Getting it Wrong

“Getting it Wrong”

Rev. Stephen Milton

Lawrence Park Community Church

May 18 2025

Do you have any food restrictions? Foods you won’t or  can’t eat? One of the ways in which modern life has changed a lot over the years is that people have become much more picky about what they will eat. There are vegans who won’t eat anything that includes animal products, so no meat, dairy, eggs or fish. Vegetarians will eat eggs and dairy, but no meat. People who are gluten sensitive avoid eating wheat; people who are lactose intolerant suffer pain when they eat anything with dairy in it. Those are all personal food restrictions, some by choice, others based on biology. And waiters in restaurants are expected to understand all of it. 

There are also food restrictions that we practice as entire groups. Muslims don’t eat pork, neither do Jews. Christian Gentiles like ourselves like to think that we are free of food restrictions and taboos, that we can eat anything. But occasionally, you may encounter another culture’s food habits that bring you up short. In some nations, people eat bugs, like ants and locusts, a good source of protein, and cheap to produce. Here, we send a salad back if it has a bug in it.  

In the church I came up in, we found a cookbook from the 1930s. It has serious recipes for squirrel - raccoon- and possum. Even before I gave up meat, there was no way I was going to scrape up a roadkill squirrel from the street and serve it for dinner. Why? Because that would be disgusting. You might as well serve up some rat on a plate. Not going to happen. Disgusting. That’s what a food taboo is like. It is not something you think, it is something you feel in the depths of your being. We don’t know why we don’t eat something, we just don’t.

I mention all this so we can understand what Peter was going through when he had that vision of the sheet descending from the sky. There he was, doing his daily prayers on the roof of his house after Jesus had gone back to heaven.  A sheet comes down containing all sorts of animals which the Romans would eat, but no good Jew would ever touch. Peter reacts with revulsion when he is asked to eat them. No way, he says, I’m a good Jew. But the angel has a plan. The angel wants Peter to start spreading the good news to the Gentiles. They are people who do eat the animals on this sheet. And if Peter is going to share the good news about Jesus to the Romans, then he will be expected to eat with them. And what they eat is forbidden to Jews. Because the angel knows, there is no way to get people together without them eating together. If this new faith is going to spread, people will have to break bread together. 

I think it is important that we recognize that the angel did not just visit Peter. An angel also arrives in the pagan household and speaks to them. God’s spirit breaks into the lives of Peter and this pagan household with a new idea that strikes everyone as impossible, unwise and possibly dangerous. But the reason we are telling this story today is that Peter and the pagans both said yes. They set aside their worries and concerns and decided to go with God’s strange plan. Peter entered that pagan home, ate with them, and spent days telling them the good news about Jesus, and so the faith started to spread. It was the start of a spectacular growth spurt that spread across the entire Mediterranean, and now counts 2 billion people worldwide.

This year is the 100th anniversary of the United Church of Canada. In the most recent issue of Broadview Magazine, there is an article describing the church’s growth and decline after the 1960s. All over the country, churches are shrinking and closing. No one wants this, of course. Churches have tried all sorts of strategies to stay open. But the sad truth is that usually by the time churches decide they need to do something different, it is too late. They are down to 20 or 30 people on a Sunday, or less, and there just isn’t enough energy left to do anything to turn things around.

So what should we do? That was a question that was taken very seriously at this church, Lawrence Park Community Church. We were formed 80 years ago, and in the fall we will be celebrating our anniversary. However, before the pandemic, it wasn’t obvious that there would be much to celebrate. The endowment fund, our savings, was down to about 250,000 dollars, not enough to see us too many more deficit years. Attendance had been dropping, too. The writing was on the wall. We needed to try something very different or the church would die, through shrinking numbers and too little savings.

The lead minister at that time, John Suk, proposed something new. He said that since church attendance was down all over the country, doing more of the same on Sunday morning wasn’t going to work. So, instead of begging people to come on Sunday morning, why not create a new service. One that met in the evening. That service shouldn’t be very religious, since most people aren’t into religion. But what people do crave is community. 

So, John took a page from the old book. He said, let’s offer a free meal, where strangers can sit down and get to know each other. The strategy was right out o the book of Acts and today’s story. A new start begins with food, the breaking of bread together. Not in the sanctuary, that would feel too religious, but in the gym. 

Soul Table

This new service was called Soul Table. 

Bruce Lourie+old people eating quick

Each week a free dinner would be served, and inspirational speakers would give talks. And there would be a band, doing secular songs. 

The hope was that this format could attract new, younger people to the church. 

As the older congregation dwindled, hopefully a new, more secular kind of service, built around creating community could grow, with younger people. 

It would be expensive. Without ongoing grants, it would burn through our savings in a couple years. It would need a new minister to run it, and a new staff member to make the bookings and create the publicity. This plan was a Hail Mary pass. If we were going to die, then let’s at least die trying to do something new. This congregation debated the merits of the idea, knowing that its cost could end the church. But in the end, the congregation voted in favour, and we received some major grants from the presbytery and other sources to make it happen.

Soul Table started as a weekly event in September 2019. I was hired to be the new minister to run it. Judi Pressman was hired to be the program manager. 

 Many of you attended Soul Table, and many liked it. We had a great band, and people did come.

People looking at screen

 On slow nights, about 30 people would attend, on good nights, up to 90. There was an an average of 45 people each night, and there were always more people from the community than from our congregation. 

 So we were off to a good start, although it was going to cost more than we could afford in the longer run. We hoped we would keep getting grants to keep it going. But that’s all it was, a hope.

As it turned out, we were wrong about pretty much everything. Despite all we did to attract young people, they didn’t come. We advertised at Glendon, we advertised online. 

Old people

 But the vast majority of the people who came were over 55. We spent a lot of money not attracting young people. 

 Soul Table also didn’t get a chance to grow because the pandemic arrived. Overnight, we weren’t allowed to serve free dinners or get together in person. No one could see that coming, of course. We tried moving Soul Table to zoom, but none of the Soul Table newcomers came. They wanted free dinners and in-person community. So after all that work and dreaming Soul Table ended. 

What should have happened next was that our church would have continued to shrink. Our bank account would be slowly drained as we ran deficits, and as people died, the congregation would get smaller and smaller. During covid, we feared people had lost the habit of going to church in person. Surely, we were doomed to fade away once the pandemic ended. 

But as we can see, we were wrong about that, too. We didn’t fade away. On the money front, we received two major bequests, from the Pooler and Lent families, who attended this church long ago. They helped increase our endowment substantially, to more than double what it was before the pandemic. We have a rainy day fund again. And since then, other people have been very generous as well. Last year, for the first time in quite a while, we didn’t run a deficit. So after years of assuming we would run out of money, we are doing much better.

Another thing we were wrong about: attracting young adults. We thought Soul Table would work, but it didn’t. During the pandemic, a few of the young choir members wanted to talk on zoom, so we started doing that. It grew to about ten people, so when covid ended, we decided to keep going. I assumed that most of these young adults would not want to come to church, so we hired Roberta to run an online ministry for young adults. We were wrong about that, too. It turned out that young adults did want to come in person to our Sunday services, and they are still here, even more than before. They didn’t want to meet online, but to be in community, on Sunday mornings. Some of them are even having babies now. 

Before the pandemic, we assumed that Church attendance would keep declining until we died. That didn’t happen, either.  Most Sundays, we have between 60-90 people here in person, and another 30-40 online, sometimes more. We have more people each Sunday now than we did before the pandemic. In fact, this is the highest it’s been since 2011.

How could things go so well even though we were wrong about so much? I think this suggests that when doing church work, we need to be humble. We can make plans, but ultimately, we are here to do God’s will, not our own. 

We’re all like Peter that day on the roof praying. It wasn’t his idea to go to the pagan’s house. That strange idea came from the angel. The same angel who talked to the pagans and said, go get this Jewish guy Peter, have him come talk to you. God intervened. Peter probably wanted Christianity to spread in synagogues, he never would have dreamt up this weird plan of spreading the word among people who eat strange, unclean food. God knows what is going to work, and often, we don’t. And that’s ok, provided we don’t assume that our plans are more important than what God wants to do.

It appears that God wasn’t ready to shut down this church. God seems to want us to keep sharing the good news, in words and music, and through good works among ourselves and in the community. At a time when churches are closing everywhere, the strangest thing of all is to stay open and grow. But if that’s what God wants, who are we to argue? As one of your ministers, I do not say any of this with pride. I am as surprised as anyone. I have made all sorts of plans and strategies that didn’t work out as expected. But what we have all done is remained open to the urging of the spirit. We have been flexible enough to change our plans to meet where the spirit has been leading us. As long as we remember that our calling is to follow God, to be like Peter, going where the angels tell us to go, then we will be working on the right strategy, wherever it leads us. What a strange and wonderful journey, one where it’s okay to get it wrong, while God gets it right. Amen.