Many of you know that I very much enjoy J.R.R. Tolkien’s stories of Middle-earth. (One of my tattoos can attest to this!) These include The Lord of the Rings and other stories, but they began with the children’s classic The Hobbit, where a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins takes an unexpected journey full of adventure, and his whole life is changed. In the story, Bilbo writes his adventures in his memoirs and titles them, “There and Back Again: A Hobbit’s Tale.”
A few months into 2023, we realized that Emmanuel was spending a lot more money than we were taking in, and had to figure out what was happening. Some of our members who had died in the previous year had been incredibly generous to our ministry; now we had to figure out how to continue our ministry without their generous support. I went to every stewardship training I could find. I read a few books. I spoke with mentors and church finance “experts.” It turns out what was happening at Emmanuel wasn’t that special, and it was going to happen sooner or later to nearly every congregation. The Church had changed, and we had our own “unexpected journey” to take!
So off we went! Not on a hobbit’s journey with dwarves and a wizard to face a dragon, but on a journey to discover our core values. And it was going to take the whole company of us at Emmanuel to get where we were going. With the help of the North Carolina Synod, our Congregation Council led us to discover that our core values are “inclusivity, generosity, and community.” I know I’ve shared before how incredibly Spirit-filled this process was. When reviewing the many index cards on which you wrote what you all thought our core values were, our partner with the NC Synod told us that she had never seen such clarity.
What was so impactful to me about the core values process was that it wasn’t about aspirations or what” church” we wanted to be. No, it was about telling our stories to discover the church we have been and the church that we already are — when we are at our best. It’s about looking back to know how to move forward. The way we have lived out these core values may look different, but there are so many threads connecting those across our 117 years of ministry in this community. (I look forward to sharing some of those connections I’ve found in our archives in future posts.)
In The Hobbit, Bilbo’s journey to a distant mountain and back home is literally a journey from “there and back again.” But more than that, it emphasizes the transformative power of the hero’s journey and the cyclical return to a familiar place with new eyes after profound experiences. In returning home, Bilbo becomes even more into who he is meant to be.
As I wrote above, the Church has changed. But then, that’s not true. The Church has undoubtedly changed, but that makes it sound like it’s something that happened once, or only a few times. In fact, the Church is always changing to become the Church it was always meant to be. Likewise, Emmanuel’s journey, “there and back again,” is also a cyclical one of transformation. We venture out to the many new “there’s” where God is calling us to do now, trusting that the journey will then lead us “back again” to who God has called us to be. And at Emmanuel, what God has clearly always called us to be is a church that values “inclusivity, generosity, and our community.”
Our core values have become the map we use to navigate our ministry to the “there” where God is calling us to next. And they have led us to exciting ministry, and hard decisions have been made easier. But a map isn’t all we need for a journey. We need an adventuring pack filled with tools to help us get there. I guess you’ll have to keep reading next week to find out what those are…
Your joyful journeying companion,
Pastor Ethan
P.S. Click HERE to learn more about our Core Values, and you also might just figure out what those “tools” are…