Prayer Circles

Anchor Statement #2 for our Church, “Take time to pray for your neighbor, that you may surround them in God’s love.”  Is this the most foundational element missing from our Neighborhood in God’s Kingdom?  Intentional, community prayer?  What if the first layer of ‘success’ in church is accomplishing this task?  Statement #1 is to take time for our neighbor.  But what if before we even take time with them, we need to pray with them?

So I believe the Church needs to introduce into its structure a series of Prayer Circles.  My goal is for 90% of the Church Neighborhood to be in these Circles.  Each Circle shall contain four to seven individuals (family members MAY be in different Circles).

The Circles are encouraged to meet in person, can reach out by telephone or e-communications. 

Each Prayer Circle begins with a Leader.  The Leader will take the initiative to:

1.        Receive Prayer requests from the church and pass them along to the Circle.

2.      Monthly reach out to the Prayer Circle members to seek prayer requests in return.

3.       When applicable, reach out weekly with special prayer support of the church.

4.      Back up their Messengers when the Messengers are not available.

5.      Participate actively in the Ministry of Prayer for the Church.

6.      Report back on the activity of the Prayer Circle.

Each Prayer Circle will have two Messengers.  The Messengers shall undertake the following:

1.        Assume the role of the Leader, if the Leader is unavailable at a given moment.

2.      Pass along the Prayer requests to the Leader of another Prayer Circle.

3.       Participate actively in a Ministry of Prayer for the Church.

 Service as a Prayer Leader or a Prayer Messenger will be for four months at a time.  December 1 will mark the first Season of Prayer.  In February, we will reach out to our Prayer Leaders and Prayer Messengers to ask them to continue. 

Church membership is NOT required to participate in a Prayer Circle.  We are not going to dispatch the Nominating Committee to recruit Prayer Leaders and Prayer Messengers.  We are going to display the Prayer Circles in the Hallway outside the Choir Room. 

This Outreach is going to grow organically.  I will serve as Prayer Leader for the first Circle.  When we reach ten to twelve members, we will split into two, recruiting actively for Leaders and Messengers as we go.  And this is not an “online initiative”.  There are a large number of our Church members who do not have access to the Web.  There are shut-ins within our congregation. 

We are going to press this initiative in the Herald and at the Congregational Meeting in November, spend a month setting things into motion, and launching on December 1.

How do you get into a Prayer Circle?  Let me know, by email, by FB, by phone, in person.  Give us a week to return to you.  Want to make it faster?  Gather friends into a Circle and bring it back to me.  Appoint a Leader, appoint Messengers, and it is one step closer.

Lessons in Prayer will be provided for all who ask.

The Church and People With Strange Accents

The text for Sunday is Luke 22: 47-62.  It is the story of Jesus being denied by Peter three times.  Not a typical text for the fall.  And this text comes from a sermon that I preached some years ago, but as one of the few sermons where I remember the conversations afterward.  I guess that says something about me as a preacher, that there are not enough sermons with memorable conversations afterward?

Quick background: Jesus was arrested after coming out of the Garden of Gethsemane, where he was engaged in the seditious behavior of praying to God.  It is the dead of night, away from the crowds, there is nearly a violent confrontation, and Jesus goes quietly-to his eventual death.

Peter follows, and fulfills a prophecy Jesus made about him.  He was brave enough to slip into the High Priest’s compound to witness the trial, but not brave enough to stand up for Jesus.  And his accent betrays him, “for he is a Galilean”.

I am white, an immigrant to this nation from the far shores of … Canada…so except when I’ve tinged my “o” and use “eh” the way a teen from the San Fernando Valley in LA uses “like”, you really can’t tell.   

Peter stood out because of his accent.  We should take pains to be aware of reaching out to those folks the Lord sends along to us who are also standing out in our congregations because of their accent, or because of something different.  We need to be painfully aware that our unconscious habits of long practice may exclude them when we need to be taking steps to include them.

I need to undo the habit of labeling ‘different’ people as “them” when “they” are us.

And the fact of the matter is we should stand out.  Not like Peter hiding in the crowd at the high priest’s home.  No, like Peter on the streets of Jerusalem after the coming of the Holy Spirit!  He made a spectacle of himself.  And it isn’t like things were different in the city.  The disciples were in hiding because they were afraid of their own arrests. 

What made the difference for them was the coming of the Holy Spirit.

The hymn “They shall know we are Christians by our love” jumps to mind for me.  If we are going to make it, we need to stand out.  But not because we look funny or we talk funny or we act funny because of our ethnic, cultural, or racial heritage.

No, we should look funny and talk funny and act funny because we are daring to show our love and our faith.  People should be helped and blessed and aided by who we are and what we do because that is what Jesus would have done.  If it is hard for us, buckle down and look to the Lord for strength to make a spiritual sacrifice in his name (see the sermon in the last post for more on that).

Amen.

  

October 20, 2013 Sermon: “Does Size Matter? In Church? Really?”

1 Peter 2: 1-10    


“More.”  Sum up what is defined as better in American culture in one word, and that word would be, in my humble opinion, More.

        One is good, three is great, five is better.

        More means “newer”.  Why settle for the Apple Iphone 4 when the Apple Iphone 5 is naturally superior?  Why?  Because it’s got more.  And rumor has it the map app is fixed…

        In 2001, the first version of HALO came out, and it has been consistently amongst the best first person shooter games on the market.  In 2014, HALO 5 is on its way.

        You know why?  More.  Every new version has more.  More guns, more apps, more enemies, more death and destruction, more realism, more and more and more. 

        More is built into family life.  Start off in the apartment, save up for more, the starter home, with the expectation that you will sell that house when the kids come along…why?  Because you need more!  More family, more kids, more!

        Consider the armed forces.  Built into the culture is the quest for more rank.  You rise in the ranks or you die.  Period.  If you are an amazing major, happy in the role, excellent at fulfilling the duties required, it will be a death knell to your career if you choose to stay there.  Take an amazing major, and you promote him or her.  And who knows, an adequate lieutenant colonel may then become an incompetent bird colonel.  How do you fix that?  Brigadier General!!

        There is even a phrase for this phenomenon, not just in military life but in every organization where “more” is expected.  One “rises to one’s level of incompetence.”  There is a certain humor in that statement, but there is also enough truth to make it uncomfortable.

        MORE also affects the church.  What do we want in church?  More people and more money.  That allows us to do more things, appeal to more demographics, to do more programs, to appeal to more folks, to get more people, who bring more money.  See how the spiral accelerates?

        More is better.  It’s a cultural mantra.

        Today, we define our churches today by the “more” standard: A: healthy-which by definition means more people or B. unhealthy, a shrinking population-NOT MORE people.  More is health, more is success, more is better.

        And at first glance, the Bible seems to promote the ideal that churches must have more. 

        Consider the Great Commission.  Go out and make disciples of ALL the world.  Put that together with a cultural expectation that more is better and is it any surprise that More is the “magic bullet” for the church?

        And, as if to reinforce this ideal, there are, in our country, the mega churches, where “more” is enshrined, places with thousands of members, flexing great power and influence in their communities.  They are the ones you see on TV, the ones I hear about in the seminars and courses offered to pastors for the growth and expansion of their churches. 

        Is “more” what a church has to do in order to be a success?  By the world’s measure, are we of the small churches just a collective failure?

        So now we come to Peter, chief of Jesus’ apostles.  He is writing a regional letter, to be carried to the churches across the sections of the empire where he has traveled.  Unlike his comrade Paul, who wrote so to individual churches, Peter provides us with more general information, a wider point of view of the how and the what and the why of church.

        And after his introductions, here is how he starts off his discussion about being a successful church:  Rid yourselves of malice, guile, insincerity, envy, and slander. 

Let’s discuss these terms:

Malice: the wish or intent to do harm

Guile: cunning and deceitfulness

Insincerity: not reflecting true feelings, often of resentfulness

Envy: wanting what someone else has

Slander: the act of saying something false or malicious to damage someone else.

For Peter, the first step is to clear the spiritual decks of our lives of all these things that hurt and undercut other people.  Every term he puts out describes people cutting down other people.  Once these things are gone we are like “newborn infants, longing for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it we may grow into salvation.”

        Did you know this is how we start worship each Sunday?  It is why we have a Prayer of Confession.  We lead off worship with praise to our God that we can come to Him, but then we recognize the accumulations of sinful garbage and corruption that builds up in our lives, and, by our group and individual prayers, we ask the Lord to flush it out of our lives. 

        And, as tempting as it is, I am not going to build on that flushing metaphor.

        Instead, I am going to go for the cheap laugh and tell you the metaphor in the passage is about getting stoned, Jesus-style.  To quote: “Jesus is the living stone and we are called to be living stones as well, built up by Christ.”

        With Jesus, it is not about the numbers, not about the more.

        The verses of our stone metaphor set two groups of people in contrast to one another, believers and unbelievers.  Now, in the modern church, the following interpretation seems to carry forward.  The world is divided into believers and unbelievers, the heaven-bound and the hell-bound.  Their dividing line is Believers and Everybody Else.   The race is to bring as many unbelievers into the fold as possible before the game is over and they are all condemned.

        I don’t think this is exactly what Peter is getting at. 

        For believers, the modern interpretation is spot on with Peter.  Jesus is the living stone, the cornerstone, chosen and precious in God’s sight.  We are called to surrender ourselves to Him, to allow him to build us as living stones into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood.  We are believers.

        But modern interpretation diverges from Peter when it comes to defining the unbeliever.  For Peter, the unbeliever is not “everybody else” once you’ve separated out the believers.  No, the unbeliever is the one who heard the message and rejected it.   

         Good news for those who believe, bad news for those who rejected him.  Peter defines the unbeliever specifically.  They rejected the cornerstone, they disobeyed God, and now the living stone of Jesus is for them a stumbling block, something they fall over.  They have been destined for rejection by God.

        This is so critical in Peter’s thinking.  There are believers and unbelievers.  Both sets have heard the gospel message, and they made their choice.  There is a third group that Peter does not address and that modern thinking lumps with the unbelievers.  It is the great mass of those who have not made a choice, who have not truly heard the message, what we may call non-believers.

        So here is the takeaway.  If I, as a Christian, divide the world into two camps, the believers and the unbelievers.  If I brand everyone who is not a believer as unbeliever and therefore hell-bound, I have misinterpreted what the Scripture has to tell us. 

        And if my belief is that I have to get the gospel message to every person by every means necessary.  If I have gotten caught in the trap that more is better in church, because of that thinking, more in heaven is better than more in hell, I have missed the point of what Peter is trying to say to us.  If I have done all these things, what I have done is taken the control of the church out of God’s hands and decided that I know better.

        What Peter says is that the unbelievers are already condemned for the choices that they have made.  For him, unbelievers have rejected Christ completely.  Can they change their minds?  Sure, but that is God’s purview, not ours.

        What Peter does say is the following:

1.   God builds the church.  We are simply called upon to let him.

2.   God is building us into a holy priesthood, a spiritual house, not as individuals, but as a community, as a neighborhood.

3.   We are built up into this holy priesthood so that we can offer spiritual sacrifices. 

That is the endgame.  For Peter, the definition of successful church is how that church connects its people to the power of the Living God.

        It isn’t about winning souls for Christ, it isn’t about building our numbers, it isn’t about achieving status as a ‘mega-church’.  It is about offering spiritual sacrifices.

        So, “What’s a spiritual sacrifice?”  It is based on the Old Testament system of sacrifice.  Here is a quick summary of what sacrifices were offered for: During the harvest, the first fruits of the gifts God gave his people were offered back to the Lord in a sacrifice.  Sacrifices were made in dedication to the Lord, for a newborn child, for a marriage, for a time of personal retreat to come closer to the Almighty.  Perhaps best known was that atonement was made for sins committed by an animal sacrifice.  The penalty for sin was an eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, blood for blood.  The animal was the substitute for the person in question-blood for blood.

        The final sacrifice of blood for blood was made in Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for our sins.  His atonement was sufficient for the sins of the world and carried within it the grace that leads to our salvation.

        The blood for the sacrifice has been given once for all, but the need for the sacrifice remains.  We still need to thank the Lord for the blessings that we have been given.  That has not changed across the bible.  We still dedicate things to the Lord, like our children when we have them baptized.  We know God is the giver of all and we celebrate that.  And we continue to sin, we continue to hurt others, and ourselves.  And our spiritual sacrifices are what we do to overcome those sins with good.

        Our spiritual sacrifices are how we seek forgiveness and forgive other people.  But our spiritual sacrifices are not just reactive, but proactive.  We feed the hungry, we cloth the naked, we visit the sick.  Our faith has been at the vanguard of very socially progressive movement designed to help the basic plight of humanity.  Because of that, we  are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people,^* in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light,

Proclaim them by the words we speak, and proclaim them by the spiritual sacrifices that we offer to our God in a world do very much in need.

And the bonus is that as we touch the lives of nonbelievers, as we invite them into the priesthood God has set for us, we do see people coming in, not because of the fear of hell, but we, as God’s church, are seeking to bring people closer to God, through the love of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

More is defined in each of us, more sharing, more spiritual sacrifices to reach out to others, more giving of the faith that Jesus builds within us, those are the things of true spiritual growth.

Amen.   ^And

 

Halloween: Pagan Infiltration of the Modern Culture or Church Sanctioned Fun?

I have only received a few pieces of negative fan mail in my time in ministry.  The first was for running a Halloween funhouse through the church I was interning at for the Junior High Youth Group.  They went nuts for it.  The church was huge and old, they set up stations for the tour, and we raised some money for the place.  It was probably the highlight event of the year I spent there.

And it was over the top.  Were it a movie, it would have received at least a PG-13.  I censored for risqué ideas and costumes, but for blood and gore, not so much.  I remember the quietest girl in our group brandishing a plastic kitchen knife as she played the psycho surgeon.

And then I got the long, reasoned letter on how I was leading the children into temptation. He cited some Scripture, and tradition, and his own presuppositions about the day, and that was that.

But since then, some Christians of good faith and conscience have asked me or questioned me about my views of Halloween.  I haven’t taken a settled position (although my attitudes are well displayed at home and at church).  Today, I am going to take a position.

I do not believe that the Bible takes a position on Halloween.  Celebrations are sanctioned, fun is okay, parties are appreciated, in general terms, so long as they don’t cross a line into something more sinful.  Dancing is not sex standing up, but it can lead to inappropriate liaisons.  Alcohol is not a bad thing, but it is easily abused.  There are reasonable limits that reasonable people can see and agree to.

I believe Halloween falls into that same category.  We dress up and have fun.  Yes, blood and gore are standard, as are demons, vampires, zombies, serial killers, and all manners of evil and nastiness.  But there are also angels and puppy dogs, superheroes and sheriffs, police officers and monster hunters.   

If I see a kid coming down the street dressed as Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers wielding an actual chain saw, yah, I have a problem with that.  If the vampire cheerleader is actually attempting to chomp down on trick-or-treaters, I think an intervention is in order.  When a bunch of demon-clad youngsters are gathered in a front yard actually trying to summon Mephistopheles because the home owner went for "trick" instead of "treat", there are issues to be discussed.

But this is my opinion of Halloween.  I don’t pretend that it should be THE rule for other people.  Folks have different opinions and I believe that we need to respect those opinions.  As a pastor, I have worked with people who have real problems from past experiences around Halloween.  But those have been moments when things went too far.

The most important thing about Halloween is that our kids are safe as they have fun.  And I believe the Lord would bless us as we enjoy the day.

Preview of Sunday's Sermon

Hypothesis: Our church is a small, family-centered church.  Many believe that small churches with few resources of members, money, facilities, and leaders are not OK. The feeling that we have nothing of value to offer is deepseated, that only big churches with multiple programs can attract people.  We begin to ask, "What is wrong with us?" The more important question may be, "What is wrong with this picture?"

 

The Jeremiah Journey is challenging us on size.  In a culture that demands more as better, how does that affect the church?  Is it a valid argument?  Is bigger naturally better when it comes to church?  Is there a certain critical mass that a church has to hit in order to be effective in its ministry?  Is it a hundred people?  Two hundred?  Five hundred? 

And it is not just the numbers of people, but what comes with more people, more programs, more opportunities, more things to do.  When a church is growing and multiplying its ministry, is it that much more effective than when it’s of a stable size?  Are there measures outside butts in the pews or dollars in the collection plate that truly mark the effectiveness of a congregation?

Those are all sociological questions.  What about some theological questions?  Like, what does Scripture have to say about this?  There are certainly celebrations when people come to the sure and certain knowledge of Jesus Christ, but is there a biblical theology around the concept of “more”?  Or does the Bible have another focus?  Is the “success” measured by how many people come to church supposed to be an end in itself, or is it the byproduct of something else that a church might be doing?  Is it even reasonable to equate “growth” with “success”, assuming growth is the number of people on any given Sunday?

The passage from 1 Peter 2 does challenge the question of numbers in the pew as the grand measure of church success.  Is the expansion of the church a human endeavor at all?  Or are we simply instruments of God’s growth of the church?  And if we are God’s instruments, can we dare to know the mind of God?  Can we attempt such a task without much fear and trembling? 

One of the presuppositions of the growth movement in the church is the division of all humanity into two camps, heaven-bound believers and hell-bound unbelievers.  Is that absolute division even supported by the Scriptures?  Peter gives us one of the clearest passages that contrasts believers and unbelievers.  But do we really know what Peter is telling us?

And if we are wrong, then the church notion that runs through so many congregations expounding on the absolute necessity of winning as many souls for Christ before they die and go to hell, does that come into question?  Is there another way?  Even another, greater purpose to being the church?

See you on Sunday to hear more.

Community Organizations Active in Disaster (COAD)

It was a little more than a year ago that I went, on behalf of the church, to my first COAD meeting-three weeks before Hurricane Sandy.  The idea was pretty simple, looking at what was being done in the County about disaster preparedness and response.  There had been a couple of fires in Perth Amboy in the weeks before and it seemed like opportunities missed that our church could not be part of the response.

It seemed like a natural fit to our vision to be a Neighborhood in the Kingdom of God.  How can we help in our own community?  Then Hurricane Sandy struck and the Long Term Recovery Group formed as an extension of the COAD, and that is where my time has gone.

So what is it that COAD can do for the church?  Or what can the church do for the COAD?  There is a small group here for the meeting today and Steve Nagle, the chair person, commented that it is “very hard to get people to focus on the next storm, while they are still focusing on this storm.”

Disaster preparation.  Not something that is at the forefront of our minds, despite the beating we took from Hurricane Sandy.  Still, it is a big question, what do we do for the next one?  And what if the next one comes up Raritan Bay, not across the Shore like Sandy did?  And what if its not natural, but manmade?  Terrorists?  Industrial accident?

This is a reflection in the light of the First Anniversary of Hurricane Sandy in a couple of weeks.  What should we be prepared to do next time?  How do we make sure our people are all okay?  Our congregation is spread over a wide area.  How do we set ourselves up as a center in the community?  We are a block up from the Waterfront, which was so damaged.  We have so much space, so many possibilities. 

What practical results have we seen in our congregation since the Hurricane?  One member gave a number of hours of volunteer service to the office.  Another entered their training and works now in Case Management.  And now, a year out, the real need for volunteers and for work crews is finally beginning in earnest.  Before now, I would have assumed that the work for recovery would be DONE after a year.

I have not talked to anyone yet in our congregation who has flat told me that this is something we should not do.  The big question is how?  It starts with people whose hearts resonate with what they read here.  They want to be involved, but are not sure what to do.  This is your opportunity to reach back to me.  If there are three people interested in doing something to prepare for disaster through our church, we have a beginning. 

And we don’t have to be disaster experts or first responders or credentialed up and down and back and forth.  We just need to be people who care about one another, doing what a Neighborhood does to look after its own.

A devotional from 1 Peter 2: 4-5

“4 Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and ⁵like living stones, let yourselves be built^* into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”

One verse, drawn from our text for next Sunday, to start our week. 

Can you picture a desert?  Lots of sand dunes with impressive winds blowing across?  Something out of Lawrence of Arabia?  Or maybe the hardpan where Emmett discovered Payton at the beginning of Silverado?  The desert of the Middle East, around Jerusalem, the desert of Jesus’ home territory, is not that blowing sand, it’s all about the stones.  Lots and lots and lots and lots of stones, everywhere. 

The law to this day is that building in Jerusalem must be done in the local stone. 

It was a common vision to all the people reading Peter’s letter.  They would have gotten the image of a living stone, of other stones building upon that living stone, they would have gotten the metaphor of the spiritual house that is being built.  Today, the image we might recognize would be that of the automobile.  We see them everywhere, there is no place to escape them.

The call is to come to him and to allow ourselves to be built upon the cornerstone that he set.  It isn’t about what we can, should, or ought to do.  What we are supposed to do is even harder.  We have to surrender everything we think we should be doing in order to let Christ start over in us.

Yoda said something powerful to Luke in Star Wars, “You must unlearn what you have learned.”  Same for us.   We must unlearn so that we may learn from Jesus.  We are being built into a spiritual house, we are being built into a holy priesthood, we are being built into something that God wants us to be.  Why?

We are called upon to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.  Once again, we have an image that would have been immediately seen and understood by the Jews receiving Peter’s letter.  Their entire religious structure was set up around the Temple in Jerusalem.

And the Temple in Jerusalem was built up into an industry of animal sacrifice.  The entire Law of Moses was built on the premise of blood for blood.  Our very clean, sanitary world has a very hard time wrapping its sensibilities around that the practice of animal sacrifice.

But the requirement of the passage is that we make SPIRITUAL sacrifices.  Jesus was the final sacrifice of blood for blood, sacrifices finally and for all who believe in his name.

Now consider what is required in the sacrifice.  It is an offering to God in three parts.  1. It recognizes that God’s laws have been broken.  2. It offers something else to God rather than oneself to atone for breaking the law.  3. Built in is the implication that you will not do it again. 

Jesus spilled His blood on our behalf.  How are we going to change our lives to show the world that blood wasn’t spilled in vain?   

We are not, not be ourselves.  But learn about Jesus, pray to Jesus, make him a part of your life, and let yourself be built into a spiritual house.