This past week, someone brought to my attention a different kind of church. Travel a half-hour south of Dallas, Texas, and you’ll find the Cowboy Church of Ellis County. Based on the photographs they provide on their website, you’ve got a few choices if you want to lead worship at the Cowboy Church. You can either wear blue jeans or black jeans. And you can either wear a white cowboy hat or a black cowboy hat. The coffee and doughnuts are free and you’re welcome to bring them into worship with you. And they claim to play both kinds of music. You’ve heard this joke before… both kinds of music… country and western. When people are baptized, they are dunked in a big galvanized steel horse trough. And it’s not just the decorations or the style either. Following Sunday worship, they have "open ride" where anyone can bring their horse to church and ride in the arena that is right next to the sanctuary. They have classes for kids to learn how to handle horses. Every Tuesday is the women’s Bible study… and barrell racing, happening in a different part of the church building. Every Thursday is the singles Bible study… and bull riding. Looks like an interesting place to go to church. It’s really different than what we’re used to here at Burlington United Methodist Church, but I think we’d all agree that the Cowboy Church of Ellis County is an equally valid way of being the church – it’s just different.
This past year, the confirmation class visited three different churches that had very different styles. We attended Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, where we were among hundreds of middle school youth at a worship service designed specifically for that particular age group. We went to Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Rockford, where we had an experience of African-American style of worship that honored that cultural heritage. And we worshipped at Salem Korean United Methodist Church in Schaumburg at a service intended to reach second generation Korean-Americans who spoke English and embrace much of American culture but want to retain portions of their Korean culture as well. These churches could not have been more different in style, but we would consider them all valid churches.
While churches can look very different in the ways they worship and the ways they do ministry, there are some things that truly make the church the church. There are some aspects that are essential to being the church, no matter whether the church is big or small, urban or rural, traditional or modern, laid back or straight-laced. Today, we’ll be looking at this fundamental question, "What is the church," as continue our series, Back to the Basics.
Will you pray with me as we prepare to hear the message this morning…
At Annual Conference this year, we had the great pleasure of having Grace Imathiu lead our Bible study each morning. She grew up in Kenya, and is now a pastor near Milwaukee. She tells a story she learned from her father about a man who goes out hunting one day and shoots down an elephant with his bow and arrow. As you can imagine, he is very excited. I mean, just imagine all the meat! He won’t need to hunt for months now!
But, there remains the daunting task of dragging the elephant back to his hut. But he’s pretty determined, so he grabs the animal by one leg and pulls, and pulls, and pulls, he does everything he can think of to get that massive carcass to move, but the animal won’t budge. It’s far too heavy for one man to pull. He tries to haul it by the trunk, by the tail nothing works; the elephant is too darn heavy.
Finally, the elephant hunter goes to his village and announces he has killed an elephant and needs help to drag it back to his hut. The villagers listen and one of them asks, “Whose elephant is it?”
“Mine, of course,” replies the hunter.
“If it is your elephant,” the villager says, “it is your problem. Pull it home yourself.”
As the villagers begin to leave and return to their homes, the hunter rethinks the problem and quickly announces, “I have killed the elephant for all of us.” The villagers stop in their tracks. “An elephant for all of us? Our elephant?”
They break into celebration and quickly gather and head off enthusiastically for the forest to find the slain elephant. Men, women, children, everybody joins in, determined to drag that elephant back to the village. Even the aged and frail join the crowd, insisting that if they cannot help drag the elephant, they will cheer on the work.
In the forest, gathered around the huge animal, the villagers each grab a piece of hide. And somebody begins to shout, “One, two, three, whose elephant?” And the villagers reply in unison, “Our elephant,” pulling as they shout. Again, “One, two, three, whose elephant?” And they shout their reply, “Our elephant,” shifting the huge animal a few more inches closer to home.
As they near the village they notice that when someone shouts, “whose elephant?”, the hunter’s lips do not quite match the words of “Our elephant.” So one by one the villagers pause and when someone again shouts, “Whose elephant?,” they listen for the hunter’s response. What a surprise to hear him mutterering, “My elephant.”
So they leave the elephant right there and it takes a whole day and night of begging and promiseing by the hunter that it was, truly, “our elephant” before they return to pull th eelephant back to the village again.
Now, why do you think I would tell you that story on the day our Back to Basics series is focusing on the Church? What does a story about a man and an elephant and the people of his village have to do with the Church?
Well, let me put it this way: being a Christian, a genuine real-life believer and follower of Jesus is an awfully big job. Not entirely unlike trying to drag an elephant down the road. It’s really bigger than any one of us can handle on our own.
An exciting job, yes! A huge blessing, yes! But no single person can do all the work by herself. It’s too big for just one person. No one person can contain all of God’s gifts by himself. No one person can do all the loving that Jesus Christ calls us to do all by himself. There is no possible way for any one person to be a genuine follower of Jesus Christ all on their own. The job is too big.
Which means, if you’re going to try to accomplish such a big task, you’d better start recognizing that you are going to need some help. You are going to need the Church, the group of people Jesus has gathered together under the guidance of the Holy Spirit for just that purpose, for helping one another be followers of Jesus Christ. For helping one another “carry the great elephant down the road.” And, of course, when the village works together to carry the elephant, everyone benefits, not only the people doing the carrying. When the church is faithful, it not only helps us, but the church helps the world as well.
The good news, of course, it that, for those of us who are putting our trust in Jesus, trying to follow him and to discover all the fulness of who he was and what he has done, we are travelling in the same direction. We all have the same goal in our sights and the same road to travel. We are all heading the same place. Just as no one of us can do the work for ourselves, neither can any one of us can claim all the blessings for ourselves, so, as we go on our way, we help each other, encourage one another, keep one another on the right path, show one another the right way to go, protect each other from dangers, that sort of thing.
When Eugene Peterson translated that reading from the fourth chapter of Ephesians that we heard this morning, he put it this way:
“I want you to get out there and walk—better yet, run!—on the road God called you to travel. I don’t want any of you sitting around on your hands. I don’t want anyone strolling off, down some path that goes nowhere. 2And mark that you do this with humility and discipline—not in fits and starts, but steadily, pouring yourselves out for each other in acts of love, 3alert at noticing differences and quick at mending fences.
4You were all called to travel on the same road and in the same direction, so stay together, both outwardly and inwardly.
Back in the days when Paul was writing, people didn’t travel long roads alone. Travelling was difficult and dangerous. You didn’t dare venture out without some companions to travel with you. Your travelling companions protected you from robbers and hazards and other dangers. Whenever you would find yourself in a tough spot, you would help one another along, trade off carrying the heavy load, pull one another up the steep roads, and encourage each other to keep going. Occasionally, if you got hurt, the others might even carry you along the road for a while.
The church is like that for us. On this journey of faith and following, the Church is our travelling companions. We travel the way of Jesus Christ together and as we go we help one another and encourage one another and bear one another’s burdens from time to time. We teach one another how to travel and which way to go and we urge one another on so that no one lags too far behind or loses their way. We keep an eye out for one another, so that when danger comes near, no one is left on their own to face temptation or despair alone.
Those who know their way help the others stay on the right path and show us how to move more quickly along the paths they already know.
And the people of the Church are our companions, our friends with whom we share a goal and a destination, friends with whom we can travel and talk and share our lives with.
That’s what the Church does for us. It helps us on our way, it shares the journey, it shares the great task, it shares its blessings and gifts with us and teaches us the way we should go. And it’s the way followers of Jesus are called to live our lives. No one follows Jesus alone. It’s together that we carry the full blessing God gives us and together that we grow in faith and discipleship.
But there is at least one very important way that the Church helps us in our own faith journeys that has no parallel to travelling a road. The Church is a community that travels together on the road God calls us to travel, but the Bible is also very clear that the Church is the place where we actually find Jesus. Jesus lives among and in the community of people who gather in his name.
In Matthew 18:20 he promises that wherever two or more are gathered in his name, he will be present there. Jesus is present in the community in a way none of us can find on our own. If we truly want to meet Jesus and come to know him for ourselves, we must be part of the community that gathers in his name, the Church.
In fact, Paul regularly talks about the Church not merely as the place we find Jesus, but as the very body of Christ, the image of God in the world today.
If that’s true, then we need the Church, not only for help and learning in how to be a follower of Jesus Christ, but we need the Church because that is the place where we find God in the fullest measure that God is available to us in this life. The Church is the community where we connect not only to the stories of Jesus or the people who believe in Jesus, The Church is the community where we find Jesus himself, the very body of Christ living and moving among us!
At the beginning of Ephesians, Paul says, “the Church is Christ’s body, in which he speaks and acts, by which he fills everything with his presence.” The Church is where you not only learn about Jesus, but where you hear him speak, and see him act, and feel him love and heal people.
Now if we as Christians are members of the body of Christ, then we’re certainly connected with each other. But you and I know that a body doesn’t exist simply to be connected to each other. Someone could lie in bed all day and have their body parts in perfect working condition with all the members of the body connected exactly the way they’re supposed to, and yet, at the end of the day, they’d still be lying there doing nothing. But that never happens! Every single day of your life, if your body was able to get up and do something, you did get up and do something! The only time we actually lie in bed and do nothing is when we’re sick… when our body is broken or it lacks the strength to work properly. We feel sorry for somebody when their body isn’t able to get them around. And none of us like it when our bodies fail us and are incapable of doing what we wish.
This is because our body isn’t intended to simply be a collection of body parts. Yes, our body parts have to be connected properly to one another, and yes, our body parts have to work together the way they are supposed to. But when our bodies do work the way they are meant to, we don’t usually sit and marvel at how impressive it is that our body is functioning properly. Instead, our brains tell our body what to do and it does it. Brain says, "Go to work and earn an income." Brain says, "Go to school and gain new knowledge." Brain says, "Go drive to the grocery store and buy food for dinner." Brain says, "Go visit friends and have a nice conversation." If we are healthy, then when the head gives an instruction, the rest of the body follows that instruction.
Yet sometimes in the church, we make the mistake of acting like a headless body. Folks in the church that are all connected to each other, but Jesus isn’t the head of the body any longer. So they gather for fellowship and friendship and figure they’ve "gone to church" and done their religious "duty" for the week. Without Jesus as the head of the body, the church ends up looking like a social club.
There’s an old story that’s been told a million times, but it still makes a powerful point. Long ago, there was a town in New England on the Atlantic Ocean. Because the seas off the coast could be quite rough, there would often be shipwrecks and numerous lives were lost. So the people of the town decided they needed to do something about the problem. Out of their heartfelt compassion for others, they established the "Lifesaving Society" and built a series of huts along the coast. Any time there was a storm, they would sit in these huts and look out to see if anyone was in trouble. Whenever there was a shipwreck, they would quickly get the words to others and risk their own lives in order to save as many people as they could. Times changed, and eventually the U.S. Coast Guard was formed, with this Lifesaving Society as its model. For a while, the Coast Guard and the Lifesaving Society worked side by side to save lives. But eventually, some people started saying, "Why don’t we just leave this life-saving stuff to the professionals. After all, they’re the ones who’ve been trained and who get paid to do this." Before long, they stopped manning the huts along the coast and instead, they built a clubhouse where they could meet and socialize. The clubhouse was decorated in a maritime theme, and the entryway even featured oars and rowboats they used to use to rescue people. They’d tell stories about the heroic rescues of the past. They’d even hand out an annual award for humanitarian service. They still called themselves the Lifesaving Society, but they weren’t in the lifesaving business any longer.
If we’re not careful, we can find ourselves in the same situation. The church can become a place where we gather to socialize and tell stories about the good ol’ days. We can feel strong connections with each other, and yet lose the connection with the broken and hurting world around us.
If we go back to the idea of the church being the Body of Christ for a moment, this is like having all the body parts connected to each other, but none of the body connected to the head. The body itself is doing okay, but it has no direction, no guidance. Because Colossians 1:18 spells it out for us: "Christ is the head of the body, the church…" And we’re certainly connected with Christ, who is the head of the body. When the church is a truly healthy body, we’re not only connected to each other. We are also all connected to Christ, the head of the body. And it’s from Him that we receive our guidance and our instruction.
Because as I mentioned earlier, the church has two main purposes – to help us and to help the world. In fact, they’re directly related – the church helps us so we can go out to help the world. We gather as the church in order to be strengthened, to encourage one another and build each other up, to grow in our own faith and beliefs, to learn from God’s Word, and to gain new skills to live more faithfully. But we do these things not only for ourselves, but so that we can go into our families and workplaces and schools to share God’s love with others.
This is the reason we are not called to go to church. We are called to be the church, to be the very presence of God in the world for others. I’ll close with these words from the letter of First John, chapter 4. Again, we’ll use the Message translation of the Bible, an attempt to bring the eternal message of God into today’s language.
My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can’t know him if you don’t love. This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. My dear, dear friends, if God loved us like this, we certainly ought to love each other. No one has seen God, ever. But if we love one another, God dwells deeply within us, and his love becomes complete in us—perfect love!
We are going to love—love and be loved. First we were loved, now we love. He loved us first. If anyone boasts, "I love God," and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar. If he won’t love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can’t see? The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people. You’ve got to love both.
May the God who loved us first through Jesus Christ be revealed in the love that Burlington United Methodist Church and the love that Christ’s universal church shows the world. Amen.
