Fire in the Belly

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
The First Presbyterian Church
Washingtonville, New York
May 15, 2005

Fire in the Belly
1 Cor. 12:1-11
John 7:37-39

I have a fire in my belly.
In fact I have two.
One is the result of age, stress and probably too much coffee.
I can control that fire pretty easily, however.

The other fire is one I don’t want to control.
On the contrary, I am at my best when it is stirred up.
It is a fire that moves me, pushes me, drives me;
it calls me, it shakes me.
Even when I try to ignore it, I cannot.
This fire comes from God.
It is the Spirit of God that I have within me.
We all have the same fire in our bellies,
because we all have the same Spirit of God within us,
the Spirit we believe God graces us with at our baptism.

This is the Spirit that Jesus promised us.
This Spirit is our Advocate –
that’s the word that Jesus uses in the gospel of John.
An Advocate to teach us what we need to know,
and just as important
to “remind [us] of all that [Jesus has] said to [us].”
(John 14:26)
We are all pretty good at learning,
it is the remembering, retaining the lesson,
where we get into trouble.

This Spirit is that gnawing feeling we get when we read or hear
a story of something that is clearly wrong,
and feel that we have to do something.
Without the Spirit, without that fire,
we could hear about even the most horrific story
and yawn and turn to the sports section.

It is truly a fire in our belly.
When I read the second lesson, you heard Jesus say,
“As the scripture has said, ‘out of the believers heart
shall flow rivers of living water.’”,
the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ.
But if we check the text in the original Greek,
we find that that scholars who translated that sentence into English
made a little change:
the sentence does not use the word “heart”.
No, in the original translation, Jesus says:
“out of the believers belly shall flow living water.”
The word is…belly;
not stomach, not abdomen,
not insides, not midsection
just that wonderful basic word: belly!

I think that is a much better translation
because it reminds us that we have a fire in the belly;
Fire fueled by the Spirit within us,
a fire that will not allow us to rest, to be complacent,
to sit still, to say, “let’s let someone else do it.”
No the Spirit empowers us, energizes us,
teaches us, calls us…..and reminds us.
The Brief Statement of Faith we all said at the beginning of the service
reminds us that the Spirit “gives us courage to pray without ceasing,
to hear the voices of peoples long silenced,
and to work for justice, freedom, and peace.”
The Spirit does something else: The Spirit challenges us.
It challenges us so that just when we feel like we are doing
all we can do
just when we feel like we want to take a time out,
when we want to rest, to take a break from discipleship
we find that gnawing in our belly that hunger,
that feeling that we are called to do more.

That feeling has been burning within me for some months now
as I have thought about the future of our church
and the direction God is calling us to take.
The past five years have been filled with activity.
We have grown in size: we have twice as many adult members
and three times as many children as we had in the year 2000.
As a result of our growth, we have taken some significant steps:
The Session of our church took an enormous leap of faith three years ago
when they made the decision not to renew our lease agreement
with English Rose, the daycare center.
English Rose had grown to the point where they had taken over
every inch of available space in our Sunday School building,
including the kitchens and the bathroom.
Their size and presence limited our Sunday School and other activities.
But, we collected more than $20,000 year in rent from them.
Just a few years ago, the rent we collected from English Rose
accounted for more than a twenty-five percent of our budget,
….a quarter of our budget….
The rent covered 80% of my salary.
But our Session was unanimous in its decision to end the arrangement,
to have the church get out of the real estate business,
to free up our facilities for God’s work:
for ministry and mission.
The Session was confident that given time,
we could make up the rent gap
with increased giving from the congregation,
and we have done just that.
Every Elder on the Session three years ago felt that fire in the belly,
felt the call of the Spirit, and took a leap of faith.

And then just one year later, after a great deal of hard work
on the part of the Planning Committee,
the Session took another leap of faith
and voted unanimously to approve the committee’s
recommendation that we launch our own nursery school,
a decision that required us to invest almost $30,000
in salaries and equipment.
Had we looked at things through the lens of fiscal prudence,
we would not have done either, not taken either step,
but our Session responded to the call of the Spirit,
the fire in the belly calling us to serve Christ
in new ways, better ways.

We now have more room for our own programs,
especially our Sunday School.
And Stepping Stones is doing beautifully –
with Baby Steps, and Step Up joining the regular program.
I learned this past week that our 3-year-old class
is almost completely filled for next year!

For the bold steps we have taken over the past few years,
now we have to ask, where is God calling us next?
What is God challenging us to do next?
Our tendency might be to say “let’s take a breather”,
but God won’t allow that.

Based on the fire that has been in my belly for quite some time,
I think God is calling us, challenging us in three areas.

The first area I think God is calling us, challenging us,
is to do more for Mission.
We presently allocate $4,000 for Mission support.
That’s support for Habit for Humanity, Safe Homes,
Presbytery Mission work, a Christian seminary in Cairo, Egypt
and emergencies like Darfur, Sudan and tsunami relief.
Earlier this year our Session voted to allocate money
we collect from special services, like Christmas Eve
to Mission work.
But even with that additional money,
we rank near the bottom of all churches
in our Presbytery for Mission giving.
We give about 3-4% of our budget to Mission giving;
we should aim for 10%
and that is what I propose we make as our goal:
that within three years,
we allocate not less than 10% of
our budget to Mission giving.
That means we would be looking to triple our
Mission giving to $12,000 over the next 3 years.

The second area where I feel God is calling us,
challenging us, to do more is Christian Education.
Would you like to guess how much money we as a church spend
per child on our Sunday School?
Go ahead, guess $40, $50, $60?
If you had guessed $20, you’d be right.
Yes, $20 per child, per year.
and that number is up from about
$15 per child five years ago.
Guess how much money we allocate per child
for our high school students.
I will give you a hint – it is the same amount we allocate
for Christian education for each adult member of our congregation.
Zero, zip, nothing.
Those figures aren’t something we should be proud of.
I finally realized a few weeks back why we are not having any success
in recruiting a Sunday School superintendent.
Clearly, if God wanted us to have a Sunday School Superintendent,
God would have called someone,
so I took a step back and looked at other churches like ours,
and what I realized is that churches like ours,
churches with 200 or more members .
have a staff person who focuses on Christian Education,
Christian Education for children, for Confirmation classes,
for high school students, and for adults.
This staff person is called in most churches,
the Director of Christian Education.
This Director of Christian education is an advocate,
a resource person, a teacher, and a trainer,
someone to work with me, the Sunday School teachers,
the leaders of Vacation Bible School –
all areas where we should be doing more
with Christian Education.
We don’t need a full-time staff person, at least not now.
But my challenge to us is to have a part-time
Director of Christian Education
working with us and for us by the fall of next year,
in about 15-18 months.

Now doing these things takes money.
Everything in a church takes money,
and I have yet to find a church that has more money than it needs.
We will always have needs that exceed our resources,
if we pay attention to the fire in the belly.
Our church is blessed by the fact that over the years
we have been left many generous gifts and bequests.
We have an endowment that is valued at more than $100,000.
Over the past five years I have heard lots of people say
we take too much money from our endowment.
But in those five years I have never heard anyone talk about
the flip side: how we can add more money to the endowment.
We can do that two ways.
One is to encourage everyone in this church to remember the church
in their wills, as Ruth Overfield, Bruce Felter, and others have,
most generously.
But the other way is for us to have a capital campaign.
A capital campaign is separate and apart
from our annual giving campaign.
A capital campaign raises money for capital improvements,
big things like the new roof at the manse we know we need
or the organ we will have to buy within the next few years.

Churches are encouraged to have capital campaigns every 10-12 years.
I believe the last capital campaign we had was 55 years ago,
so I would say we are more than a little overdue!
Our brothers and sisters in Christ up in Montgomery,
a church quite similar to ours, ran two capital campaigns
in less than 10 years,
and each was successful in raising more than $150,000….each
Pat and I worshiped at a Presbyterian Church
when were in Bermuda.
The church has about 300 members and the day we were there
they were launching a capital campaign
to build a new classroom building.
Their goal was $1 million.
Back in 1950, the members of this church realized
that they needed more space,
especially classroom space.
So they prepared plans to build the Sunday School building.
It was only a few years after the war,
the economy was plodding along,
this area was principally a dairy farming community.
And yet this community felt the fire in their bellies,
and raised $30,000 to build the building.
In today’s dollars, that would be about $250,000.
Could we raise that much?
Why not, if we have enough fire in our bellies?
That is my third challenge, to lay the groundwork to launch a capital
campaign within the next 18 months, and complete it within 5 years.

There are my three challenges:
three challenges that the fire in my belly tells me
God is calling us to:
Triple our Mission giving
Hire a Director of Christian Education
and launch a Capital Campaign.
All within the next three years.
These are the things the fire in my belly is telling me
we need to address
These are the challenges I believe the Spirit is calling us to.

If you are thinking, we can’t do any of these things,
much less all of them, then you have your answer.
We won’t be able to do them.
But with fire in our bellies, there is nothing we cannot do.
With God, all things are possible.
Doesn’t our Lord Jesus tell us just that?
If it is mission and ministry,
God will see to it that we have the resources that we need,
just as God has these past five years.
Through the power of the Holy Spirit
we are called and we are given everything we need
to be faithful disciples.
All we need to do is pay attention…..
pay attention to the fire in our bellies.
Amen.