A Call Without a Map

This sermon was preached during the season of Lent as our congregation reflects on the future God is opening before us. Drawing on God’s call to Abram in Genesis 12, it explores what it means for a church to trust God when the path ahead is not fully clear.

Introduction

Occasionally, I step to this sacred desk aware that we are standing at a hinge moment in our life together. I feel that today.

God’s call to Abram to take a journey without a map can sound daunting and fearful. Or it can be embraced with a sense of adventure and possibility. And that is how I trust you will hear this sermon. It is not about fear, but about faith.

Abram’s Call and Obedience

Abram was 75 years old and quite settled with his family of origin and his wife Sarai, when God appeared to him and said to leave it all behind and go where God was sending him.

Leave all that is familiar and comfortable. Leave behind security for promise. Leave your past, and embrace this moment.

And Abram went. That’s it. He didn’t demand to know a destination. He did not ask for logistics. He did not question God’s intent.

Abram went, on a journey without a map.

We could not have a better text for the second Sunday of Lent or this season in the life of our congregation. Because when we follow Jesus in Lent, we enter the wilderness. We are called to place we will not recognize and cannot name. We go.

Abram’s story is not one of conversion. He knew and worshipped God. It is a story of redirection and reorientation. But it begins with no direction and in total disorientation.

What does this tell us about God?

1.  God is not tethered to the past.

2.  God rarely gives us a detailed itinerary before he calls us to a journey.

3.  God provides for anyone who answers his call to “Go.”

Such obedience does not come by faith as believing, but by faith as trust.

This story – Abram’s story and the Lenten story -- invites us to consider how humility and magnanimity open us to God’s initiative—calling us beyond self-centered certainty toward lives that become a blessing to others.

God calls settled people into unsettled futures in order to enlarge their capacity to bless.

Our Moment of Discernment

Perhaps the question before us is not, ‘How do we preserve what we have known?’

But, ‘How is God enlarging our capacity to bless in this next season?

Let me tell another story in an attempt to illustrate this.

It was 1856 or thereabouts. A small group of people worshipped in the Debnam Hotel in a rural village that had been chartered as the Town of Henderson, NC, only fifteen years before.  

Henderson boasted a population of around 500 when this gathering took place. The population didn’t really grow for another 15-25 years, and it was slow.

They were not a church. They were gathered as a mission of the Baptist State Convention of NC under the ministry of Dr. W.T. Brooks. Records show that as late as 1861 there were only about 18 members.

A conversation was initiated at some point. “It is time for us to constitute as a church,” someone said. And the debate followed.

“How do we go about doing that? Who  will lead us?”

“I don’t think we can afford to do this right now. We can barely     pay Dr. Brooks.”

“We need a church here; people have to go all the way out to Island Creek to attend church. Come on people, have some faith.”

“We don’t have any tradition – what kind of church should we have?”

“We don’t have a building—can we be a church without a building?”

“We are living in perilous times friends. Our country is so politically polarized. Things are becoming violent. This may not be the time. Why don’t we just continue as we are and see how things shake out?”

Yes, I can hear them, can’t you? Those are not faithless questions. They are honest ones.

Does their story and context sound familiar?

Like them, this is a moment for discernment. Like them, we have faithful questions.

“We can’t afford staff.”

“Why are we renovating a building?”

“Are we shrinking?”

“Are we pretending we aren’t?”

“Are we trying to build our way out of insecurity?”

We have no map for our future.

Our founders stood in that moment and decided they had heard God say, “Go...I will provide for you and you will be a blessing to many.” And without answers to all of their questions, and little certainty of the future, they took a great step of faith.

What if they had hesitated?

What if they had prayed:

“Okay God, we will do this but we need a map. Give us a sign. Send us some assurances for our future?”

They did not. And God only said, “trust me.” They did, and we are here because of it.

Think of the blessings this town would have missed had they not been trusting.

These seasons of surrender come from time to time.

One came for this congregation in 1910 when the decision was made to build a new building where we sit today.

Those were volatile days as well. Political progressives were seeking to curb the growth, power, and profit of corporations. There was a powerful wave of  anti-establishment fervor sweeping the nation. Jim Crow was firmly established.

I hear voices again!

“I just don’t know, we are just fine here. Why do we need a fancy new building. Is that really how God wants us to spend our resources.”

“Amen, with so many people in poverty, we need to be helping them instead of ourselves.”

“But if we don’t do this, the Methodists will, and that will kill our church.”

Can you hear them? No assurances or guarantees. This would be an undertaking requiring great sacrifice.

They had no clue that WWI was just a few years away, and would stymie their progress for years. After that, they did not know that the Spanish Flu pandemic would cripple the country for two years.

The commitments they made in 1910 did not come to fruition for 16 years!

You see, friends, we cannot keep an eye on the road ahead if we are constantly staring into the rearview mirror. Gratitude for the past is holy.  Nostalgia that freezes us in place is not.

And we must not look too far forward. We have no crystal ball...we must not allow uncertainty about the future to paralyze us.  

Fear has a voice.

Prudence has a voice.

Fatigue has a voice.

And faith has a voice. Lent invites us to learn the difference.

Answering a Call Without a Map

What it will not require:

• It will not require operating out of blind optimism,

 but deepening trust.

• It will not require ignoring financial realities,

but planning with reason and expanding our stewardship.

• It will not require denying decline,

but remembering that faithfulness and size are not the same thing.

• It will not require resisting change

simply because it is uncomfortable.

What it will require:

·         It will require opening our imaginations to new structures and strategies

 that can lead to revival and renewal.

·         It will require loosening our grip on what once defined us,

liberating us from nostalgia.

·         It will require trusting God with reputation,

unshackling us from fear of appearing less.

·         It will require choosing mission

over comfort.

·         It will require acknowledging that it will not be easy

and building endurance.

·         It will require every member engaged in the work

--not farming it out to others.

It will require moving, because when God says, “Go,” we cannot sit still.

The same God who was faithful in 1856 and 1910 is not asking us to recreate 1856 or 1910  -- or the 1970s or 1990s

God is asking us to trust Him in 2026.

We have the same Lord, the same gospel, the same mission.

But God may be calling us to new expressions, expansive stewardship, and deepened trust.

Abram did not lose who he was. But he relinquished his control. He released the illusion that what he had known was permanent.

Likewise for us. We will be the First Baptist Church. But we must release the illusion that what has been must always be.  

We become more authentic, not less, when we loosen our grip on the past and trust God with the future.

In other words, going with God will not make us a different church.

It will make us a free and faithful church — living hopefully in this moment God has given us.

Conclusion

Friends, we do not have a map for the years ahead. Neither did Abram.

We have a promise.

We have a call.

And we have one another.

And if we walk humbly, generously, and courageously into this next season, we will discover that the unseen hand of God has been guiding us all along.

PRAYER: Teach us to walk humbly, trust deeply, and follow faithfully wherever You say, “Go.”  Give us ears to hear...Amen.

Reflect: Where do you sense God might be inviting us to trust him more deeply in this season? Please give me call, drop my email, or arrange for a time to talk.

Ronald S. Cava

First Baptist Church

Henderson, North Carolina

March 1, 2026