Hannah Montana has come and gone, but the hype persists. For those who aren’t a ticket scalper or don’t know a pre-teen girl, you may not be aware of the sold-out concert at the Target Center last Sunday night. Miley Cyrus is the 14 year old star of the hit Disney Channel series, “Hannah Montana”. Her character leads a dual life as a rock star and an ordinary school girl and Cyrus’ Best of Both World’s Tour features both personas.

Turns out tickets to that event were the hottest in demand locally since the 1991 World Series. 14,000 tickets were sold online in seconds and then reappeared minutes later on the Internet at an average price of $161 apiece with some tickets going for more than a $1,000. But even this was considered a bargain, because the average ticket price for Hannah Montana concerts across the country is $239 each! This is just the ticket and doesn’t include additional costs of parking, food, hat, t-shirt, program and poster concessions.

I confess I’ve never watched or heard this 14 year old pop singer, but I am amazed at the financial commitment she motivates. At a spending average of $250/attendee in a venue like the Target Center with 14,000 seats, that’s $3.5 million for a single 1 ½ hour concert! Imagine what Good Samaritan Church could do with the same amount of money. We could pay-off all our mortgaged debt and secure our facility needs not for 1 ½ hours, but for the next 1 ½ decades! Then, imagine if they just reoriented the staging to sell another 4,000 tickets, still well below the seating capacity of the Target Center; that would generate an additional $1 million – more than enough to completely fund our church’s operating and missions budgets for an entire year!

Think about the difference in terms of lives touched for 18,000 people. If our church’s ministries enabled 1,000 members of Good Samaritan to spent just 1 ½ hours (the equivalent of the concert time) with just 18 people over the course of an entire year, our congregation’s ministry will have touched as many lives as the people passively sitting through that Miley Cyrus concert. Or another way to look at it, if our church offered nothing more than two one-hour worship services each week with an average weekly attendance of 400+, we’d still reach as many people in a year as that concert did. And certainly, we connect with far more people than that, for far more time than that, for far more meaningful purposes than that, as we Good Samaritans unite in faith, fellowship and future.

Today is the third and final sermon in this series addressing our annual fall stewardship drive for our 2008 operating budget and at the same time, a three-year capital campaign to retire our bond indebtedness for our recent building expansion. I’ve been amazed at the response and positive energy to date. Leadership gifts are already coming in with over $1 million committed to the capital campaign in addition to strong support of our operating budget. About 30 volunteers met yesterday morning to personally distribute packets of information and pledge cards over the coming week to each of about 300 more households in our church.

Please take time to read this material, pray about your commitment to both the operating fund and the building fund and complete your two pledge cards in preparation for collection at our special Celebration Sunday service on November 18th. A wonderful booklet entitled Reflections of Faith, was written by fellow congregational members and mailed this week as a tool to help your own reflection over the next three weeks on the value of Good Samaritan in your life. There’s 21 entries, make it a discipline to read one each day between now and November 18th. United in Faith, Fellowship and Future: being united in our faith – our spiritual journeys, being united in our fellowship – our caring connections and being united in our future – our common commitment to what is yet to come, all bind us more closely with God and one another. Today we peer briefly into our future.

The Detroit Free Press ran a fascinating article on pigeons a few years ago that I ran across in the October 5, 2007 edition of the United Methodist Reporter newspaper. A reporter noticed something peculiar about the way pigeons walked starting and pausing with regularity. After some research she discovered that the eye of a pigeon is so constituted that it struts forward for only a few steps before its focus blurs. It then stops and jerks its head abruptly to refocus.

It seems to me that this is a valuable image for futuring within organizations like the church. It’s important to keep strutting, but to pause with regular frequency to make sure we’re still in step with the spiritual needs of our congregation and our community. We’ve done just that in our strategy mapping process of two and a half years ago when our motive, mission and vision statements were revisited and revised and nine key initiatives were defined to redirect and strengthen the future work of Good Samaritan. Unlike many strategic plans, this one wasn’t just filed in some drawer as an interesting exercise, but leadership and financial resources have been allocated to address several of these during each of the past couple years:

1. Fully Utilize Family Life Center (2005-06)
Our new Family Life Center is offering a space that integrates faith, recreation and fellowship creating a resource for spiritual and physical wellness. We’ve established policies, procedures, equipment and staffing that have opened our gym to preschoolers, out of town mission teams, sports life camp, homeless families, scout meetings, as well as a variety of our own church programs for all ages.
2. Improve Organizational Processes (2005-06)
We’ve reviewed our organizational structure and standardized administrative operating procedures, boundary training and job descriptions enabling staff, committees, volunteers and congregation to work together with less effort and greater clarity.
3. Nurture Children (2005-06)
We’ve developed a dynamic children’s program with a scope and sequence for education and recreation programs and better communication and visibility to parents and congregational members. Sunday School attendance has doubled and nursery attendance has tripled in the past year.
4. Improve Communications (2005-07)
We’ve instituted a program for church leadership training, upgraded our newsletter, added monitors in the lobby and reconstructed our website to help members and visitors feel more informed and motivated. A new communications committee was also established to coordinate congregational and community promotions.
5. Engage Members in Ministry (2005-07)
We’re improving our system of assimilating new members in relationship and service so they get connected with our church family. As of this date, we already have received more new members in 2007 than we did in 2006 with another nine households anticipated by the end of the year. An audit of new members joining within the past 2 years reveals that 29 of 41 households are regularly involved in some ongoing small group or leadership beyond Sunday morning worship. That’s nearly 3 out of 4 new households actively engaged in ministry!
6. Connect Youth (2006-07)
A survey of our youth program has been completed with results to be communicated and acted upon. Already consistent and deepening programming has about doubled Sr. High attendance since a year ago.
7. Broaden Opportunities for Artistic Expression (2007-08)
With the dream that our church will become a destination for people of all ages interested in the arts, some planning is beginning. The Laramie Project performance last winter gave us visibility to a couple hundred people from outside our church, the Holy Cabaret is next week, and proceeds from that event will help launch other music ministries.
8. Build High Functioning Staff (2007-08)
Compensation and supervision processes have been implemented and several group continuing education experiences have been scheduled for everything from data base management to program planning.
9. Expand and Improve Adult Ministries (2008-09)
Still on the horizon as we strive to provide adults with diverse avenues for participation and increased personal commitment to spiritual growth.

When I was in college, I worked as the youth director at Centennial UMC in Roseville. I needed to look presentable on Sunday mornings, but had limited interest in caring for dress clothes. I learned the trick that with a sport coat and a tie I could get by with a quick dorm room ironing job on just my shirt collars and cuffs, because the rest of the mess and wrinkles could easily be covered up. That’s the point of Jesus parable for today about the Pharisee and the tax collector. Both went to worship, both prayed, both gave offerings, but it was the tax collector who had the courage to take his coat off and expose to God and the world who and what he truly was in the faith that his future would be transformed by God. That’s exactly what we’ve been doing as a church. We’ve made an earnest assessment of our present in order to determine our future with God!

This past week I plopped down in front of the evening news at the end of another exhausting day. I was watching KARE 11 and as they often do, they displayed a photo from some amateur photographer during the weather report. I admired the gorgeous autumn scene with a small lake and multicolored trees and then they announced that it was taken on the shore of Mirror Lake at the intersection of Blake Road and Interlachen in Edina. Well I turn at that intersection every day of the week between my house and church and I’d never paid attention to the view. My mind had been so fixed on what’s on my future schedule, that I missed the present moment. So that next morning with no one behind me, I paused briefly at Interlachen and Blake, looked out my car window and enjoyed the glory. As we move toward our future as a church family, may this fall stewardship campaign be just the pause we need, to take stock and give appreciation for the glory around us at Good Samaritan!