By Reverend Laurie DeMott

"Kids (and adults for that matter) shouldn't come to church because they feel like they have to," they said, "but because they want to. They should feel like there is something here that they need and that they cannot get anywhere else."

"How can we make sure that church is something special?" they asked one another. "How can we bring a real sense of Christ's presence to what we do so that children and youth and adults will look forward to Sunday as a time when they can come and be renewed in their faith?"

One board member said, "It reminds me of that movie, 'Field of Dreams' where Kevin Kostner plays this farmer who decides to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield in Iowa because he hears a voice telling him, 'If you build it, they will come.'"

And so, at that meeting, the Board of Christian Ed decided to take as their motto for this year, "If we build it, they will come." Which is why we ended up with a baseball theme for Rally Day.

And there is in that phrase, "If you build it, they will come", a reminder of the kind of faith that Jesus asks us to have as workers in his field. In Matthew 28, the resurrected Jesus commissions the disciples to carry on his ministry. Up until that moment, the disciples had only been following and now suddenly Jesus was asking them to lead, to go out into the world and teach others what they had learned and to make new disciples who would in turn take over when they had gone. How inadequate they must have felt to that task especially when the crucifixion, and their own failure at the foot of the cross was so fresh in their minds. Yet Jesus entrusted these befuddled, sometimes cowardly, often fallible human beings with the task of carrying on the work of the son of God and because Jesus trusted them, and because they accepted the work in faith, not knowing where it might lead or how they were going to accomplish it, the church was born. And it has flourished for 2000 years because of people like you and me who heard that call of Christ and embraced it in our own lives. Some of the gatherings of the faithful that have followed in the generations after those first disciples have numbered in the thousands: cathedrals echoing with the songs of huge choirs, international conferences of Christians joined in service, mega churches with their 30 piece worship bands and their auditorium seating, and some of the gatherings of the faithful have been small -- a cluster of families meeting in a living room for Bible study, a tiny country church with an out-of-tune piano and a quavering 80 year old soloist, a church whose Sunday School consists of one teenager making pipecleaner crosses with the three younger children. When we apply the phrase, "If you build it, they will come," we are not talking about a promise to pack the sanctuary with bodies -- we are talking about Christ's promise that when we believe in the work we do here, we will be part of a long line of faithful who have ensured that the gospel message continues to live among us and that Christ's work is done in the world.

Tony Campolo, a well known pastor, speaker, and author writes, "[One year] when I was doing research in the archives of our denomination, I decided to look up the church report for the year of my baptism. There were three names: [my own], Dick White, and Bert Newman. [I am a now Christian author and speaker,] Dick's [become a missionary], and Bert Newman is now a professor of theology at an African seminary. 'Then I read the church report for my year: 'It has not been a good year for our church,' it said. 'We have lost twenty-seven members. Three [did join] the church, [but] they were only children'.'

Would 50 new members have made the work of that church any less significant? Whatever they thought of themselves, they were clearly doing something right if the three kids who they baptized went on to dedicate their lives to Christ's work. In Matthew 28, when Christ says to the eleven, "Go into the world and make disciples," the Greek word that we translate "make disciples" is actually one word -- mahth-ay-TOO-sa-tay -- and it is a verb. One scholar said that rather than translate this verse as "Go into the world and make disciples" as if we can measure our success by the number of bodies seating in the pews, we should translate it as something like, "Go into the world and disciplize ". Disciplizing is a lifelong process which cannot be quantified, cannot be recorded on a ledger sheet, and has nothing to do with the number of kids in our Sunday School or voices in our choir. Disciplizing is the constant deepening of our faith. Whether you are a four year old just hearing the story of David and Goliath for the first time, or a 70 year old struggling to stand against the powerful forces of oppression in our society with only your tiny slingshot, this church should be a place where we will help you to make David's story your own. This should be a place where you can be sure you will find people who will pray with you as you encounter life's trials. This should be a place where your questions will be taken seriously and your desire for meaning shared. This should be a place where you can walk into this sanctuary every week and hear that the sins and the failures and the doubts that have brought you low in the days past are left behind at the door so that when you walk back into the world, you walk out as a forgiven new person.

If we build this kind of church together, they -- our kids, our youth, our neighbors and ourselves -- will come because we will be certain that this is what we need in our lives and in our hearts.