Sermon preached by Dr. John A. Huffman, Jr.
February 24, 2008
Copyright © 2008, John A. Huffman, Jr.
All rights reserved.

Those twelve stones, which they had taken out of the Jordan, Joshua set up in Gilgal, saying to the Israelites, "When your children ask their parents in time to come, 'What do these stones mean?' then you shall let your children know, 'Israel crossed over the Jordan here on dry ground.' For the Lord your God dried up the waters of the Jordan for you until you crossed over, as the Lord your God did to the Red Sea, which he dried up for us until we crossed over, so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the hand of the Lord is mighty, and so that you may fear the Lord your God forever." (Joshua 4:20-24)

Try to picture Newport Beach without St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church.

It's difficult to do, isn't it?

St. Andrew's has been an integral part of this community for sixty years.

If there were no St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, there would be no Hoag Hospital. It was key lay and clergy persons primarily from this church and the Laguna Presbyterian Church who dreamed, prayed and worked to establish this great medical center, which so effectively serves the Harbor Area.

Think of the tens of thousands of lives who have been spiritually touched by this ministry over these sixty years. This church has been so faithful in its caring and restorative ministry, faithfully serving all ages, cradle to grave, with the love of Jesus Christ.

Pastors and laity of St. Andrew's have, with the anointing of the Holy Spirit, led thousands to personal faith in Jesus Christ, built tens of thousands up in their faith, been there to encourage people in times of personal crisis, presiding at celebrative occasions and deployed so many in servant ministries here and throughout the world.

Imagine where we'd be today if those early founders had not summoned up the courage to have a groundbreaking for the first buildings on this site. And think what the last quarter of a century would have been like if we had succumbed to the naysayers who said we simply couldn't do it in the early 1980s. But, with God's help, we tore down those ten houses on Clay Street, putting in two hundred fifty parking spaces. We tore down several other buildings to put in a brand-new sanctuary, a brand-new education facility, a brand-new administrative/chapel building and a total remodel of Dierenfield Hall. What started out at seven million dollars climbed to nine, ten, then twelve and a half and, ultimately with interest, sixteen and a half million dollars. There were those who fought that building program, declaring that it would kill the local and world mission outreach of this church. But, far from that, the local and world mission has increased from five hundred thousand dollars a year when I came to over seven million dollars this past year, with over two and a half million dollars of that for mission projects beyond St. Andrew's. And, some fifteen years ago, we burned the mortgage, paying off sixteen and a half million, functioning since then without one penny of debt.

Think of all the ministries that have gone on through these sixty years. It's hard to picture Newport Beach and the Harbor Area without St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church.

Our God plans carefully the facilities for His people.

So often we read the Bible and listen to sermons to derive inspiration for us personally, to enable us to make it through one day at a time. It's so easy to lose sight of the fact that our God, in addition to being a God who works individually with people, is a God who is constantly reproducing His family here on earth. The family of God needs housing, buildings, facilities to carry on its worship and to be a physical base out of which vital ministries are deployed.

Once again, this year, I'm reading the One Year Bible. In doing that, I am constantly exposed to Old Testament passages that one might otherwise never read. Just a few days ago, I came to Exodus 35-40. Open your Bibles to them. There you will read six chapters, page after page, of specific instructions for the building of the tabernacle, the place of worship. Moses has just come down from Mount Sinai for the second time. He is given the Ten Commandments. He shares with the people the instructions of God in regard to their future. He knows there will be years of wandering in the wilderness, yet they needed a place, a physical place for worship. Listen to these words that describe Moses as he takes up the initial offering to build the tabernacle.

Moses said to the all the congregation of the Israelites: This is the thing that the Lord has commanded: Take from among you an offering to the Lord; let whoever is of a generous heart bring the Lord's offering: gold, silver, and bronze; blue, purple, and crimson yarns, and fine linen; goats' hair, tanned rams' skins, and fine leather; acacia wood, oil for the light, spices for the anointing oil and for the fragrant incense, and onyx stones and gems to be set in the ephod and the breastpiece (Exodus 35:4-9).

Then Moses goes on to specifically instruct how the skilled workers were to build the tabernacle, giving, in intricate detail, descriptions that would impress the most fastidious architect and interior decorator.

Again, several hundred years later, when the people had finally entered the land, David assembled in Jerusalem all the officials of Israel and told them that, because he was a man of blood, he was not to be the builder of the temple. That would fall to his son Solomon. But he raised all the money and physical resources for it. You can read about this is 1 Chronicles 28 and 29. Then in 2 Chronicles 1 through 8, you can read how Solomon, over a twenty-year period, carried out a detailed architectural and resource planning for the building of the temple that culminated in its dedication. It was in the context of this dedication that God declares, "'. . . if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land'" (2 Chronicles 7:14).

Our God is meticulous in planning.

In the New Testament, as the early Church was established in Jerusalem among Jewish and Gentile converts, we see how the people of God rallied together to establish a vital community. In Acts 4, we see the ends to which they went to take care of each other and strengthen the ties of the family of God. We read, "With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need" (Acts 4:33-35).

Here at St. Andrew's, we have planned diligently over these sixty years to provide the best facilities to carry out the work of Jesus Christ. Once again, with God's help, we together are endeavoring to bring this latest building program to a healthy, positive completion.

This building program has been long in being birthed.

Some of you heard me say how one of my major reservations in accepting your call back in 1978 to move from Pittsburgh to Newport Beach was the realization that this would probably take a toll on me in terms of a major building program. I did not go into the ministry to build buildings. My call into ministry was clearly to lead people to personal saving faith in Jesus Christ, to build them up in their faith and to deploy them in servant ministry here and throughout the world. There was nothing in that call that mentioned physical facilities.

During my six years at the Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church in Florida and my five years at the First Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, we had done some refurbishment of the facilities but no new buildings. We had gotten First Church into top shape physically--a great Gothic cathedral at the heart of a major industrial city.

But it was clear that God's call was to St. Andrew's. Some of you remember the deliberations surrounding that early 1980s building program, which I've already described. In addition to the parking lot, the new sanctuary, the new education facilities, the new administrative/chapel building and the refurbishment of Dierenfield Hall, was the necessity of a youth center. Frankly, we were so overwhelmed by the growing cost of these first five dimensions, we postponed the sixth, the youth facility. We weren't sure where it would go or how we would fund it. But as soon as the debt was paid off in the early 1990s, the conversations once again began. I dragged my feet. I didn't want to be part of another building program. But, faithfully, unknown to me, a small group of lay people met each week to plan, to think, to pray about the youth facility. Reluctantly, I became involved, as did the Session. We tried to buy the Masonic Lodge, but they had no desire to sell. Finally, toward the late 1990s, it became apparent that we had to do something. We asked Ken Williams, who had recently retired from McDonnell-Douglas, to assume the chairmanship of the Building the Future project. He gathered around him a strong team, and they have worked unceasingly, facing the greatest odds, to put together the plan we now have.

You know all the ins and outs of the complex relationship with our neighbors and with our civic leaders. We don't need to recapitulate all the controversy that churned up until about a year ago. The fact was that our hoped-for youth center, which would involve a full-size gymnasium, would demand underground parking and some eighty restrictions in terms of our conditional use permit, even though our proposed project was whittled down in a compromise from an initial thirty-six thousand square feet to fifteen thousand square feet. We were not happy, nor were the neighbors, with that compromise. In the process, what appeared to be a project costing approximately twenty to twenty-two million dollars, of which we had raised some thirteen million, was escalating to an unconscionable doubling of that figure, with estimates closer to forty-four or forty-five million dollars.

So we had a tough decision to make when we saw the community response and the spiraling costs.

Over two and a half years ago, we decided to start from scratch and do a zero-base planning. A cross-section of St. Andrew's leadership was brought together to reassess in its entirety our physical plant. Various options were presented.

Option one was to find land elsewhere and move. That option had very little attraction, for we had no desire to be another Orange County mega-church, moving to another city, where we could find more land. This is where God has called us to serve, even if the shoe of limited land would limit how large the foot could grow.

Option two was more radical. It may come as a shock to some of you--we even considered removing all the buildings from this land and starting over from scratch. That idea did not have a lot of attraction, but, at least, it was considered.

Option three gave consideration to tearing down some of the present buildings, even the most recently built--the administration/chapel--so that a gym could be put in its place. But we realized that we dare not decrease the present ministries so as to have the luxury of a gym.

All this time, we were watching the calendar. Several Junes had come and gone, dates in which we had hoped to break ground, so as to get our project started in the summer, disrupting only one church year for the building process.

So option four emerged. A year ago, about this time, we voted to move forward with the present plan that would say "no" to any square footage expansion but would tear down the old Dierenfield Hall and the old children's education building, coming up with a much more efficient space utilization that would give us an outstanding state-of-the-art youth facility, going down eighteen feet into the ground with an outstanding new Youth and Family Center with an up-to-date new children's education building next to it. The decision was made to break ground in June, even though we did not know the final costs.

As bids gradually came in throughout the summer, we came up with a total program of approximately twenty-six million dollars. One million was devoted to a mission project called "Hearts and Hands: Mission Initiative" in which we are helping the establishment of the new Ladera Ranch Presbyterian Church, help for the physical plant revitalization of the Chinese Presbyterian Church of Orange County in Westminster, sending four new missionaries to teach in Pakistan, and two of our own members, Shelly and Brett Faucett, to serve in Christian medical missions in Thailand and throughout Southeast Asia, dealing with the AIDS epidemic. Also included in this total amount was a complete refurbishing of our sanctuary, which we did several years ago, additional technical updates to our audio/visual capacities, including the screens in the sanctuary, the costs of the ongoing architectural plans as they shifted through the years, and finally the two brand new buildings--the new Youth and Family Center, the educational building and all of the furnishings of them and the full landscaping of our site.

The easy thing for me personally to do would be to declare this is too time-consuming and distracting. We've paid a terrific price in terms of public relations in the community, with much of the controversy having been focused on the person of the senior pastor. Let's just drop this and let the next pastor decide what to do. But that would have meant a new leader having to start all over again. New controversy would erupt in both the community and within the congregation. The cost would escalate.

Frankly, I remembered how it was when I arrived back in 1978. John Miller, the chairman of the Pastoral Nominating Committee, had alerted me to the fact that a building program was needed, but he seriously questioned whether, because of escalating prices, it was possible. They had seriously considered one several years before but had decided against it. Then the real moment of truth for me was when the then-clerk of session, Les Miller, came into my office in the early weeks of my ministry with a stack about a foot high of architectural plans for the building program that had been carefully worked out during the late 1960s and early 1970s but never implemented. I, in good conscience, could not allow that to happen to the next pastor.

Let me speak to the funding plan.

As already mentioned, we always knew that there would be an additional asking from that of 2002, when we thought the building costs would be somewhere between twenty and twenty-two million dollars. As recently as a year ago, a member of the church stepped forward to make an additional pledge of three million dollars, bringing the total amount pledged to approximately sixteen and a half million. Of that, we have about thirteen million in cash, including interest that has accumulated. When the final bids came in at the end of the summer, we realized that we were talking approximately twenty-six million dollars, which meant that we would need to raise an additional nine million two hundred thousand dollars.

Some suggested that we simply resort to long-term debt. That's the way a number of churches in our area have chosen to go. We decided "no." In consultation with your leadership, I agreed to stay until May of 2010 and devote myself to four primary issues, in addition to providing pastoral leadership to St. Andrew's. These four are: to help with the transition issues involving succession to the next pastor; to deal with controversial denominational matters; to help see us through the struggles with some legal suits; and to help bring to completion the building program.

So here we are. The transition is in process; the denominational issues are being addressed; the legal suits, both civil and ecclesiastical, have all been resolved; and we plan to move into the new facilities at the end of August.

Now comes the job of paying off the buildings, which we choose to address now instead of deferring to future generations to pay.

I'm so happy we made this decision. One of our sister churches is highly respected but with long-term indebtedness. The cost of that was to cut its budget for local and world missions by eight hundred thousand dollars and to let go a number of staff members. We've chosen to address the issue now and endeavor to raise the money--the family doing together what we couldn't possibly do separately. Our dream is to hand on to the next generation a debt-free facility.

Let me say a word about a financial firewall.

St. Andrew's has had a firm commitment during my thirty years as pastor of not "borrowing from Peter to pay Paul."

What do I mean by this? We have made a very firm commitment that local and world mission funds be kept completely separate from building funds.

This has not always been easy to do. There were times in the early 1980s and more recently in the last four years where we had substantial monies in the building fund when we were under strong pressure in the local and world mission fund. It would have been so easy to borrow from the Peter of building funds to help the Paul of local and world mission. Then there were times in the mid-to-late 1980s when we had greater flexibility with local and world mission funds and felt the pressure of our cash flow for the building fund to pay off our short-term indebtedness to Glendale Federal Bank. But in each case, with strong resolve, we held firm and maintained the firewall, never having blurred the lines and transferred funds from one account to the other. God has blessed this decision.

There has been a bit of a misunderstanding about a statement made in the video shared in the home groups. Something was said about the importance of us not having to pay this building off by decreasing twenty-five percent of our budget that we faithfully give to world missions. Please do not misunderstood what was said. Jack Weiblen, our co-chair of this building program, was simply saying that the reason we are moving ahead now is to avoid impacting, by long-term debt, our local and world mission outreach.

This is what I mean by a "firewall." We dare not take from local/world mission monies to complete this project. We must keep local and world mission completely separate from the building program. In order to do this, we are having this present campaign.

It is important that none of us decrease the money we're giving to local and world missions, simply transferring that in a pledge over to the building program.

I am asking you to consider what God would enable you to do in a sacrificial over-and-above, three-year pledge to finishing off this building project, so our local and world mission can move forward, unencumbered, even as we give the gift of superb facilities that will be a great mission base for intergenerational ministry for the decades to come.

Here's what we call three kinds of giving. I call it left-pocket, right-pocket and back-pocket giving.

The "left-pocket" is the kind of money we use for our living expenses, whether it be food, clothing, housing, transportation, hopefully with tithe at the very center of that. It's that money out of which we do our local and world mission.

"Right-pocket" giving is that special money that we have saved for the big events in life, such as an educational account, retirement funds, investment in a second home or inheritance monies or special assets that have increased in value. It's out of the right pocket I hope that you will give to the building program. And do it in a sacrificial way. That's what Moses saw happen when he challenged the people to give to the tabernacle. They did it out of present assets. That's similar to what happened when David appealed to the leaders of Israel, along with the rest of the people, to provide the resources for the building of the temple several hundred years later. And that's what happened in the New Testament Church when there were unique needs of brothers and sisters in Christ, and people liquidated assets to help with those needs.

Then there is what I would call "back-pocket" giving, and that's what we're able to do when we die. Anne and I cannot liquidate our home now, yet it has increased in value. Some of you have heard me say that we have drawn up our will so that ten percent off the top before taxes goes to the work of Jesus Christ, letting our children know how important, even in death, our faith is to us. But when all of those resources are liquidated, St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church and Fuller Theological Seminary, along with perhaps several other ministries, will be the primary beneficiaries of this back-pocket giving.

So please know I urge you to hold steady in your local/world giving, that left-pocket giving. What we're asking is for us to reach into that right pocket in a sacrificial way to make a commitment for the next three years that will enable St. Andrew's to move forward without long-term indebtedness.

I ask you to consider what God would have you do.

As I mentioned, this is a three-year pledge, over and above our local/world mission commitments.

For those of us who are already tithers, this will involve some second-mile giving, some extra sacrifice. If you're not already a tither, this is a good time to stop and think about the fact that everything you have is a gift from God temporarily on loan. It gives you the perfect opportunity to try God out, testing to see if the Bible is correct. You can live a better quality life on ninety percent of your income than you can on a hundred or even a hundred ten or fifteen percent, like some people try to do.

Right now, whatever your circumstances may be, I'm going to ask the Holy Spirit to plant a dollar figure in your mind to pray about and consider over the next two weeks. I urge you to make it a figure that would involve some kind of sacrifice, as you invest over and above what you're already giving to the local and world mission of St. Andrew's to Building the Future Together. Write that amount down. Sometime within the next week, you should be receiving a mailing from the church with the building campaign brochure as well as a faith pledge card. If you're married, within the next few days, share what figure you wrote down with your spouse and talk about and pray over what God would have you do. Then, two weeks from this weekend, we will have a gathering of those faith pledges and announce the following weekend on Palm Sunday what we as the people of God have agreed to do to get these buildings finished and paid off. If you've not yet joined St. Andrew's and are not on the mailing list, yet this is your church home, there will be extra pledge cards and envelopes in the pew pockets next weekend, so that you can come back two weekends from now prepared to reconsecrate yourself and your resources to the Lord.

Let me conclude today this time of family talk with a personal word that is very much the theme of this Building the Future Together.

You've seen on all of our literature in recent weeks these small stones that form the shape of a cross. These are memory stones. You received one as you came into the sanctuary today. They are smooth. They are clean. There is one for each person.

There's something valuable about having tangible, touchable symbols for commitments we make with our lives. After the exodus from Egypt, the people of Israel wandered for some forty years in the wilderness. The tabernacle was portable. It went wherever they went. Four hundred or so years later, the temple would be built in Jerusalem at a fixed place on Mount Zion. We've seen the elaborate preparations that Moses made for the tabernacle, and David, along with his son Solomon, made for the temple.

There was an event that happened in between these two. It was when the people passed over the Jordan River, with that great miracle, when the waters of the Jordan were rolled up, enabling the people to pass over on dry ground. Joshua commemorated the event with the most interesting activity. He selected twelve men, one from each tribe, and commanded them to take twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan and carry them over into the Promised Land and lay them down in the place where they camped that night at Gilgal. He said, "'. . . When your children ask in time to come, "What do those stones mean to you?" then you shall tell them that the waters of the Jordan were cut off in front of the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed over the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. So these stones shall be to the Israelites a memorial forever'" (Joshua 4:6-7). They did this in obedience.

Then it says, "(Joshua set up twelve stones in the middle of the Jordan, in the place where the feet of the priests bearing the ark of the covenant had stood; and they are there to this day)" (Joshua 4:9).

Isn't that interesting? There were two piles of stone--twelve at the center of the Jordan that are there to this very day, mired deep in the mud and muck of that ancient river. And for the generations to come, there were twelve stones at Gilgal as a memorial to anyone who passed by that God had delivered His people out of the bondage of Egypt, had walked with them to the wilderness and, ultimately, had backed up the waters of the Jordan to enable them to cross over into the Promised Land.

God only knows where those stones are today. Generations came and went, and finally that heap of stones in disrepair disappeared.

But what's important is the tangible sign, reminder of those memory stones, codified as they are in the biblical account of Joshua, that God has worked in the life of His people, both as individuals and as a community.

Several weeks ago, we set up that huge tent. Some eight hundred of us gathered in a celebrative event, acknowledging the completion of the year of "Visioning Together" and the launching of the final sprint in the Building the Future Together building campaign. That evening, each of us was given a stone, as each of you have been given one this morning. You were asked to write on that stone something of significance--a Scripture verse, your name, some promise of God, some prayer. That night, we gathered those eight hundred stones, as we will, this morning, gather additional stones from those of us worshiping in these three services this weekend. At the appropriate time, our contracting firm, Snyder-Langston, will dig a large trench around the cross at the center of the plaza, and we will bury these memory stones in a dedicatory act. Then the plaza will be resurfaced and refinished. In the decades ahead, from the littlest child to the most senior of us, something of us individually will have been buried at the foot of the cross, joined with all the memories, stones of our brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ, signifying that the ground is level at the foot of the cross.

Jesus Christ has set us free as individuals and as a community to be all He created us to be. My children can tell their children that their mom, their dad, their grandparents loved Jesus Christ, rededicated themselves to the Savior on the sixtieth birthday of St. Andrew's with a resolve to help this church continue to be a Christ-centered, biblical, intergenerational church, connecting the generations and serving others in His name. Twenty years from now, if I'm still living in my late eighties, my children, my grandchildren can drive me by this church; and I will look at that cross, remembering what I wrote on that stone that I buried back in 2008, remembering that on that stone I wrote Proverbs 3:5-6 in a prayer for the future, as Anne and I, along with the rest of you, made our sacrificial pledge designed to help build the future together.

Take your time. Linger after the service. Write on that stone you have in your hand whatever God leads you to write. Leave it in baskets held by ushers as you leave the church. We will gather them together and bury them at the appropriate time in the appropriate way as memory stones, every bit as real to us today as were those stones some thirty-three hundred years ago at the Jordan River!