This past Sunday, our house church event focused on Scripture from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: Matthew 5:14-16. This text from the Bible gave our spiritual ancestors, the Pilgrims of Mayflower and Plymouth Rock fame, the vision for their new faith community founded in the wilderness of the New World. The vision was of a “city built on a hill.” The image conveys the intention of the Pilgrims to create a community that would be both a blessing to and an example for the wider world. Wow! That’s chutzpah!

The Pilgrims had grand visions for their mission. Reality turned out to be a bit different. The Pilgrims faced many obstactes, disappointments, and adversities during their journey to America. They lost one of their ships and a large part of their group along the way. Their voyage was delayed so that they arrived at Plymouth Rock in December 1620 to face a bitter winter during which half of the small group that actually made it to America survived. They didn’t even manage to arrive at their intended destination–the Hudson River–instead they landed on Cape Cod before making their way to Plymouth.

Later, William Bradford, pastor to this tiny, fragile faith community would write,

But here I cannot stay and make a pause and stand half amazed at this poor people’s present condition. . . . They had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or towns to repair to, to seek for succor.

What astonished Bradford was not that half of the Pilgrims would perish that first winter, but that half of them would survive.

What could now sustain them but the Spirit of God and His Grace? May not and ought the children of these fathers rightly say: ‘Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice and looked on their adversity.’

Everyone comes from somewhere. One of the first questions I get when I’m introducing myself to people in Fishers is, Where are you from? Or, when they find out I’m a church planter, some form of What denomination? This question is a way of asking Spiritually, where are you from?

The story of the Pilgrims is important to Prairie Sky Church because it gives an important part of the answer to Spiritually, where are you from? We are tied to the story of the Pilgrims at least two ways: 1) Nicole is a literal descendant of the Mayflower Pilgrims, and 2) as a United Church of Christ community, Prairie Sky Church is a spiritual descendant of the Pilgrims, who formed the Congregationalist Church, which became in 1957 the United Church of Christ.

As a new church start, we identify with and take strength from the earliest chapters of the Pilgrim story. Many of us are newcomers to Fishers and have our own stories of landing in a “new world” and struggling to make a life for ourselves and our families without the support of friends and relatives nearby.

We also took away from our conversation a key word for defining our spirituality: Simplicity. When you have a vision for being a “city on a hill” in a “new world” that presents obstacles, challenges, adversity, and opportunities, you need to pare down the clutter of your life to the bare necessities. As pastor Craig Parker of Bridgeway Community Church (Fishers, IN) put it in a sermon this past Sunday morning, “Jesus plus nothing equals everything.” Like our Pilgrim forefathers and foremothers, it is our desire to keep our hearts, minds, and faith community focused with great humility and simplicity on our Savior, Jesus. In doing so, we trust that the light of Jesus will shine through our words and actions and that people will respond to that light by praising God with their lives. Is that chutzpah? Maybe. But it’s all for Jesus.

For more reading on the triumphs, trials, and failures of the Pilgrims, see Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War.