"is God's Church For Everyone?"

“Is God’s Church for Everyone?”

Acts 8:26-40

When I was a brand-new Christian a friend of mine and I were doing some street witnessing.

What I mean by that is we were meeting strangers on the street and asking them if they knew Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.

We were 18 years old and we were on fire.

At one point we struck up a conversation with a small group of homeless guys.

One of the men, who was bleeding because someone had thrown a bottle at him, said, “I used to want to be a Methodist Minister, but then I went off to Vietnam (this was in the mid-1980s that we were doing this).”

I said to the guy, “You can still do that.

You can still go back to the church.”

And he said something I couldn’t comprehend.

He said, “I wouldn’t be welcome there.”

I think there are a lot of folks in our world, in our communities who feel as if they wouldn’t be welcome in our church.

It could be that they don’t think they fit into the right socio-economic class.

Maybe they don’t think we would approve of their tattoos.

Perhaps, they have had bad experiences with churches in the past and think they will be judged.

Maybe they think they have too many questions about faith, or they are too unsure…

…and they think we will expect them think exactly the same way we do.

There are a lot of reasons people aren’t coming to church.

According to a Washington Post article that came out last month, more people have left the church in the last 25 years than all the new people who became Christians from the First Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening, and the Billy Graham Crusades combined.

Churches are closing at rapid numbers in the United States, researchers say, even as faith continues to dominate American politics.

And this might be one of the problems.

About a quarter of younger adults who have dropped out of church said they disagreed with their church’s stance on politics.

For many, Christianity has come to be thought of as affiliated with only one certain political party, but should it be affiliated with any political party?

People perceive some churches to be more interested in the American political landscape than loving God and loving neighbor.

In a recent Pew survey about quitting church a third of people over 65 years of age who stopped attending did so because they didn’t feel welcome.

According to a woman named Robenna Redl, who is black and has two biracial children, “The church became increasingly antagonistic towards ‘others,’ and not attuned to the fact that I am the other.”

The City of Red Bank is booming.

We have become the new North Shore, with young families who want to live close to downtown clamoring to live here.

The fact that our Preschool which is full with a waiting list is a testament to this.

But I have found it difficult to get these new people interested in coming to church.

Why is this?

Do they lump us in with churches that are very political in nature?

Do they think we might be judgmental and hypocritical?—another reason many non-churched folks say they stay home or do something else on Sunday mornings.

Do they think we won’t accept them?

What is it?

Our Scripture Lesson for today is one of Radical Christian Inclusion, and I think it’s an important text for us to study while trying to navigate the changing perception outsiders have about God’s Church.

(pause)

Phillip was one of the seven Greek-speaking Jewish Christians who had been appointed by the Twelve Apostles to take care of the needs of others, especially widows, in the Greek-speaking part of the Church.

He is also known as Phillip the Evangelist, and had four daughters who were considered to be prophets in the early Christian Community.

He was a man who listened to the Holy Spirit of God and wasn’t afraid to take risks for the Gospel.

We are told that an angel of the Lord directed Phillip to change his travel plans, and “Go south to the road—the desert road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.”

Phillip followed the directions and came upon an Ethiopian man who was on his way home from Jerusalem.

The man was a eunuch and an official responsible for the entire treasury of the queen of Ethiopia.

The fact that the man was a eunuch seems to be particularly important to the author of Acts since he mentions it five times in this short passage.

A eunuch is a castrated male.

And this Ethiopian Eunuch had most likely been castrated so that no one had to worry about him being a servant of a female in a royal household.