our listserv should have received an email from the planning team that provided up-to-date information, but also asked people, individually and in their mission groups and ministry teams, to consider this question: “What have we created as a church that we want to hand down to the next generation of Seekers?”
The mission group to which I belong, Eyes to See, had a rich and connecting conversation in response to this first question. As we looked back on our conversation we felt how important it had been to do the process in a group. Through being in a group, one sharing could spark affirmation or reminders of other times that hearts, minds, and souls were touched, formed and reformed, and transformed over time.
Tomorrow, another DPC newsletter should land in your digital inbox. And it will include a second prompting question. Again, we invite you to talk about your response to this prompt in mission groups, ministry teams, support circles, or other group settings. Maybe talk not only about the prompt, but also about your own lives—what made the biggest difference; but also what you might have wished could have happened better—grounding our conversation in prayerful consideration of the lives we have shared here in community.