Clovis Christian Church
12 August 2007
Body of Christ, on behalf of church leaders I must apologize to you.
For the sake of expedience we have short changed you and let you be cheated out of the greatest pleasure and blessing of the Christian life.
With good intentions we have surrendered to a select few the rights and privileges you should have claimed for yourselves and exercised.
There have been and still are rare places where the perceptive few have not allowed themselves to be taken in by the prevailing deception and are reaping blessings untold for their grasp onto what is rightfully theirs.
It’s time to reclaim what Christ intended every believer to be and the joy that comes with it.
Let me tell you how it was at the start and how it is always intended to be.
It all started with Jesus.
It is because of him and in His name that we do what we do but we have drifted away from His way
Early in His ministry He selected twelve men to train up in His teaching and His Way.
When He selected them they didn’t know what they were signing on for
But He did and He spent the next three years showing and telling them everything it would take to carry on what He started when His time on earth was finished.
Jesus completed His purpose for all mankind at the cross and three days later came from the grave victorious over sin and death.
These twelve men Jesus chose were not professional rabbis or preachers they all made their livings in common occupations before He got hold of them.
Fishermen
Public servants
Accountants
Legend says one of them was a plasterer
And others
Before He returned to the Father Jesus gave His final assignment to His disciples:
He told them:
Matt 28:18-20 "God authorized and commanded me to commission you: Go out and train everyone you meet, far and near, in this way of life, marking them by baptism in the threefold name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Then instruct them in the practice of all I have commanded you. I’ll be with you as you do this, day after day after day, right up to the end of the age." Msg
Moments before He ascended to the right hand of the Father Jesus told his disciples:
Acts 1:8 8 ". . . you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes into your life. You will tell about Me in the city of Jerusalem and over all the countries of Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth." New Life Version
A week and a half later the power Jesus promised was released with an explosion
It was in Jerusalem
There were Jews and converts to Judaism in the neighborhood of the temple and there were lights and noises and sermons and confessions and baptizings and the church began.
It was no modest beginning
The day the church was brought fourth it was more like a hatch or a spawn than a birth
It began with 3000
The number grew daily
Only a page and a half later in my Bible the next time a count is given there were five thousand men
I don’t know how generically “men” is used here.
After that the number is not given
It became multitudes
Even some who had been priests of Judaism gave that up along with the perks of the service and enrolled in the Way
About that same time the church in Jerusalem had become so large that some of its ministry overwhelmed even the apostles so helpers were selected from the multitudes.
Luke tells us of seven selected for table waiters and meals on wheels directors or we might say Sandwiches by Sandals or Food on Foot
Or maybe Groceries for Grandma
Now I don’t want to second guess an inspired writer but I think it’s a fair assumption that there were other specialized services of the church that Luke does not mention which were carried out by others like the seven but Luke does not name them or describe their service.
I can think of some things like putting workers together with employers.
Coordinating places to meet and publicizing meeting times
Remember Christianity was not universally accepted and its practitioners were subject to arrest, jail and other persecution so this needed to be done but not too visibly
Maybe there were clearing houses for outgrown or surplus clothing just like there were distributions of groceries
There could even have been a Christian housing committee to put people with needs into the homes of people with space.
The reason I bring this up is because some of those Jews who became part of the Way were cast out of family and home and could have lost jobs or livelihood.
They cared for one another.
Let’s talk about one of these seven men.
Stephen
He quoted whole sections of the Hebrew Scriptures to council of Jewish leaders and they stoned him for his witness
But what did the other Christians do after Stephen’s martyrdom
It wasn’t safe for them in Jerusalem so they fled
Did they go into hiding?
What of the 3000?
What of the 5000 men?
What of the great company of the priests?
What of the unnamed women and children?
They don’t get a lot of ink but there is a sentence that speaks volumes!
Acts 8:4 Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went. NIV
Their Lord commissioned and commanded them to make disciples and make disciples they did everywhere.
If they found a man on a lonely road they preached Jesus
And when they found water they took him into it and brought him out a new creature in Christ
Let’s go back to another one of those table waiter/caterers for a minute.
Philip was his name.
He gets special mention because he was preaching up north from Jerusalem in Samaria with great results.
Preaching, you say?
Was he allowed to preach?
Had he been to seminary?
Now Dr. Luke tells us about Philip because it suits his purpose to tell us how Samaria was evangelized.
Remember what Jesus said about where they should tell about Him? Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria? Well Philip was one of the pioneers to Samaria
Another note about Philip: he had four daughters who prophesied
Don’t get the idea that they were soothsayers or fortune tellers or charlatans
In the New Testament sense of the word they were preachers!
The place or women in the church in apostolic times is a subject for another time.
Only let me say that it is not as cut and dried as some people might wish.
And maybe women are not absolved from preaching and teaching in Christ’s church after all
They didn’t wait until they had someone there who was ordained or specially educated or heaven forbid paid to do it.
For they had received the ordination of the crucified hands
What more authorization did they need?
They preached, baptized, taught and sent them on to do the same.
And it didn’t matter who they were
Jew or Greek
Slave or free
Male or female
All were authorized to preach and did
All they met were candidates for conversion
And the church was unstoppable
The Rothschild banking dynasty was immensely powerful in 19th century Europe. From roots in the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt, Mayer Amschel’s five sons set up a banking network in the then five major financial centres of Europe - London, Frankfurt, Paris, Naples and Vienna. The Five Arrows, as they became known, created vast wealth and established themselves at the very peak of European society.
Waddesdon Manor was built (1874-1889) by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild to display his outstanding collection of art treasures and to entertain the fashionable world. http://www.waddesdon.org.uk/plan_your_visit/history.htm
The story is told of two beggars who were passing Rothchild’s Castle. One of them decided to try to get inside and attempt to get "a handout". By some strange miracle he actually got in to see the famous banker. Mr. Rothchild greeted him kindly, referred him to his secretary, who turned him over to the butler, who sent him down to see the porter, who directed him to the gate keeper, who promptly booted him out!
The beggar who had remained outside rushed up and said: "Did you get anything?" "Not exactly," said the panhandler, "but I’ll tell you one thing: the organization in that place is terrific!"
What let the church thrive as it did was the very lack of organization and structure
There were no boards to approve or deny one’s ministry
There were no levels of management to handle the sick and hungry and hurting and down trodden and pass them off until they were shoved out the door.
There were no hired staff to take the work away from them
If they didn’t do it it didn’t get done and it got done better than we today can imagine.
So that’s how it was at the beginning and that was the way Christ and His apostles intended it.
So what happened?
Where did we go wrong?
Why is not the church taking over the world like it did in the first generation?
A woman was at work when she received a phone call that her daughter was very sick with a fever. She left her work and stopped by the pharmacy to get some medication for her daughter. When returning to her car she found that she had locked her keys in the car. She was in a hurry to get home to her sick daughter, she didn’t know what to do, so she called her home and told the baby sitter what had happened and that she did not know what to do.
The baby sitter told her that her daughter was getting worse. She said, "You might find a coat hanger and use that to open the door". The woman looked around and found an old rusty coat hanger that had been thrown down on the ground possibly by someone else who at some time or other had locked their keys in their car. Then she looked at the hanger and said, "I don’t know how to use this." So she bowed her head and asked God to send her some help.
Within five minutes an old rusty car pulled up, with a dirty, greasy, bearded man who was wearing an old biker skull rag on his head. The woman thought, "Great God. This is what you sent to help me????" But, she was desperate, so she was also very thankful. The man got out of his car and asked her if he could help. She said "Yes, my daughter is very sick......I stopped to get her some medication and I locked my keys in my car, I must get home to her. Please, can you use this hanger to unlock my car?" He said, "SURE".
He walked over to the car, and in less than one minute the car was opened. She hugged the man and through her tears she said, "THANK YOU SO MUCH..... You are a very nice man." The man replied, "Lady, I am not a nice man. I just got out of prison today. I was in prison for car theft and have only been out for about an hour."
The woman hugged the man again and with sobbing tears cried out loud....."THANK YOU, GOD, FOR SENDING ME A PROFESSIONAL"
Only a few generations after the initial explosion a structure and a system foreign to the New Testament developed.
A class of professional ministers took it upon themselves to be the pastor-teaches of the flock and the flock permitted it.
After all, except for the occasional fleecing, the life of a sheep is a lot easier than that of the shepherd.
This is exactly the opposite of how it was in the New Testament.
Nowhere in the New Covenant scriptures can we find an example of any man being imported by a congregation of believers to function as the minister, the pastor, or the preacher. And that is because the early believers ministered to and edified one another. They didn’t find it necessary to import a professional ecclesiastic to do their ministering for them. They exported men to evangelize, and supported them financially, but no one was ever imported to do what all believers should be doing--ministering to one another. (http://www.mindspring.com/~renewal/Communal.html)
The present result of this program is that Christianity has been reduced to a spectator sport.
The “clergy” run the show and the program and the “laity” kick in to pay the bills
The “clergy” are the people who have trained and studied and dedicate themselves to “full time Christian service.”
Friends, what other kind of Christian service is there?
No one ever became a “layman” until there was a clergyman to make him one
No matter what we call him, “minister” “pastor” “preacher” or “evangelist”, the only thing that makes a person a minister in the New Testament is that which makes him a Christian.
The day that a woman embarks on the Christian journey she is a minister
The very moment a man arises out of the watery grave of baptism he is a minister
When you were baptized into Christ and put on Christ you accepted His commission to ministry
Remember that part of the Great Commission about teaching?
Well, there is an unspoken corollary:
In order to teach those who become disciples one must learn
A teacher who is not always learning is shortly ineffective and irrelevant.
Do you ever wonder and worry over the stagnation of modern Christendom and our own body?
I hope you do.
I know there are some here who do and have decided to do something about it.
And the most important thing to get out of all of this is that like it or not you are a minister of Christ.
You see the job is too big and too important to leave it to the professionals.
There aren’t enough and probably never will be enough professionals to get the job done.
It has to be done as it was in the first century: By everyone
We can hardly pay one person to do what we all ought to be doing.
If we all did what we have been commissioned and commanded to do we could free up the resources to have a person go where we aren’t able to go.
Now maybe you have a fuzzy idea of what ministry is.
If you think that standing in front of a group on Sunday is ministry then you are putting a lot of faith in the rhetorical skills of a professional talker
And I can tell you most preachers do not have the skill of a Billy Graham or a Bob Russell or a Kennedy or a Schuler
OR
If you think that running the programs of the church is ministry then you a expecting too much of something put together by man with the fallibilities of man and ripe to be supplanted by the next slick, well promoted program
OR
If you think that having someone in charge in the building during the week constitutes ministry then your thinking is way too limited to what goes on here in the building instead of what happens out among the people and in their hearts
Ministry is much more than preaching and programs and what happens at 1701 Locan.
If we rely on what happens here by the visible people that work here and programs that happen here we will always be driven by what someone else wants done rather than what God wants done.
And we will always be trying something new and different to be on the leading edge of the current human invention
What God wants is for the whole world to be won to him
God wants it done by every Christian and everywhere there are people.
The least efficient way to do that is to bring them here on Sunday. And the least effective way to do it is to turn the professional loose on them.
What did Luke say about how they did it?
Daily in the temple and from house to house And the Lord was adding day by day those who were being saved
These weren’t Sunday only Christians
They were telling the good news in the streets and in the stores and in the fields and in the forum.
What worked in the time of the Book of Acts will still work today
Don’t you tell me the world is different now than it was then.
The people you rub elbows with are just as apathetic and antagonistic as the people who didn’t care and despised those early saints and that didn’t stop them
Don’t let it stop you
The world is no less pagan than the world in which the apostolic church thrived.
We know we can do better and we know God expects more of us.
We can beat ourselves up with guilt or we can decide to make a difference
There are some things, call them tools or opportunities that you can use to equip yourselves to do what you know you should be doing.
We have formal classes in which you can study the Word of God so you can handle the word of truth correctly and competently.
We have small groups that meet to share mutual concerns and successes. You can become a part of one of these. We will guide you through things you ought to know about sharing your faith with your neighbors.
The first cadre of people who are committed to finding the ministry that is best suited for their spiritual gifts and their heart and abilities and personality and experience has used various tools to sharpen the focus of their ministry. More will have the opportunity to learn about these tools in September.
There are others not too far behind them in this discovery process.
Now,
Lest you are thinking that I am breaking the news to you that we are not looking for a minister, let me assure you that the search is ongoing.
Your pastoring elders are interviewing another prospect Monday night.
We hope to have someone for you to start working beside in the near future.
But in the meantime let’s work on some new habits to carry over after that person is here.
Each one of you look for your ministry.
If you haven’t participated in CLASS 101 or 201 get up to speed as quickly as you can then you can be a part of 301 and learn to use the tools that the first group has used to find out what and how they can best minister before Christ and to you and the world.
Jesus commissions and authorizes you to ministry.
He didn’t say it was going to be easy
Indeed some have died on the field of ministry
Many, maybe most have sacrificed for its glory
Jesus didn’t say he was easy but He promised that He would be with you always day after day after day right up to the end.
The first of December 1862 the North American continent was in the greatest political and social upheaval of its young life. President Abraham Lincoln addressed the U.S. Congress and told them it was not going to be a short war nor an easy victory then uttered these famous words.
“The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion.”
That is the situation we are in.
We are in difficulty. We must rise to meet it
Some of you are in the difficulty of being without the saving relationship of Jesus Christ Now it the chance to do something about that
Some of you are in the difficulty of knowing God has a ministry and a plan but don’t know how to find it.
Now is the time to take that first step and commit to rising to the occasion together.
