Hope

Traditionally, the four weeks of Advent correspond to four ideas that guide us through the season: hope, peace, joy, and love. I want to spend some time reflecting on these concepts over the next few weeks here. So, let’s start at the beginning of it all. Hope. What does it mean to hope?

This question was posed in a small group class that I’m in at Wartburg this week. We were asked to share what we hope for with regard to the world, our close circle of family and friends, and ourselves. A lot of hopes were uplifted. People hoped that we could have peace in the world and that people could listen to and understand one another, getting along and sharing space even when disagreements arise. Some hoped that the needs of all in the world would be met, so that no one lacks for any fundamental requirements of life. Some hoped for the end of the COVID pandemic. We looked around at the challenges of the world and hoped for solutions. 

The pattern of hoping for solutions to problems recurred on all levels of this exercise. We hoped for rest. We hoped for safety for our family members. We hoped for peace of mind and absence of interpersonal conflict among our friends. I suspect that this is true for most people, not just my small group of seminarians. There are so many problems that affect our lives: supply shortages, rising prices, the pandemic, wars, political divisions, broken friendships, mental and emotional health that fragments more and more as the stress of the year continues to weigh heavily upon us. It makes a lot of sense for us to focus on our needs, our shortcomings, our weaknesses and pray that God fills what is lacking.

But there were other things that people hoped for as well, and while I don’t want to discourage people from hoping for a better future by specifically imagining the absence of the problems we face now, there may be another way to think about hope. Another one of my classes recently had a guest speaker who talked about how to lead in a particular context. He talked about learning about the community in which your church is situated and mapping out the assets and needs.

He described assets as those gifts that God has given a community to better serve it. These may be things like the local library, parks and playgrounds, schools, hospitals. These are all very important ways a church can connect with a community, but people can also be assets: elderly people who have interest and time enough to help with various church activities, energetic parents willing to teach Sunday school, community members who don’t attend the church but are friendly to the congregation and are willing to help them with their local mission. The assets are all the things the community offer that the church can use to turn and help the community. They grow together.

The needs are the problems that require some help. These are the points of agreement in mission between church and community. These can be things like unemployment, illiteracy, poverty, drug abuse and other things that might negatively impact a community. In small towns and rural communities in general, there may be a growing sense of displacement. As people spend more and more time online, the atmosphere that made small towns special ebbs away. Small towns may feel like they have lost their identity, like they only exist as satellites to cities, but lack the culture and respect that once made them so unique. Needs are opportunities for the church to utilize its assets so that the community and the church can both benefit.

Now, if assets serve to address needs, it may seem that you should focus on the needs first. How can you try to formulate a plan to address the problem until you explore the nature of the problem? The interesting part of this presentation was that the guest speaker argued that we should start with the assets. If we look too much at the needs first, we may feel overwhelmed and hopeless. We begin by building our arsenal, preparing ourselves to fight the needs by making sure we fully understand just how much God has blessed us.

So what does this mean for hope?

Again, I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t hope for our problems to go away. There are some needs that are real concerns that overshadow the rest of life for the people who experience them. It is hard to appreciate the good things God has given us when we live in a scarcity mindset, and sometimes the only way to fix a scarcity mindset is to address the concerns that cause it. However, it also wouldn’t hurt to explore what it would mean to hope in an asset rather than hoping against a need.

Especially in churches with small weekly attendance, there is a tendency to construct plans about how to bring more people in. “I just wish we could have more people here on a Sunday.” “I would like to have enough kids for Sunday School again.”

We are hoping to remove a problem. In this case, the problem is a lack of people. We are defining our hope by what we don’t have, what we want, rather than what gifts we already possess. When we turn to look at what we have, we find a lot to hope for. We have the members who come consistently; we can hope that they will continue to grow in Christ’s love and have courage to delve further into what the Gospel means to them and to share that good news with others. We have nearby towns, and we can hope that they will find a rooted identity in an ever shifting world. We can hope that they will find new ways to make small towns come alive and be places of unique culture and joy. We have farms and pastures around us. We can hope that the land produces bountifully and rests well over the winter. And when you think back to those assets of parks, schools, hospitals, and all the like, we can hope for all of those institutions to prosper in God’s sight and to interact with the community in meaningful ways.

There is certainly no problem with hoping that God would take our problems away, but there are times when it may be better to hope rather that God would be present in those things that strengthen us and trust that the problems will be managed. As we consider hope this Advent season, let us consider not only what things need fixing, but also what gifts need growing.