Day 31 (part 1): Church of the Resurrection-- the Methodist Mission-Minded Mega?

I can already tell: this church is going to require a minimum of three entries, possibly four.  There is a lot here that I like, and while the things that I don't like are minor in comparison to the whole scope of the place, they do require a considerable amount of explanation (such as the stuff on baptism).  What matters most to me right now is Resurrection's missions focus.  It is truly spectacular, and the amount of work that they do might even put them on par with some of the safe haven churches I visited earlier this summer.  Of course, I've still got three services and a meeting (hopefully) to go, so it may still be a little early to tell.

The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection is located in Leawood, KS, one of the many incorporated communities that lie outside Kansas City in Johnson County.  The wealthiest county in Kansas, Johnson County was built up partially by the location of Sprint Nextel’s corporate headquarters in Overland Park (the county’s most populous city just to the northwest of Leawood).  Attracting members from all over the county and Kansas City itself, Resurrection has impressive facilities and is surrounded by upscale businesses and restaurants in what seems to be --by my assessment-- a very nice neighborhood.  The largely-undeveloped land around the church is dotted with soccer fields, shopping centers, and recently-constructed clusters of cookie-cutter homes, the roofs of which sometimes tower over the walls of their communities.  I’m staying with Luke’s family in the neighboring town of Olathe to the west, which is still a very nice community --for example, I have no concerns about my car being stolen-- but not quite the level of extravagance that I perceived in Leawood.  Again, I’m trying not to pass judgment on a community that seems to be prospering so much financially, but my impulse to glare with a sanctimonious stink-eye is sometimes a hard one to suppress.  Some of that Shane Claiborne “Hell is a gated community” rhetoric got lodged pretty deep in my brain, but I feel like churches like Resurrection defy those suburban stereotypes.  My biases being what they are, Resurrection had a pretty steep hurdle to overcome because of its affluent surroundings and large facilities, and so far, it’s doing a superb job of doing just that.  What has blown me away about Resurrection so far is its missions focus, both to the local community and to the larger world, and I think that other megas ought to be watching them for ideas.

First Impressions

Having yet to see the church building or even explore the neighborhood, I woke up this morning (after sleeping through my alarm), showered, jumped in the car with Luke and headed off to Church of the Resurrection to help package and ship hygiene kits.  Sure, I was doing things a little out of order this time (since I normally want to embed myself in a community for a little while before even setting foot in the church), but it was a good cause, so I was happy to be involved.

As I drove up to Resurrection, I couldn’t help but think back to Mars Hill.  Like Mars Hill, Resurrection’s location in a high-traffic shopping area might cause you to miss it at first.  It sits on a hill with a few higher-end restaurants right around it, and I might have driven right by had I not had Luke in the passenger seat directing me.  Luke filled me in a bit on the church and the neighborhood as we drove there, and I was glad to have such a well-informed guide.  Of course, Luke didn’t tell me so much that I wasn’t still surprised when I walked into the church’s main building.

The proposed building is the gray structure on the left side.

The inside felt fairly typical at first: beige walls with some wording here and there about the church’s mission, a nice patterned tile floor, a model for a proposed building, lots of windows and glass doors-- the usual convention center/shopping mall feel that I’ve come to expect from large churches.  In fact, looking at the proposed building made me flash back to the impressive facilities at Willow, and I couldn’t help but think that Resurrection is right at that church’s heels building-wise.  Of course, unlike Willow (which takes pride in not having a steeple like a traditional church), Resurrection is actually in a bit of a battle with the city over the size of their proposed steeple.  Apparently, its massive size might violate building codes, and looking at the model, I can see why!  This church is really expanding.  With the growing satellite campuses and the constant facility and member expansion going on at the Leawood location, Resurrection is booming.  Back to the building itself though . . .

What caught me off guard was a display right by the main entrance in the foyer.  The church is currently engaging in relief efforts in Malawi and Haiti, so they had actually constructed typical Malawian and Haitian homes right there in the foyer.  I’ll attach pictures since my descriptions won’t do the display justice.

Yep, an entire section of their foyer was dedicated just to international missions.  I was impressed.

Cardboard Boxes and Conversations

Of course, I was also impressed when I realized just how many people had gathered there for the morning’s mission effort.  For the purpose of assembling hygiene kits for the people recently displaced by severe weather in Joplin, MO, there must have been around 300 present in that foyer, and Luke and I observed that there was a pretty even distribution of kids, teenagers, adults, and senior adults.  Sure, I thought that the college-age demographic was conspicuously underrepresented, but it was 9:00AM on a Saturday after all, so I’m willing to look the other way on that one.  I spoke to a few church members and found out that the event hadn’t been that heavily promoted (since the Joplin tornado occurred barely two weeks ago, and promoting events like this is a long process), so I was all the more impressed by the big turnout.  Even more impressive is the fact that Resurrection does this sort of thing on a fairly regular basis and even has multiple staff members dedicated to such events.  I didn’t get a chance to find out how many kits we actually packaged, but I’m sure I’ll find out at one of the services this weekend.  I’m planning to attend three, so one of them is bound to announce it!

Absentminded volunteer having too much fun with tape roller.

Luke and I parted ways, and I found a place at a table assembling boxes that had been donated to us by Frito-Lay.  I struck up conversations with a few people immediately around me, hoping to find a church member with a lot of knowledge of the church and its mission efforts, and I lucked out.  Standing right across from me was Pat, a member at Resurrection’s west campus in Olathe.  Pat was a school teacher who was nearing retirement, and she was a wealth of information as well as just being a joy to work with.  We stood there assembling boxes and taping them together, and as our newly-assembled boxes awaited their health kits, I was able to ask her questions.  Pat told me that the west campus had grown from 30 to 500 in just four years, and even though I’m sure some of this growth was the result of Resurrection members in Olathe discovering that this new campus was closer to home, it was still an impressive number.  The campus meets in a school, and Pat informed me, “We’re working on constructing a chur-- a building I mean.”  I liked that she made the distinction.  We talked for a bit longer, but Luke soon came up and tapped me on the shoulder.  Apparently, Jeanna Repass (the church’s director of Kansas City Missions) was nearby and was available to talk.  Luke took over for me in the assembly line, and I sought out Jeanna.

A younger black woman, Jeanna was attired in the same bright blue shirts that the rest of the event coordinators wore, and she was standing by the smaller Firestone Prayer Chapel, where people had been encouraged to go in and pray over slips of paper bearing the names of tornado victims.  As my little blue notebook was safely stowed in my messenger bag (which was still sitting next to a pile of recently-assembled cardboard boxes), I didn’t get to record a lot of our conversation, but I was immediately moved by the interest Jeanna took in me.  She was great about answering my questions, but she also seemed very interested in getting to know me, and that’s something I haven’t seen at every church I’ve attended so far this summer.  She asked quite a bit about my call, and I got to talk with her about my desire to work in an inner city church (especially one with a lot of hands in nonprofit work and partner ministries).  When I asked Jeanna for her thoughts on that partner ministry approach, I liked her response: Resurrection doesn’t start independent 501c3s because it doesn’t want its ministries to branch off and turn into parachurch organizations.  Resurrection wants to make sure that its mission efforts stay closely affiliated with the church and that the church stays active in its mission efforts.  I have to agree that the diminishing relationships between churches and their partner ministries over time has been a concern of mine, so her answer really resonated with me.

Of course, I feel like Jeanna really knocked it out of the park for me when she said, “Tom, we don’t just want to do relief.  We don’t just want to do disaster recovery.  Those things are important, but we want to go beyond that and help people develop the mechanisms and structures that they need to lift themselves up, and it goes beyond that old cliché about teaching someone how to fish.  We don’t just want to be that big church out in the suburbs that tells people how to do things; we want to be involved and working in people’s lives, helping them to make things better.  This church was founded on missions, and it grew because of missions.  That’s what attracted all these people: the chance to show the love of Christ to the world.”

Wow.

Jeanna encouraged me to come back on Monday morning so that she could give me a tour of the facilities and explain Resurrection’s involvement in the community a little more.  She wanted a chance to walk me through all the many things that the church does in the community and how the church’s twenty-year history has been so shaped by their missions efforts.  She gave me a business card so that, worst case scenario, we could continue the conversation over email, but I’m going to do everything I can to make that meeting happen, even though it may mean my hours behind the wheel next week won’t get to be quite as staggered as I had initially planned.  (Don’t worry; a stop at Westboro Baptist is still on the menu for Monday afternoon.)  Jeanna prayed over me before we parted ways.

I took a slip of paper with a tornado victim’s name and headed into the chapel, where I lingered for a bit even after saying a few prayers for the safety and recovery of the victim’s family.  Having sat there for a good while, Luke came in and tapped me on the shoulder, “Hey Tom, want to come attend a baptism preparation meeting?”  DO I?!  Again, Luke is an awesome guide.  Of course, I’m sure he knew he was playing with fire by inviting a Baptist to attend a United Methodist baptism class, but we had fun with it anyway.

Dunk, Sprinkle, Pour

Luke led me over to the Wesley Covenant Chapel in the Leawood campus’s east building.  It probably had room for about two or three hundred people and was fairly traditional-looking, with fabric hangings around the standard golden cross behind the altar.  We were seated in green fabric-covered chairs (which reminded me that I’ve only been in a pew once so far this summer, and that was at my home church in Memphis), and there were about a dozen families represented in the room, most of which were young couples with infants, but a few of whom were individual adults seeking membership through baptism.  Presiding over the meeting and presenting on the significance of baptism was Rev. Glen Shoup, a fairly big man with an even bigger voice.  Clad in a white polo shirt tucked neatly into black slacks, Rev. Shoup was probably pushing 40 and had the supportive but slightly gruff demeanor of a high school basketball coach.  According to the church website, he is a congregational care pastor who is responsible for members with last names beginning A-C (since Resurrection divides their members up alphabetically to ensure that everyone has access to a pastor), but he was flexing his preaching muscles today during his presentation.

Gardens and baptismal pool at Resurrection.

Now, as a Baptist, I believe that Believer’s Baptism (the full immersion of a consenting adult as an outward sign of God’s grace and of membership in a church community) is the best way to go, but Rev. Shoup was speaking mostly about infant baptism today.  I found it interesting that, while so many of the churches I’ve attended so far this summer have stressed accepting Christ into your life and being baptized, the decision is somewhat reversed with the introduction of infant baptism into the equation.  Rev. Shoup explained that all children are born as children of God and that baptism is a church’s affirming of that.  The waters are a vehicle for communicating God’s grace into the life of the child, something of which the child becomes more aware as he/she grows up.  The child will eventually reach an age of full awareness and decide whether to reject that grace or continue to affirm it, and God respects that decision.  I may be stretching his argument farther than he intended, but the implication seemed to be that you never really have to say yes to God (as the grace flows upon you naturally), but you can always say no to God.  Again, this struck me as the polar opposite of the evangelism-heavy models I’ve seen at churches like Willow, and I have to admit that I’m pretty skeptical of it.  Still, it’s an interesting concept that will definitely require some more thought later.

On the question of dunking, sprinkling, or pouring, Rev. Shoup used an analogy that neither Luke nor I found satisfying, even though our disappointment stemmed from different reasons.  Rev. Shoup compared baptism to wedding rings: “Wedding rings might come in all different sizes and styles, but they always mean the same thing.”  Luke’s problem with this analogy was that the ring doesn’t quite have the same grace-imparting effect that the baptismal waters do.  Wedding rings are a symbol that has been incorporated into Christian ritual from other traditions, and there are plenty of cultures around the world that do not recognize rings as the symbol of marriage.  Baptism, on the other hand, is a universal symbol of Christian discipleship, so the analogy breaks down pretty quickly.  My qualm was that the different styles of baptism actually have very different significances that are belittled by Rev. Shoup’s analogy.  The ritual of baptism conveys several different meanings --a symbolic death and resurrection, an imparting of grace, etc.--, and each different method of baptism tends to highlight one of these symbolic elements above the others.   For example, immersion provides a better concrete visual for death, burial, and resurrection than sprinkling or pouring does.  By the same token, sprinkling and pouring give a better visual for the imparting of grace and blessing.  There is give and take in the different methods of baptism, and how you baptize can say a lot about your theological priorities, so no, it’s not at all like a wedding ring.

That aside, it really wasn’t that bad of a talk, and I actually walked out of there feeling a little more okay with the United Methodist style of baptism (even though I’m still planning to stick to the Baptist way).  Also, I was given a CD on my way out, so I’m planning to consult it later on down the road when I’ve got a little more time to kill.  For now though, I’ve got an evening praise service in like an hour and a half, and I still haven’t gotten around to eating lunch, so I’m going to go do that to make sure I don’t fall asleep during Rev. Scott Chrostek’s sermon.

More to come.  So much more to come . . .

Peace and Blessings,

Tom