What Does Success Look Like?

August 31, 2025  First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA

Luke 14:1, 7-14 — On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the Sabbath, they were watching him closely. . . ⁷ When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. ⁸ “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host, ⁹ and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. ¹⁰ But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. ¹¹ For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” 

¹² He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers and sisters or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. ¹³ But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. ¹⁴ And you will be blessed because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

I can just picture it.  Think of it as like going to one of those dinners at a church convention.  You stand outside in the hall, waiting for the doors to open, then when the doors open, everyone rushes in at once, heading for their favorite table….  Some of us gather in the back, filling the table with friends we’ve not seen for a year or more.  But some of us rush for the table closest to the speakers, because we want to be seen, because maybe the speaker will say “hi” and everyone will know we’re important.  It’s all show, no substance.

Now of course, not everyone who rushes for the front table is trying to show off – some of us can’t hear well, or can’t see so well.  Some of us are real friends of the speaker and want to offer their support to the speech. Some of us have heard that it’s best to fill up the room from the front to the back, and some of us are only following the crowd.  But, just as Jesus points out in the reading, some folks want everyone to know they’re important.  That’s success for them, to be known, recognized.

I think most of us like being known, being in a community, a place where everyone knows your name.  But making a success of our lives is about more than just having your name known, being recognized when you come to church.

This past week I had a great conversation with one of our members – and success was part of the conversation.  What does success look like?  How do we get there?  Our conversation was really about what success looks like for churches, but still the same question is part of the discussion – is success about being “seen” or something else.

It’s an important question for us just now.  As I’ve been saying this month, this is a key time for our church.  It’s clearer and clearer that we cannot continue as we have.  The world has changed, people have changed, times are changing.  The old, tried and true ways of keeping our church going just don’t work anymore.  

When our church was first gathered, in 1721, pretty much every resident in town had to attend the church, and the town had to support the church financially in order to be officially recognized as a town.  We were more than a hundred years old before that changed.  In 1833, the Congregational Church was disestablished, and we had to put together a new way of financing our work; we could no longer count on people coming because it was required.  Over the years, we’ve met change, large and small.  Today is no different.

Well, maybe it is, because in times past, we could always count on the respect of the community, we could count on our children learning basic things about Christian practice in school.  That’s different now.  

In particular, one of the struggles we are dealing with is the general public disdain for religion.  Last week, there was an article in the Boston Globe about the First Church UCC in Somerville.  Now Somerville is “student-heaven”; that church has something like 85% turnover in membership every year, because so many of their members are students at MIT or Harvard or one of the many other colleges in the area.  First Church has extra space in their building; there’s a problem housing the homeless in Somerville, and they’ve proposed turning their basement into a handicapped accessible homeless shelter.  As you can imagine, the neighbors aren’t happy.

The article’s pretty good, but it’s the letters to the editor that are illuminating – people don’t want the homeless anywhere near them.  In any argument you’re going to hear someone slam Joe Biden, and someone else slam Donald Trump.  And at least a quarter of the people accuse the church of something – misusing their land, misrepresenting their purpose, being vain…   And this particular story is pretty well received.  Time and again, when a story about churches or pastors is posted on news sites, people respond by calling believers names.  This is also part of our current reality. For us, this means we cannot assume that everyone outside our doors understands what we do, or wishes us well.

So, what might success look like for us?  Living and serving Jesus in a world where we can’t assume respect, or where we can expect people to come to church when they have kids…  what is success?

There are a billion books out there telling us how to succeed – well, I exaggerate, but not by all that much.  

Do you want to succeed, they say, well here’s how to do it.  Have this kind of music… no, that kind.  And for heaven’s sake, never never use the other kind.

Focus your service about the particular interests of the people you want to attract…. Don’t try to have a church that welcomes everyone.  Just promote what appeals – the most important thing is bringing people in, not being faithful to the Gospel.

But the thing is, all those are only really about attracting people, because they all depend on first naming what’s important for you, not getting clear about what matters to God.  If we just adopted ideas from a book, without regard to how they line up with our beliefs about what’s important, we’d be in trouble for sure.

And that gets us back to that convention dinner and sitting down front.  Here’s the truth for us.  First, we need to be clear about what we think following Jesus means for us and our church.  And then we need to work on how we live that out.

Being a success is not about putting on the glitz and sitting down front.  It’s about being faithful to your beliefs and doing whatever we do, to the best of our ability.  Because, we’re small, not dead.  And we can still do powerful things.

Here’s this week’s example:  for the past few weeks, we’ve been collected money to purchase teacher supplies for the teachers over at Brimfield Elementary. This grew out of our commitment to the children of our town.  The council decided that we could most effectively help our children by helping their teachers, and we’d all been struck by how much our teachers do, how much of their own time and money they put into educating our children.  So we asked the school what would be most appreciated and set a date to come over there with munchies and gifts.  We didn’t get fancy.  We did what worked with our source of money and people.  

On last Tuesday, Deb C, Deb G, Kitty and I took them two huge piles of Clorox wipes and Expo markers.  Yes, we took name brand stuff, because it matters, because we hoped it would say “you matter”.  And it succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.  The teacher’s lounge was packed – maybe 37 people all together – they loved the treats, but what really was amazing was their reaction to those wipes and expo markers.  They were astonishingly grateful.  We had great conversations with half a dozen people there, some of whom we knew before, and some were new.  Some of the people didn’t know where our church was, but they all do now.  And they know it’s a church with friendly people who care about them.  

That’s what success looks like.  We succeed when we live out our beliefs, when we show others respect and love, when we plan and execute events that fit with our resources – our building, our land, our peoples’ time and abilities.

Amen.

© 2025, Virginia H. Child