Serving in Community
“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread from house to house and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.” Acts 2:42-47
August 25, 2013
Acts 2:42-47, 1 Peter 4:8-11, Serving in Community
Doug Scalise, Brewster Baptist Church
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It’s nice to be back at Brewster Baptist Church after our trip to Kodiak Baptist Mission on Kodiak Island in Alaska, August 12-23. Founded 120 years ago in 1893, Kodiak Baptist Mission is a Christian social service organization whose purpose is “to improve the quality of life of children and their families by ministering to their unmet physical, social, emotional, spiritual and intellectual needs, by following the example set forth in the life of Jesus Christ.” KBM relies on volunteer mission teams that come and do work that otherwise wouldn’t be accomplished or would take much longer to complete. Kodiak Island is familiar to people who watch the Discovery Channel’s, Deadliest Catch or who saw the 2006 movie, The Guardian, starring Kevin Costner about folks serving in the Coast Guard in Alaska. Kodiak is home to the second largest fishing fleet in the United States and the largest Coast Guard station. The island itself is roughly equivalent in size to the state of Connecticut, but has only about 13,000 residents and 100 miles of roads. Alaska’s state motto, The Last Frontier is very appropriate. Most of Kodiak Island is a Wildlife Refuge.
If you’re open to it, you can learn a lot on a mission trip. There are life lessons for all of us, whether we went or not, that teach us about God, ourselves, and living out our faith. On this trip, the thing that struck me the most was the power of Serving in Community. The power of serving in community is manifested in many ways like in today’s scripture.
The early church devoted itself to the apostles’ teaching. For us, after breakfast our morning began with chapel at 8:00 am. Three candles were lit and those three persons went up to one person each and offered a prayer of blessing for the day and passed the candle to them. Once you received your blessing, then you went and blessed someone else. It was a marvelous example of the priesthood of all believers. Each day there was daily scripture readings as the KBM staff is going through the Bible in a year. The regular daily reading of scripture is a great practice for all of us whether we’re on a mission trip or at home, whether we do so in community or on our own; it helps to build our spiritual lives. Thinking how we can intentionally bless and pray for others every day is something we can do wherever we are.
The early church devoted themselves to fellowship and so did we. As we served together in community we experienced many of the benefits of fellowship the first of which is Encouragement. One day I was digging holes by myself for large square concrete stepping stones to connect a path from the pre-school to the sidewalk. I was digging 25 holes and trying to get them to be both the correct size and shape so the stones would lie flat with no wiggling or movement at all. It made such a difference as other members of our “cleaning team” Jill, Nina, Melanie, Ellen, and Deb came over as they finished a job and started helping me. It is such an encouragement when others come to help us and we don’t feel alone and the task gets accomplished faster. We can an encouragement to other people as well. Frequently those of us who were doing smaller jobs or things that popped up, would check in with some of the other teams and ask, if they needed any help. Other times, folks would seek out some willing hands to do something that needed more assistance, like lifting and moving 40 foot long black pipes.
A second benefit to serving in community is it enables people to serve where they are gifted, talented, or willing. This is what we heard in 1 Peter 4, “Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received.” We didn’t have to exert any pressure to get things done. Dave and Deb Hunt volunteered to help clean up after every single meal and Sharon Palmer and Julie Bray offered to help prepare the meals which freed up everyone else which was a great blessing. Julie also ended up helping in a preschool class and Sharon handled some tasks in the office. Some of our most experienced builders, Bob Linnell, George Metzgar, Roger Bray, and Wayne Johnston, served on the project of supervising Greg putting up all the boards on the back of the barn. Nancy Bray who is an excellent photographer took hundreds of pictures in between doing jobs.
A third benefit to serving in community is the opposite of serving where we’re gifted; it can mean getting out of our comfort zone. One aspect of going on mission trips that would benefit us all if we remembered it at home is being willing to get out of our comfort zone and trying new things. On a mission trip people have different comfort zones. For me, being in chapel every morning, where we sang, often not too well, heard scripture read, shared our thoughts on the reading and then prayed was very comfortable. For some members of our group, that activity was a stretch and many members of our group never shared a thought or prayed out loud, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t get anything out of it, they just weren’t comfortable speaking or praying out loud. Our 20 year-old son Nathan got to work with Ben Gregson and Mitch Summey who are both excellent carpenters, designing and building two sets of stairs that functioned in one case as a fire escape and in another as regular means of entering and exiting a house. Nathan learned how to operate a whole bunch of power tools he’d never used before. Peter Donovan, who was such a great part of our team with all his skills, insisted that I drive a fork lift, something he can do in his sleep at the marina he runs. He knew it was out of my comfort zone, but he clearly and patiently told me and showed me how to do it and now I can add fork lift driver to my list of mission trip experiences.
Peter’s helping me with the fork lift and Ben and Mitch helping Nathan with power tools and building stairs illustrates another aspect of Serving in Community: the value of mentoring and teaching others. Skills, knowledge and abilities are taught and learned from person to person. What skills, knowledge, and abilities do you possess? How and where are you sharing them? The world around us is our mission field and there are all kinds of opportunities for us to share and learn if we are open to doing so.
Our 17-year-old son Greg did a lot of landscaping with Josh and Peter Donovan and Dave Hunt. The first thing Greg and Josh did was cut the huge yard behind our house, it took them about 2 ½ hours the grass was so high. Within an hour of when they finished, there was a pre-school class out there playing. One of the nice things about serving in community is often we get to see tangible results rather quickly, often more quickly than in some other areas of life. There was a short little railing held up by posts right outside where most of the counselors lived that someone had started to scrape to prepare it to be painted but they never finished it. So every time the staff members came and went they saw the half scraped railing. So we scraped, primed, and painted it and the railing looked so much better. If our vocation or work involves primarily people rather than things, it can be really nice to see something get transformed in a matter of minutes, hours, or days, because if you’re a pastor, teacher, social worker or something like that, you don’t always know what impact, if any, that your time and effort are having.
Seeing in another place while you serve enables you to appreciate the beauty and variety of God’s creation and it’s enjoyable to experience that in community as well. We saw bald eagles and had Junior at the top of the tree right behind our deck screaming for breakfast. Andy Palmer and Mitch went fishing for salmon several times in rivers and streams that were flooded with fish. The mountains all around were stunning and provided great views. The Spruce forests that went right down to the rocky shores seemed almost primeval, especially with the moss hanging off the branches and carpeting the forest floor. We even saw a mother Kodiak bear and her cubs.
Driving to fossil beach was an adventure, (driving away was even more so). While there we saw thousands of fossils from the Miocene Era, perhaps some ten million years ago. The kelp there was also ridiculously big and looked like something out of a science fiction movie. It was fascinating and humbling to stand on rocks, looking out at the north Pacific holding a rock with fossil shells and to think about how incredibly brief our span on earth truly is. Geologically speaking a human life is barely a breath on the face of the earth. It reminded me both to appreciate every day we have as well as the importance of focusing on eternity.
Serving in Community we see the power of Caring in many different ways. Last Sunday, Trevor Jones, the Executive Director of KBM, took us out in their boat to Long Island. It was about a one hour boat ride and then we walked around the island and saw in the midst of the trees and moss, the ruins of Quanset huts built by the US Army during WWII about 70 years ago. Trevor pointed out that many of the buildings on the mission were built at the exact same time, the difference has been, that people have cared about and for their buildings, and the ones on the island were just left to the elements. Whether one talks about buildings, people, or organizations, the importance of people who care can’t be overstated. Who and what do you care about? How are you expressing your caring?
Like the early church in Acts 2, we “were together and had all things in common.” We had 23 of us on the same schedule in terms of meals and work in a house with three toilets and three showers. There was anywhere from two to five people in one room. Jill, Nathan, Greg and I were in a room less than half the size of my office. Mitch and Ellen Summey, Andy and Sharon Palmer, and Melanie Stone were in one room that was thankfully bigger than ours. While there are some downsides to having so little personal space, the positive aspect is that it literally brings people together. So people sat in the kitchen, living room, or deck and visited and talked. One of the great values of serving with other people is you get to know them much better.
According to Acts 2, the first Christians, “ate their food with glad and generous hearts.” In Kodiak, people were generous in going to Walmart (to which there was an almost nightly pilgrimage by at least a couple members of our group) or Safeway and bringing back bananas, cookies, ice cream, milk and other items to share with everyone in the house. We certainly were always glad to eat. Andrew North, the cook at KBM, did a nice job for us and thanks to all the salmon that folks caught, we had salmon like Bubba’s family had shrimp in the movie Forrest Gump. We had teriyaki salmon, balsamic salmon, plain old salmon, blackened salmon, salmon burgers, salmon tacos, salmon spread.
Sometimes as Christians we can miss the word “glad” in today’s scripture. It says in Proverbs 17:22 that “a cheerful heart is good medicine.” While folks worked very hard and got sore and tired, I’ve never been on a mission trip that featured so much laughter. Don Jamieson and Eileen Johnston who worked together painting hundreds of boards for the back of the barn, were our resident George Burns and Gracie Allen comedy team. Whatever time you woke up, if you weren’t first, you could hear laughter coming from the kitchen table and the living room. Whatever time you went to bed, you could still hear people talking and laughing. Laughter is contagious and you almost felt like you wanted to get up or stay up because you were missing something. We laughed as we worked. We laughed in the vans as we drove around the island. We laughed when we looked at the mud room where we entered and exited our house.
Today’s passage from Acts 2 seeks to answer the question, why should I be a part of a church rather than just doing my own thing? The Bible doesn’t say, “All who believed went their separate ways and did whatever they wanted and became faithful, mature, devoted followers of Jesus.” No, they devoted themselves to community, to learning, fellowshipping, eating, and praying with one another. Floyd Roseberry writes in his little book, Invitation to Relationship with Christ: A Seeker’s Guide to the Christian Faith (p.46), “God expects us to be part of the Christian community, the church. Faith in Christ brings us not only into relationship with God, but with God’s people. Nowhere does the Bible refer to persons who enter into relationship with God through Christ and do not become part of the Christian church. Rather, individual Christians are likened to parts of a body, stones in a building, branches on a vine, citizens in a community. Faith in Christ is personal, but not private. Part of faith is joining the community of faith.”
We participate in a faith community like BBC so we may grow in Christ-likeness, to express and receive love, and to share in carrying out the mission of the church. Together we learn, encourage, support, laugh, cry, pray and provide accountability as we live out our commitment to Christ & to Christian community. And we all have an important part to play in making it happen. As we were flying home, I thought about the final thing I learned about Serving in Community. Our group ranged in age from 15-years-old to 81, people had different skills, different energy levels, various strengths and abilities, but every single person through their work and effort, their presence, their sharing, their encouragement and generosity added to our experience. Every single person in our group made a contribution and our group would have been diminished if even one person had not been present. Every one of us truly can make a difference if we’re willing to serve. As long as we seek to love and to serve, we bear witness to God’s love in Christ.
Let’s pray: Lord,
Open our eyes to see the wonderful world you created & the challenges we face.
Open our ears to hear of the needs of people all around this land & the world.
Open our minds to imagine the world as you want it to be.
Open our hands to share with people who are hungry, grieving, & homeless.
Open our mouths to pray, to share your Good News, & to speak out for others.
Open our hearts to love you & our neighbors near & far.
Help us to serve together in love in Jesus’ name. Amen.