Everyday thousands of pastors and church leaders get up in
the morning, drink a cup of coffee, pray, and start their day of ministry. For
most of us, the day is a day of small things: a phone call to a parishioner who
has been in the hospital, an administrative task, a meeting with the chair of a
ministry team, a phone call to a community partner about an event. Each day is
filled with a series of small things, any one of them, on their own, does not
seem important.
Most of us spend our entire careers doing small things. We
will never be named a CNN Hero for our work. We will not be elected Bishop (if
we in a denomination that does that).
Still, we follow a Savior who taught us that insignificant
things, and sometimes things that seem like failures, can be the cornerstone to
something powerful. You just never know. Jesus once told the Jewish religious
leaders: “The stone that the masons threw out is now the cornerstone.” He was
making an reference to himself as someone they were rejecting, but of course he
is the cornerstone of our church. They saw him and his work as something small
and useless. But we know better.
On the first Sunday that our church, The Village, opened for
weekly worship we had a new visitor show up. She told us that there was a need
for a support group in Northwest Ohio for people like her. Her group is an infinitesimal
portion of the population, but they are greatly oppressed and harassed by the
rest of society. She said to me, “We need a safe space.” The Village Church
offered our church as a safe space for the first transgender support group in
Northwest Ohio. Twenty-five people came to the first meeting and they continue
to meet monthly, now five years later. The support group is a small ministry,
now meeting in another church because we moved and we could no longer offer
them space. We did a small thing to get them started.
The act of starting a support group did not turn us into a
mega church. They did not bring significant money into our church. But on any
given Sunday, you might find one to four transgender persons worshiping with
The Village Church, feeling welcome and accepted. This is a small and yet
powerful thing.
Sometimes it is easy to feel small when we do what seem to
be only small things. But small things are not small to God. And small things
are not small to the people they touch. Small things are powerful. They might
even become the cornerstone for something big. Either way, I hope you will keep
doing small things, because small things
matter.
