Rev. David Holwick
First Baptist Church
Ledgewood, New Jersey
October 10, 2010
FACEBOOK OR FELLOWSHIP? [transcript]
Hebrews 10:23-25
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Please open your Bible to Hebrews Chapter 10, starting in Verse 23.
Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promise is faithful and let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together the summer and the habit of doing but let us encourage one another and all the more as you see the day approaching.
Every Tuesday Celeste and I go to the movies because we have one of those CableVision promotion cards that allows us to get in for free. Half of Roxbury Township apparently has that same card so the theater is always packed to the rafters. But this last week we saw the current hit, "The Social Network," about the early history of Facebook. And some of you probably had no idea what Facebook is but not too many of you because around the world there are five hundred million members of Facebook. And I counted up my friend list on Facebook and fifty six of you are my friends. Most of my “friends” are very young, with a few older ones - the retirees don’t tend to be on that as much. I actually have two hundred and thirty-two friends altogether. About a third of them I have never met before, I have no idea who they are but I didn’t want to insult them when they asked to be my friend so they’re on my list. It’s interesting that according to the movie, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has a hard time making friends himself. As a matter of fact by the end of the movie he has alienated the few that he has and he’s getting sued by most of them. But there’s an opening scene in which Zuckerberg is trying to date a girl from Boston University and it’s going downhill real fast and Celeste nudged me and said, “That’s our first date.” So I have much in common with this man except for his multi-billion-dollar net worth.
A lot of people have noticed that in a Facebook generation we know more and more people. We’ve got all these connections yet so much of it doesn’t seem to do us any personal good. So much of our relationships seem very superficial. And some people out there fall through the cracks completely. Back in November 1998 a landlord in Bonn, Germany, entered into an apartment because the guy had stopped paying his rent. The rent check had always gone to his bank and it was paid automatically but all of a sudden the bank said that account was closed now. So the landlord knocked on the door, got no answer, got a key and he went in and he found Wolfgang Dirks sitting in front of his television set. Or at least what was left of him - he was just a skeleton. His TV was in the “on” position, although it was no longer working, and Christmas lights were wrapped all around the apartment. And the landlord thought that was kind of unusual because it was the beginning of November, why does he have these up so early? Well, it turns out there was a TV Guide by his side dated December 5th, 1993, five years before they found his body. The police say that we can’t determine exactly when he died so they just took the date on that TV Guide and that’s what is listed on his death certificate. None of his neighbors had noticed or made any comment or sought him out and what I found interesting was this is not some ninety-year-old guy. He was forty-three years old! [Illustration #6338]
Some people we know and would be better off maybe not knowing them. We’ve all heard about the Rutgers University case where the roommate of Tyler Clementi set up a webcam and secretly caught Tyler and another male student in a compromising position and then posted it on the internet. A few days later Clementi threw himself off the George Washington Bridge and died. And some people are trying to tie this in with the whole mindset of anti-homosexuality but in reality it just boils down to anti-human issue because the new entertainment in our culture is cruelty and embarrassment. On a global scale, once something gets on the internet it never dies. I’ve noticed lately they’ve been saying “this webpage has been taken down” but you can always access it because apparently Google has archives of everything that ever has been on the web. You can’t really erase it, it hangs there forever.
Christians above all people have always valued relationships because in the very beginning of the Bible it says that Adam was created and something was missing. God looked at him and said it’s not good for the man to be alone, I must create a helper that must be suitable for him, and that’s where Eve comes into the picture. So from the very beginning God has made human beings part of a wider community. You’re not designed to be happy and contented on your own. And even modern people recognize this. We would rather be connected than convinced.
Haddon Robinson is perhaps the most famous preaching professor in American and he taught at my seminary -- after I left. This explains all of my shortcomings. But Robinson was once asked, when you’re preaching what do people need to hear nowadays, and he said, back in my generation everybody wanted apologetics. They wanted you to prove the faith, they wanted facts and reason to show that our faith made sense. But he said nowadays people are different. People don’t want to hear “evidence that demands a verdict.” He said what people are looking for is a warm fellowship where people care, where there is an atmosphere of love. He says if you can provide that for them, they’ll come and then they’ll ask questions about Jesus. But what people really want is a place where they can belong. [Illustration #33360]
Now our church can provide what people are looking for, where people can find honest and caring relationship with people who sincerely believe in Jesus, opportunities to grow and serve together. All these are possible in our church - but they don’t necessarily happen. None of this is a guarantee but we can work to make it a reality as God intends.
But first we have to find out what is good fellowship, what can it do for you. Researchers have actually found out some concrete evidence that’s rather interesting. Number one is that it is a great cure for depression. Temple University did some research and they found that people who believe in a Higher Power and pray regularly are one-and-a-half times more likely to be depressed than the general population. And they were wondering about this and apparently it’s because people who are already depressed are using religion as a coping mechanism and they’re hoping that by turning to a Higher Power and really praying that maybe their life will turn around.
But then they found something else in the research. People who report they’re not particularly close to God but they are tied in with a faith-based community are thirty percent less likely to be depressed. Apparently by being in a faith-based community like a church you help form attachments to other people and that keeps you from being depressed. As I read this I thought, wow, what if you really did want to be close to God and pray a lot and you were in a church environment then nothing could go wrong in your life. It will be all butterflies and roses and everything will be hunky-dory! Well, that’s not always the case but certainly connecting with people on a spiritual and emotional level is one of the best ways to stay healthy and emotionally centered in your life. [Illustration #35491]
If you are in a good fellowship you should be able to have deeper sharing and even about your problems. We call this transparency and openness where you can share the concerns of your heart and you’re going to be accepted, people will listen and people actually care about you. But guess what, that often doesn’t happen in churches. Bill Hybels is the pastor of one of the largest churches in America, Willow Creek. I attended once because I was invited by my friend Glenn Gunderson. We had to park about two miles away, they actually had about thirty people in the parking lot directing traffic because it was a whole traffic jam coming in off the highway. And I said to myself, this better be good because I’m making a lot of effort coming to this church.
And yet when Bill Hybels was growing up he says that in his church, one of the things that he noticed was that there would be a family sitting in a pew year after year. You know how it is. Where you’re sitting right now, you always sit there. The wood is kind of indented where you’ve been sitting and he says they’d been there for years and years, all of a sudden they disappeared. And you’d hear through the grapevine that they were having marriage troubles. But instead of coming to the church and share with people that, hey, we love Jesus but our marriage is kind of rocky right now, we need help. Instead what they would do is run away because apparently there’s a perception that the last place you want to admit a problem is with other church people, and he says he personally learned that lesson well. When he got old enough to stand on the church patio after the service, someone would say, “So, Bill, how are things in high school?” And he’d give the expected response. “Things are going great!” He didn’t feel he could share that his heart was being ripped to shreds because his girlfriend had broken up with him. Or that he was flat-lined spiritually. Or that he had an older brother who was drinking too much and driving too fast and Bill was afraid he wouldn’t come home someday because there would be a car wreck somewhere. He didn’t say anything, because he felt that a good Christian just didn’t admit to having problems. Hybels says in many churches, that’s called fellowship. And it shouldn’t be. [Illustration #9370]
Fellowship should be something deeper that if you’ve got anything, I mean something really horrendous, to share people are listening to it and accept it and try to help you with it because a genuinely fellowshipping church should be a deeply caring church. We give you opportunities not only to meet the people you’re all familiar with but maybe some new people, people with issues in their life and it can be a good thing for you to help someone who has an issue, maybe an issue that has never touched you, maybe it’s an issue that someday will touch you but if you can help them through it, it will make you a stronger person. It says in Hebrew 10:24 that the whole purpose of coming here is to spur people on to faith and good deeds, to building people up.
Sometimes caring means confronting. Now you may all think that is not part of fellowship but it really can be because the people are having hurtful attitudes that people are doing things or hurting other people and dragging them down, they need to be aware of it. Maybe they’re oblivious but if we want a caring fellowship you’ve got to nip the negative stuff as well as build the positive stuff. And in any genuine Christian fellowship you need to have Jesus at the center. Now churches like to think of ourselves as warm places with nice people. But that really shouldn’t describe a church because a lot of you are not nice. The Bible says so - you are sinners. That’s why you come to a Baptist church, because you’re a sinner in need of redemption. And during the process of being redeemed you’re still kind of rotten. You have rough edges and that’s why you come here, because you want us to mold you into a disciple of Jesus Christ where you become more and more like him. But you haven’t arrived yet. So instead of having this fantasy that everyone here has it all squared away we need to come together with honesty and say we’re here because Jesus can do something for us.
It says in 1 John 1:3, “We proclaim you what we have seen and heard so that you may also have fellowship with us, and our fellowship is with the Father and with the Son, Jesus Christ.” So sort of a continuum -- if you want to connect with another person you have to connect with God through Jesus. It all works together. So it should matter to us when we’re getting together not just hey my partner has this little group but is Jesus part of our group. Does everyone that you’re connecting with in this group, first of all do they know Jesus? Now you might think well sure, the Baptist church everyone’s coming here because they believe in Jesus but it’s not necessarily so.
I was leading the youth group the other night (every once in a while there is a crisis and I have to go over and lead them) and I was apprehensive because teenagers can be a hard audience. But they were very good, very receptive, even we’re going through the book of Habakkuk. You probably can’t even find Habakkuk in your Bible. We were studying this book and it came upon me to ask how many of them believe that Jesus is their Savior, they’ve accepted Him? A bunch of hands went up then I asked how many of them haven’t and a couple of hands went up. I thought, wow, if you do that with adults no hands would go up on that second question because they think their preacher’s going to bite their head off or use them as an example but these teenagers admitted they haven’t come to that point yet where they believe in Christ.
Maybe the person next to you is in the same situation. They don’t hate God, they don’t hate the church but they’re not sold on it yet. They’re not sure of the validity of the truth of it. Maybe they’re coming for another reason, to make somebody happy. Why don’t you find out why they don’t believe and influence them? Tell them what Christ has done for you. And even if they are a Christian, are they living as a Christian? Are there issues in their life that maybe a Christian shouldn’t have? You need to deal with that because we’re here, to sharpen one another.
And of course there’s always a case where people drift away. People want no part of us, and they don’t come anymore. This is October. Do you know what October means? The Deacons have their meeting and they have to go over the membership list and pick out the people who have been inactive. Some of you may have the impression we sit there just rubbing our hands with glee like, oh joy, we have booted another one out. But we never have that attitude - it is something we do because the church bylaws demand it, and we struggle over it. The first step is to contact them by a visit or a letter and we try to word the letter very carefully so that maybe we can entice them to come back. Maybe they’ve moved away and they need to find another church but they have dragged their heels on it. We try to spur them to get back into fellowship because if Satan loves one thing it’s a detached Christian.
Do you have to be a member of the church to go to heaven and be with Jesus? No, absolutely not. But I can almost guarantee that if you’re on your own and you’re not in any Christian fellowship you will start to fade. You’ll start to doubt, you’ll stop caring. You’ve got to be in fellowship to keep it all plugged in. Even in the Bible you’ve got examples of people in this situation. Consider Lot, who was a nephew of Abraham. Now Abraham was a superstar. He’s the one who started the ball rolling and here he’s got this nephew who probably loved the Lord too but the nephew decided to move to the big city, Sodom, where he had no other fellowship. And he knew it, he knew what the people in the city were like because he had his own place near the city gate, which probably means he was considered a leader there. But when the day of the disaster came he was isolated and would have lost his life if the angels hadn’t dragged him out of there because he chose to go where there is no fellowship. It can happen to you as well.
Churches try to bring people into fellowship but some of the things we do don’t necessarily work. A lot of churches have a coffee time as the solution to their fellowship problem. We have ours between services and we have cookies out there, we had some bagels this morning and we have coffee. Now in a lot of churches coffee time is for chit-chatting, but not in our church. The coffee machine is in the kitchen and there’s a line of people staring at the floor, they’re twitching like this and you know the thought in their mind is, they better not take that last Hazelnut Blend, that one is mine! I’m not a coffee drinker so I can make fun of them. But if you think about it, you’ve got ten minutes to drink your coffee and chat with someone, are you going to change anyone’s life? Are you going to find anything earth-shattering? Probably not. It’s probably like Bill Hybels’ church, it’s how are you doing, I’m doing great. But if you’re sensitive you may be able to take a coffee time and detect if someone does have an issue. You’re not going to solve it there but maybe you can touch base with them later in the day or later in the week. It is a time to forge a minimal-level connect with another person that you can build upon.
Another problem we have in church is becoming stagnant and self-affirming. That means we’ve surrounded ourselves with people who are just like us. We are not seeking anything deeper, we just kind of fossilize or calcify. It happens in churches all the time. One of my concerns right now is we have a lot of Bible studies going on but I’m leading most of them. So you hear the same voice over and over again, and as soon as you hear Pastor Dave open his mouth you can just click off and go to sleep, right? We need to have some fresh blood. Not only do we need new people coming in but we need new people teaching and sharing and challenging us to dig deeper into God’s word.
Another issue is thinking that since you have a lot of activities, your doing fellowship. We have a lot going on in this church. Every night of the week it seems like the building is being used for something. We have all these different groups and activities for young people - tonight we’re taking them to a Corn Maze. These are opportunities for fellowship but they don’t necessarily produce fellowship. Even in a crowd you can be alone. So we have to always ask ourselves, is what we’re doing building people up? Maybe we would be better off cutting some of it out.
But if you do have fellowship there are things that you can do to make it even better and one is to encourage people to get involved in more than worship. Now all of you, you’re in church right now. Later on in the week will you have contact with other Christians in a different venue or come back to the church for Bible study or something? Most of you probably will not and that’s to your detriment because the real fellowship occurs outside of a worship service. It’s a time of sharing one on one with people, or you’re going around a circle and saying here’s what I think the Scripture means to me. Bible studies are often where we get into the deeper issues of life and talk about them in a personal way. Maybe if you’re feeling kind of thin as a Christian you should challenge yourself in that.
When we get together was also need to watch our own attitudes. In the movie about Facebook, one of the fascinating things is that the thread that ties this whole movie together is depositions in front of lawyers. That’s how these friends are talking to each other. One guy apparently owned a third of the original company and he signed some papers he didn’t realize were going to dilute his share of the company from 30% down to like 0.02%. It meant he was out hundreds of millions of dollars. Well, he ends up suing about that. It turns out that what was done to him maybe wasn’t illegal but it wasn’t very nice, it was actually cruel and that’s one of the things we find in the world.
People are doing things they’re not going to jail for but God would never want you to do it. What about in the church? When we have fellowship we have to do it as Christians, we need to treat people as Jesus wants us to treat them. The world doesn’t have that requirement. The church should. Trust and closeness must be earned. A lot of churches fail on this and we need to share ourselves with new people and because we tend to sit in the same place, we gravitate towards the same people - that’s human nature - but it doesn’t really build things up in an organization like ours. You need to find someone, maybe one person a week and say, I don’t know you that well, here’s my name, what’s going on in your life, who are you? Dig out, just reach out a little bit more and you might be talking to a person that has come here challenging God, asking him, “If this is really the place, Lord, let someone talk to me.” Maybe God is asking you to do that.
Ultimately we want our fellowship to be with Jesus and the best way to have fellowship with Jesus is to have it with people who love Jesus. The people you hang around with make a big impact on you. We always tell that to young people, to teenagers, and it’s true when you’re older too. Who are you consorting with? Are they building you up or are they tearing you down? You need to find people who will challenge you in the right things and aim you toward God.
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SOURCES FOR ILLUSTRATIONS USED IN THIS SERMON:
#6338 “Man Dead For 5 Years With TV Guide In His Lap,” Memphis Flyer, December 22, 1998. Roddy Chestnut Collection.
#9370 “Authentic Community,” by Bill Hybels, www.sermoncentral.com newsletter, July 2, 2008.
#33360 “Apologetics Is Trumped By Fellowship,” Preaching Now newsletter, www.preaching.com, October 10, 2006.
#35491 “Study Finds Link Between Faith, Depression,” by Ashley Gipson, Religion News Service,
These and 35,000 others are part of the Kerux database that can be downloaded, absolutely free, at http://www.holwick.com/database.html
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