The Power of Vision, Part III

Authentic Community. A sermon preached August 29, 2004

by The Rev. David Harper

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Authentic Community

Father, help me, by the power of the Spirit, to reveal Jesus and to bring forth his word. Come now and plant that word in our hearts, that we might, as your people, grow into a community where you, Lord Jesus, are enthroned as the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. We ask this in his name. Amen.

A couple of weeks ago I began this series on “The Power of Vision.” I’d originally planned to preach about something different, but after receiving feedback from a recent “vestry exchange”—where vestry members are available after our services to interact with the congregation—it became clear that many of you wanted to hear about our church’s vision. I heard the Lord in what you said, which is why I’m preaching this series in the summer!

Vision takes hold of our lives and moves us into new places! I explained to you that our church has a vision, or calling statement. It is “To make visible the power of God’s love so that all will come to know Christ.”

Last week I addressed the question, “How are we going to do that? How are we as a church going to make the power of God’s love visible to the world, and to each other?” I preached about dynamic worship, and today I want to talk about authentic community. Before I get into that, I want to recommend a book by Andy Stanley, called Visoneering. It’s a wonderful book about vision, and will have, I think, some important insights you can apply to your own life as well as giving you insights as to what God is doing here within our church It is on the book table at the back of the sanctuary.

Up until 1973, I had thought that the notion of Christian community— fellowship, the life of the church—was pretty non-controversial; something rather self-evident and almost bland. You know, you just do church, which is all about worship and fellowship and how we structure those things.

That notion dramatically changed for me through something that happened that year. I was giving a Lenten mid-week teaching series in the church where I was then rector. In the earlier weeks of Lent, I had taught about some things I thought were really quite controversial for that congregation, which was highly resistant to the renewal of the Holy Spirit.

When I taught them about baptism in the Holy Spirit, with some trepidation, light bulbs popped on and they responded with enthusiasm. I thought, “Thank you Jesus. This is a huge breakthrough!” The last talk I gave, in Holy Week, was about community, how God is calling us to live together and love one another as the people of God. When I’d finished, I experienced an outburst of rage such as I had never encountered before. One parishioner, an expert in the Bible, literally banged his Bible down on the table where he was seated, and shouted—so every one could hear—“He doesn’t preach the word!”

I realized then how, when we talk about authentic community, we are talking about something that gets really close to the heart of where we’re living our lives. We’re talking about how God intends us to live together. This is where the rubber meets the road, so brace yourselves! This morning I’m not just going to be preaching something bland, where we all nod in assent and say, “Well yes, how nice to be the church.” I’m preaching on something that will challenge and extend us.

I want to begin by taking you into I John chapter 1, verse 3, which you heard read in this morning. I want to read it out the way most of us think John really meant to express it. “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard so you may be born again and go to heaven.” “What John really wanted to achieve when he proclaimed the Gospel to his readers,” we think, “was to get them to born again, to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and have their ticket stamped so that they would go to heaven and enjoy the gift of eternal life.” The reason we think that’s what he should have said is because we tend to view the faith, not in terms of community, but in terms of our own individuality. That is why, when we talk about community, it is so controversial. We are not talking about me, we are talking about us.

What John actually said, of course, is totally, radically and completely different. “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us.”

“The reason why we preached the gospel to you Christians in this particular church,” he is saying, “was not just so you could be born again—of course that’s what we wanted to happen—but so you could have fellowship with us. Our goal was to bring you into the body of believers that we are part of, and begin to grow with us, relate to us, and to become an authentic community with us. The whole point of preaching the gospel is so you come into our church!”

Over my years here, I have heard over and over again this response when I have commended evangelism: “David, that’s self-serving. We don’t want to evangelize people so they can come into the church. We just want to evangelize people, and then let them go wherever they want! What really matters is their relationship with Jesus.” You need to know that that is absolutely antithetical to Holy Scripture. John preached the word so that those who heard the word and responded and believed could have fellowship with him. That is the goal. That is the purpose.

God’s second purpose for our lives is community.

Rick Warren puts it well: “You were formed for God’s family.” You weren’t formed just for an individual personal relationship with Jesus, but for a personal relationship with Jesus’ family.

Let me explain this from another perspective. When you and I were born, most of us were fortunate enough to be born into a family! That’s the way it normally happens! For some it was an adoptive family. For others it was a biological family, or a foster family. When we were born, there was a community waiting expectantly for us. The moment we arrived on planet earth, they began to give us things and do things that we couldn’t do for ourselves. They began to feed us, to love us, to pick us up, and talk to us. If they hadn’t done that, we probably wouldn’t have made it. If somebody had just stuck a bottle in our mouths, and left us to drink it on our own, we would at best have become seriously malnourished in our development—and not just physically. We might even have died. Even if we survived under those conditions, we would have become very, very damaged people.

When we are born again, it is exactly the same. When we are born a second time, the reason why we need to come into fellowship is that we aren’t going to make it unless a community receives and loves us. It is absolutely essential. It’s not optional, it’s not an elective, and it’s not just an ideal. It’s not something to hope will happen. If it doesn’t happen, we’re not going to make it; it’s as simple as that. We are members of one another. We are siblings in the family of God. Some preachers would probably have you turn around at this point—I’m not going to do this!—and say to your neighbor, “I’m your sibling!” Some of you would be saying that to your spouse, some to a young person sitting beside you, others to somebody you’ve never met before. But we are all siblings. To use the New Testament language, we are members of one another.

So then, if we are born, not just into the Lord Jesus but into his church, and if that church is to be an authentic community, what should that community look like? I want to say two things about it.

Firstly, it’s a community where we are clear about who’s in charge. John said, “so that you may also have fellowship with us.” But then he adds something critical: “and our fellowship is with the Father, and with his son, Jesus Christ.” It isn’t our fellowship, it’s His. Our fellowship is with you, but it begins with Him. This is not our community, it’s his. It’s not my church, it’s his. Sometimes people say to me, when they know I’m rector of a congregation, “How are things going in your church?” And I want to say, “It isn’t my church!” Our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.

Let me tell you something else: It’s not your church either! I’ve got no right to cast a vision that’s just some fanciful notion of my imagination. We’ve got no right to determine the rules of who comes to this church and who doesn’t, who’s welcome and who’s not. We have absolutely no right to set any ground rules about anything. We have no right, we who preach, to decide what we’re going to preach independently from Him. It’s all from him. We pray. We seek the Lord. Then, as we prepare, we ask the Lord to breathe into the material, because even if it’s the right word, it needs to be right for today—not just right in a universal sense because it’s true, but right because it’s true for us now. Everything belongs to him. And that is very, very challenging. If this is his fellowship and not mine or yours, then we all have to take our sticky little fingers off wanting to control what happens, and seek the face of the Lord. We are to let go of control and let the Lord reveal what he wants us to be. This is his fellowship. It’s not ours.

We are accountable to him for our stewardship, those of us in leadership, and that’s a very, very high calling and responsibility. Sometimes we get it wrong, and when we do we need to repent and to turn back to the Lord.

If it’s his church, then He’s the one who’s called you here. He’s the one who’s brought you into this fellowship. You’re not just here because of your choice. Your choice was involved in it obviously, but you’re here because of his calling, and therefore we are not a club of the like-minded. We are very different people. We’re different ages. Obviously we’re different genders. We are people of different life experiences, educational levels, color, and just about every possible thing.

Do you know that out in the parking lot, if you walk out there and look on the rear bumpers of cars, you will see some bearing “Bush/Cheney” stickers, and you will see others with “Kerry/Edwards” stickers. As far as I’m aware, neither Bush nor Kerry are candidates to become head of the Church! The Lord Jesus is the head of this Church. And there is great diversity in him because it’s his family, it’s his community. We are not defined by what kind of bumper stickers we put on the back of our vehicles. We are defined only by our faithfulness to the Lord Jesus Christ. And therefore, if it’s his community and not ours, we are able to receive one another and to accept one another despite all that diversity. That’s how it works.

And because it’s his church that means that we point one another back to him, because he is the one who, we trust, runs this place. If somebody comes up to you and shares something really wonderful about their lives that they are very excited about, you rejoice with them—and then you point them to the Lord. You say “Isn’t he wonderful?” Yousay that because the goal of this community isn’t to point people to ourselves or to themselves, but to Him. If someone comes up to you with a very different kind of word, and is complaining about something or gossiping about someone, you simply say “Could I point you back to the Lord Jesus? Maybe you need to go to the person you’re talking about. Maybe you need to forgive.” We don’t bend towards the person. We don’t point them towards ourselves in a codependent kind of sympathy. We love them, and we point them to Him. If we don’t do things like that, then, frankly, we degenerate into a club and become about as useful to the kingdom of God as the local golf club. Golf club members can have a lot of fun because they enjoy the game, but it’s not changing the world. It’s not making a difference. It’s not transforming lives. Maybe people’s games are becoming transformed as they get better at the art of swinging a golf club, but it’s not changing the way things are on planet Earth. So we need to be very clear about who’s in charge.

Here’s the second thing: we are radical in how we live. I John 1:5-6: “This is the message he’s given us to announce to you. God is light, and there’s no darkness in him at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.”. I want to draw out two aspects about how our lives are to be radical lives.

The first aspect is this: our lives are open to God and we accountable to him That’s radical living.

Mostly, we want to live without being accountable to anybody except ourselves. Paul writes in Romans, chapter 14, “For none of us lives to himself alone, and none of us dies to himself alone. If we live, we live to the Lord [there’s the accountability]. If we die, we die to the Lord. So whether we live or die we belong to the Lord.” We don’t live our lives independently of God. If we are accountable to Him, that means that where you’ve come from doesn’t matter to the Lord: your sexual orientation, your sexual history, your past experience of life, is totally irrelevant. The fact is that you have heard the message of the gospel, and now you’ve come to have fellowship with us in this church. His arms are open to all, and so are ours. But here’s the challenge: having brought you into the fellowship of his church, he expects you to change. He expects you to grow. He expects you to become like our Lord Jesus. He doesn’t want any of us to stay where we were when he found us. So being open to God, being accountable to God, means that we are changing, that we are growing. Our lives are being transformed.

We should be able to say: “Compared with last year, I’m beginning to get some victory and success now in areas where I was chronically failing. I think my life is beginning to resemble the Lord Jesus just a little bit more, and that is because of the fellowship. It’s happening because of the ministries of the church, like the Healing Center, the preaching on Sundays, the Bible studies, and all the other means that help me grow.”

All these ministries and opportunities help change and transform us. If we’re not changing, if we’re still stuck where we were five years ago, perhaps we need to ask, “Lord, am I being accountable to you for my life?”

The second aspect is that our lives are open to one another. We’re transparent. “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his son purifies us from all sin.” I can’t think of a better way of illustrating this than to tell you a story. Though the man whose story it is has shared it publicly with the church, I don’t think I should use his name. He came to me when he was brand-new to this church, around 1990 or 1991. He came into my office, and told me about a very, very deep secret that had that filled him with deep shame. Because he shared it with me as a pastoral confidence, he and I were the only two people in Church of the Apostles who knew about it. He felt he couldn’t share it with the body of Christ, not because he was unwilling to on principle, but out of a fear that people wouldn’t know what to do with it, and they might reject him. In other words he wasn’t sure if this was a safe place to be transparent.

He belonged to a home group, and one night he decided that his group might be able to deal with what he wanted to share. It was a huge risk on his part, an enormous risk—but he took it. He told me afterwards—this is my language, I don’t remember exactly how he put it—how he was surprised by joy. The home group embraced him, loved him, and accepted him. They didn’t try to fix him, they just accepted him. That was hugely instrumental in giving him victory and encouragement to move through that area of brokenness. He’d already achieved a great measure of victory, but what happened in the home group that night took it to another dimension.

“If we walk in the light . . . ” This person walked in the light by his transparency before his brothers and sisters. Now the onus was on them to walk in the light with him, and not reject him or be legalistic Christians by throwing the Bible at him, or withdrawing—all the games we can play when we become uncomfortable when someone’s story impinges on our own unhealed and unresolved areas. If were not quite sure what to do when others make us uncomfortable, it’s tempting to reject or stiff-arm them, holding them at a distance. That kind of behavior is self-protective; it’s designed to protect ourselves from the things we’re not ready to deal with.

That home group was magnificent. But look what John says happens when we do what that man did. “We have fellowship with one another!” Why? Because we have demonstrated that we can love each other even through the things that might otherwise separate us. But there is even more: “The blood of Jesus purifies us from all sin.” We discover God’s forgiveness and deliverance by being transparent with one another, loving each other, praying for each other, and accepting each other in these difficult times in our lives. It takes courage, but it’s what an authentic community does. It’s the way the church is meant to work. And if it doesn’t work like that, then were the golf club again, where the talk is mainly about golf and things superficial. That’s not the church of Jesus Christ. It’s much less than Jesus wants.

If that’s what authentic community looks like, how does it make visible the power of God’s love so all will come to know Christ? I want to say three things.

Firstly, this kind of community reveals Jesus. You heard in the gospel this morning, “May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you’ve loved me.” Frankly, church, our words aren’t enough. Most people out there have heard the Christian message. On radio, on television, even if they’ve never been to church, they’ve heard it. You can’t live in America without hearing the gospel. But many who have heard it are not particularly impressed. They may agree or disagree with it. But even if they agree, it may not move them to want to give their lives to Jesus or join a church. What people need, what a skeptical world is wanting, is to see the Gospel lived out. Christianity, like Islam, is a way of life. It’s not just a set of beliefs. And the whole notion of authentic community is that we can’t present the gospel unless we are living the gospel. That’s why this whole notion of community is a very robust message.

My family and served in the New Zealand diocese of Christchurch for a number of years. I used to get invitations from all over the diocese to conduct preaching and teaching missions. Whenever I traveled, I would always take one or two people from my congregation with me for prayer support. This particular time I was down in South Canterbury, doing a week-long mission in a small rural church. Peter Prosser, a member of my church, accompanied me. He was ten years my senior, a very successful accountant with the biggest practice in town. He was fabulously well off, because he was so good at what he did. He was organized. He was a detail person. He and I complemented each other. We stayed in the South Canterbury rectory during the week of mission. I preached, and he prayed.

At the end of the week, we were back in the rectory with the rector for a debriefing session with the rector, Struan Duthie. I asked Struan how he felt the week had gone. He said some kind things, but then said something that stunned me. “I have to tell you that the thing that made the biggest impact on me was seeing the relationship between you and Peter. You are so different in every way. But I’ve seen you serving each another. You lay down your lives for each other. Peter, I’ve seen you laying down your life for David. David, I’ve seen you laying down your life for Peter.” And then Struan said, “That’s what I’ll never forget.” Authentic community reveals Jesus.

Here’s the second thing: this kind of community releases God’s power.Look at Acts 2,:42-44: “Many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles . . .” That verse is like the filling in a sandwich: we need to look at the verses right before and after it. Both describe the life of the Christian community in Jerusalem: what they did and what they were like. The verse before describes how “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer.” Then we learn about the miraculous signs and wonders. After that, it continues, “all the believers were together and had everything in common.”

The release of God’s healing power wasn’t all about the apostles’ ministry; it was about the life of the church! How was it that when Peter walked down the streets of Jerusalem, even if his shadow fell on sick people sitting there at the side of the road, they would be healed? Why was that happening? Was he some great wonder worker? No! It was because he was part of an authentic community living the gospel. It was the prayer of that community, the life of that church, that enabled him to do things that he could never have done on his own.

The Lord wants to work more and more signs and wonders through Church of the Apostles. We are already seeing this happening. We are seeing people being born into the family of God. We are seeing bodies being healed, lives being transformed, and so much more at The Father’s Blessing, through the prayer rail ministry, and in many other ways such as Alpha. As we attend to the work of the community, as we become authentic as the body of Christ, more and more we’re going to see these signs and wonders happening, and they are going to bring people to want to come into this fellowship to ask “What is going on in this place?”

Here’s the final thing that this kind of community produces to make visible the power of God’s love: it results in growth. “And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” That’s put almost as a postscript at the end of that Acts 42-47 passage. After describing the extraordinary life of that infant church, Luke adds, almost as a throw-away comment: “Oh by the way, the Lord added daily to their number, those who were being saved.”

I don’t know that anyone in Jerusalem was looking around their congregation and, seeing some empty chairs, praying, “God, you’ve got to fill this place.” I’m sure they wanted people to come in, but their focus wasn’t growth. The goal of our church isn’t growth either. Growth is the by-product of a healthy Christian family living an authentic life as a community. Of course I want growth, and so do you; but it’s a by-product. If I or any of us were to make growth our greatest desire, we would begin distorting the gospel and manipulating God to make it happen. Acts teaches us that when we are living the way God wants us to live, growth is going to happen, and the Lord is the One who does it. “The Lord added daily . . .”

Years ago I met Moses Tay. He was Bishop of Singapore at the time, a magnificent leader. In a Bible study he referred to the words of Jesus to the Apostle Peter: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” Moses went on, “Jesus did not call us to build the church, but to proclaim the kingdom. He will build the church.” But we need to add that Jesus won’t build any congregation that calls itself “church”—not if it’s a golf-club church. He only promises to build a church which he is able to claim as “my church.” He says to us: “You proclaim the kingdom, preach the gospel, heal the sick, be an authentic community, create a fellowship where I am center and Lord. If you attend to that work of the kingdom, I will build your church.” Growth results from being an authentic Christian community.

God has given us an incredible vision to make visible the power of God’s love so all will come to know Christ. Authentic community is the second way in which we are going to bring that about.