Coming Out: Leaving Comfortable Places
Hebrews 11:1-3
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Albany, NY
April 16, 2023
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUwSm3AAu-A
At the Executive Team meeting this week, we were talking about today’s congregational meeting, about the important decisions to be made regarding the future that God is calling us into. People are feeling a certain urgency about taking decisive action soon and I applaud that. On Tuesday night, I heard some comments that I’ve heard several times recently. People who have been part of Emmanuel for a long time know that this is not the first time we have wrestled with some of the same questions over the last several decades. In the comments I’m hearing recently, there is an acknowledgment that this time the outcome will likely be different, the discernment about what God is to do with our energy and resources and building may lead us in a radically new direction from before. I recognize that truth of that and also I want to be sure to point out that those who came before us were faithful in their own times. If with God’s help, we choose something that Emmanuel did not choose 10 years ago or 25 years ago or 50 years ago, it does not mean that we were wrong in those previous decisions. Those congregations, which overlap with the present congregation, were faithful in their own time as we must be in ours.
This conversation keeps coming around again because attending to the future that God is luring us into is an ever present part of our faith journey. An early version of the conversation in this church happened in 1868.
The church was only about 34 years old then. With the rest of the nation, they had suffered through the difficult years of the Civil War. Many young people had left Albany to fight in that war. Baptisms had declined. Church membership had fallen off. The neighborhood was changing and businesses were encroaching on the church property. So in January 1868, the church called a meeting to consider their future. At that meeting, a committee was formed to investigate these options – 1) merging with another Baptist church in the city and/or 2) finding out how much they could sell their building for and 3) whether they could purchase property to relocate into a new house of worship. [1]
Does that sound familiar? The decision was made to move up from Pearl Street to our current location and to change the church name from Pearl Street Baptist Church to Emmanuel Baptist Church. This building was dedicated in 1871. To those Exec team members who said we have had this conversation before, I wonder if you knew how right you were.
Our Scripture reading was short today, and probably familiar to many of us. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
Our predecessors at Emmanuel had hope for the future. At a difficult time, they stepped out in faith to create something unforeseen. They could never have imagined what would unfold in history or the varieties of ministries in this place that happened over the next 150 years. They surely didn’t anticipate that automobiles would become commonplace or they would have secured land for a parking lot!
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
In his Cotton Patch version, Clarence Jordan translates that verse like this “Now faith is the turning of dreams into deeds; it is betting your life on the unseen realities.”
The author of the book of Hebrews spends the rest of chapter 11, reminding us of faithful people in the past.
By faith Abraham and Sarah obeyed when they were called to go to a place that they were to receive as an inheritance; and they set out, not knowing where they was going. They are now linked with not one, but three major world religions. What an unseen reality.
By faith, Moses refused to be identified as the son of the Pharoah’s daughter. He left the safety and protection of the palace choosing to identify with the oppressed Hebrew people instead. He could not have anticipated that he would be the one to lead them out of Egypt.
By the end of chapter 11, the author has called to mind several named and unnamed faithful people who stepped out in faith and bet their lives on unseen realities.
Two thousand years later, the roll call of the courageous faithful is exponentially longer. We might add . . .
By faith, the desert fathers and mothers went to the wilderness to follow Jesus in prayer and contemplation because the Emperor Constantine had embraced Christianity and the church was getting cozy with Empire.
By faith, Francis of Assissi abandoned his father’s wealth and took on a life of poverty and kissed a person with leprosy, starting a whole new kind of Christian ministry
By faith, Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery and then returned to the south 13 times to lead others to freedom.
By faith, countless people whose names are lost to history served God and cared for their neighbors, spoke truth to power, sought justice and loved their enemies. They lived their lives on “the settled conviction that the unseen God is real and that this God continues to uphold this world and commune with God’s people.”[2]
I would like to remember 10 more names on that roll call today. The names are Tamer Page, Betsey Burke, Catherine Gordon, Margaret Jones, and Eleanor Penry. Joshua Burke, Salem Dutcher, John Gray, William Penry, and Charles Boyington. Does anyone recognize those names? By faith these five women and five men, were led to form the First Baptist Society in the City of Albany. That was in 1810. I have jumped back even further into Emmanuel church history.
One year later, those ten people had doubled in size to a congregation of 21 and the First Baptist Church of Albany was born. Five different pastors served First Baptist in its first 16 years. That is a lot of turnover in leadership and it did not grow as desired. But the congregation persevered faithfully and then Dr. Bartholomew Welch was called pastor. Dr. Welch seems to have been a powerful preacher and charismatic leader. The church steadily increased in numbers and in influence in the city. By 1833, there were 327 members and they began to consider planting another Baptist church. Dr. Welch said that the church felt that they had passed from “the most perplexing embarrassments and the lowest state of depression to their present state of comparative ease and prosperity’ in just a few years. They also believed that they had an obligation to live to the glory of God and not rest in that relative ease and prosperity.
Like the butterfly, they would have to leave the cocoon in order to fly. As our gathering song says, they were being called out of their comfortable space to meet Jesus in a more difficult place.
As First Baptist discerned their future, they unanimously agreed that God expected them to plant another church. But no one was willing to make the personal sacrifice, to give up the comfort and familiarity of their current church, in order to do this work Everyone thought that someone should go plant this new church, just not them. Writing about this 100 years later, the then pastor said “At the divine call, everyone meekly and submissively answered, “Lord, here am I; send him.”
Eventually, they came up with a new plan: a majority of the church members would stay at its current location with its debt-free building and its strong reputation in the community, but Dr. Welch, the dynamic and visionary pastor, and some members of the church would be released to form a new church. It took about a year to secure a property and build the new church building. Then the church clerk again collected the names of those who felt called by God to plant the new church. This time, there were 123 volunteers. Some in leadership were alarmed that so many were leaving. More than a third of the congregation and the beloved pastor went to plant the second church.
Probably everyone involved was uncomfortable with this scenario. First Baptist had to continue doing faithful ministry despite the loss of the pastor and his family, three deacons and their families and many active workers among those who went to the new church. Those who stayed did so with courageous obedience.
And the new church, had to start over, a new ministry in a new place, with a worshipping congregation about 1/3 the size they were used to. They probably missed their old mortgage-free building and their friends at First Baptist. Maybe they missed singing in the choir or the way the light came in through the windows at certain times. But, by faith they set out to make God’s dream real with their deeds. The new church they planted was Pearl Street Baptist. They could not have foreseen that in another 30 years, it would move again and become Emmanuel Baptist Church. If they had not acted as they did, you and I would not be here today.
Living by faith means letting ourselves trust that the future may be different from the present and that will be OK. We are ever-emerging spiritual creatures and change is part of growth. Coming out as individuals and as a church from what we have known into a new identity may be filled with anxiety and unknowing and lots of questions. But I hope that you are encouraged, as I am, by the examples set by those who came before us both in ancient Biblical times and within our more recent faith family.
I discovered this week that I have only preached on this passage once before. That was on my very first Sunday as your pastor in 2010. Anticipating the future ahead of us at that time, I said “We don’t know yet what our time together will bring, what adventures and unimagined possibilities for joy will be ours. Getting to this day has not been without cost for either of us, but I have a persistent belief that it will be worth it. In fact, I’m betting my life on that unseen reality.”
I am still betting my life on that unseen reality. I hope you are too.
[1] Historical information in this sermon gleaned from Emmanuel Baptist Church Albany Centennial 1834-1934 and Bi-centennial History of Albany: History of the County of Albany, NY from 1609-1886, Vol. 2, by George Rogers Howell
[2] Joshua W. Jipp in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year C, Volume 3 Joel Green, Thomas Long, Luke Powery, Cynthia Rigby, Editors, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2019), p. 227