While Christianity declines, is God asleep in the boat?

Introduction

Well, we are coming to the end of our series in Mark. We’re going to come back to it, but we’re at a transition point in one sense in the series in Mark. The first four chapters of Mark are really focused on the message of Jesus, and the next little bit is going to be focused on the miracles of Jesus. It’s not that there haven’t already been miracles, but there’s a significant shift, and you feel that shift in the passage we just read, which is the end of… we read the parable of the mustard seed again. We read that last week, but we read that again, and then there’s an explanation, a summary about Jesus taught other parables that we haven’t written down, and then we move into the calming of the storm. So this is where we’re at; it’s a transition, but I’m going to do something else with that this morning. I’m going to try to pull a whole lot of things together; we’ll see how this goes.

What I want to do is talk about that transition, blend that with our thinking a little bit about our mission as a church as we come into Easter, and then I want to tell you some practical things of what we’re looking at as a church, particularly thinking about what decisions our parish council is making about future plans for our church. As we do every week, we’re going to spend some time in the Bible and think about what that means for us, God’s mission for us as a church. I think one of the things that we find as we look at particularly the parable of the mustard seed is this idea that God’s kingdom is always growing. As tiny as a mustard seed grows into a huge plant, God’s kingdom is always growing, and sometimes it feels like that’s not our experience of God’s kingdom.

Sometimes we can certainly see through history that that happens, but in our own circles, maybe even in our own life, is the gospel always growing? I mean, I give you an example, just a kind of Australian culture and history. This is Australian religious affiliation according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This is no real surprise to anyone, but over the years, going from the ’70s, we’ve seen the number of people writing that they are Christian in Australia has dropped to below half at the 2021 census, and the people that have written no religious affiliation is almost up to half. So we say that the kingdom is always growing, but the reality is that it hasn’t felt that way in Australia for the last little while. The other religion category by comparison is actually quite low. We often think about how to engage other religions, but actually overall in Australia, it’s quite low. Some of that percentage is from migration, people migrating to Australia with other religious backgrounds, but actually the migration data suggests that even that only half of the people that are coming into Australia are coming in from Christian backgrounds over that time. Actually, more than half, I think.

We feel that I think in churches. Riverstone has felt that. The history of our church, the churches struggled in Riverstone for two reasons. One is the meat works. When the meat works in Riverstone closed down, a lot of jobs, people moved out of town. So lots of churches in Riverstone, not enough people, so the numbers were spread thin, paired with the decline in attendance. The history of this church is there’s a story about one confirmation Sunday where there were so many people that they were sitting… there used to be a brick wall for a fence, and people were sitting on the brick wall and out into the grass. They didn’t have a live stream out there, so I don’t know what they were seeing or hearing in that service. There used to be a bus ministry here where multiple buses went and picked kids up for Sunday school and brought them here. The church struggled for a while for some of these reasons, for a number of reasons, but one of them is just the decline in attendance in Riverstone. There were quite a few churches, not enough Christians to resource them all. Sydney Anglicans overall have had the greatest decline in Australia. Sydney Anglicans have actually held ground for a little while, but in our last Anglican, we call it synod, but it’s like parliament for Sydney Anglicans, we had a report put to us about churches in Sydney Anglicans.

This is that report. This is only going the last 10 years, but you can see we were seeing some increase, not compared to population growth, mind you, but since 2017, a significant drop in attendance at Anglican churches. The next bit is quite hard to decipher because COVID changed everything, but you can see as of 2023, that last date, we still hadn’t even got back to pre-COVID numbers. Someone made the joke that, “Oh yeah, but look, it’s on an upward trend.” That steep turnaround in 2022 doesn’t say we suddenly had revival in the church; that was just the return to church after COVID. So this is the state of play we’re in. When we think about the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, it starts out tiny, and then it grows huge, it feels like that’s not always our experience of it. We start asking the question, what is God doing? In fact, it can feel like God is asleep in the boat, can’t it?

Is God Asleep in the Boat?

A Very Real and Dangerous Situation

That’s the story we read from the New Testament from Mark this morning. It can feel exactly like that. This is the scenario we have, that the disciples were in a very real and dangerous situation in this boat in the story. The Sea of Galilee is actually a lake; it’s not a sea, and it’s actually not prone to storms. It’s the second lowest body of water in the world, the Dead Sea being the lowest. It’s below sea level, it’s quite warm, it has very few storms, though they can happen, and they can be fierce. In some ways, maybe that accounts for the fear of the disciples, because if you’re not even the fisherman on the boat, if you’re not used to severe storms, well, that accounts for some of it. The Sea of Galilee is not huge. At its width, which is the narrow side of it, it’s 13 kilometers across, so you could be six, six and a half kilometers from shore if you’re in the middle. That’s from Vineyard to Windsor is 6 and a half kilometers, so it’s not a huge lake, but you imagine you don’t want to swim that distance in a storm, so it’s pretty serious ground.

If you’re in a violent storm 6 kilometers away from shore, you’re in a pretty serious situation. If you’re one kilometer away from shore, the swimming skills in the day were not like we have. People could swim, but it’s not like the kind of efficient swimming training that we do with kids today, and so swimming a kilometer is not something people would be doing. On top of all that, we’re told it’s nighttime, that they went out in the evening. They had lights back then, but they were flame lights; they didn’t fare well in storms. The clouds would be covering the moon, no lights on the boat, probably very little visibility to how far the shore was at all. It wouldn’t actually take even seasoned fishermen to feel a little bit of the threat that is going on at that moment. Whatever is happening, we’re told very clearly all the disciples, including the fishermen, were scared for their life. That tells us something about what is going on. This is not a story that just says something, you know, they were having a little bit of fear, and Jesus calms them down. Something serious is happening in this moment.

Jesus Was in the Stern Sleeping on a Cushion

What is surprising is what Jesus is doing. Mark gives us one of the strangest verses in the Bible here. This is the verse: Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. Did you catch that? Not just asleep, he’s comfortable in this moment. He’s found himself a pillow, he’s pulled it up, and he’s had a little snooze while the disciples think they’re going to die. That’s surprising, right? But what’s most surprising is what he does when they wake him up. I think in some ways this is the most astonishing miracle for different reasons. There’s a lot of miracles we hear about Jesus that if you heard someone did it, there’d be kind of things you would be thinking as to how it happened. You would be saying, his first miracle in the synagogue that Mark records, someone yells out with they have an evil spirit in them, interrupts his sermon, and he casts that spirit out. I think the rightful thing of any preacher that’s interrupted during a sermon, but he casts that spirit out, and there’s a clear reaction, but you could skeptical, you could say, I mean, he this guy with the evil spirit’s really just a lunatic and just plays along with the the moment.

You have the stories of healing. I had friends who visited a famous kind of back in the day of tele-evangelist kind of stuff, it’s streaming evangelists these days, who did a healing ministry, and his Bible teaching certainly didn’t coincide with it. I want to say God still heals today, and I’m not suggesting there’s no such thing as miraculous healing. We were skeptical on this particular guy’s miraculous healing, and there was someone two rows in front of my friends who was in a wheelchair and went forward, and by the end of the session was walking. Of course, my friends, their question was, was the wheelchair actually necessary in the first place? Is this just a staged thing? So you can see that kind of thing. But here, the calming of the storm is Jesus gets up and rebukes the storm. We’re told I don’t know if you’ve ever rebuked a storm, it’s not on the top of your thoughts. You might curse a storm for certain reasons, but he rebukes the storm. He says, “Quiet, be still.” And it does. Now, if you’re going to be really skeptical, you could argue timing and stuff like that, he just fortunate, but the guys that were there seeing that happen, it feels like for them it must have been undeniable. This is crazy what has just happened in front of them.

Jesus Has a Plan

The message Mark wants to tell us when we ask the question, who is this man, is he is the one with the power. So when we ask the question, is God just asleep in the boat, the first answer is, well, can God do anything about a situation? The answer we get quite clearly here is yes, he can. So then the next question becomes, why doesn’t he? I think the answer we get from Mark is that Jesus has a plan. He has the power, but he also has a plan. One of his plans is for creation. He has a plan for creation, and we get a glimmer of this through the language that is used in this story and also other stories in Mark. For example, if we compare this miracle with Jesus’ first miracle in the synagogue, in this miracle Jesus says to the storm, “Silence, be still.” In the synagogue when the demon-possessed man calls out, we’re told Jesus says, “Be quiet, come out of him.” We see a very similar language, we see the same in the response from the people.

So in the synagogue, the people say, this man has such authority, even evil spirits obey him. In this story, in the calming of the storm, they say, who is this man, even the wind and the waves obey him. There’s a very strong parallel there, and what we see is Jesus’ plan is not just in the moment, but there’s a plan unrolling here for all of creation. It’s not just to do away with the evil that opposes him in his life, but it’s to do away with the impact of evil over the whole world. We live in a world that is completely impacted by evil, that there’s a brokenness in the way God created this world, and we see natural disasters in a way that is a result from the brokenness of our world. Jesus’ plan is not just for the evil that he faces directly, but it’s for the evil that has impacted our whole world. He speaks to creation in the same way that he speaks to an evil spirit, that is the work that is happening here. Jesus is undoing the evil of the world. He has that plan, and that is a long-term plan that we look forward to.

One of the questions when we say is Jesus just asleep in the boat is, well, there’s this hope for the future, but more than just a hope for the future, Jesus is working a plan for the kingdom right now, and we see that in this story as well. One of the other surprising things I find in this story is the unfair question that Jesus asks the disciples. They are scared for his life, and he gets up, he rebukes the waves, and then he turns around and says, “Why are you afraid?” I mean, it’s just such an unfair question for the situation, and then he adds to it, and he says, “Do you still have no faith?” One of the questions is, what does he expect them to have faith in in that moment? They’ve never seen him calm a storm before. They don’t know that’s on his to-do list. So what is it they’re thinking in that moment? Why should they expect God to do something they’ve never seen him do before? It’s not even something we see common in the Old Testament.

What the problem is with their faith is they have seen that God has a plan. He has called them together. He has just spent the day teaching parables about his plan, about how he’s going to scatter seed, and some will respond, and some won’t, but he finishes that with saying the kingdom of God is going to grow, it’s going to go forward. That very day, we’re told it’s the evening that he told that parable. That very day they get on this boat. He’s just told them the kingdom is going to grow like a mustard seed, and that very day they’re like, “Well, this is it, the end. Mustard seed’s going to die, didn’t sprout after all.” That’s what he has a problem with, their faith in, not that they should have expected him to calm the storm, but they should have expected that God has a plan. This is not the end of it. It doesn’t end with some bad weather in the Sea of Galilee. He challenges them because God has a plan, and that is the reminder to us that God has a plan for his kingdom even when we are in the storm and we don’t know what he’s going to do, and we know he could do things, but we don’t know what he’s going to do.

Our Church and the Mission of Our Church

Prayers Not Answered

Let me apply this two ways. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about our church and the mission of our church as we go into Easter, and I want to talk some things practically about our church as we think about what it means to be part of a kingdom that’s growing, but not sure we can’t know what God is going to do in every situation. I want to talk about that, but I just want to pause before we get to that and acknowledge the very real scenario that’s happening in people’s lives as we ask that question, is God asleep in the boat? We talked already about the Johanna Mora, and there’s a very real feeling of that sort of thing of prayers not answered. I know and I mentioned it before, I know there’s others here that are struggling with other things that are quite a number of people. This week we are a church that we’re a reasonably young family church, and that means one of the greatest pastoral things that we face as a church is fertility, miscarriage, that kind of family planning journey, and those are moments where the feeling of God asleep at the boat, what is he doing, he can, but will he kind of questions, they are difficult questions.

Just the last two weeks, my family, Jet has had a stomach condition his whole life that comes and goes, but the last two weeks has been the worst it’s ever been in his life, just absolute pain. When he sleeps, he groans, and he’s been crying out in pain. Probably the most heartbreaking moment was I heard him talking to Susie the other night, and he was just in so much pain, and he said to her, please can you help me? You think, of course, if we could, we would. We’re very thankful in our situation that two days ago we took some advice that wasn’t the doctor’s advice, and we gave him a diet, and he cleared up that next day. The pain is completely gone for him at the moment. We still have a long journey of figuring it out, but of what’s the reoccurring problem is, but just to say that we recognize those moments where we cry out to God and we don’t have answers and we don’t know.

God Has a Plan Beyond the Immediate Storm

I want to say that that is a difficult journey, and we do pray as a church for those many parts. We do believe in a God who can do miracles, but we also recognize the pain of that journey, and it does need to be encouragement for us that God has a plan beyond the immediate storm that we’re facing, and that plan comes with the promise that if we cling to him that it will all be worth it. That phrase, it’ll all be worth it, is a difficult phrase because the question is still a question of timing, right? When Jet was sick before he was born with his heart condition, and we were asking that question about whether the surgery would be successful, someone said to us, “God will heal Jet, it’ll either be through doctors or it’ll be in glory in heaven, but he will be healed.” That question of timing is a painful question, and so we recognize that God has a plan, he is got a plan for his kingdom, he works for the good of his people, and the terribly hard thing to wrap our heads around in the middle of the storm is that he can work good in the suffering, not just after the suffering, but God can work the good in the suffering. The hard thing for us to wrap around our heads around is that suffering sometimes does the good work, and that is a difficult process for us to embrace a God of plans who is in control.

How Do We Increase Our Capacity?

Let me think a little bit more, step out of that space again, and think a little bit more about our church and how we step out in faith as a God who works his kingdom and grows like a mustard seed from small to big. We’ve had an experience here where we’ve seen small to big to some extent. The days of eight years ago when I started here and there was 15, 20 people in this service, and it’s very different now. I sent out a message last week about the dedication we had preparing for that and preparing for more people in the room, and just said we officially out of space. I said that that week we were definitely officially out of space last week. We did everything we could to fit more people in. Johan and I cut the riser down on that tech desk and pushed it back half a meter and got an extra row in there, and we moved the coffee machine outside. I’ve probably spent 16 hours over the last two weeks talking, thinking about, and moving coffee machines, and thinking about how we do space better, and it’s a great blessing for us to have that problem, and yet we want to take the opportunity, keep moving forward in faith and saying how do we increase our capacity to see our ministries continue to have kingdom impact beyond the capacity of what we have right now? We’ve talked about this before, options of planting things like that. I don’t think that’s on the cards for us in the near future, but we face serious challenges.

Many of you know if we have that first image, we bought land back in 2012, 2013, that’s what it looked like back then. This is what it looks like now. All those houses that are in the dotted line, we sold them off. The Anglican church, there was $2 million profit on top of that that has gone into other churches buying more land to see more churches built in Sydney, and so we played a significant part of that. We now hold on to those patches of orange that are still there. This is a bit of a clearer picture of what we currently have as our assets. The one on the left there, that long skinny one, that’s where we are at Elizabeth Street. We own this with a house on it and the church. The orange, we own all that. It’s got a house on it that I live in. On Hamilton Street, it’s got two houses out the back of that that are separate lots, but we own them, and there’s tenants in there, and then down Loan Avenue, there’s two more houses we own, and then after that, there’s an empty lot. It’s a hole in the ground. We had to have a water detention pit before till council connected the storm water, and so that’s now allowed to be filled in and can be sold off. So that’s our current state of play of where we’re at as a church.

The plan has been to build. The plan has been actually for the Dasis, Anglican Dasis, to build us a church on Hamilton Street. That was the plan 10 years ago. It was an impossible plan. They didn’t have the resources to do it, and building prices went up. We’re really at a place where if we want to see this go forward, we need to fund it almost entirely ourselves, that is pay for the building. To do that, we will need to sell some properties. The properties in this diagram that are in gray are the ones that ultimately we would be expecting to potentially leverage for a building. That includes the property we’re on. It doesn’t take much for you to figure out the complications with that. The two houses that are down Loan Avenue, the water tension, and retain all the ones that are connected to the main property there. That’s the process. The Dasis has put together, they call it the nucleus design. Basically, it’s a low-cost building structure. It’s a big shed up one end that’s lined and acoustically treated to try to stop noise pollution to the neighbors, and a building down the other end that the internal roof is the same height as this one, so the 6 m on one, 3 m on the other, and a little span between them, and pretty much all the walls inside that can be moved around to cater for what we want. That’s not a final design, that’s my concept. I put some ideas together for that one, but as we’ll be working with an architect.

The reason that’s important is we can’t ask the question can we afford to build a church until we find out what kind of church we would build, and then we ask that question. The answer is $5.5 million for that building and a car park, and on top of that, we have to pay council a million dollars community contribution before we can even start building. We can, if we sell all those things, our cost estimate is we can afford the building, we just can’t afford to start building it, small problem. The Dasis is saying they would help us with that, and we would also have to do some fundraising on our own. Sorry, just to clarify, when I say sell, some of the conversations around leveraging the value, which means we could take out a loan against a property rather than sell it, but at the end of the day, the is tied up in the banks. Our parish council this week said yes to the first step of that. The first step is sell the water detention basin and use that money to submit a DA and do the research that’s needed to properly flesh this out. At the moment, low risk for us just to take that step and get that ball rolling. That’s where we’re at.

Some of the difficulty becomes what do we do along the way, and what do we do in the meantime? A year by the end of the year, we’d love to have the DA. It would be optimistic that we’d have the building finished at the end of three years. Four years is probably more realistic, 5 years it. The other buildings have taken longer. What we don’t want to do is just sit and wait. The first step is how can we make the most of this space? There’s very little we can do. I’ll tell you the ideas we have. We currently have a grant from the government to raise the roof from here to that pole there, raise the roof and open up to a exposed truss, which is just to make the room feel a bit more breathing. It doesn’t give us more seats, I recognize that, but there’s more to the vibe of space than just seating space. We have got a grant application for a mobile kitchen. If we get that, which we won’t find out till November, then we could remove the kitchen, and we could move the kitchen into a trailer, limited. It’s a very big trailer, but to be fair, it’ll be limited to what we currently have. We could explore a demountable on the property and potentially also remove the parents’ room, parents’ lounge, and move things around so that kids are in a demountable. There’s significant cost to that if we went down a path of a portable building, but that’s kind of some ideas on how we maybe make the most of what we have.

The problem of space is greater than we are able to process. They say a church can’t grow beyond the number, the magic number is 80%, 80% your seating capacity. The number of seats you have, our churches just won’t grow past that, except in rare moments of revival. There’s lots of stories of churches breaking that, but the reality is if I say it like this, church is not a sellout concert. If for no other reason than it’s the people of God gathering to proclaim his name and celebrate him, but it’s not, and if you go to a sellout concert, you will sit side by side and you will make the journey from whatever car park and you’ll sit in traffic in traffic trying to get out of the venue because that’s what you were there for, but people won’t do that for church, least of all those that are not sure what they think about God, and so we’re not going to reach the lost with thinking like that. What that means is church looks quite similar. A full church looks similar to what we have this morning, which is scattered empty seats, and so that is we need scattered empty seats if we’re going to see the kingdom grow here.

Every time we make more space in this room, every time I’ve gone, that was silly, that was premature, shouldn’t have done that decision. Many of you were here the time we pulled the wall that used to go there. We basically gained a whole third of the room, and we had some low attendance the weeks after that, probably recovery, but I felt like here I am as the minister, I said, “We need this space.” We were sitting in a little circle here, and I was like, “We don’t need that space, you fool.” I understand these moments, but every time we’ve opened up that was a whole third of the room, we filled that third. We have doubled in size as a church. Every four years, if it’s four years to a new building, we need double the space if things are going to continue the way they are. It’s not just a few extra rows, it’s not just we, you know, two more rows at the front. We remove these rises, we can do all that, of course we’ll do all that, we’ll add space as much as we can, but we need to make serious decisions over what the next four years look like.

Six months ago, I thought was convinced the answer was two family services on a Sunday morning. Some moving parts for that one is we might have to sell this property sooner rather than later. It’s going to be a tricky thing to sell because a heritage building and heritage trees, if you even knew that existed. We’re out of space, and maybe we need to think about going to a school sooner rather than later for a few years. I want to say all those things are costly. It’s very costly to plant two services in the same, two family services. Those of you that are helping out with kids programs know we are barely covering the bases for how many people we need running our kids programs to double that or to ask people to double up on two services on a Sunday is really tough, but of course moving off site is really tough. There’s huge limitations on midweek ministries. We have to answer the questions. I’ve spent the last two weeks moving from a meeting where I’m talking to a guy about removing the roof here to a meeting where I’m talking to a guy about using a school hall to a meeting about buildings and building a new building up on Hamilton Street. We have to push forward on all those fronts. I don’t think it’s good enough for us to let any one of those slip by. We want to keep moving forward here, and we want to keep looking at our options further abroad.

I want to update you on that as we wrestle with what it means to be part of a kingdom that is always growing. I don’t know what God holds for our church here. We don’t know what the economy is going to be like over the next three years and where the $5.5 million is a fenceful idea. We don’t know what these things hold. We could easily be in a storm at any moment. What I do know is we want to be a church that continues to move forward in faith seeking the next step for what God wants for us. Some of the challenges we face personally. This is more than just a question of space, it’s a question of culture. I know some of you experienced it last week when we had a full room and a full morning tea space. It became significantly harder to keep track of where your kids were. That space impacts us. These are culture things that impact how we do church together. As we grow to the next stage, our relationships in our church change. Knowing who people are has already started to change when new people have come. Embracing this kind of change is more than just trying to find the money to build a building, it’s thinking about how we do church and we continue to welcome people even maybe when church is getting for some of us on a size and even bigger than a size we are comfortable with or want to be in.

There’s all kinds of costs we face as we think about what this looks like, and I want to continue and invite you to be on that journey. Partly I want to talk about where we’re at because it was a significant decision to say we’re happy to sell that water detention basin. I want you to be talking to our parish counselors about that journey if you have concerns, talking to them, talking to me, because this is a decision that we want to go into together. It’s also something we want to keep moving forward in faith as we look towards Easter, which attendance goes up and down. I suspect a little bit down this year just because of the way the holidays fall and many of you are going away, but still huge opportunity to invite new people, seekers into our church. I think our Easter flyer says if you’ve never been to church, there’s many who experience their first Easter with us. That is always true, and we’re praying that it’s true again this year, that we might proclaim Jesus to people that haven’t maybe understood him before and invitation to follow him.

God Grows His Church

God grows his church. That is a reminder that it is the work of God, and we do this prayerfully. This year we want to think about a way that we can encourage each other to pray in a bit more of a structured way. That may be through prayer meetings. Prayer meetings seem to only work for a small select group of people, so we want to think of other ways that we can help people gather around this mission and pray for it, but it’s true too as we send out alpha invites, as we send out Easter invites, be praying for people in your life. God partners with his people through prayer. God grows his kingdom and therefore we trust in him, and God grows grows his kingdom which means we continue to rely on him even when we don’t see that growth, even when we feel like we’re in the storm because leaning into God in the storm will always be worth it eventually.