The sermon below will be preached tomorrow night at a circuit service to mark the beginning of the new Methodist year (strangely, we think the year starts on 1st September – is that why you find so many teachers in Methodism?).
Introduction
At the beginning of a new Methodist year we think of hope. But hope can be
short supply, like a precious metal. Signs of hopelessness surround us,
especially numerical church decline, with the time bomb of our particular
failures with younger generations. So many Christians are desperate for hope.
Where might we find it?
By way of introduction, I want to say that we sometimes look
for hope in the wrong places. It can be the hope we invest in a new minister or
a Christian ‘personality’. That’s why – at my welcome service two years ago – I
quoted the line from Monty
Python’s Life Of Brian where Brian’s mother tells the adoring crowds, ‘He’s
not the Messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy.’ Invest your hopes in Christian
leaders and you will be disappointed. Whatever gifts we bring, we are all
sinners.
Or we look for hope in the ‘latest thing.’ We hear that
something ‘works’ somewhere else, and we adopt it in the hope it will turn
things around for us. That has happened in recent years with the Alpha Course, where churches start to run Alpha
without absorbing its values. Even more recently, it has happened with Fresh Expressions. People don’t
cotton onto the radically different values from traditional church, and start
claiming that anything out of the ordinary is a ‘Fresh Expression’, when it
isn’t.
In all this lusting after the latest thing, we forget that
it is not techniques that save us, but Christ. In fact, both the fevered
adoption of trendy success stories and the false hopes placed on church leaders
amount to idolatry. They are a worship of something or someone other than our
God.
And not only that, the goals of our hopes can be wrong. Martyn Atkins,
this year’s President of the Conference, tells this story in his new book, Resourcing
Renewal about an incident in his first appointment:
‘What’s the purpose of
our church, why are we here?’ asked the leader [of the lay witness weekend].
‘To invite people to join us’, it was readily agreed.
‘Yes, but why?’ persisted the leader.
‘Well,’ said one of my stewards earnestly, ‘we’re all getting
older and someone’s got to do all the jobs – we can’t go on forever.’[1]
Do you see the problem? It was all about prolonging the
institution. There was nothing about wanting people to find Christ. They
construed church as a religious club to be maintained, rather than God’s
primary agent of his mission.
Idolatrous hopes and wrong goals for our hopes: we need a
corrective. Let me recommend this passage from Matthew 16 as one that will help
us do so. What constitutes hope for the Church?
1. A Church Where Christ Transforms People
Simon Peter makes the confession: ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the
living God’ (verse 16). It is this confession of faith that is entry to the
church, and its foundation. We are not dealing with a religious club, where –
as Martyn Atkins discovered – we need to invite more people to join us to do
the jobs and preserve the institution. We are a group of people centred on
living faith in Christ.
And Christ transforms the people who confess their belief
and trust in him. So Jesus replies, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For
flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I
tell you, you are Peter …’ (verses 17-18a). He renames him. No longer is he
Simon (the reed) but Peter (the rock). Yet this is the man who will soon
misunderstand him, who will deny him, and who will not always maintain the full
inclusion of the Gentiles in the early church.
But Jesus says, not Simon but Peter. He prophetically
renames him. He sees him as different. He knows he will fail within minutes. He
knows that will not be the final failure. But the renaming from Simon to Peter
is sign of hope. Jesus announces his project for Simon who is now Peter.
Confession of faith is not where discipleship ends, but where it begins. Jesus
loves us as we are, but loves us too much to leave us as we are. He is committed
to our transformation.
In the meantime, he doesn’t wait for our perfection. But – neither
does that mean Christ is content for us to stay as we are. So he gives us the
Holy Spirit to be partners in his mission, and to work transformation in us.
That isn’t to say ‘let go and let God’. God gives the Holy
Spirit to Christ-followers, but we have a responsibility to co-operate with the
Spirit in order for transformation to happen. What is our part in that? The
classic answer – and Broomfield friends have heard me say this several times –
is participation in spiritual disciplines. We make ourselves available for
Christ’s transforming work by his Spirit by practising spiritual disciplines.
Just as an athlete won’t win an Olympic medal without training, so we won’t
show the signs of spiritual
fitness and transformation without participating in the disciplines God
appoints for us.
So there are no shortcuts. A new Methodist year may well be
the time when we say we’ll commit to new patterns of prayer (alone or
together), Bible meditation, fasting, solitude, silence, giving, simplicity and
many of the other tried and tested disciplines. It’s time to renounce the ‘I
want it all and I want it now’ attitude of a microwave-cooked,
broadband-enabled society, in favour of what one writer called the ‘three
mile an hour God.’ He transforms us not only with an instant zap but also
in the slowness of discipline. Let us embrace that.
2. A Church Where Christ Is Lord
‘I will build my church,’ says Jesus
(verse 18). Would it be too shocking to suggest that there are occasions when
we think Jesus is not looking and we try to make off with his church, and make
it our own possession, our plaything, our hobby?
I have mixed feelings when I hear a church member say, ‘This
is my church.’ It can be positive: it can indicate that here is where I am
working out my discipleship. It can mean that here is where I have found a
welcoming community and the love of Christ. But it can mean, ‘I want things my
way.’ The idea that I can have worship how I like, and other things to my
taste, is one of the most damaging things in church life. If we take this
attitude, then when we don’t like something we become like the small child who
throws a tantrum, picks up the football and says, ‘It’s my ball, and I’m taking
it home.’
But Church is not something we buy at Toys R Us: it is
Christ’s body. It is the community of his Father’s kingdom. It is the people
living under the reign of God. It is Christ’s primary agent in mission. To
reduce it to a consumer choice is to insult Christ. It’s like the true story of
a lad who asked his father, ‘Which brand of church do we belong to?’, as if you
could reduce church to the status of Coca-Cola, McDonald’s or Tesco. Some of us
have chosen church on the grounds of ‘brand’, and then we think we own it. This
has to stop.
So I sense an old message being renewed for us: Jesus wants
his church back. It’s not that we offer the church to him as a present; it’s
that we return to him what is rightfully his. So if my first point about
spiritual transformation is a call to discipline, this second point is a call
to repentance. Let Jesus have the first and final words about his church. In his
words, not ours, we find hope.
3. A Church Built By Christ
As I said in my introduction, we might wrongly hope in the latest spiritual
fashions and success stories. And we want more people to join us – although sometimes
our motives are questionable. The New Testament paints a picture of a growing
church. In this passage, Jesus promises, ‘I will build my church’ (verse 18).
Jesus wants a growing church, but he builds it, not us. One trap
of a technological society is that we think we can deploy certain techniques
and then results are guaranteed. That has its place. But it is dangerous
nonsense when transferred to the church. In the church, we do not deal with
processes, engines and computer chips: we deal with people. Church growth is
not technique. It is the work of Christ. Our hope for growth is not in finding
the latest programme or adopting a new fad: our hope is in him.
What is our response, then? Is it to sit back and do
nothing? Is it to blame Jesus for numerical decline? No. We still have a
responsibility. It just isn’t for the growth. We are responsible for the health
of the church. Those who research church growth today say that Christ grows the
church, but our part is to create a healthy
church. Researchers such as the Anglican Robert Warren suggest
several qualities:
energised by faith; outward-looking focus; seeks to find what
God wants; faces the cost of change and growth; operates as a community; makes
room for all; and does a few things and does them well
At this point, let me simply call for a health
check, a spiritual ‘medical’ for our churches. The ministers of this District
have a medical every two years: maybe a medical for our churches wouldn’t be so
bad, either! When I had one of these medicals in January, they highlighted one
or two things I needed to change in order to be healthier. More exercise and
less chocolate would be the summary! What might a spiritual medical of our
churches ask us to change? Here are a few suggestions:
·
Stop treating
the church as if it were for us and not the world
·
Remember to forgive
one another
·
Stop using
power in the church to hurt others.
That will do for starters! Can you spot what’s
unhealthy in the church you serve? Will you address it?
4. A Church Focussed On Christ’s Future
‘I will build my church, and the
gates of Hades will not prevail against it,’ promised Jesus (verse 18).
How
easily we adopt a siege mentality. One evangelist I used to know said that
everywhere he travelled, the local Christians told him their town was the
hardest place for the Gospel. They couldn’t all be! But we may be prone to
think that the forces of evil are overwhelming us.
Jesus
will have none of it: ‘the gates of Hades will not prevail against’ his church.
Gates are not a form of attack, but a form of defence! When did an aggressive
pair of gates last clobber you? No. The gates of death – Hades being the place
of the dead – cannot cope with the forward movement of Christ’s church. We are
resurrection people, and death cannot stand in our way.
But
you may feel death is getting in the way of the Christian church. Members die,
and we don’t seem to be replacing them with younger Christians. We’re growing
the Church Triumphant, but not the Church Militant.
Yet
– death is ‘the last enemy.’ If death cannot cope with Christ and his Gospel,
then it means that everything the enemy and the forces of evil have at their
disposal is too weak to withstand the God of creation, his servant Son who
stoops to conquer from a Cross and leave a cold tomb empty.
How
might we respond? Well, we love all that resurrection talk. We thrill that
death will finally be defeated. But resurrection requires a death first. To experience
the all-conquering resurrection power of Christ in our churches is going to
require some death first. Are there aspects of church life that are no longer
suitable for today’s challenges? The methods of the nineteenth century or the
1950s need to die.
Yes,
we need to stay rooted in the Gospel that is Jesus. But where we have elevated
other things as if they, too, were non-negotiable, then a death is called for. That
can mean the style and content of worship, the ways of doing church, and so on.
Even good things may need to die. All God calls us to keep is faith in Christ
crucified and risen, and the Spirit-empowered life of the kingdom community. Everything
else is relative. There will be funerals before we live the resurrection hope
of Christ. But those communities willing to live the adventure of following
Jesus will find indestructible resurrection hope.
Conclusion
Do we want hope? It’s found in Christ. He transforms people; he is Lord of the
church; he builds the church; and he gives it resurrection hope.
But
each of these Gospel promises comes with a challenge: to spiritual discipline;
giving the church back to him; looking after the health of the church; and
seeing what needs to die.
Who
will embrace this adventure of hope?
[1] Martyn Atkins, Resourcing Renewal, p 10.
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