282 Believe, Behave/Belong

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Believe, Behave/Belong”, originally shared on October 25, 2023. It was the 282^nd video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.) 

   What is the Church and who are its members? What is a church and who are its members? Today, we’re going to find out how the very future of the Christian faith in the Western world will be influenced by how we answer those questions.

   September 10^th was “God’s Work. Our hands.” Sunday in my Christian denomination. It was observed last Sunday, October 20^th, in the church of which I am a member. It’s a day for church members to do service projects for the community.

   I never made much of it in the church that I served before I retired. My thinking was that community service is something that happens all the time.  It’s a natural result of who we are in Jesus Christ. We don’t need a special day.

   Anyway, a colleague said that the day should be called “God’s work.” Period. That’s where the attention should go. I can see that.

   Then why do we do it? I think we do it because it gives the community, at least the non-Christian community in our increasingly secular times, the impression that the Church is good for something. It’s a defensive program.

   I sat with an acquaintance who is highly respected in church circles the other day. We hadn’t seen each other in years, at least not since before the pandemic.

   I don’t know him well, but I know he is a Christian. We talked about the nature of the church.

   He spoke with admiration, as I understood what he was saying, for a prominent clergyperson he knew who had said that the order that Christians traditionally have followed to invite non-Christians to come to faith in Jesus Christ was to invite them to first believe, then to behave, and finally to belong.

   But, the clergyperson he was talking about said, we have the order all wrong.

   Instead, he said that it was his practice to invite non-Christians to first behave (like doing social justice projects with the congregation and taking part in worship, including Holy Communion) and then to belong (like joining the congregation), and then, he said “maybe, to believe”. The volume of his voice went down a little bit for that last part.

   This is how, I think, many “progressive” churches see their work.

   But even churches who care about being the means by which people come to new life in Jesus Christ are sometimes not far from that same order.

   Many churches have built their ministry around an “attractional” model.

   That is, if we tell people that we are friendly, and if we have the right programs, and buildings/grounds, and an attractive leader who pleases people, and if our communications say “All are welcome!” then people will be attracted to our churches and, maybe, they will hear the Gospel and come to new life in Jesus Christ.

   It’s sometimes expressed with the saying, and I’ve said it myself, “The church is not a museum for saints. It’s a hospital for sinners.” Which sounds right, but is a little off.

   I’ve come, instead, to believe that the Church is built around a “missional” model. It is more like the paramedics than like a hospital.

   Paramedics go to where the wounded and broken people are. They stabilize them, treat them, and transport them to a place where they can receive more specialized treatment and longer-term care. Missional churches are structured to bring people from zero to Christian, to disciple.

   How many churches do you know whose attitude instead is to shrug, “Our doors are open”?

   Why, then, aren’t the people coming?

   Because the people outside of faith in Jesus Christ don’t know that we have anything to offer them other than another social group that needs our time, treasure, and talent to stay open. For what?

   I think that the order of ministry for a missional Church is first to “believe”. That is, to come to a living, life-changing relationship with the one, true, living God. The Creator of the universe. The one whose presence makes me holy. The Redeemer of my whole personhood.

   And that’s it.

   Everything in the Christian Life comes after that as a natural outcome, including the behaving and the belonging parts.

   Paul writes, in his second letter to the Corinthians, in 2 Corinthians 5:17,

17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

   God makes us new! That is the message. We who were sinners are reconciled to God at the cross. We who were no people are now God’s people. We who were dead in our sins are now given eternal life. Deeds happen in response to this. Behavior changes in response to it. But, if we start with good deeds and behavior, then we have no power to be changed. We have nothing to offer but a social service agency that uses religious words.

   Instead, we offer transformed lives!

   How do we bring that message to a world that isn’t interested?

   Ross Douthat, in his book Bad Religion encourages us to live in ways that bear witness to our status as God’s people, in the faith that was first handed down to the Apostles by Jesus Christ. Through holy living and the Arts.

   Our behavior comes as a natural result of our relationship with Jesus Christ, revealed and empowered by the Holy Spirit.

   The Christian life is not a “have to” life, but a “get to” life, a “want to” life. It is as natural as it is for a fruit tree to bear fruit. Paul writes of this life in Galatians 5:22-23,

22 By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.

   We point the world to Jesus Christ, and to the fact that our lives have been transformed by Him. We point to the cross, to the forgiveness of sins, to eternal life as a gift of God’s grace.

   We are the Church, for whom the Bible’s principle metaphor is The Body of Christ!

   The word “member” is thought by most people today to mean “a part of some group”.

   But if you look at your accident insurance policy it will say that you will receive X amount of money for the loss of a “member”. A member is a leg, or an arm. It is a part of your body.

   We are members of the Body of Christ.

   There is no place in the Bible where we are told to build church buildings!

   But there are many places where we are told to build up each other.

   Each of us receives a spiritual gift when we are baptized. It is not given to us, but through us for the Body of Christ, the whole people of God. Why? Paul writes, in Ephesians 4:12-13,

12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, 13 until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.

   This is God’s work, period, making us saints, making us holy, making us fit places for the one holy God to dwell! We just point people to it.

   You might remember Derek Fisher from the showtime era of the Los Angeles Lakers with Kobe and Shaq.

   Derek Fisher was my favorite Laker. He wasn’t flashy. He wasn’t a superstar. His name wasn’t synonymous with the franchise. He was just the guy you called in when you wanted to get the job done. In other words, he was the most Lutheran of all the Lakers. 😊

   I once shared that observation in a sermon. A man who had been coming to worship with his wife, but who wasn’t a member of the congregation, later attended our pre-membership classes and became a member. He became a part of a stewardship effort and gave a stewardship talk during worship. He said, “I used to come to worship regularly with my wife, but I wasn’t a member. One Sunday I heard the pastor talk about Derek Fisher and I realized that I have been a Lutheran all my life and didn’t know it!”  😊

   But he had been a member of the Body of Christ for many years before that. His faith came as a gift from God.

   I was filling in for a pastor at a local church not long ago and was receiving instructions from a congregational leader about some of their worship customs. I had noticed in the printed service that the pastor announces that all who are present are welcome to receive Holy Communion. I asked if that included the unbaptized. He lowered his head and replied, “Well, we are kind of a liberal church.” (!)

   Having no requirements doesn’t remove roadblocks to becoming a Christian or participating in the Christian life, it removes their meaning. It removes that in which people are called to believe.

   The early Church required three years of instruction before people could be baptized, belong, and receive Holy Communion. That’s a significant requirement for membership.

   But it leads to the formation of a community that knows what it is and has received so much from God that it responds in action toward others. As Paul writes in Hebrews 10:24,

24 And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, 25 not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

   We are a Christian community, established by God. We invite people to meet Jesus and to receive life transformation that truly is life.

   We point to Jesus, who changes lives for the better.

   We believe, and then we behave/belong and everything else.

   As John writes at the climax of his Gospel, In John 20:30-31,

30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. 31 But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

281 Influencers

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Influencers”, originally shared on October 18, 2023. It was the 281^st video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Musicians and other artists are often asked, “What are your influences?” That’s a good question for Christians, too. Today, we’re going to find out how influencers work in the Christian life.  

   Sally and I were at a gathering for churches of her denomination, The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)/UCC, the other day, and we took part in a short hymn-sing.

   It was led by an African American woman who clearly had a gift for presenting the Gospel in music.

   One of the hymns we sang was “Blessed Assurance.”

   The music for “Blessed Assurance” was written in 1873 by Methodist Phoebe Palmer Knapp (composer of over 500 Gospel hymn tunes and lyrics) who played the tune for Fanny Crosby (composer of over 8,000 Gospel hymn tunes and lyrics), also a Methodist, who had been blind since she was 6-weeks old. Ms. Crosby immediately spoke the first stanza,

“Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!

Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!

Heir of salvation, purchase of God

Born of his Spirit, washed in His blood”

   Some people don’t like these kinds of hymns because of their “Me and Jesus” message. Our relationship with Jesus Christ is personal, but it’s never private, it’s true.

   But many of those hymns are personally meaningful to others, and to me. They are among the things that have influenced Christians as a means of the Holy Spirit.

   I think of the Sundays when I was in college when members of the school’s student congregation went to visit people in a nursing home after worship. We would sing hymns, mostly requests, from the residents.

   Some of those hymns I had never heard of, but they were well worn standards to the people we sang for. Some brought people to tears.

   One of those hymns was “Blessed Assurance.”

   It begins clearly, with just me and Jesus, and then it introduces the Gospel message: “Born of his Spirit, washed in His blood.” It’s a message of grace.

   Detrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor and theologian murdered by the Nazis at the end of World War II, said that grace, God’s unearned love, is free but it’s not cheap. It’s not cheap because is cost God-made-flesh in Jesus Christ His life. His blood was poured out. The Christian life is lived in response; it has a certain substance.

   Bonhoeffer said, “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

   Why were those old Gospel hymns so meaningful to the people we sang for? I think that one reason was that those were people who had lived the cost of discipleship and had been renewed. They were people to whom discipleship, the cross, and Jesus Christ, living and incarnate, were all their living reality.

   It’s like the person who was told that their faith was just a crutch who said, “It may be a crutch, but it holds me up.”

   Another reason might be the words ending the second verse, “echoes of mercy, whispers of love”, and at the end of the third, “filled with his goodness, lost in his love.” They are words of comfort.

   I think of the people I most admired when I was young, among my early influencers. They were the people in my church whose faith had a luminous quality.

   I wanted that and I tried to figure out where it came from. Then I realized that they had had great challenges and tragedy in their lives that had made faith difficult, but their faith had endured. They had needed comfort and had received it by God’s grace.

   Both of the final two (of three) verses of “Blessed Assurance” begin with the words, “Perfect submission…”

   And submission in our culture of radical individualism is hard. It’s counter-cultural hard.

   Singing “Blessed Assurance”, I found tears forming in my eyes for, I think, much different reasons than for those in the nursing home.

   I mourned for the faith that our culture, and even many places in our Church, is throwing away. I was struck by the hymn’s straightforward declaration of Jesus Christ, a kind that we rarely hear these days, even though it is our living reality. I was encouraged by its confession, its direct statement of faith. “Blessed Assurance” is a hymn that is a reminder to ourselves as well as to the world that we are a new creation, born again, a people set apart. The words “this is my story” sound to me like a statement of defiance.

   I once heard another hymn-sing leader lead the congregation in singing “Blessed Assurance”. He directed the congregation to slow down the first words of the chorus and sing each word loudly and clearly, “This-is-my-story,” and to hold the last word for an extra several seconds.

“This – is – my - stooreey, this is my song

Praising my Savior all the day long

This is my story, this is my song

Praising my Savior all the day long”

   I don’t know that everyone experienced that moment in the same way, but it was a very powerful moment for me.

   People who are influencers in the world today may be online, or are social media influencers, or may have perceived empathy and a connection with their “followers”, or may have positions of actual power, or may hold a high office, or may have education and experience, or they may have no qualifications at all other than that they are popular. The people don’t care. That’s nothing new.  But the numbers are.

   Unlike influencers of the past, they are not just someone at a meet-and-greet, or answering fan mail, or making a speech, or appearing on television, or making a statement in a movie or in print.

   Online, pop culture, and social media influencers today can speak directly, and in nearly real time, to millions of people. They can influence what those people buy, what they wear, how they spend their time, even what they think. They can make careers, and they can break them. Quickly.

   Online influencers can be a mile wide, but only an inch deep. They are powerful until they are not.

   The Holy Spirit speaks to us deeply, where we actually live. And the consequences are eternal. The Holy Spirit can speak to billions of people at the same time, as well as to just one at the right time.

   God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, one God in three persons, the Holy Trinity has made us new. That’s influence! And when we are made new, even our understanding of Jesus becomes new. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 5:15-16,

16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. 17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

   We don’t see the wind, but we see leaves moving and trees bending. We see its effects. We see transformation.

   Jesus says, in John 3:5-8,  [NOTE: the NRSV renders “born again” as “born from above”]

⁵ Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. ⁶ What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. ⁷ Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ ⁸ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

   Everything changes when we are made new.

   And everything that influences us changes as well. We seek influences that build us up, that draw us closer to God, that share our love for others and particularly for those who need it most, in our words and in our deeds. We want to glorify God, and we want to be with others who do as well.

   That means we might have to lose the “friends” that want to drag us back to the old life. It means being with people who share our faith. It means we get better friends. Sometimes the same goes even for our family.

   We have many influencers in our lives, our parents, our teachers, our media, our friends, social media, our churches, pastors, hymns, news sources, books, and a host of others.

   When we are born again, we live lives that are no longer necessarily influenced by them, even by what we think are the best of them, but only when the Holy Spirit speaks through them. The Holy Spirit speaks through means. And it transforms us.

   But the primary way that God speaks to us is through the Bible.

   Paul writes, in 2 Timothy 3:16-17,

¹⁶ All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, ¹⁷ so that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.

   The word “inspired” contains the same root as “respire” and “respiration”. Some translations render it as “God-breathed”.

   The words, “pneuma” (pneumatic, pneumonia) in Greek and “ruach” in Hebrew have the same three meanings: wind, breath, and spirit”. It is the same Holy Spirit that inspired the writers of the books of the and, more importantly, that inspires us to understand what they mean.

   The Bible is authoritative not just for the words on the page, but for the living, present God who inspires us to understand them. That’s why the Bible has authority in any language, and in any faithful version in that language.

   That “This-is-my-stooreey!” moment in “Blessed Assurance” was powerful because of the influence of the Holy Spirit. “Born of his Spirit, washed in his blood.” It touched me as it has touched millions before me. Personally.

   The Christian life, both personally and for the whole people of God, is formed by the Holy Spirit speaking through many means, primarily through the Bible. We open our hearts so that we may be formed by the Influencer of all our influencers and live as God’s people.