Some of you may know the author Annie Lamott, who a few years ago wrote a delightful column titled, “Why I Make Sam Go to Church.” Sam, you see, is Ms. Lamott’s ten year-old son - and evidently one of those very rare ten-year olds who is not always begging to go to Sunday morning worship. None of Sam’s little friends go to church, it seems, and some mornings he makes a very strong case to play Lego Star Wars or watch SpongeBob. But in her article, Annie Lamott offers the short answer as to how she gets Sam to church most every Sunday - she says, “I make him because I can. I outweigh him by nearly 100 pounds.”

She goes on to explain that she considers being part of a worshiping community to be very important to Sam’s well-being as a person. He is being formed by this spiritual community, in what his mom calls “weight training for life.” Of course he doesn’t want to come to regular morning worship, she says, but then, he doesn’t want to floss his teeth either. Left to his own devices, Sam would probably run things differently.

Truth be told, Sam’s not alone in this - he’s human, and part of the human condition is that we fall prey to cycles of laxity and unhealthy habits. This holds as true for Christians as it does for those of any other disposition. In our scripture reading this morning, we hear of some believers who had started to act on the assumption that being part of a community was not necessarily part of having a saving relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Maybe it didn’t take a community to be saved from sin, they reasoned. The second-generation Christians addressed by the letter called Hebrews were not eyewitnesses to the Resurrection of Christ. They’d heard the testimony, come to believe and then tried to live out the significance of the Good News…but over time their enthusiasm cooled, and now some of them are having trouble fitting discipleship into their day-to-day lives.

If it seems surprising to you that such a thing could happen within just fifty years or so of Jesus’ earthly life, there may be some good news in it for us. For anyone who has ever felt that the folks in the Bible are rather remote in time and place, certain of their convictions and primitive in their understandings, the letter to the Hebrews tells us the picture was not always as rosy or simple as that. Perhaps there are some today who cannot relate to the crisis facing these Hebrew Christians, but I think there are more of we who have something in common with them: the need to get serious about why Jesus gave us Christian community in the first place.

So today we speak about Intentional Faith Development - the learned set of habits and exercises that enable us to accept God’s saving grace, and become the people whom God has made us to be. We say intentional faith development, because we recognize that Christian discipleship does not happen accidentally to us, out on our own. We become more like Jesus over the course of a well-spent life, together with others who are becoming better-acquainted with him. If as children we regularly take part in Sunday School, we learn the stories of our faith - Moses plucked from the Nile in a basket, leading his people in the wilderness, Jesus saved from Herod, welcoming little children unto himself. Likewise, our children are taught songs of praise, learning the art of worship, a life of offering thanksgiving to God.

Later, when young disciples go through the Confirmation experience, (which here at St. Mark’s takes a fairly rigorous nine months!), they are invited and encouraged to step forward and become part of Wednesday Night fellowship and Sunday night small-groups and Summer mission trips - all designed to lead them to develop and sharpen the gift of faith that God has placed within them.

Nor are we older folks deprived of pathways to deepened faith. There are many roads available to us to continue with an intentional up-building of our spiritual lives - all of them premised upon having a loving and supportive community of people who need the same spiritual enrichment that we do. Now certainly, we adults might read the Bible on our own, might pray by ourselves, on our own time - and we do encourage one another to embrace these individual spiritual practices.

But if we aspire to lead godly lives, if we wish to experience the love, joy, peace, and goodness that the Bible speaks of, we recognize that these are gifts only discovered in communion with others. Perhaps this is why Jesus told us that where two or three have gathered in his name, he will be there with them. The lowest common denominator for the Christian life, then, is two-plus, is holy relationship - which is quite interesting, when you consider that this is just what God is like. Alone among all the world’s religions, we Christians proclaim a God who is Three-in-One, a Deity who cannot be known at a level more deep than loving relationship.

So if we accept that God calls us into a community to become what we have been made to be, namely, people marked by habits of love and forgiveness, we can reasonably ask: do we make progress along the path of holy living by taking a few random, accidental steps at a time? Or are we more likely to be successful by making choices that aim at milestones, by having others partner with us to help keep us moving? Around here at St. Mark’s we have all manner of ways to be intentional about our journey. Last Sunday we lifted up our Sunday School ministry, and if you or your family are presently one-hour Sunday-morning people, I want to encourage you to be two-hour Sunday-morning people, with an hour to worship and glorify God, and an hour to fellowship and grow with other brothers and sisters.

Apart from Sunday School, there are Bible study groups meeting on Wednesday mornings, Wednesday nights, and (for sisters among us) on Thursday mornings. (DISCIPLE Bible Studies will gin up again next Fall, according to our annual rotation.) Already a spiritual small-group meets on Thursday nights, and it is only the first of such groups at St. Mark’s. Still another group meets monthly to fellowship and discuss movies from a Christ-centered perspective. Our United Methodist Women’s and Men’s groups are always eager for new members. Our Sanctuary Choir delights in new singers and our Bell Choir can indeed use new ringers. Children’s teachers and Youth leaders find community in common tasks, and for those with a heart for the elderly, a new group will soon be forming to care for and shepherd those who live at home but are not as able to come and be with us as once they were.

All these are pathways to the serious, healthy maturation of our faith, and I have not even mentioned the host of mission and service ministries that build up the Body of Christ at St. Mark’s! We will have to wait until week-after-next to give these their due, for that is when we will speak about the importance of Risk-Taking Mission and Service in the life of the Church. For now we say this: the invitation to deepened discipleship is not a plug for one or two or ten programs to make your busy life even busier. I simply invite you into a prayerful conversation with the Lord, and offer you a vision, and a dream: if every person part of the life of our church were to find one small group, one new fellowship, one class to make part of his or her life, taking one step forward in his or her walk with God, that could, I believe would, transform our church.

Recall that Hebrews 10 offers the vision of a Church in which the believers naturally “spur one another on,” enriching one another’s lives by means of authentic Christian relationships, spiritual friendships. This is the kind of church each of us needs, for sure. But even better, this is the kind of church we can, by God’s grace, continue to become.

Thanks be to God.

Note: for those interested, Annie Lamott’s column, “Why I Make Sam Go to Church,” can be found in its entirety on ChristianityToday.com, posting date 1/1/03.