Shane Hughes 11-9-25

My name is Shane Hughes. I'm one of the ministers here. I don't know if you remember if you've ever had the opportunity to preach your first sermon. For me, that was a. It was in my home church in Denver, Colorado, a church that had raised me since birth and had loved me every step of the way, had been cheering me on.

I had started college being a music major. I was interested in conducting and composing. But through a couple of just moments of lack of passion and confusion, I thought, you know, maybe this isn't for me. Maybe I should do something else. And I landed in ministry, and my preacher back home heard about that, and so they just gave me a shot, and so I stood up and I gave a sermon.

And I'm sure there's somewhere in the archives of that old church, like a cassette tape with that sermon on it. We don't need to find that cassette tape. We don't need to rehearse that sermon. But. But as I stepped down with the preacher and we walked to the back of the auditorium, that was kind of the way you did it back then.

And everybody left. Everybody said, well, we're so proud of you. Great job. Isn't this amazing? So glad you're here.

Right? Encourage me. A hundred different times. Is it any wonder that it confirmed in my life that choice of maybe preaching is something I could do, something I could become? Jesus seems to have a very different experience, his first time preaching in his hometown.

Because at first they're amazed by what he said, but then they say to themselves, isn't this Joseph's boy? I mean, we kind of know him. I mean, he grew up around here. We saw him playing in these rows. We saw him running around the synagogue like, we know this kid.

His father's poor. Is he really claiming to be the Messiah? At which Jesus quotes two Old Testament texts, which are problematic for Jewish listeners because he said, hey, look, remember Elijah? He didn't go to a Jewish widow and take care of her during the famine. Remember Elisha?

There's a lot of people with leprosy. And he didn't heal a Jew. He healed a gentile and then just made them so angry they're ready to throw him off a cliff. Here's the question. What is it about Jesus claim?

What is it about Jesus claim That sounds like gospel to our ears and sounds like death to other ears. So we're going to talk today about the new initiatives that Highland is going to begin in January, and this is going to be our focus for the next three years. We're calling this the Restoration 2029 vision. Right. And I want to be clear about a few things.

For this next three, three weeks, you're going to hear about new things that we're starting as a church body to do God's work at Highland and Abilene in the world. We're going to partner with God in the restoration of all things in those three places. And so I want to. I want to be clear about a few things because there might be some confusion. We are not stopping any of the work that's currently happening here.

So if I don't talk about grace or freedom or our children's ministry, our youth ministry, and in the next few weeks, that doesn't mean that all that's ending. These are new initiatives in addition to what we've already been doing as our work as a church body. Now, something may stop in the future. I'm not promising everything happens forever. That's not how it works.

But this doesn't replace anything else. This is in addition. And just because you hear about some particular ways that we're partnering in our community and in our building, that doesn't mean that we don't care about other things as well. Right. You're going to hear about how we're going to help people that are in harm's way in our city, but we also care about the people that are in harm's way in this room right now.

In fact, you've probably partnered in a Share the Joy project to help someone in your small group or in your class or someone, you know, to kind of get out of a rough spot. Highland has quietly has helped with rent and other assistance for our own members. The thing is, you don't know about it because we believe that dignity matters as much as generosity. And so the Highland Food Pantry that we're collecting this food now is for our city, but it's also for us that are in a hard spot, that have been in a rough season.

So just for a minute, I want to talk about how we got here to this, these initiatives, and where we go from here. So this whole program began about two years ago when I gathered about seven people to form a listening project to discern what God was doing in our midst, what God might be doing. And you may have talked to one of those seven. You may not even known you were talking to them about this, but they just began asking questions around our church and to one another about what is it that Highland needs to do next? Where is our future?

Where is God leading us? What are the things that we deeply care about more than other things. And then later, elders and ministers generously gave me about six elders meetings in the past year or so and lots of staff meetings to ask questions about who we are and our past and our history. What are our values, what's the situation that we find ourselves in an Abilene and what's the situation that our church finds itself in and how do we best move forward? And you heard some of that last week, but we're going to talk more about it in depth over the next couple of weeks.

And so I am prepared to kind of talk about what we think God has for us on the horizon. And the question is, how do we get ourselves in a posture where we can do what God has called us to do? And so there's kind of three priorities that came out of all of that conversation and listening and prayer. The first one is that we want to reclaim our innovative DNA. If you were here last week, what you heard was all of the ministries that were birthed out of this church and went on to do fantastic and Amazing Things, 75 ministries that existed within this church over the course of the last 97 years.

And if I were to be honest with you, I would tell you the truth, which is say almost all of those brilliant ideas came from your pews, not the pulpit. The best ideas that Highland has had has come from honestly seeking members of Highland finding the next right thing to do to serve their community. And so what we're going to do is work to empower our church to do the right thing, the right next thing. We're going to make a move from excellence and staff driven performance to lay, empowered participation. We believe that we can do more if we're all working.

It seems to me like the expectation that, well, we're just going to wait for staff to lead us is waiting too long. Staff's working hard. They have a lot to do. They have missions and purpose that they are doing in an excellent way. But I think there's more that God has for us than just what staff is going to be able to do.

And the third principle is pretty clear. Mission, discipleship, missional discipleship and community is not just for kids or students or college, but for all believers. I think somehow in our church models what we've fallen into. And I think this is American church in general, not just Highland, but we have people specifically appointed to think about, okay, how do we form faith in children and how do we form faith in our students and how do we form faith in our college students. But it seems that, like, once you get out of that college age, it seems like the church just says, well, you're kind of on your own, or I guess we're done.

We've done everything we can. But actually, faith development continues throughout the course of your life. You're still going to experience crisis and of experience and crisis of idea. And you need to be formed. And we know, we know that the best way for you to be formed into the image of God is if we do it together in small groups and communities.

Doing the work of God together brings us together. It changes us. And so these three principles are going to guide all of the things that we've chosen to do. And what we're trying to do is enter into the mission of God. We talked last week that, you know, what God is interested in is the restoration of all things, the restoration of the cosmos.

And we get to be a part. And it's kind of unbelievable that the God of the universe would choose this church in Abilene, Texas, to do God's work. And so as we were talking about this vision, we met with about 70 leaders. I love this story. We invited 80 leaders from Highland to come and hear about the vision first and get their feedback.

I thought, okay, we invite 80, maybe we get 40 to show up. 75 of the leaders came. Overwhelming participation. We were talking and I presented, and then I presented this Venn diagram. And I said, okay, here's the mission of God.

This is the work that God's going to do. And here are our interests and our talents and all of those things. And in the intersection of the mission of God and the our talents and kind of a Venn diagram, that's the work that we're going to do together. And my friend Chris was sitting in the audience and he says, that's totally wrong. I was like, what do you mean?

He's like, it's absolutely, completely wrong. I said, say more. And he said, if we're really talking about the restoration of all things, then the whole thing is God's work. And I was like, yeah, I hear you. But like, I'm talking about on this side, I'm talking like Pokemon and pickleball, right?

Like, there's stuff that you can be interested in. There's has nothing to do with God's work. He said, if it's the restoration of all things, it's all of it. And I thought, okay, I'm going to chew on that for a minute. And so I want you to think about the mission of God the missio day as God's work throughout all time and all space, from Genesis chapter one to the end of the story in the book of Revelation.

Everything, every person that's ever been on the the planet, every hurt that's ever been created, every harm that's ever been caused, every sin that needs to be redeemed, God is interested in restoring it all. Let's think of that work as like the sun, right? Big thing, and this is God's mission. But then what God gives us is on the sun, like one pixel, right? That's Highland's part.

That's the work that we get to do. That's the work that God has chosen to share with us in this space, in this time and this. And we get to be a part of it. And it's unbelievable. In Luke, chapter four, Jesus picks the scroll that he wants to preach from and he turns it open to Isaiah 60:1 and he.

And it's a. It's. What's clear about Luke is that God cares for the margins. The beginning of the story, when Mary finds out she's pregnant, an angel visits her and says, hey, I know you're not married, you're a teenager, but you're going to bear God's son. And Joseph hears about that.

She's the one that he's engaged to and he's a good man. So quietly he says, well, I know I'm not the father, so I'm going to divorce her. Quietly, another angel has to show up to convince Joseph to stay with Mary. But in that moment, Mary sings, and it's called the Magnificat. And we're going to.

We're going to focus on that song and prayer in Advent together. It's going to be a project you can work on at your house. It's going to be what we talk about in service. But the Magnificat speaks of the high are going to be brought low and the hungry are going to be fed. There's going to be a churn in the world when the Messiah arrives.

Barbara Brown Taylor calls it a Ferris wheel that's been stuck and broken. But when the Messiah comes, when kingdom comes, that that Ferris wheel is about to turn and the people on top are going to be on the bottom. The people on the bottom are going to get a chance. The desperate in need will get what they need. And the Jesus sermon ends up talking about the year of jubilee.

The year of jubilee was this brilliant idea that exists in the Torah, in the book of Leviticus. And it says every seven sets of seven years. So every 49 years everything gets reset. You see, when the Israelites were entering into the Promised land, every tribe got their allotment of the land, the Holy Land, the Promised Land. And each of those tribes had clans and every clan got their share of and every family got their share and every person got their piece of the land.

It was their birthright to God's big promise. But over the course of your lifetime, like trouble's going to happen, a famine's going to strike and you're going to have to choose between feeding your family and keeping the land. And so you might have to sell the land or you might make a mistake, or somebody else is going to get greedy and they're going to come in and take, and you're going to lose the birthright that, that God had given you. Well, every 49 years, once in your lifetime, more than likely than not, everything gets reset. It's like they take the monopoly board, redistribute all the property, give the money back to square one.

Everything gets start over. And it's this beautiful idea because everyone gets to keep the gift that God had intended for them. It's this beautiful idea. And my professor in Old Testament in my seminary class reminded us that there is absolutely no evidence, no evidence at all that the year of jubilee ever happened in the story of Israel. Of course it didn't happen.

It's a no brainer why it didn't happen because it would require the powerful to give up their edge and, and give it back to everybody else. It would cause the winners to reset the match. If you're about to win the game of Monopoly, the last thing you want is for everything to get reset.

And so you know, when Jesus stands up in that synagogue in Nazareth to read from Isaiah 61, he's not just making a theological statement, he was announcing a kingdom. The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, to set at liberty those who are oppressed and proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. And then he sits down and says something absolutely scandalous. He says, today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. And that sounds one way to us, because we believe, because we know the end of the story, because we know that at the end of the story God's vindication of Jesus claim is going to be evident in the resurrection.

But those that are listening, that know this is Joseph's son, it's a scandal.

But what does it mean for us? What is this gospel story?

I want to suggest that the Gospel creates a certain kind of community, one that reflects the year of the Lord's favor. That brings. And. And, and that brings me to kind of two specific ways that we're being called to live this out. I want you to notice that Jesus says he's anointed to preach good news to the poor in our city.

One of the primary ways people experience poverty isn't just low income. It's housing instability. Even though Abilene is a cheaper place to live than Dallas or Austin or other places, there is a significant number of people in Abilene that work two jobs and. And they're still not able to make ends meet. And there's a significant number of people that are on the razor's edge between eviction and living on the street and staying in the home where they are.

And look, the gospel doesn't just save souls in some sort of abstract sense. It creates people who say, if my brother or sister lacks daily bread or a roof over their head, how can I say I love them? I don't think this is charity as the world understands it. I think this is the family of God acting like a family. And so I want to tell you, I'm excited to tell you about the first initiative that we're going to undertake in the next three years.

We're going to partner with Habitat for Humanity to create roofs for people that desperately need them. I want you to watch this video.

Our vision is a world where everyone has a decent place to live. When Highland Church of Christ donated the St. Anne property to Habitat for Humanity, the immediate thing that we saw was potential. And so we immediately started talking with Park Hill, one of the local architect firms, and looked at potential ways to build out a small little pocket neighborhood there. And so the plan is to build 11 homes on the former San site. We already have the plans, and we're hoping on having the infrastructure completed by summer of next year and that we actually will start framing houses next fall.

The neighborhoods that we work in have so many people that are constantly coming and going because there's so much rental in those neighborhoods. And so this little chunk of land that used to be St. Ann's is now going to have 11 families in it that are living there permanently. That, again, will be most likely a mom with a couple of kids. And so I imagine over the next several years, the. Those families getting to know each other, becoming friends, becoming family, spending time together, raising their kids together, eating meals together.

And then I imagine what it Looks like for Highland church members, members from Grace Church coming and spending time with those families, sharing meals with them. There's so many opportunities to create community when you have families permanently living together, sharing space together, sharing time together.

I'm excited about the resolution of St. Anne's I'm excited about the way that Habitat and Highland can partner. And we've already committed to three of those 11 houses. And I'm going to work over the next year to try to partner with other churches to. To fill those spaces in, to create an anchor in the neighborhood. And by the way, this is like three blocks away from our Grace building, so it's.

It's within walking distance of Highland. And I wonder what would happen if we show up and we have barbecues in that. That space in the back of all those houses. I wonder what happens when we show up to. Ross had told us that the.

The average person that gets a Habitat house is a single mom with 2.1 children. I wonder what happens when we show up right before school with backpacks for every one of those kids so that they can have a good first day at school. I wonder what kind of community, what God can do with that space when we ask God to bless it. So I'm hopeful for how Highland can partner with this pocket neighborhood and see what happens. But that's not the end of the story.

That's 11 households that can be changed. But the reality is that there's a lot of people in Abilene that, just like I said, they live on a razor's edge between what keeps them in a house and what keeps them out of a house. And so, not only partnering with Habitat, we're also going to partner with the West Texas Homeless Network. Now, you may have never heard of that. Actually, Becky Almanza, our community minister, she was one of the founders of the network.

So we are already involved in this. But it gathered together every nonprofit and organization that cared about all homelessness and Abilene, and it put them all under one umbrella to put them in one place so that they could have dialogue with one another. And most of the time, when you put nonprofits in the same space that are competing for resources, it's not very pretty because they feel in competition with one another. But when I've started going to the meetings of the West Texas Homeless Network, what I've seen is they share. Some of them say, I have a grant, but I can't use it.

Does somebody else want to use this grant? They give to one another. They. They offer because they all have the same interest, which is the best that can happen for Taylor County. And so I want to introduce to you two people, Jenny Good and Courtney, and they're going to talk a little bit about the West Texas Homeless Network.

The West Texas Homeless Network is a collaboration between many agencies in our community that's existed really for more than 20 years. But in the last 10 years or so, the group working together has made a really active effort to address the mission of making homelessness rare, brief and non recurring in Abilene. So I just kind of have this bird eye view, this unique role in our community where I'm able to watch our whole homeless response system in town and kind of watch those experiencing homelessness from their housing instability all the way into housing. So homelessness is a really difficult thing for people to experience. Experience.

It's very hard when you don't have a place to safely sleep at night to be able to address any other issues that you're experiencing. So if a person is experiencing mental health crisis, if they have an addiction problem, if they're trying to get a job, if they just need to feel safe, it's very difficult to feel safe when you're sleeping on the street. People experience all sorts of trauma during the time that they're unsheltered. So I was homeless and Abilene from literally unsheltered from about 2014 to 2017. I think some of the reasons why homelessness is such a significant issue, number one, it's the unsafe component of sleeping literally on the streets in your car.

For me personally, I was a female, so a lot of people don't understand Drugs was a mechanism for me to stay awake, to not get assaulted. A significant time on the streets and is going to cause a lot of trauma and it causes a lot of barriers. And what I mean by barriers is that when you are applying for a job, most places you have to have an address. And if you do not have an address, you are most likely not going to get a call back. Me personally, if I'm carrying everything I own in my backpack to come to a job interview, I might not smell the best.

And it's just like a red flag for someone that is up in this employment market. When we approach homelessness in our community, we are trying to do so with a housing first approach, which means that we believe that people need to have housing in order to address the other things in their life that have created barriers for them to have success moving forward. We also believe in the lightest touch approach. So if we encounter Someone who is on the verge of becoming homeless and just a small bit of support, whether it's financial or services or some other method of intervening, can prevent them from entering homelessness, we're going to do that. We're trying to do a lot of work on the front end to avoid people becoming unsheltered and then falling into this category of chronic homelessness where they're unhoused for long periods of time.

Families experiencing homelessness have different barriers in a housing crisis that we are seeing here in Abilene, not only for availability, but for pricing. When they have to choose between paying their rent or feeding their children, most of the time they choose to feed their children and keep their transportation, to get their children to and from school and keep their employment. When we have a referral or a call in for someone who is housing insecure or they're on the verge of eviction and things are becoming unstable, it is so, so very important that we address the issue at that moment in time before we get too far in to where they experience literal homelessness. The cost to a taxpayer for someone experiencing chronic homelessness is about $38,500 per year. Those experiencing chronic homelessness use systems that are costly to a taxpayer to include the medical care system of emergency room, our local police services, the county jails.

And that's where that tax cost comes into. For a housing program with supportive services to wrap around persons that are experiencing homelessness into housing, it costs the taxpayer about $12,500 per year per individual. So it's a significant savings to those in our community.

All right, so there's three keywords I want us to lock in on that video. The first was housing first, which basically means before you get cleaned up, before you get a job, before you're sober, before any of those things, we're going to give you a house. And about 10 years ago, when we began dreaming about St. Ann's and what that might look of, we proposed a housing first model. And at that time, it was unheard of and unpopular because that would just be giving away resources to people that don't deserve it, the people that don't need it, the people that are going to waste it. But of course, that's what it is, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And it's not because of some sort of profound take on housing and development that we landed there. We landed there because it was part of our story, because that's exactly what God did for us before we were cleaned up, before we had it all together, before we were able to present ourselves as holy. God came to earth and made us so. And so that's what we do for others.

And now the cool thing is, more than 10 years later, even the federal government, Housing and Urban Development has seen the effectiveness of Housing first model and has adopted it in their programs and grants nationally. So if you want to know where housing first came from, I'm just kidding, that's not true. But we got there early. The West Texas housing network is known for, for being one of the best networks in the nation because of the way those nonprofits work together. And so we are going to enter into that network as a contributor.

And the place that we're going to contribute is in prevention. So you heard how much more expensive it is to help someone that's chronically homeless rather than someone on the edge. Because sometimes if you're on the edge, if I could just get another six weeks, I would get connected to somebody. I could get a better job. There's money coming in my.

But I don't have the rent now. And so if we can just do the lightest touch to give them the littlest amount that they need to make it through that time, then they're going to be okay. And so we're going to do the lightest touch with wraparound care to help every aspect of their human dignity to promote Housing first models. And we believe this is going to help our city. We believe it's going to change people's lives.

The second thing I want to talk to you about today is foster care and crisis care for children. Jesus says he came to set to set at liberty those who are oppressed and who is more vulnerable and more oppressed by circumstances beyond their control than a child that is in the status of having been removed from their home, even if it's the best situation for that child because their home is not safe. This is still an extraordinarily traumatic and harmful situation. This children didn't choose it and they're experiencing trauma that's going to shape them they for years. But here's what the gospel does.

It creates people who have received such a radical grace that they can extend that grace to others. You were adopted into God's family not because you deserved it, not because you earned it, but because of God's mercy. And the gospel reality should produce communities that support and nurture and care for children at risk. The it should produce people wanting to come around struggling families in that circle of care, not judging, but supporting because we ourselves have been supported by grace. Now I'm going to say this, and I want to say this carefully, and I want you to listen closely, because I'm not confident that anyone could or should be a foster parent.

I think this is a very particular gift. I think it is a particular calling, and I don't think that it's a burden that every person should hold. If that is your skill set and your gifting, you should choose if you want to pursue it or not. But I don't think everyone is called to do that. And as a matter of fact, we don't currently have a lot of foster families in our church.

But I want to remind you of a story a couple of years ago. Ashley Crisp and Ashley Sturman, two of our ministers here on staff, they did a listening project to the families here at Highland who have children with special needs. And listen to them say, what would make Highland? What would make this place more hospitable for you? What would make it easier for your family?

What is the best possible care that we can provide for your children? And they listened closely, and then they changed things. They created different spaces and different processes, and you can talk to them more about it. But it really did create opportunities for families at our church that have children with certain disabilities to grow. It's going to find flourishing there.

But then the most amazing thing happened. It was an unexpected thing. At least I didn't see it coming. You remember last week we talked about the parable of the mustard seed, how that mustard seed grows into a bush, and then hyperbolically, it grows into a tree, and then birds find their nests in that tree. That God's kingdom creates an ecosystem.

Well, what we started noticing was other families that had children with disabilities began to come to Highland because we had the kinds of limbs and branches that would allow their families to flourish. And so our goal over the next three years is to create the kind of place and support the kind of partners that are doing the work to help children at their. Their most, the most risky place in their lives to find safety and thrive. Because when we make space, when we show that we care, God does this restoration work. And so there's four places that we're going to talk about more, and you'll.

You'll get more about this information in the future. I don't have a whole lot more time to talk about this, but there's four critical places of support for a child that's at risk. The first is casa. Children need an advocate as they go through the court system. It's confusing and it's scary, and it's labyrinthine to people that even lawyers that know how to navigate it.

It's hard. And so what a casa does, and we're going to encourage you to consider if you could be a casa is someone that walks beside that child during that hard time. And maybe it just looks like showing up at a park for an ice cream cone. Maybe it definitely means sitting with them in court as they hear good news or bad. But you walk beside them through that difficult time.

The Care portal is our work toward prevention. Sometimes there's not a safety issue in that household. It's an issue of like this household needs a bed, they need a car seat, they need a crib, they need something so that their house is suitable for that child to live in. And we can actually do that. Your small group, your class on Sunday morning can get together and say we want to help somebody.

And Care portal is the way by which we can connect our time, talent and treasure to their desperate need. The third is to Engage twoengage functions as the managing resource from the state that helps children figure out this process as they're in foster care. And to engage is incredibly overwhelmed. There are over 400 children in their system right now. Over 130 of them live out of Taylor county because there's not enough foster families.

But these caseworkers are overwhelmed. And actually their office is like two blocks away from our building. And so I wonder what happened if Highland adopted to engage. And we just showed up, we figured out what everybody's favorite sonic drink is and we show up on Friday and everybody gets their favorite sonic drink. We show up at Christmas for gifts for these hard pressed workers that are overwhelmed.

Let's see what happens when we care for the caregivers. Let's see how that changes our system. The last effort that we're going to take, I'm very excited about, it's Highland foster family, foster support. This is the ecosystem we're going to build, the branch that allows foster families to thrive. Because sometimes a foster family just needs, just needs a meal and they need somebody to ask, they need a night out.

And so they need babysitters that are qualified to come in and watch foster children. We can do that. We can do that. Now I know what some of you are thinking. You're thinking, Shane, I can't do this right?

I don't have the capacity, I don't have the resources. And that may be true, but I want you to notice something important about Luke. Chapter 4. Jesus is not talking about individual heroics here. He's Talking about a community that embodies jubilee, the year of the Lord's favor.

And some of you may end up fostering, and some of you may provide respite care. And some of you will become a casa. And some of you of our small groups and Bible studies will use the care portal to prevent such events from even happening and build relationships along the way. And some of you are just going to pray. You're just going to organize meals.

I want you to know that this moment, right now, this moment is me inviting you into it, to be a part of what God's restoration work is in our county and in our church and in our world. No one's going to come along and just tap you on the shoulder and say, hey, yeah, we really need your help. This is the moment where I'm inviting you to be a part of what God is doing in this world. You can swing a hammer at habitat. If I can hang drywall, you can hang drywall, right?

Like anyone can do this. You can sit and make crafts or play soccer with a foster kid. This is very doable things. All it's going to take is a community that really believes that we are the embodiment of the year of jubilee. Here's the point.

The gospel announces a new reality where the blind receive sight and the oppressed go free. And then what Jesus does right after that is create a community that makes that announcement visible and tangible in the world.

This is not optional for the people of God. These bags. This is what it looks like when Jesus said, today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. We are what it looks like when God proclaims the year of jubilee. Me, let's stand and sing.