GA08142

The strength to transform

By Mike Ferguson

SAN JOSE, June 28, 2008 — We Presbyterians have a lot to be humble about, said the Rev. Dan Chun, the preacher at Saturday’s General Assembly closing worship.

For 42 consecutive years, the church has been losing members. Only five churches of the nearly 11,000 in the denomination have grown every year for the past 10 years. Three in every four churches have either reached an attendance plateau or have experienced declining attendance.

“Do we despair? Do we ignore the facts and put our heads in the sand? We can say, ‘Who cares?’ or we can humbly face the facts head-on,” said Chun, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Honolulu, a church that purchased a golf course and holds services in the clubhouse there.

Chun’s prescription for Presbyterians is “a radical self-inventory of what we’re doing right and what we’re doing wrong.”

“We should admit before God we have made some bad decisions,” he said. “We should be saying to God, ‘Give us the strength to transform and reform before it’s too late.’ Things will never radically change for the better if we continue doing the same thing. People’s lives and souls are at stake.”

“Jesus gave us the responsibility to grow our churches, but we aren’t doing a good job, are we?”

No restaurant would survive if fewer customers ate there year over year, Chun said.

Change, he said, will require “radical confession.”

“Has there been more love of ourselves, our programs, our spiritual heritage, than of you, Lord?” he asked.

The opposite of humility is not arrogance, he said – it’s ignorance, the “ignorance of what God and the Holy Spirit can do in our lives.”

“When we know what God has done in spite of us,” he said, “it is far easier to give God the glory.”

Chun himself has walked a pockmarked path that taught him humility. Two weeks before he entered seminary, his then-wife left him, telling him she’d never loved him. Being divorced throughout seminary “made them the worst years of my life. I felt like the biggest loser in the world.”

But eventually he received a call to serve a Bay Area church as an associate pastor heading up a singles ministry. The Honolulu church called him to be their pastor, and the church somehow acquired its golf course and clubhouse with just $200,000 in the bank when the seller was asking for $20 million.

He’s since remarried, and said that even after accepting his current job, “people have left my church, I have been betrayed by good friends, and I have taken risks and failed.”

“I’ve wondered if I had the skills, wisdom, strength and endurance to be a pastor, and I’m sure you have, too,” he said. “The Bible tells us to boast of our weakness, and I will do that any day, any time.”

“For our denomination, for the decisions we have made and not made this week, today is a call for humility,” he said. “Let’s be thankful for our past accomplishments, and let’s keep on doing justice and loving kindness, but let’s also keep walking humbly with God.”

“It is in humility that we can get along with viewpoints strongly different from ours,” he said. “It is in humility alone we will find answers for our future and true faithfulness for our ministries.”

The Milpitas (Calif.) Praise Band offered energetic, upbeat music during Saturday’s service.