This sermon was preached on Roman and Maryanna Stutzman's last Sunday at Germantown Mennonite Church. Several weeks earlier there was the official goodbye, but I got assigned the Sunday that was their last and took the opportunity to focus on something that they had epitomized throughout their involvement at Germantown:

Like few Mennonites of my generation, I actually grew up in the city. My father and mother were a missionary couple in New York City during the first ten year of their marriage, and both believed that it was God's will that they minister in the unknown and dangerous place that the city was to Mennonites at that time.

While I was going to graduate school, and thinking about the impact of family experience I asked them about their life in New York City. I asked them what they did, and why they did it, and what it was like to be such pioneers. I came away from these conversations with a new image of my parents. It's a courageous image, with my father stopping a neighborhood fight at midnight, and my Mother walking the south Bronx streets alone to take groceries to a poor neighbor.

And it's an image of naivete' and humor, too, as I see Dad and Mom handing out tracts in Times Square as a fellow missionary preached from a soap box, Dad wearing the traditional plain suit, and Mom wearing the capped dress and covering, with strings. As my mother has said, they left the Mennonite farm for New York with manure still on their shoes. But I see now, they went deeply believing that there was meaning to what they saw as their sacrifice.

I've become aware that hidden among what I've seen as the cultural eccentricities my parents took to New York was also a sense personal value and a meaningfulness that goes beyond the idiosyncracies. They were unconsciously embedded in their culture and their faith. This embeddedness was both the motivation for their actions as well as the very thing they wanted to share. Their belief in God and the Church was intricately part of them, it was a thing of great value for them, and they wanted to give this sense of purpose, contentment, and belonging to others.

The sense of belonging that my parents had and still have has not always been easy for me to experience. I didn't grow up so embedded in the familiar and comforting country community. When I did visit my grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, I brought jaded, city bred eyes that were distrustful and uninitiated to the ways of country Mennonite faith. I didn't belong there, and in some way the faith didn't belong to me.

I've been thinking about this idea of a place to belong because I'm a psychologist, and because of the value such a place seems to have to people, and because of the difficulty and pain people seem willing to suffer to attain such a place, or do suffer when such a place isn't available to them. I've found, in my brief experience in life, that people will go to great lengths to be somewhere in which they think the belong. The lengths they will go transcend simply the energies of group participation or the travel time and money invested in group involvement. These lengths include a willingness to mislead themselves about the value of a group, about it's good intentions, about it's intelligence or creativity or about it's benign attitude toward them. These lengths also include the honest and authentic efforts at relationships that show a mature and enlightened commitment to build and maintain relationships with those who share a common place to belong. Many times such places to belong are Churches.

And so, this morning, I want to talk about the church, this church as well as other churches, as a place to belong. I want to look at this church as the ground behind the diverse figures of our lives. I want to see how we can be a church in which there is always a place for each of us, regardless of our eccentricities, our failures, and the manure on our shoes. And how the church must try to recognize and accommodate to growth and change in the people and families that are part of it.

I'm going to use some of the ideas of a developmental psychologist named Kegan. Like the infant, says Kegan, who is actually held in the arms of his parent, the family metaphorically holds the developing child of all ages. This holding task demands both active care, and also letting go at the right times.

It is my thesis this morning that this same task is something the church, in a larger setting, can perform. The church can provide a holding environment for it's members. It can actively hold us, and let go at appropriate times. It can do so for its adult members and for its families. It can serve us in this way in regard to important issues of conscience. Indeed, the church, itself, progresses through its own stages as it holds its members.

As I talk about the individuals, families and ethics that the church holds, there are a couple of things I want you to bear in mind. The church, like the family holding environment, need not be perfect, but it does need to be "good enough" to hold its members. It must provide a place in which needs for both intimacy and for independence are met, and it must leave room for change.

Each of us continues to grow and change during our years of church membership. The task of establishing identity separate from one's family; the task of meeting ones needs for intimacy; the task of bonding with others for child rearing and training a new generation; and the task of making meaning of ones life and work: these are all tasks that usually occur after baptism and membership.

We experience ourselves differently during these different times of our lives. Indeed, the shifts from one stage to another are often marked by shifts in our self understanding, shifts that often seem to us to be a metamorphosis from one self to a new self. Such transformations often occur with high drama. Phil's reference to this kind of transformation last week is, I think, the best way to understand it. One dies so that one may live again. Phil's description of the powerful transformation he has experienced is also one that shows that these differences in the way we make sense of our world are not just a difference in perspective, but a difference that taps our very souls. We should tread gently on ground such as this.

Each one of us, during our adult years, will have more than one such transformation. It will happen differently for each individual, as each one of us finds our own creative balance. The church should provide a place for each of us to belong, to be held and to be let go, throughout both the quiet times and the dramatic changes we encounter in our lives.

The church serves, for its individual members, as the place that holds us. It is the place to which we belong. And for as many transformations there are that can happen to us, there are ways in which we can belong to the church. Those who are separating from their families of origin find in us an alternate, larger, and less constricted place to be, a camp site on the way to independence. Those who are establishing life competencies compare themselves to others further along the way -- and share challenges and achievements with a supportive audience. Those who are engaged in the more intimate task of establishing primary relationships, either with mates or with children, also find in us a place where the empathy and the example of others gives needed support. The church should hold us when we need it, it should let go when it is time.

But just as the church lets go of us, it also calls us to let go of old selves. It challenges us to new transformations, and new balances. Those engaged in lives ruled by themes and tasks of independence are called by the church to let go of that balance and remember intimacy. Those balanced in the intimacy of relationships find themselves called to personal independence. The preoccupied student may find a startling pleasure in providing nursery care, or the harried mother a sense of hopeful satisfaction when viewing the independent career of a peer.

What do we as a congregation do to perform these functions of holding and letting go? We don't actually do anything all that dramatic. The transformations that happen to individuals are naturally occurring events that arise largely from the growth of each person. Each one of us will respond to events in the church in ways that reflect the direction we are going. Someone who has only just made a new balance will not even see the most obvious challenges calling him or her to the next balance. But one who is on the edge of change is likely to perceive each event as pivotal.

We must admit that we here at Germantown hold some people better than others. Like the rest of society we over-hold women when they make sense of their lives in ways that emphasize closeness, and we over-hold men when they are not balanced at stages dominated by independence. I'm not sure how we can change it. Our awareness may help.

But we need to remember that the recurring argument over how intimate or independent we ought to be as a church does not necessarily reflect sex differences, nor does it reflect theological or philosophical differences. Rather, it demonstrates differences between how individual members make meaning of life. We should remain open to member's who's time of life requires independence and achievement as well as those who want closeness and interrelatedness.

We need to remember too, that we as a church serve even those who understand themselves in ways that is difficult for us to understand, making it difficult for us to serve them. If someone is here, he or she is often here for a reason, even if it is unknown. We should hold and challenge as best we can.

Equally important, we need to recognize individuals inevitable tendency to change. We should not lock people into prescribed roles that may become painful for them after a transformation. Instead we should encourage the exploration of new roles and ways of belonging in the congregation and the world.

Most important is that we must make an effort to remember the legitimacy of each balance. Indeed, we must remember that each individual achieves their balance by engaging their very soul. We must tread lightly both in support and in challenge.

We need not be perfect at any of this, we need only be "good enough, and we need to remember that people change.

Families change too. They go through life cycles like individuals. Beginning arbitrarily with the single young adult, families go from the young adult stage to the young married without children stage, to the young children stage, to the adolescent children stage, to the empty nest stage, to the married older couple without children stage, to retirement stage and with grandparenthood somewhere in between. There are also important variations to this theme, including single, and childless life-styles, and there are important interruptions to the stages, like divorce, death of spouses, or children, early or late pregnancy, and more. As we have all heard often recently, the variations are more common than the norm.

Like for individuals, the church is part of the ground behind the figure of family life together. The church must remember that families change over the years, that families will vary over the intimacy-independence balance. Fortunately, we as a church need be only good enough.

I don't need to say which family stage we over serve. We have rapidly swung in the five years that I've been in this congregation from a young adult and young childless married's congregations to a congregation dominated by families with young children. As part of a young childless couple, I don't begrudge this change. The sealing up of church families who have a new, dependent, and demanding presence is an inevitable part of congregational life. The loss of their energies to the congregations is, however, analogous to the loss of an individuals energies when he or she makes a move toward independence. At the same time the families need for help with this formidable task pulls it into a new kind of intimacy with the congregations, an intimacy that can appear to be a retreat from prior independence. This shift of the type of intimacy and independence needed is the mark of the changing family. We do well to hold, and we do well to let go when it is time.

We also do well to remember the under served among us. While we have a place for the independent unattached adult to prioritize his or her career outside of the church -- do we have a place for the young adult who is more inclined to look for intimacy among us? While we have a place to use the energies of intimacy still present for couples who have launched their children -- do we have a place for their renewed impatience for personal independence and achievement? While we have a place for those families who's needs for intimacy and for independence follow the stereotype of the traditional intact family -- do we have a place for families who are not so predictable? Families of divorce, with remarriage, with same sex partners, or with births, losses or connections that have come either to early or to late to follow our expected pattern.

Even with the dominance of one or two groups in this congregation I believe we can still have a place for the varying needs of each family who chooses to connect with us. We need only remember that families change, remember to respect the varying balances that families achieve, and then be good enough.

This church needs to be good enough, because our individuals and our families need us. Milgram, in the fifties wondered how it was that the authoritarian regimes of WWII could get decent human beings to commit atrocities of incredible horror. He wondered about the power of authority figures, and designed an experiment to test how many dangerous shocks a normal human being would administer to another human being when told to do so by an authority figure. What he discovered surprised the world of social science. On simply the word of a laboratory assistant wearing a white coat and paying a modest sum to the experimental subject, 65% of normal human beings administered shocks beyond a level marked "Danger: Sever Shock." When subjects were placed up close to the laboratory confederate who received these unknowingly fake shocks, cooperation dropped to 30%, but when they were removed out of visual range, it increased to over 90%. These subjects didn't cooperate without protest. But they did cooperate.

What I want to point out is the one variation in this experiment that offers me hope. When the person who was administering the shocks had a peer with him who supported his or her protests, and encourages him or her to make a stand, less than ten percent of the subjects completed the series of shocks.

It is in this way that we need the church as a place to belong. We need the peers in the church to call us to ethical and moral actions in our work. We are surrounded by decisions. Our actions, be it treating patients, hiring employees, obeying bosses, or buying grapes, have an impact on the world and on other human beings. Whether we make sense of the world in an intimate way or an independent way; whether we need the church up close, or at a distance; whether we need it as a place of change or a place of stability: we need the church.

And so we should protect our church, and treat it gently. And we should be careful as we both follow it and guide it throughout its own life cycles. We have passed through the adolescent stage of church life, through the time when we were dependent on parental funds for existence, as the time of youthful rebellion and anger at the value differences we have with our parent conference. We have passed into the stage of young adulthood, the stage where we must decide if we need to rent a new home for our growing needs, or if we can afford to buy. We are in a stage where we must decide how we will incorporate the symbols of our roots into our life together. We are in the time when our energies are sealed up and where the community is little benefitting from volunteer actions inspired by our church involvement. We are at the time when we are considering hiring help to do work we feel is important, and at the same time are looking anxiously at our limited resources. We are at a dangerous time, when the still smoldering fires of adolescent emotion call us to fight complacency and warn us that being responsible is really selling out. And we are at the time when the fear of this responsibility holds us trembling in our boots, paralyzing us in the face of challenges to strange, to new, to seem surmountable.

Like the plant that has been repotted, our roots have been trimmed, our branches cut back, and we have been put in a new, larger and different place to thrive or to perish. The Chinese symbol for crisis, Phil said last week is the combination of the symbols danger and opportunity. We are at the crux of change. Like the high drama and high emotion of Phil's vision quest, we too are experiencing the exhaustion and exhilaration, the fear and the excitement of a time of transition.

I believe this transition is one of great promise, and I offer you this, my vision for our church: that we be a place to belong for all of those who wish to connect to us.

For those who have suffered the pain of their own formative rebellions against the authority of country or religion, we should be a place to belong.

For those who have suffered prejudice and rejection for reasons beyond their control, we should be a place to belong.

For those who have suffered the broken relationships and broken dreams, we should be a place to belong.

For those who hold high the authority of God's kingdom, over the authority of the kingdom's of earth, we should be a place to belong.

For those who are ambivalent about religious work, but who know the actions of faith, and for those who's words are but dim reflections of their actions, we should be a place to belong.

For those who hold the values of inner integrity and purpose above the values of acquisition and influence, we should be a place to belong.

For those who value human life more than the perquisites and possessions provided by violent power, we should be a place to belong.

This church is a place of great value. Like our parents, as they age, like our children, as they grow, we should cherish our church. It is a place where change can happen, where balances are respected, a place where we can belong.

I want this congregation to be here for a long time. I want it to be here when the children of this group, or their friends, grow up and do something to challenge our limits. I don't know what that will be then, but I'm sure they'll find something. I want us to be here to say "you belong here" Not because we don't care about ethics or standards, because we do. Not because we can't stand up to sin, because we can. Not even because Jesus said so, thought that is a very good reason. I want us to be here to tell them: "You belong here because we love you."

Roman and Mary Anna are here for their last Sunday among us as residents of Germantown and in a minute Roman will have something to say to us. They are leaving to go to Goshen, in the center of the Mennonite Community. It is in the Center of the Mennonite Community that Roman and Mary Anna first found out they had a place to belong, and it is somehow right that they go back there to retire. But we'll miss them.

I have a wish. I wish that someday this place is, for Dirk and Myrna, for Al and Karen, for Joni Baumgarten, for William Moyer Alderfer, maybe for Susan and myself, the place we return to because this is where we belong.