What if God is about to do something new in your wilderness?
The Rev. Justin Spurlock delivers rich insight during worship at Presbyterian Older Adult Ministries Network’s annual conference
BOULDER, Colorado — Nearly 100 people from 24 states are attending “Bridging Generations,” the annual conference of the Presbyterian Older Adult Ministries Network.
During opening worship Wednesday at the Frasier Retirement Community in Boulder, Colorado, the Rev. Justin Spurlock, senior pastor at Grace Presbyterian Church in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, and Covenant Presbyterian Church in Greenwood Village set the vision for those in attendance with an inspiring sermon based on Isaiah 43 and his own experience.
Conference musicians the Rev. Bill Davis and Brendan Schuster added to worship with voices, guitar and shruti box. Worshipers wrote their prayer concerns on ribbons which they wove through chicken wire sandwiched by wooden frames, all of which were on their tables.
“My hope is that you will take a peek behind the veneer,” Spurlock said after reading most of Isaiah 43. When God tells the people “I know you” and “I love you,” “those are words that mean a lot to people who don’t have those connections, who aren’t rooted in that place,” such as the people of Isaiah’s time. “Particularly as we work with older adults, so often they have come from a place where they were rooted and are now in a place that feels quite different, a place where they don’t have those connections. They begin to think — and we leaders push it on them — that those eyes that have seen a lot cannot be trusted anymore.”
Then Spurlock asked this question: “When people are pushed to the side and told their memories and experiences don’t matter anymore, what happens to their sense of identity? They begin to feel they’re not loved and not known, that their faith from the past is no longer valued and perhaps no longer matters.”
“We call this space ‘wilderness,’ friends,” he said. “What if God is about to do something new in your wilderness? What if your eyes, that have seen so much, might actually be tuned to see the true new thing that God is up to in our midst? What might that mean?”
Those who have seen a lot “can see what’s coming next,” Spurlock said. “They can perceive what might be new, that these are streams flowing through these wilderness places.”
The opportunity in the desert that many churches are experiencing “isn’t with families with kids. It’s with older adults. I’m speaking to the choir here,” he said. “Our senior adults among us feel like they aren’t the places where God is going to bring a flowing river, yet they have the experience to know what might actually be new. They have literally seen it all, and they can come alongside us and say, ‘let me help you dream something new. The thing you are handing us is something we tried 27 years ago, and it didn’t turn out like you leaders had hoped. Let’s try something together.’”
“It’s in these spaces,” he said, “where God does something new.”
Wind Crest Senior Living is “a stone’s throw” from Grace Presbyterian Church, Spurlock noted, and about three years ago he and others formed a new worshiping community there called Winds of Grace, part of Denver Presbytery’s rich tapestry of new worshiping communities. Even after preaching two sermons on a Sunday, Spurlock looks forward to a third sermon once a month at Winds of Grace.
“There aren’t the typical expectations a congregation brings,” he said. “I sing some songs and pray some prayers on a Sunday afternoon. They don’t care if the sermon is a little tired or I am a little tired. They accept us for who we are and we are excited to be in this space together.”
He comes out of afternoon worship “believing I have encountered the holy in the wilderness. It’s anything but a desert,” Spurlock said. “I wonder if that’s what all our church communities should feel like? They have arrived at that place because they have seen so much, experienced all of it, and they actually know what is new and what is from God.”
“We have the opportunity to lift these experiences up to provide value, to say, ‘you are known and loved and God is not done with you yet. God is going to make a way in the wilderness.’ Amen.”
Check back with pcusa.org for additional reporting from the Bridging Generations conference, which runs through Friday.
You may freely reuse and distribute this article in its entirety for non-commercial purposes in any medium. Please include author attribution, photography credits, and a link to the original article. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeratives 4.0 International License.
