We Are the Body of Christ, Part V

We Are Free. A sermon preached June 1, 2003.

by The Rev. David R. Harper

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We Are Free

Today I am concluding a series of five sermons on the theme, “We are the Body of Christ.”

I want to try and apply what I have described about the kind of family we are: catholic, evangelical, and Pentecostal. How can we possibly live out all those things, since some of them seem contradictory; there are paradoxical elements in those three streams. They don’t easily harmonize with each other. It’s difficult to homogenize them, to hold them together.

Trying to put them together is like making a marriage work. Imagine a husband and wife who come from very different backgrounds and temperaments. She is a nester. She wants to establish a home and live there for the next 25 years. He is an army brat, and throughout his life has moved around every couple of years. Staying anywhere much longer makes him very nervous. How do you put that together? Or what if one is a spender, and the other a saver. How do you put that together? Frankly, that’s what most marriages are like—trying to hold together disparate, contradictory things. The only way they can do that is by grace! Let me tell you that to hold the three streams together in a church requires the operation of grace, which mercifully God has given us.

I want to look at three ways in which we can integrate these three streams.

First, let’s talk about worship. I first discovered three streams worship in my life when, in 1981 I became the National Director of a ministry called Christian Advance Ministries. This was a ministry to the whole body of Christ in New Zealand. Every summer, in January and February, we would hold what we called “summer schools.” These were conferences that we offered in five or six major metropolitan areas around the country.

We invited speakers from all over the world, and large numbers of people turned out. What was unique about these conferences, which were celebrating the renewal movement, was that the crowds were drawn from every strata of the body of Christ. Roman Catholics and Anglicans (Episcopalians) were always the two largest groups, but Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Pentecostals, and people from non-denominational churches were strongly represented also. These were extraordinary events.

Let me tell you about the worship. It was always rich and profound, but we always ended those summer schools in the same way, with Holy Communion. Let me tell you how we did that.

At one end of the Communion table stood a Roman Catholic priest, and at the other end an Anglican priest, each a celebrant. It may sound confusing, but it was quite the opposite. The Roman Catholic attendees weren’t allowed to share Eucharist with us, because of their rules, so they had their own Communion station. There was liturgical discipline and order within those services, and yet there was total charismatic freedom —prophecy, tongues, and other gifts of the Spirit operating, accompanied by passionate evangelical preaching. I had never experienced worship like that before, that was so rich, so full, so wonderful, so unutterably profound. That changed me forever. When I became the National Director of that ministry, I was blessed by being able to direct and lead and encourage that kind of expression of worship. Those kinds of experiences made me want to encourage that kind of three streams worship wherever I went.

What you may be surprised to know is that this kind of three streams worship—where you have liturgy, evangelical preaching, and Pentecostal freedom—is springing up all around the world in the most unexpected places. Listen to this: “A peculiar blend of ecclesiastical styles has emerged within some African-American church circles. Initially it looks like a page out of a high church mass. Ministers wear white Roman collars, and elaborate vestments, pour Eucharistic wine into chalices, and recite the Nicene Creed. But a closer examination reveals that it’s neither Roman Catholic nor Episcopalian. The congregations engage in joyful singing, raise their hands high in worship, and pray in tongues. The setting is high church, but the Spirit is unmistakably Pentecostal.”

That scene is from a fledgling but steadily expanding movement towards high-church liturgy among some black Pentecostals. Led by three young black denominations, high-church Pentecostalism is redefining the way many blacks think of worship. Now there’s a man who is the president and Bishop of the United Pentecostal Churches of Christ. His name is Delano Ellis, and he was interviewed for this article. He is a member of one of these participating churches that, though Pentecostal in tradition, is embracing liturgy and evangelical preaching and finding a richness there that they had never known before. This is what he says: “What we are discovering is that order is not blasphemous.” Listen to this, from a black Pentecostal leader: “Order best represents God.”

But order with freedom. You don’t need to decide which you prefer: uninhibited freedom or dead order. That’s the tension a lot of people experience. They say, “If you have order, liturgy, it’s dead, it’s the same thing every week.” And other people say, “We just want freedom!” Yet people who just want freedom often find themselves becoming legalistic with their freedom! Three-streams worship is immensely powerful, and we covet it here at Church of the Apostles. We are very intentional about how we do Sunday worship here, and that is our model.

We plan our services here on Sunday mornings meticulously. The music is built around the theme of the scriptures, the praise band rehearses, and we all come here well prepared. But let me tell you something: we welcome interruptions!

We don’t want to hold on so tightly to what we’ve prepared that, if the Holy Spirit wanted to interrupt and move us in a different direction, we’d say, “Sorry Lord, our plan trumps yours.” Perhaps you aren’t aware of this, but Gary will frequently change the music if he senses the Spirit moving us in a different direction. Even though the worship is prepared, even though there’s a plan, the plan is always flexible. The plan implies order, but the flexibility allows for the spontaneous moving of the Holy Spirit and our desire to respond to that. It’s very, very powerful. We want order and freedom here at Apostles. We want the Word and the Spirit, and we don’t have to decide which of those we prefer.

The way we can personally integrate three streams worship into our lives is to make sure that, in our own prayers, we don’t just rely on inspiration and spontaneity. If you do, you’ll hardly ever pray! If you wait in the morning until you feel inspired to pray, the inspiration will become less and less frequent. The fact is that we need to bring in catholic order, and catholic discipline, into our prayers. We also need to make sure that the word is central to our life of prayer; and in our prayers we need to expect the intervention of the Holy Spirit to inspire us and to take us into places we may not have expected to go when we started.

Second, let’s talk about authority. Here we have some very difficult conundrums. In the catholic stream, authority is expressed hierarchically, it is centralized. It is to do with the office of the incumbent: the bishop, the clergy, ministry leaders. In our Anglican tradition, we place a high value on order because the catholic tradition is part of our heritage.

The evangelical stream is also part of our heritage. It locates authority within the word, within an egalitarian church structure, and is very suspicious of hierarchical leadership. The authority within the evangelical model is vested within the congregation, which values the priesthood of all believers.

In the Pentecostal model, authority is vested in whoever has the anointing. Whoever seems the most inspired will be given authority in the congregation. It could be anyone, and it can change at any time. How do you hold all those things together?

Hebrews 13:17 seems to support the catholic notion that leaders are people who need respect, and the office of leader something that the church needs to recognize: “Obey your leaders, and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you, as men who must give an account. Obey them, so that their work will be a joy not a burden, for that would be of no advantage to you.” You think the writer might have said, “that would be of no advantage to the leaders if their work’s a burden.” In fact, the congregation will suffer if their lack of honoring those in leadership puts a burden on those leaders. Under those conditions the leaders will be consumed with the burdens, and won’t be able to release the gifts that God wants them to give to their congregations.

Three-streams leaders understand the importance of what Hebrews say, but they know there’s more. They recognize that it’s not just the office which is sufficient to give them authority. They also understand the need to operate under a continuing fresh anointing of the Holy Spirit. They will daily go before God to ask for a new infilling of the Holy Spirit, so they can grow in their gifts of leadership. They know that it isn’t enough to think, “I’m the rector, I’m a vestry member, I’m a warden ... and my hard-earned office is all I need to be effective.”

The third thing that a three-streams leader will do is not simply hold to the dignity and significance of office and seek an anointing: he or she will also understand his or her responsibility to equip the saints for the work of ministry. A three-streams leader will not keep all ministry to him or herself, but will understand the evangelical idea that all of God’s people are part of a priesthood of all believers, and that we are the body of Christ only as we participate together in the ministry.

There’s tension in that. If leaders hold onto their office and wear that role, it creates a very clear demarcation between the role of the leader and the role of the congregation, which helps clarify mutual expectations. But where the leader, who bears that office, is also functioning under an anointing and empowering of the saints for the work of ministry, the lines of demarcation can become blurred. It takes a great deal of maturity on the part of the body of Christ not to turn that into a tug-of-war, where the congregation and those in leadership are vying for power, neither respecting the other. The leaders resent the fact that the people want places of leadership within the body of Christ, while the congregation resents the fact that those in office are lording it over them. Balancing the three streams in terms of how we deal with authority requires great grace and great maturity, but it releases such freedom when we can get it right.

But three streams congregations—not just leaders, but entire congregations—have a responsibility that goes even beyond obeying and submitting to those in leadership over them. They are called to prayer. Look at Hebrews 13:18: “Pray for us.” “We’ve got the office of leadership,” he is saying, “but we can’t discharge that stewardship unless you pray for us. We can’t function under God’s anointing unless you pray for us. And even though we are sure that we have a clear conscience, and desire to live honorably in every way; even though we seek to walk with the Lord, obey what he is telling us to do, and lead with boldness—you still need to pray for us, otherwise we’re not going to lead in the way that God would have us lead.” Church, pray for your leaders.

There’s a further application to this: those who bear office have also got to perform according to Biblical standards of faithfulness. There’s a great example that Paul speaks about which relates to fathers: “Fathers, don’t exasperate your children.” In other words, if you bear the office of being a father, you’ve got to perform in that office. You can’t just say to your children, “I’m your Dad, so I can lord it over you, I can really treat you as I choose.” No, I’ve got to operate under the anointing. I’ve got to ask God, if I’m a father, to be anointed in that ministry. And I must also equip my children for ministry. We have to perform within our God-given places of authority, all of us.

And here is the final area I want to talk about: ministry. I’d like you to imagine two churches. These are fictitious, but they are not atypical. Each is wanting to become more effective in evangelism. One church, based on their tradition, calls people to pray. They hold nights of prayer, and seasons of prayer, and they fast as a church, because they expect they will discover how to do evangelism through prophecy, through scripture. So they are listening very carefully to God, asking him to speak to them about how they are to become more evangelistically effective.

Church number two forms a committee. They open their meetings with prayer, but they do demographic studies, they figure out who’s living in the community. They take a lot of time and trouble to try and understand where God has put them, so they can then develop programs to reach out to those people.

Which of those two is right? I tell you, there’s tension in Church of the Apostles over these things. When we’ve done the Gallup survey, I’ve heard people say to me—and it’s a reasonable thing to say: “That’s a worldly way of approaching things; we shouldn’t need George Gallup to help us to understand the church. We just need to turn to the Lord.”

Three-streams churches say both approaches are equally valid. You may recall a famous statement made by William Booth that addresses both models: “Work as if everything depended upon your work, and pray as if everything depended on your prayer.” “If you are going to build a tower,” he said in effect, “for heaven’s sake, figure out, do an analysis of your resources, to see whether you can complete it. Use your minds, use your planning skills. It’s not just a matter of prayer, it’s a matter of applying your mind.” On the other hand, if we only apply our minds, without prayer, then we may find ourselves moving into places that God doesn’t want us to go. The fact is that both are right, and each needs the other. The planning church needs to have the passion for prayer of the first, but the first church needs to have the commitment to planning that the second had. Programs are not unspiritual, and prayer is not impractical.

Three-streams churches won’t fall into the trap of spiritualizing reality and despising the planning and programmatic elements of the life of the church. They understand the need for the new wine, which is inspiration, but they are also very careful to create new wineskins, which are the structures. That is why we are a purpose-driven, prayer-empowered church. “Prayer-empowered” releases the wine. “Purpose-driven” is the wineskin. Unbalanced churches will either focus only on developing the wineskin, or only on the wine.

How does a three-streams church focus its ministry? Very quickly, a three-streams church, if it is evangelical, and filled with the Spirit, will seek to evangelize. They won’t be tempted to grow complacent and inwardly focused, wanting to hoard for themselves the richness God has given their congregations. They will want to reach out and share Jesus with others around them.

A three-streams church also understands the catholic commitment to service to the poor. There’s tension in churches over that. I’ve heard people in this church over the years say, “If we go out on grate patrol, but aren’t actually preaching to the people on the street, should we even continue doing the ministry?”

If we’re not a three-streams church, we will think that we can only serve people if we’re also giving a verbal message. That would ignore a whole part of the biblical tradition, which says: “By their fruit, you shall know them,” and “Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it to me.” If you read that passage carefully, you will find that there’s nothing about preaching with words. It is all about visiting people in prison, it’s about clothing the naked, it’s about feeding the hungry, it’s about looking after those whom the world despises and neglects. It’s all about caring. Jesus is saying is that inasmuch as you show that kind of love to the least of these my brothers, that is your sermon. You are showing me to people who won’t see me any other way. If you are self-conscious about proclaiming the message, they will not think that your caring is authentic. A three-streams church will have no conflict about service to the poor.

Often churches that serve the poor don’t really understand much about evangelism, but the opposite is also true: many churches that are into evangelism don’t know much about service to the poor!

A three-streams church sees that both are part of our devotion to Jesus and to our serving him. There’s so much more that we could say, but you see, these three streams provide such a richness and a challenge to us as a church, to live into the gospel in ways that will often involve tension. That’s ok; it’s just like a marriage. It’s ok to have tension in marriages, because the goal is to bring disparate elements together and try to homogenize them into a life-giving relationship.

That’s what we are doing here at Church of the Apostles. It’s ok to have tension, and we ask God’s grace to help us to discover what it means to live in that place. If we don’t, we will cut off the part that we don’t like, and go for those things that are easy and congenial to us.

Why live in this three-streams way? Because Psalm 46, verse 3 says: “There is a river whose streams make glad the City of God.” When we live into these three streams there is a joy that is released—but there’s something else. Paul writes, and you heard it read in the passage this morning, “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”

Church, God is calling us to live a life of freedom; a life where we take every part of this family heritage of ours, and learn to live together and bear with one another. As we accept the challenge, he will give us joy and freedom. Let’s walk this way together.