Remnant People - Elizabeth Dilley

Rev. Elizabeth Dilley is our Opening Worship preacher - she is pastor of First Congregational UCC, Red Oak, Iowa

Our mainline churches are only a remnant of what we used to be....with many lamenting throwing their hands in helpless despair.

But some are dancing...hooray!  Those remnant are there because they want to enter the sacred space.  we have been liberated from having to do it as it always has been done....Let's celebrate.

Living in a state of grace, is the only way that we can live....we must rely on the power of God...nothing else is left.  If our remnant could only rely on itself, we would not be here....but here we are.  How is it that our small little churches in small dying towns with mediocre to pathological leaders with only a few people?  There is only one way that they do it...it makes no sense....they do it only by the grace of God, only because God has something for them in the future.

Remnants of cloth in fabric stores get thrown in a left over bin.  I like them because I almost always find something wonderful.  Like this, ministerial leaders....pastors with little going for them come into this remnant churches and love them into unpredictable excellence. 

The town I serve is of 5,000 in the most rural and the most conservative part of our state.  Our church was the Country Club church when church membership was required for civic leadership.  Then things faltered and a bad pastor fractured the church.  Then Mac came 20 years ago came into their midst and said "you can live or you can die and I can help you do either of them well".  It took a while but they decided to try to live.

This church re-embraced their call to be a progressive presence in Southeast Iowa.  In 2001, they became an ONA church -- none like it for 120 miles.  Then they sold their parsonage to make a full time ministry possible.  In one of the two most conservative legislative districts in the state -- this church has celebrated 15 same sex weddings since 2001.

All we have to offer is God's love and God's grace.  And new people started coming and some stayed.  Now, we don't see ourselves as a remnant church but as a re-emerging community.

Many of you still part of remnant churches....let me hear an AMEN!  As for you churches who are doing well...I still have some good news for you.  We celebrate that we are living on the margins....where exciting stuff happens....it is where we can play....experiment.

As a remnant people....we MUST...MUST....MUST rely only on God.  Then God who loves us can pour out on us....because we are of God's own choosing for a future.  Let us go out boosting in the Lord's power to create beauty and wholeness for remnants such as ourselves.