Peoples Evangelical Congregational Church, Ashburnham, Massachusetts

March 4, 2012 (Sunday 10)
Peoples Evangelical Congregational Church
Pastor Dan Allen
56 South Main Street
Ashburnham, MA 01430
978.827.4010

Church History: This congregation was started by a small number of families in South Ashburnham  during the last decade of the nineteenth century. The original church, also on South Main Street, was replaced by the current structure circa 1960. The Congregation affiliated with the CCCC in 1968 or perhaps 1969. The sanctuary is architecturally typical of small twentieth-century New England Churches, and the varnished laminated beams that support both the walls and the sloped roof of the church is very typical of mid-century church construction in general.

Affiliation: Conservative Congregational Christian Conference  (43,000 members)

Sunday’s Service: After the congregation greeted each other and some announcements were read, the congregation was led in song, accompanied by piano. The three songs were examples of modern faith music.

Next came the offertory, followed by the Doxology and the Offertory Prayer. Then it was time for “Joys and Concerns”, where members of the congregation provided the names of loved ones in need of prayer. This section of the service concluded with a congregational prayer from Pastor Allen, and then the congregation recited the Lord’s Prayer. After that, the congregation stood to sing a hymn from the hymnal, and then it was time for the sermon.

The sermon, titled “Fear and Hypocrisy, was based on the Gospel of Luke 12: 1-12. Pastor Allen began the sermon by referring to the attention in the media of late regarding bullying in (and outside of) schools. He noted that bullying is an example of demanding, by force, particular behavior. He pointed out that peer pressure was not something that only affected children; in fact adults to are very susceptible. The pressure may take different forms, and perhaps be more subtle, but it exists, nevertheless. He provided a couple of examples from his own life as illustration.

He also addressed reasons behind why non-Christians often call Christians hypocrites:

• Everyone is a hypocrite to some degree;
• Non Christians don’t understand that Christians, like anyone else, are not perfect; thus
• Christians need a savior.

Pastor Allen compared the modern-day bully to the Pharisees, who used whatever pressure available to force people to follow a set of rules that were often extraneous to biblical teaching. He went on to note that in Luke 12, verses 4-7, Jesus is making the point that corporeal life is very short, so that to sacrifice eternal salvation by taking the path of least resistance (i.e., conformity) is a fool’s gambit.

Pastor Allen drove this point home by noting that mature Christians do not need the same sort of instant gratification that small children often demand, and instead are able to take the long view. He went on to say also that life is stressful. Including Jesus in your life can be stressful as well. Returning to the Gospel of Luke, Pastor Allen indicated that his interpretation was that Luke 12 1:12 is the very definition of fear. Jesus foresaw not only his own crucifixion, but also many of the bad things that would befall his followers, and he was providing them with the long view that they would need to endure what was to come.

After the sermon, the congregation participated in communion, which including the singing of a verse from one of the songs in the hymnal. After the communion the Congregation sang the first verse of an additional hymn, the Pastor gave the benediction, and the service came to an end.

My Thoughts: The Conservative Congregational Christian Conference (CCCC) broke away from more liberal Congregational Churches in 1948. My expectation, therefore, was for a more fundamentalist service than the one I experienced. I try not to arrive with preconceived notions and particular expectations, but trying is not succeeding. I enjoyed the service from start to finish, and it reinforced for me the fallacy of making snap judgments with little or no objective information.

Normally aided by slides and amplification, that technology was not available this Sunday, and Pastor Allen did a great job, doing it old-school.

This congregation is an extremely close-knit, supportive group. I could see this in the way they greeted each other before and after service, and in the genuine care that they expressed for each other.

The sermon was very interesting, and gave me a lot to think about. As a lay person, this part of Luke is a bit confusing for me. Whenever I’m confused by biblical passages, the first thing I do is to turn to The New Oxford Annotated Bible in order to gain additional perspective. Since so much of this Sunday’s sermon hinged on what was meant by verses 4 and 5, I’ll include them here:

“I tell you my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!”

At first read, after the sermon was over, I believe that I understood this in the context of the sermon. My confusion now, however, is that the Greek word used for hell in the above passage is not Hades, but rather Gehenna. Gehenna was a deep ravine south of Jerusalem, where human sacrifices were thought to have been made during the Judean monarchy. While it has come to symbolize a place of eternal punishment, I wonder whether this was the case during Christ’s time. If it was not, then the meaning could be quite different, hinging on whether the human sacrifice is in fact a punishment for a crime, merely a religious rite, or a combination of both. I’m sure the answer is out there, but I don’t know what the answer is.

This brings up an interesting point about translating New Testament texts into other languages, which is that it often leaves something to be desired.  A more literal word-for-word translation often results in absolutely horrible prose; a meaning-for-meaning translation can often introduce ambiguity, as in the above paragraph. I’m not disagreeing here with the underpinnings of Pastor Allen’s sermon; I think it’s highly probable that the conventional meaning ascribed to the beginning of Chapter 12 is spot-on. But it is always an interesting exercise to try and dig a little deeper, to see what might be there to uncover.

The pastor mentioned during his sermon things that had been discussed in previous services about the preceding chapter of Luke. It was good to hear this, as I admire the idea of having some scriptural continuity, i.e., moving through a particular biblical text as written, rather than jumping around all over the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible, which can be a little confusing at times.

After the sermon, I introduced myself to Pastor Allen, and when I began my spiel about being in the process of writing a blog, he asked me if I was the ’52 Sundays’ guy. It turns out he had previously come across my blog when he had searched the web for the Cornerstone Church in Winchendon. I never considered the possibility that awareness of my blog would precede me. I was very surprised, to say the least. I doubt very much whether it will happen again.

I spoke with the Pastor for quite some time during the coffee and fellowship and followed the service, and it was nice to hear his perspective on many of the things that I think about from time to time. He made a point (and correctly so) of telling me that phrases like conservative can be in the eye of the beholder. He considers himself conservative when it comes to the oldest original biblical texts in Greek (i.e., the earlier ending of Mark that doesn’t include the resurrection; the story of the Jesus and the Adulterer, which virtually no biblical scholars believe was originally a part of the Gospel of John). Those views are normally views I would consider liberal. I very much enjoyed the conversation, although as I mentioned to him, I felt a bit guilty for monopolizing his time. One of the things he mentioned during his sermon is that as a pastor, he has to please God, which from time to time will not be pleasing to his congregation. That’s a principled thing to say.

I had a great time at this service, and enjoyed speaking with the Pastor and his wife, and other members of the Congregation. The sermon had a gentle spirit about it, and that’s pretty much how I like them.