As I read Erwin McManus’ book on the church entitled An Unstoppable Force, I have to say I was hit hard by a statement near the beginning, where he said: “The indictment that we must receive is that the Christian faith as we express it is no longer seen as a viable spiritual option. Masses gave the church a try and left wanting. We accuse them of not being willing to surrender to God; they accuse us of not knowing him. People are rejecting Christ because of the church. Once we were called Christians by an unbelieving world, and now we call ourselves Christians and the world calls us hypocrites. Is it possible that it wasn’t the nation that was becoming dangerously secular but the church? We were neither relevant nor transcendent. We have become, in the worst of ways, religious. We are the founders of the secular nation.”
What an indictment But I believe that he may be putting his finger on where the problem possibly lies. The world is drawn to Jesus (as we saw when millions went to see Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ), but the world is often put off by the church. We have to take an honest look to see why this is happening. Are we fulfilling the mission and purpose of the church, or have we missed it in some significant way? Are we turning people to Christ or turning them away from him? It is an uncomfortable question we must face.
In order to answer the question we have to ask ourselves what the purpose and mission of the church is, and then ask ourselves if we are fulfilling that purpose. I see at least three purposes of the church in the passage that we are looking at today. The first is: We are to become a faith-centered community. Let me begin with the word “community.” We are not called to be a group of individuals who happen to meet here on Sunday morning and who otherwise lead our own lives and do our own thing. We are called to be a community. To break the word apart, we have a common unity. We do not live just for ourselves or our own particular family, we live for, and with, each other. We share a common love for God and each other. We have a common goal of modeling the Christian life for the world and attracting the world to God. We were individuals who have now become a community, and are becoming more of a community with the passing of time. We live for each other as well as for Christ.
It does something to you when you realize that these are the people with whom you will be spending eternity. We are part of a spiritual family with God as our Father. So if you think you can be a Christian by yourself, without a community, a spiritual family, you are mistaken according to the Word of God. The Bible gives us this amazing statement: “Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others” (Romans 12:4-5). You do not belong to yourself, but to the body of Christ. We can never fully have a relationship with others unless we are fully committed to God. But we can never be fully committed to God unless we are a part of a faith community.
But this community is nothing if it is not a believing community. In the scripture today, the very people who were supposed to believe the message rejected it. Listen again as Paul says, “We had to speak the word of God to you first. Since you reject it and do not consider yourselves worthy of eternal life, we now turn to the Gentiles” (Acts 13:46). Why did Paul always go to the Jews first? Because they were the community that was supposed to believe the message and live it out in the world. Instead, they not only rejected it, they fought against it. When a community does that, they lose out on the eternal life that God wanted them to have. They did not reject the message because they could not understand it, because Paul was proving to them from the Scriptures every day that Jesus was the Christ. The writer of Acts tells us that it was not because of misunderstanding Paul’s words that they became hostile to his message, but because of their jealousy that everyone was being drawn to Paul and the message that he had come to bring.
We need to be discerning, but we want to be careful not to reject God’s truth just because it is coming from someone else. We want to be open to everything God has for us. We don’t want to resist faith, we want our hearts to be open to believe God whatever he has to say to us. We do not want Jesus to say to us, as he said to some: “How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken ” (Luke 24:25). The interesting thing in this story is that the people who were supposed to believe did not, and the people who were not supposed to believe did. It says, “When the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and honored the word of the Lord; and all who were appointed for eternal life believed” (Acts 13:47-48).
How is the world going to believe the Gospel if we act as though we do not believe it ourselves — if we are not excited about what God has done and changed by it. When we become a faith-centered community we are able to believe God even when he is leading us in new directions. When we are a faith-centered community, we are able to believe God for the supernatural. We believe God for big things. We are committed to the idea that there is nothing which God cannot do — and when that happens people are drawn to God.
The second purpose of the church is: We are to become a God-centered community. This is so important, because it gets at the root of what ails us. This is not about you The Christian life is not about God doing things for you and answering all your prayers. The church is not about getting your way and having people take care of you. Our central focus is on God — his will, his heart, his desire for us, and most of all, his glory. When we focus on ourselves, we focus on our goals and desires. When we focus on God, we focus on his will for us and the world. This is where we get our reason for being.
Erwin McManus says, “The real tragedy is not that churches are dying, but that churches have lost their reason to live.” In the scripture we read today, we saw a little dying synagogue that had lost its purpose, and therefore had lost its reason to live. They had missed the heart of God for the people right around them. When people started to flock to hear Paul’s word, they were jealous and outraged. They were content with their own little group. They had missed their mission because their focus was on themselves and not on God. God’s heart was going out to the lost people right around them and they had somehow missed it.
I was a young pastor when I was asked to be on a committee to help three declining churches in the heart of a large city to merge. At one time they had been large, thriving churches, but the neighborhoods changed and most of the members had moved to the suburbs. Each week people would drive in from the surrounding areas and go to church where they had gone for years, but the churches were dying. During the meeting, I asked the people from the churches a series of questions: Are there any people from the inner city in your church? Have you tried to reach the people in the neighborhoods surrounding your church buildings? Do you plan to do anything to reach the people around you? To each question there was a resounding, “No.” I really upset several members of the committee when I said, “Then, for me, the question is not how you should merge, but whether you should continue to exist at all.” The meeting took on a somber tone at that point, and I felt like an unwelcome guest.
This is true for the individual as well as the church. When you lose your focus on God and begin to focus on yourself, you find that you are not an important enough reason to live. Even if you get your way, it is not ultimately satisfying. You can never come to the end of the things you want and desire. Doing life your way becomes difficult, destructive and dysfunctional. Life becomes unfulfilling. But center yourself in God and you find that some of the greatest longings of your heart are being met. You find God making you a new person.
Sue and I were struggling with an issue that involved our extended family. We reacted poorly in a phone conversation with a family member. The next morning, after having our separate devotions, we came to eat breakfast together. And as we were setting the table, Sue remarked how convicted she felt about how we had responded. God had spoken to her during her devotions, and we had to take appropriate action to correct the situation. As we began to talk about it, I said, “You know, this is the benefit of living the Christian life and putting God at the center. Instead of justifying ourselves, we heard God speak to us as we came to him in our quiet time this morning — even though it was not what we wanted to hear. Our hearts were changed because we had taken the time to wait on God. People without Christ never take the time to come to God and receive correction when they need it. They just keep going in their self-centered way.” And we did not stop there — we had to do the difficult thing and make things right.
I have seen the same thing happen collectively in the church. We had our minds made up about what the right thing was to do, but when we looked to God, we found ourselves being redirected. And even those who felt so strongly one way were able to sense God’s leading and yield to it. When we focus on God, we realize that it is not about getting our needs met by the group, but doing the will of God wholeheartedly and with passion. That is why Jesus said the greatest commandment was to: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). And when we do that as a community of faith it has an enormously powerful effect on the people around us.
The third purpose of the church is: We are to become a world-centered community. When the church came to the place, historically, that it began to grow, it discovered it began to have political power. It could exert influence. And so it began to focus on itself and do the things that would benefit and prosper itself. The church became an institution rather than a movement. We began to have a fortress mentality when we were intended to be a revolution. The bureaucracy of the church began to be more important than our original mission. What is our mission? Let’s remember the words of the Lord Jesus, when he said, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation” (Mark 16:15). He said, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:19-20). Our focus is not to be on preserving the church, but reaching the world.
You are not here to promote your own well-being. You are not here to promote your pleasures and plans. You are here to fulfill the purposes of God. This involves dying to self in order that you might come alive to God. You were called to be a servant – a servant of God. And in order to be a servant of God you have to serve other people. McManus says, “You cannot wash the feet of a dirty world if you refuse to touch it. . . . It is in serving that the church finds her strength. When she ceases to serve the world around her, she begins to atrophy. In pathology, atrophy is the wasting or decreasing in size of any part of the body. When the church refuses to serve the world, she begins to waste away.”
That is why the ministries of this church are important. We go to people to whom no one else is going. We touch them and love them when they have been forgotten by most everybody else. They are the invisible people of the community. I have lived her for eleven years now, but it was not until we started the wagon ministry that I realized there was a homeless problem in our community. I did not understand the extent of abuse, poverty and the drug and alcohol problems here in our own community until I began to be with the young people who come here on Saturday nights. I did not fully realize the extent of broken families until we began our apartment ministry. It wasn’t until I, and some of the rest of you, got our hands dirty that we began to understand the social and spiritual problems that had been right under our nose.
In our scripture today, Paul reminded the Jews of God’s word through Isaiah the prophet: “I have made you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth.” Here is the reason for the establishment and existence of Israel. They were to be a light to the world. They were to embody the Word and laws of God, be models of the life of God, and torch bearers of the light of God. The people of Israel were not the chosen people because they were special, but because they had a special purpose. God chose them for the purpose of being a light to the rest of the world. God’s purpose for the church is to be found in the purpose of Israel. We are to be those who hold the laws and Word of God in sacred trust. But we are not to keep them for ourselves, we are to share them with the world. We do that in two ways. First, we lovingly speak and share the Word of God with the world, and secondly, we model the Word of God in the way we live as individuals and as a community. If we won’t do it, God will find someone who will, as he did with the people we read about in the scripture this morning. When the Jews refused to believe and respond to the Good News, then Paul, through the prompting of the Holy Spirit went to the Gentiles — people who were untaught and spiritually unenlightened. And the scripture says, “they were glad and honored the word of the Lord.”
God has made us to be a light and to bring salvation to the ends of the earth — beginning here in Mount Vernon. But you can’t be a light when you are hiding under a bushel. Jesus said, “But the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop. No one lights a lamp and hides it in a jar or puts it under a bed. Instead, he puts it on a stand, so that those who come in can see the light” (Luke 8:15-16). We were called to go out to the world. What good is a candle in a well lit room? Go out into the world of darkness if your light is going to do some good.
When I went to Honduras, through your generosity, I was able to take over 100 Evangecubes (see www.Evangecube.org) to the churches there. Evangecubes are little cubes that tell the story of the Gospel with pictures. I remember going to one little church and showing the people how to use them. After they learned how to unfold the cube and share the message with other people, one man stood up and said to the other people in the church: “We can do this. Most of us can’t read, so if there were words we couldn’t use this. But there are no printed words so all of us can do this. We are going to go out into our community and rob the devil’s kingdom of souls he has been holding in captivity and bring them to Jesus ” Now here was a man who was uneducated and could not even read. He had been an alcoholic and there were deep wounds in his head where he had been in a machete fight. I want to ask you a question. How does he “get it” when millions of Christians in the United States with all kinds of education and resources don’t get it? How does he get it when people trained in theology and who are leaders in the mainline church don’t get it? How does this man in Honduras get it when Christians in our community don’t get it? There can only be one answer: We are overlooking the obvious.
Rodney J. Buchanan
September 5, 2004
Mulberry St. UMC
Mount Vernon, OH
www.MulberryUMC.org
Rod.Buchanan@MulberryUMC.org
