April 27th, 2025 - "Planting Seeds" - Rev. Dr. Michelle Morris

Matt Nelson: Welcome to the Sermon podcast from First United Methodist

Church in downtown Bentonville.

If you have questions related to what you hear today or just want to find out

more about the ministries at First United Methodist Church, please visit us online

at FU mc bentonville.org or check us out at Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.

Rev. Dr. Michelle Morris: Amen.

Well, today after Easter, we get to talk about planting

seeds and helping them grow.

And so to get us in that frame of mind, we're gonna hear these

words from the gospel of John.

Jesus replied, the time has come for the human one to be glorified.

I assure you that unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and

dies, it can only be a single seed.

But if it dies, it bears much fruit.

Those who love their lives will lose them.

And those who hate their lives in this world will keep them forever.

Whoever serves me must follow me wherever I am.

They're my servant, will also be my father, will honor whoever serves me now.

I am deeply troubled.

What should I say, father, save me from this time.

No, for this is the reason I have come to this time.

Father, glorify your name.

This is the word of God for us, the people of God.

Thanks be to God.

Let us pray.

Lord, open our hearts, our minds, and our eyes that we might see and know

the word you have for us this day.

In your holy name we pray.

Amen.

So I was out helping.

I was actually sitting right here.

Oh my directions are all awful, but somewhere on one of these

corners directing people to get to the Earth Day Fair.

And the master garners were at the Earth Day Fair.

And they also walked around and were handing out these flyers, especially

because they wanted to let us know that their plant sale is not on our green space

this year, which I'm totally bummed about.

But they're having it over at Helping Hands and they're gonna draw attention to

helping hands, and that's a good thing.

So anyway, the Master Garner came up to me and she said, do you love plants?

And I said, I kill everything green.

That comes to me.

And so she handed me this and said, give this to someone else.

So afterwards, if anybody would like this flyer, please come see me.

In fact, I actually keep a dead plant in my office.

Just as a warning to people, don't gimme plants.

It's better for everybody that I don't have them, but thankfully I'm

surrounded by others who do know how to make things grow, including the master

gardeners, which now meets in our church and we are so glad to have them here.

But I do remember it being in elementary school and being giving a little bean

and then be instructed to put that bean and some dirt in a clear glass.

And water it so that I could watch it grow.

And I watched that little bean break open and roots grow, and a plant come out, and

I was able to keep it alive for that long.

I don't know what happened to it after that, but I loved watching

that seed be planted, breaking apart, and bringing out new life.

So I can recognize growth when I see it, and I see a lot of growth.

In this church, I wanna share with you some of that today.

We looked at our worship numbers from July 1st, 2023 to June 30th, 2024,

and compared those with July 1st, 2024, up to April 1st of this year.

So this does not include Easter.

Our average in-person worship numbers have gone from 276 the previous year.

To 321 this year.

Our online numbers have gone from 534 per week last year to 934 per week.

Yeah,

and that's with a change.

The previous year, we actually counted podcasts in that number.

We quit counting podcasts this year, so that's just straight up online views.

So we have seen an increase in person of 16% and an increase online of 75%.

And this is why you've heard me talk about on the 8th of June,

we are starting a third service.

The gathering unplugged in the 10 10 to 10 50 hour.

Now, some may ask if we're averaging 321, why do we need a third service?

Can we all fit in there?

And if it was really 321, that's true, but our average is pulling up

because most weeks now we're over 400.

In worship, Heinz comfortably holds 180 many weeks.

We are 190 or 200 in there with people standing along the wall, so it is

time to add a third service there.

We've also seen growth in our music programs.

We have had at least five new choir members join this year.

Also, we will obviously double the time for the musicians

as we add the next service.

We do track viewership or listenership of our podcasts,

and they are significantly up.

This year, we've had a rise in the number of listens and downloads, including one

brave soul who downloaded all 422 sermons.

God bless and if you need some pastoral care, we're here.

But we did take a look at where those podcasts are heard, and we

are heard in 28 different countries.

Primarily the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Brazil, but

also such countries as Mexico, Lavia Singapore, South Africa, India,

the United Arab Emirates, and Iran.

Our children and youth programs continue to grow and we continue

to meet the needs of those kids.

So we have started a youth band this year and you will get to hear them

next Sunday 'cause it's senior Sunday and the youth band is providing

the worship music for that day.

We also have started a youth leadership group.

We recognize that these kids are amazing and they have such capacity for

leadership, and we wanna make sure that they're nurtured in Christian leadership.

So I'm taking them through the Gospel of Luke together, and already the

conversations have been phenomenal.

We stopped and reflected on what it meant to be Mary and be 14 years old

and be charged with changing the world.

We talked about Jesus being in the wilderness and facing temptation and

asked, what are our current temptations?

And everybody pretty much agreed it was screen time.

So we talked about how we can work to reduce that temptation in our lives.

And then Ozark Mission Project, which is our big youth mission

trip that we do in the summer.

Last year, 11 people went on Ozark mission project.

This year, 27 are signed up.

Including six leaders, but 21 of those are youth.

We have approximately 10 new families who have plugged in and are regularly

engaged in our children's program, and we do have a need to expand the

nursery as soon as we get the people who can come forward and help with that.

We've seen a growth in small groups.

An intergenerational Sunday school class has been added, a

women's spiritual formation group.

Jonna has a five o'clock gathering that started out having just two or

three, and now they meet monthly and have 18 or so or more in their group.

And then I really made it a priority to contact and meet with every

new person that came in our doors and gave us their information.

And I was able to do that for a while, but there are so many coming in our

doors now that I cannot keep up with it.

Just to give you an idea, we had on Easter Sunday, 123 non-members sign in on Easter.

Wow.

So I'm forming a connection team to help me do that, reach out and

get people plugged in as well.

Our community outreach continues to make a significant difference in this community.

Let's just talk about what happened this past week.

This past week, our pantry distributed food to over 200 households, which is up.

They used to do a hundred, and on April 1st, they served over 300.

So the needs increasing and we're meeting that.

And then also back in our building, our literacy reading for people who

need to learn English and learn to read, and adults that need to learn

from the Benton County Literacy Center.

So we are back to offering some space for those classes to happen, including there's

a man working one-on-one with a gentleman from Ukraine who's learning English here.

We had our Earth Day fair on Saturday, and while the rain and the move of the

farmer's market hindered us a little bit.

That was still very well attended.

We had 20 more than 20 vendors that were there organizations that were there.

I've already heard from people who came to that, who said, that was amazing.

We've loved it.

It's such a phenomenal event.

Thank you, Jonna and your team for all the work that you did.

And then.

We also had at Gateway, the alternative high school and the online uh, school, we

offered our career fair where again, we had over 20 different organizations and

companies present to meet with those kids.

Those kids who might fall through the cracks, otherwise got a chance to talk

one-on-one with employers or schools.

And we got jobs for kids last year and it looks like we're

gonna do the same thing this year.

And Donna Reams back there, chairs all of that and thank her and all the team that

was part of that for their work as well.

This week we will start meeting with another group of churches.

We've been chosen by the Urban Land Institute to join their Faithful

Foundations program, which will train us in how we might assess what our

needs are here in this congregation, plan for growth, and also plan to meet

the needs of our community as well.

All of that's going on.

We have tremendous lay initiative.

We have several people trained as lay servant ministers.

We have a certified lay minister serving here.

We have someone who's on the verge of being a certified lay speaker.

We have also offered and taught classes for the state here.

We taught a class on congregational care and we taught a class on preaching.

For other people and some of the folks in our congregation to serve in those ways.

And then I keep having people just coming forward and having ideas.

Yeah, imagine that.

And coming to me and saying, Hey, I have this idea.

I would like to do this.

So I had someone come forward and say, I'd like to stock a room

for people to nurse their babies during the nine o'clock service.

So she has taken that on and we had two ladies come forward and offered

to put together the flowering cross, which if you were here Easter, you

got to see that that was lay driven.

And then yes, we have a new service about to start and I have people already

volunteering to serve in leadership there.

I haven't even asked for that yet, and I've already got people coming forward.

That's the Holy Spirit at work.

That's a church on fire.

That's a church that knows how to grow.

And because we are growing, we're doing a hospitality training.

So if you wanna join our hospitality team and be a greeter or help with the

snacks or any of that next Sunday after this worship service, we will have that

training available for folks as well.

That's a church that's growing.

Amen.

So why did I pick this passage and not the mustard seed could have

picked the mustard seed, right?

The bush and, nah, I picked this one where there's growth because the seed dies.

Well, that's because I, in the midst of this good news, have a challenge that we

are facing that I need to put before you, and it is literally a challenge of death.

We have had some members who have died or have moved who are significant

givers to this congregation.

The good news in the midst of this is that giving is much more spread out now.

So the chances that we face this challenge in the future is minimal

because we have a broad array of ages and different places in their life

giving, and it's more evenly spread.

Wow.

The middle news of this is that because we are growing, we know

there will be growth in giving.

In fact, we saw growth in giving between last year and this year.

But the thing is, growth in giving does not come immediately, and especially in

this day and age when people, they want to worship Christ, but they're hesitant

about the church they're coming into.

They wanna make sure it's a church that they can actually get behind,

and they've been bait and switched so often in Christian churches.

That they really wanna know.

We stand behind the words that we say.

So it takes two to three years now for someone to be involved in a church before

they start giving pretty regularly.

On average.

The challenging news is that those moves and deaths were $150,000 hit to the butch.

Now I'm gonna follow all this up with a letter, and if you want the

specific details on the budget, I'm happy to give it to you.

But I do think there are some things I need to lift up so

you understand where we are.

First of all, there will be a cost to the new service, but the

endowment committee met and is fully funding that cost for a year.

They're making that investment covering the cost so that we can have that growth.

Trustees repair costs are down thanks to the hiring of a full-time facilities

manager who now does those repairs for us.

Or if he doesn't know to do the repairs, he does call somebody in

and then he follows that person and watches what they do and then he does

it the next time on the job training.

But just like all of you, insurance costs are up and utilities are up.

Those of you're in Bentonville, your water bill doubled.

Guess what?

We're also in Bentonville.

Our water bill doubled.

And then when it comes to staff, everyone's workload is up.

This growth impacts every single person on the staff.

SPRC did not feel right in not acknowledging that reality, so they

did vote for raises for the staff.

It's not as much as they wanted to, but it's at least an

acknowledgement of that increase.

However, that overall increase is low due to two things.

When we took the business manager salary and the bookkeeper salary and combined

them, and we made a facilities manager and accountant that actually came in lower

than, that's previous two salaries, and United Methodist Church voted in 2024

to put a freeze on pastors pensions.

So starting in 2026, churches will not pay as much into the

pension for their pastors, and that will drop down every year.

So that is coming down.

So your costs overall on staff have been pretty much leveled due to that.

Everything else in the budget has either been cut or has held in

place, and that's with growth.

That's with growth.

We ask the staff, please cut your budget or hold it in.

And they're a creative group of people and they continue to keep paying

attention to those things and making things happen sometimes out of thin

air, but we can't do it anymore.

So this is an invitation to us to be the people of the resurrection, to

see this moment of death and see the life in it, to see that this seed that

will lose its husk will break open.

And give birth to new.

That's the challenge that is before us today, we have actually done some

work and have cut that deficit down from 150,000 to a hundred thousand.

So here's what that means.

I need 200 of you as families or individuals.

I need 200 of you to give 500 more dollars.

Two by five.

It's a very biblical number, right?

This is a loaves in the fishes moment, right?

I need 200 to give 500 more.

Now, when I first thought of that, I gotta admit, I kind of had a bit of a

heart attack about that because my brain learned about money when my dad started

giving me $5 a week for allowance, right?

So part of my brain always works from the, I have $5 a week to work with.

But that's not where we are now.

I started to take a moment and think, what is $50 now?

And I thought, you know, every time I go out to eat with someone,

one other person, it's $50.

Basically what I'm asking is give up 10 of those a year, 10 a year.

What it breaks down to is $41 and 67 cents per month.

That I need, that.

This church needs 41 67.

When I was a kid, that $5 allowance on a regular day bought 10 candy bars

when there was a sale, it bought 20.

Now that $5 buys two candy bars if there's a sale, right?

Things have shifted 41 67, I mean, one or two trips to McDonald's, and that's done.

Now I do wanna acknowledge the reality of the challenge of that inflation.

Right.

It's hard.

It's hard.

And if you're already stretched as far as you can stretch, please don't give more.

Please pray for your church or give your time.

That'll make a difference too.

And I'll also acknowledge the other real challenge that is before us is that it's

hard to invest in Christianity these days.

There's a lot of things that we hear are done in the name of Christ that are, ugh.

Hard, but I'll tell you this, when Christianity may have its struggles,

what I am not ashamed of is Jesus Christ.

I am not ashamed of Jesus Christ.

I am not ashamed to follow a man who gave everything that He is, who set

the power of God aside to go to the cross and go through death and show

us and offer us the fullness of life.

I'm not ashamed of that man, and I'm not ashamed of Jesus Christ who says, you are

meant to love God and love your neighbor.

Love God and love your neighbor.

Thank you Jesus.

And I am also not ashamed of this church.

I am not ashamed of this church.

In the last month, I have sat down with several people who are interested in

becoming part of this congregation.

And let me tell you about those people.

One's a lesbian, couple, one's a couple who came to me and said,

we identify as conservative.

And one's a family with mixed race kids.

And all of those people said, are we really welcome here?

And I told all of them, yes you are.

I didn't have to say, you have to be someone else.

I didn't have to say, you have to think some other way.

All I had to say was, as long as you are okay with being in a church with

people who are different than you.

You loving those people and loving the same God and being okay with the fact that

God is okay with all those people too.

As long as you can affirm that we are your church, they can breathe

because we can say that and mean it.

I am not ashamed of this church.

So if you've heard anything that I say today and anything that I've said today

touches your heart and you think that's growth worth investing in, I want you

to think about what you could give.

There are 370 giving units in this church.

That means a family or an individual who gives on regular.

So if half of the people who regularly give just went up by $41

and 67 cents a month, we'd be there.

But I don't wanna just talk to those folks.

I wanna talk to the people who are here and are wondering or maybe throw

a 20 in the plate from time to time.

We can't figure that into the budget.

We figure a little bit of money into the plate offering when we do

the budget, but for the most part, the budget is made up of people who

turned in one of these cards, one of those miracle multiplication cards.

There's a whole bunch of them over here, and there's some outside.

I think I left it in the other service.

So they either turned in one of those or you're signed up for a CH, the automatic

checking withdrawal, or you're signed up to regularly give with your credit card.

That's who we can count in the budget.

If we don't have that, we can't count you.

So you can grab one of these cards and fill it out and give it to me or give

it to Chandra, our, uh, office person.

Or you can email her at [email protected].

And let her know that you're increasing your credit card gift.

She processes the A CH stuff.

Or just tell her, I commit to giving $500 this year.

Please let Chandra know, especially if you change the credit card.

We don't actually get notification of that, so we wouldn't know to

know there was any difference.

So please let her know.

But if there's anything that you think is worth supporting, and you

can do that little bit, make that new commitment because you're.

Doing this for the first time, or can give a little bit more than

you're committing to that growth, you're committing to that growth.

Jesus invites us to die a little bit to ourselves here, to not make this life

our whole focus, but to invest and to see beyond and to see what's possible.

And that's what we're being invited to do in this moment as well.

And as I said, if you have any questions, I will sit down with you

and show you all that we've done.

But I'll also tell you, you don't have to trust me in this moment.

Trust the gardener.

Trust the one that Mary Magdalene saw on the other side of the tomb.

And mistook the gardener because he is the gardener, because he is the one

that when a seed is planted, it may look like death, but instead it is life.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Matt Nelson: Thanks for listening to the Sermon podcast from First United

Methodist Church in downtown Bentonville.

If you would like to let us know you are here, follow the link below to connect

to participate in Worship through Giving.

You can give [email protected] or on Venmo @FUMCBentonville.

FUMC Bentonville welcomes all.

Because we believe the communion table is God's table, we invite

everyone into our church family.

We welcome and celebrate every race, gender, gender identity, sexual

orientation, marital status, age, physical and mental ability, national origin,

economic station, and political ideology.

We come together in action and outreach aspiring to follow Jesus' example of

radical hospitality, love, and grace as a transformative movement in our community.

Please join us for worship on Sunday mornings at nine and 11:00

AM live and on our YouTube channel.

Also beginning June 8th, we will be kicking off a new third worship service,

beginning at 10:10 AM every Sunday.

We'll be calling it The Gathering Unplugged.

We hope to see you

there.

Grace

and peace.