(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Believe, Behave/Belong”, originally shared on October 25, 2023. It was the 282nd 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 10th was “God’s Work.
Our hands.” Sunday in my Christian denomination. It was observed last Sunday,
October 20th, 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.
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