Think on These Things

More than 2,000 years ago, Aesop told the story of the goose that laid the golden egg, and this fable has been rehearsed under various scenarios in both private and corporate life. Fundamentally, the motif is that care must be taken not to segregate or lessen the significance of the central player in the movie of life’s circumstances.

As we celebrated the centennial of the Church of the Nazarene, and as I heard stories of the movements of God around the world, I couldn’t help but juxtapose those stories with the oft-repeated claim that the church in the U.S. and Canada is not growing. The tincture from such proclamations can adversely affect the morale and attitude of the very goose that laid the golden egg. In fact, there have been great reports of God’s movement on many districts in the U.S. and Canada.

While it could be admitted that there has been collective growth stagnation here in the US/Canada region, it must also be recognized that this is the goose that continues to lay the eggs that provide the gold for continued missional initiatives around the globe. Consider for a minute these salient centennial statistics:

• Ridgefield on the Washington Pacific district – 61 new Nazarenes
• Nampa First – 113 new Nazarenes
• Miami Bethany, South Florida district – 251 new Nazarenes
• Tulsa Family Church – 20 baptisms and 45 new Nazarenes
• Warren Champion, East Ohio district – 20 new Nazarenes
• In 2007 the goose produced 32,609 new Nazarenes
• The Los Angeles area produced 1,738 new Nazarenes in 2007
• The New York area produced 969 new Nazarenes

The goose has great nobility when soaring in flight, but can get cantankerous when its detractors clip its wings and force it to stay on the ground. But those detractors eventually are forced to acknowledge that life without it is a pain in the neck. In fact, it is impossible.

This Thanksgiving might just be the time, in the midst of clamoring for global restructuring, to say “thanks” to the US/Canada Nazarene Goose that continues to lay the Golden Eggs.

The world watched and the nation waited. The nation applauded and the world reminisced, reminded of a 45-year old dream where people would not be judged by skin color, but on the content of their character. The nation waited breathlessly to see and hear Barack Obama ascend the podium in Grant Park to accept the results of the first general elections that fielded a Black person as party nominee for the office of president of the United States of America. Finally, a new chapter in the American cultural and racial psyche had been ushered in, one that mitigated prejudice, bigotry, inhospitality, and insensitivity and replaced it with tolerance, inclusion, understanding, self-examination, honesty, and confidence.

America must be proud of itself. The years of suspicion of other cultures’ capacity to wholeheartedly contribute to the making of America have been mitigated. Americans revealed a long-held tenet of life, that indeed “all men (women) are created equal with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

More to the point, there is a lesson here for the church. What really is the lesson for the church? It is to awake to the reality of not merely the election of a Black person as president of the most powerful nation in the world (though that is significant). It is more than that. Through God’s providence, a people who were once the objects and projects of consumerist profiteering enterprises have now been integrated into a marvelous mosaic and tapestry of God’s handiwork—fully human, fully American, fully accessible to all the American amenities.

This is not a story that should be a surprise for the church. Some 40 odd years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. reminded the nation that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It is the resplendent theme in the Hebrew Scriptures. God is inclined to effect liberation to the downtrodden and marginalized. One only has to scour the ancient texts to embrace this God who brought liberation to the people of Israel by the hands of Moses and at the behest of miraculous acts.

The inherent danger in this epochal phenomenon is to permit our partisan political proclivities to cloud the significance of the moment. This is a Kairos moment for Americans of the Judeo-Christian faith to embrace. Let us be grateful for the accomplishments that will long be remembered, not by Obama’s worn cliché, “Yes we can!” but by the chant, “Yes God can!”

Long live the dream!