Hilton Head Island, SC – January 7, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 18:15-20; I Corinthians 12:12-20,27
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. – I Cor. 12:27 (RSV)
The Chapel Without Walls held its first service on January 5, 2004. Today is January 7, 2024, and thus we are celebrating our twentieth anniversary as a congregation. In this sermon I want to refer to what my thoughts were regarding our future before we held our first service, what the realities turned out to be, and then to address a goal I have for our future from now on.
First I want to explain my understanding of what I think the word “church” meant to Jesus and his initial followers, and then what it meant to the apostle Paul in later New Testament times. Jesus spoke the word “church” only twice, and both of them are in the Gospel of Matthew. The first instance is where Jesus said that the expression of faith made by the disciple Simon Peter would be the rock upon which the Church of Jesus Christ would be founded (Mt. 16). The second was when Jesus was talking about disputes among his followers. He said the individuals should try to work it out themselves. If that was ineffective, they were to include any witnesses to the dispute, and see if they could settle the matter among all of them. If that failed, he said the disputants should take the matter to the church, and let the whole congregation settle it.
Because it is claimed that Jesus referred to “the church” only twice, and then only in one Gospel, it probably means that Jesus never actually used that word, nor did he even have a concept of “the Church” as the basis for a new religion. In fact, the writer of Matthew may have inserted the word “church” into his narrative about Jesus forty years after Jesus had died, when Christianity had evolved into a very small but viable institution that warranted calling itself a church, a word which means, among other things, “assembly.”
Saul of Tarsus, who became the apostle Paul, was the most instrumental individual in the establishment of the early Church. By the time he died, the word “church” definitely was in common usage among Christians. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul used the metaphor of the human body to describe the Church. He said that the New Testament Church consisted of different kinds of people: Jews and Greeks, slaves and free. Furthermore, each person was like a part of the human body: eyes, ears, arms, legs, and so on. He ended that analogy by calling the Church “the body of Christ.” It is a term which has been associated with the Church ever since.
The Chapel Without Walls intentionally began as a congregation without walls. Our name implies two things: first, we have never owned a building, and in 20 years we have worshiped in 12 different places, two of them in outside parks. Second, we have never tried to wall anyone in or out. Everyone is welcome, whatever they do or don’t believe.
On that first Sunday twenty years ago, we had over a hundred people in attendance. Previously, I had anticipated (or more accurately, fantasized) that we would eventually have from two to four hundred people in attendance on average. I had been pastor of First Presbyterian Church on the island, and it grew from 650 to 1800 members within ten years. So surely The Chapel also would grow, I incorrectly thought. I had been told that many members of First Pres had stopped attending church altogether after I resigned as its pastor, so I assumed many of them would come to The Chapel. We would also attract liberal Christians who had dropped out of other churches somewhere. I was incorrect on both counts. In addition, because I imagined we would have at least a couple hundred in attendance each Sunday, we would be able to give away at least two-thirds of the contributions to The Chapel to local charities or to national or international non-denominational Christian organizations. That never happened either.
As it turned out, on the first Sunday of our existence we also had the largest attendance of our existence. Most of the people there were members of First Pres who likely came to wish me well in my new venture, but they had no intention of becoming members of The Chapel, because they were still active at First Presbyterian, which is as it should be. What I also had entirely neglected to consider was that on that auspicious day I was less than a month away from reaching the normal retirement age of 65, and I guess nearly everyone else thought I would soon either be too decrepit to function or I would be dead. But here I am, less than a month from becoming 85, and I’m still at it. Go figure.
Another thing I never considered was that most of the people who would ever attend The Chapel with regularity would be more-or-less my contemporaries in age. I thought we would have adults of all ages participating, but that also never happened. We largely started out as semi-codgers, and we have become steadily more codgerly as time has marched inexorably on.
For the first five years, we had an average attendance in the 50s. For the next five years, it was in the 40s. For the next five it was in the 30s, and for the past five years it has been in the 20s. In our twenty years, perhaps 150 people or so were in regular attendance. So where are all of them? Well, many moved away for various reasons, but mostly to be closer to their children. Many are no longer physically able to attend. Many others have died. Our average age is higher than average for most congregations. When that is the case, the attrition rate inevitably is higher.
Now I want to explain in painful detail why I decided to come back to Hilton Head to organize a new congregation in the first place. This has nothing to do with what I mistakenly envisioned The Chapel would become. In October of 2002, I had completed the fourth of four interim pastorates. Toward the end of that time, I interviewed at two large Presbyterian churches to become their interim pastor, one in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, and one in Akron. I told both of those search committees that it had been my hope to receive a permanent call to any Presbyterian church willing to have me. That honest statement may have blackballed me, but I thought I should tell them that. In other words, I hoped for a permanent call, not a temporary one.
I was then 62&1/2. When neither of those “calls” (to use Presbyterian nomenclature) came through, I interviewed at two small Cleveland Presbyterian churches to become their permanent pastor, and neither extended me a call. I concluded I was rejected because they thought I was too old. Neither they nor I ever imagined I would still be preaching twenty-two years later. Thus Lois and I were totally without a regular income. So I took early retirement from both the Presbyterian pension plan and Social Security. By so doing, I lost 20% from both sources of what I would have received had I retired at 65. In order to supplement an early-retirement income which was not sufficient by itself, Lois and I took part-time jobs in what was the bleakest financial year in our 26 years of marriage. At the end of it, we moved back here, and twenty years ago, two days ago, The Chapel Without Walls held its first service. We have worshipped God together every Sunday since then with the exception of two hurricane Sundays and one Covid Sunday.
They say that confession is good for the soul, so I need further to explain the primary factor for why I became the founding pastor of the increasingly floundering Chapel Without Walls. Many of you know the circumstances behind the dissolution of my first marriage in 1996, or you may at least have deduced them. In the divorce degree, I agreed to pay a very sizable alimony. ll, Nancy and I had been married for 36 years, and I assumed that I would soon get a call to another Presbyterian church or that I would be able to do interim pastorates until I was about seventy years old. Neither, as I have explained, “came to pass,” as it says in the Christmas story in Luke. The divorce decree further stated, and I agreed to it, that the alimony would continue until Nancy or I died. Nancy is still living. She is in the memory care unit of a local assisted living facility. She has severe dementia, and probably has suffered from it for as much as ten or more years.
My confession, plainly stated, is this: I became the organizing pastor of this congregation because I needed more income. That is no proper reason for anyone to organize a new congregation anywhere under any circumstances, but that is why we have existed for twenty years. I have always felt guilty about that, but it is done, it is the truth, the whole truth, and, sadly, nothing but the truth. In addition, because salaries and necessary expenses have used up nearly all the contributions ever received on behalf of The Chapel, we have produced benevolences for almost no other worthy causes except occasional sizeable contributions to hurricane victims. However, I have also tried to mitigate my guilt somewhat by thinking that some of you would not be going to church anywhere if The Chapel did not exist. If so, that is unquestionably a providential blessing, and I assuage some of my guilt in that truth, if indeed it is true.
Some of you know some of what I have told you up to this point, but no one knew all of it. All that notwithstanding, allow me to refer to some present realities before we look to the future. There are advantages and disadvantages to any particular non-denominational congregation. The primary advantage is that we have to answer only to ourselves and not to a denomination. The primary disadvantage is that we have only to answer to ourselves and not to a denomination. The Church is all Christians everywhere more than a huge conglomeration of congregations, denominational or nondenominational. The secondary advantage of any kind of congregation is that if it is a stable, loving, reasonable group of people, it can exist in harmony indefinitely. The secondary disadvantage of any kind of congregation is that if they aren’t like that, they can shrink and suffer quietly, loudly, or implode altogether. Very happily, we never experienced the latter.
The Chapel Without Walls and I personally were blessed during our first fifteen years to have had five retired ministers who attended this church regularly. I felt honored that they attended at all. Two of them were older than I, and three were younger. One of them, John Melin, a Lutheran pastor who spent his entire career serving in foreign Lutheran congregations, was our associate pastor for several years. At one time, for a period of about three months, we had a co-pastorate consisting of John Melin, Bob Naylor (a United Church of Christ minister), Adrienne O’Neill (a United Methodist minister), and yours truly. But John Melin then moved back to France for a few years, and within weeks Bob Naylor moved back to Cape Cod, and Adrienne O’Neill moved to Mississippi, leaving yours truly to carry on. As Robert Burns said, “The best-laid plans o’ mice and men gang aft agley/ And leave us naught but grief and pain for promised joy.”
Incidentally, I became increasingly struck by the remarkable unorthodoxy of those bygone clergy members of The Chapel Without Walls and other older clergy I had known. As I too have grown old, I think I have grown along with them into a broader and less rigid understanding of what religion, and the Christian religion in particular, should and should not try to be. You have been the beneficiaries (if indeed they are either benefits or beneficial) of their thoughts and mine as we acquired a sufficient number of decades to have pondered what is wheat and what is chaff.
Fortunately for me, this congregation has been remarkably tolerant of a preacher who has always been theologically unconventional, personally unpredictable, administratively erratic, and very forgetful. You are what in former days would be called theological and political liberals, but are now known as progressives, or else you wouldn’t have put up with me for so long. To be honest, I wish there were many millions more Christians such as yourselves, but at this time and in a world like the contemporary world, that is not likely to happen anytime soon, alas. Dark clouds of excessive theological and political conservatism are gathering all over this planet. There is almost nothing any of us can do to reverse that trend, particularly at our age. But in this congregation I never had to face a heresy trial. If I were still a Presbyterian preacher, who knows?
I have always thought it is ironic, but perhaps fitting, that I have preached what I think are some of my most important and deepest sermons in several respects to the smallest congregation I ever served. My first pastorate in Bayfield, Wisconsin had two hundred members, and my last interim pastorate at the Second Christian Church in Warren, Ohio, a Disciples of Christ church, had a hundred and fifty members. Furthermore, The Chapel Without Walls technically does not have members as such, because we intentionally have no a membership roll. Thus I felt free to preach on many biblical themes as I understood them with no fear of being booted out on my ear. For that I shall be grateful for the rest of my life, however long or short it may be. For my unconventionality I should be sentenced by the Celestial Judge to live to be 139, although I would probably take measures to shorten that by 30 or 40 years, despite the justice of the sentence.
You have been great pastors to me and also to Lois, first, in her long bout with lymphoma, and recently in a difficult tussle with pneumonia. Although some of you leave immediately after the service (but I am sure you won’t do that on this special Sunday), others have formed close and unique ecclesiastical friendships of a certain type which would not have been possible anywhere other than here, because collectively we are a singular bunch.
Let us now very quickly and very briefly turn to the future. I have previously publicly stated that I plan to continue as your pastor until the end of this year. On December 19, I will have been ordained sixty years, and sixty years is perhaps more than the maximum number any preacher should preach. If Nancy Miller should die soon, I might reconsider that, but I doubt it. However, I really would like to retire sometime, and I hope that by early 2025 I will be financially able to retire. Therefore, I am now announcing that I think our last service will be held on January 5, 2025. On that date we will be exactly 21 years old. Long ago, when individually we became 21, that was when we became old enough to be considered adults. We could vote at that age, and in many states, were we so inclined, we could begin to drink adult beverages at that age.
I haven’t yet come up with a sermon title for that day, but I can give you this preview of a coming attraction, as the movie theaters used to say when we were teenagers and they ran their enticements of other movies they would later be showing. The January 5, 2025 sermon will strongly encourage you to find another local congregation and to attend there regularly until either you are called to the roll up yonder or you simply are too infirm to get out of bed. In the meantime, for the rest of this year I trust that you shall continue to attend services at The Chapel Without Walls in the Island Funeral Home. This is perhaps the most appropriate location for a congregation such as ours with as unique a constituency such as ours. What will happen after January 5, 2025, no one can properly predict.
The body of Christ has existed in countless places and permutations for the past two thousand years. Whether the Church or the world will exist for another two thousand years only God knows. As I have tried to say on many occasions and in many ways, the Church’s one foundation is God as He has chosen to reveal Himself in the person of Jesus Christ, whom most Christians call “Lord.” Amen, and Amen.