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CHURCH IMPROVEMENT : BUILDING A CHURCH THAT HONORS GOD AND LOVES PEOPLE BY LIVING TOGETHER AS A FAMILYMatthew 12:48-50 & Ephesians 2:11-19 INTRODUCTION I’m going to do something this morning that I’ve only done a half dozen times in the past ten years that we’ve been a church. I’m going to preach a topical sermon. My practice normally on Sundays is to examine a particular passage of the Bible, to explain what it is saying and attempt to apply it to our lives. This morning however I’m going to talk about what it means for the church to be a family. It is a biblical fact that every local church is God’s family. My aim is to think together about what difference it makes that we are a family. Many of you have heard me describe the wake up call that God mercifully gave to me in the early 1990’s as I was serving as the Campus Director for Campus Crusade for Christ at the University of Illinois. Through books and several friends I came to see that while I was engaged in lots of “spiritual” activity I really had no interest in God himself. I enjoyed my job of leading a team of ten full time Christian workers as we sought to share the gospel with every student at UI. I enjoyed being a husband to Jane and a father to our then five children. I enjoyed being an elder in our church and playing basketball and watching my boys play basketball and reading books and going hunting but I did not enjoy Jesus. I discovered in a fresh and powerful way that knowing God is not just part of life, it is life. God, by his grace, enabled me to see that knowing, loving, enjoying God himself as revealed in Jesus Christ is the point of life. Everything else must flow from that center and if it does not, then it is not only meaningless but wicked because God is the only person worthy of my love and faith. Concurrent with this awakening in my understanding of the gospel there was also an awakening to what it means to be engaged in the work of ministry in the church. My view of what the church is and what the church is supposed to do and how the church is supposed to function were radically altered during those early years of the 1990’s. The most influential person in that reformation was Eugene Peterson, a pastor and author. When I began to read his books I felt as though they had been written right to me. In his book, “Under the Unpredictable Plant”, Pastor Peterson tells the story of his early ministry. He had planted a church in a suburb in New Jersey. In the third year they built a building. The church by every external measure was succeeding, yet he knew that something was not right. He recounts the night he finally figured out what was wrong. He was sitting in the living room after supper one evening in June when his five-year-old daughter came to him and asked him to read her a book. He told her that he couldn’t because he had to go to a meeting at church. His daughter said to him, “This is the 38 th night in a row that you have not been home.” At that moment he woke up. He realized that he had not been doing what he was called to do. He realized at that moment that he could not be the pastor that he was expected to be and be a Christian at the same time. After recording that event he writes, “The American religious ship, well-outfitted as it is, full of passengers as it is, is the wrong place for the pastor to be. Religious activity on our continent is very popular. There is absolute religious freedom, which means that we can be religious any old way we want to. But the way we want to doesn’t turn out to be anything close to resembling the biblical originals. North American religion is basically a consumer religion. Americans see God as a product that will help them to live well, or to live better. Having seen that, they do what consumers do, shop for the best deal. Pastors, hardly realizing what we are doing, start making deals, packaging the God-product so that people will be attracted to it and then presenting it in ways that will beat out the competition. Religion has never been so taken up with public relations, image building, salesmanship, marketing techniques and the competitive spirit. Pastors who grow up in this atmosphere have no awareness that there is anything out of the way in such practices. It is the good old free enterprise system that works so well for everyone except the poor and a few minorities. Freedom of religion, one of the four freedoms that Americans esteem, has not flowered into maturity in religion. Our constitutionally protected freedom of religion has in fact turned out to be culture-enslaved religion…. Surveyed as a whole, we are immersed in probably the most immature and mindless religion, ranging from infantile to adolescent that any culture has ever witnessed…. A staggeringly high percentage of pastors actually collaborate with the enemy, (which is) the world that wants a religion that is mostly entertainment with occasional breaks for moral commercials.” As I awoke to the glory of Christ and to the glory of the church of Christ I developed a great desire, a passion, if you will, to be a pastor of a local church. At the time I was an elder in a local church and I was the pastor to a group of college students. However, I yearned to live with and shepherd a church: this haphazard collection of sinners who were seeking together to know and love Jesus and thus to know and love one another. I completed my seminary training and then began to look for a position in an already existing church. During that process it became clear that God wanted my family and I to move to Janesville to begin this church. As we moved here I had a few things to which I was absolutely committed. First, the purpose of the church is to know and trust and love and enjoy God. Jesus died to bring us to God, not so he could recruit a labor force to get his work done. He doesn’t need us. We need him. I was determined to make Jesus and his glory and his greatness the center of everything and nothing else. Second, I was determined to rely upon God’s word made effective by God’s Spirit. I did not want to engage in marketing the gospel or trying to package the word of God in a way that would make it more attractive. I am convinced that what you attract people with is what you attract them to. As I hope I demonstrated last week, God’s primary means of giving his life to dead sinners is by means of his word clearly taught and preached and shared in a wide variety of venues. If people are not attracted to Jesus Christ as he is revealed through this written word then I, for one, do not want to attract them to the church through some other means. The third thing that I was determined to do was to treat the church as if it were God’s family. Promoting relationships, not programs, is central to building a church. How you think about the church will determine how you relate to the people who are in it. Most of the current literature describing how to “do church” in the U.S. does not treat the church like a family but like a business, like a corporation or a retail outlet store in a mall. Other growing trends are to treat the church as a social service agency or like a coffee shop full of a variety of opinions and conversations but with no central, unifying reality. However, these are not biblical views of the church. The most common way that God talks about his church, as I aim to show you, is as his family. What I want to do is to consider together, how does being God’s family inform what we are to do as a local church? MAIN POINT Every local church is God’s family, therefore…I. We must think of ourselves as God’s family (Matthew 23:8-12, Ephesians 2:11-19) Most of us know that there are a variety of metaphors used in the NT to describe the followers of Jesus. We are called the “body of Christ” where Jesus is the head and each of us is a member of his body. We make visible the invisible Christ and do his work on the earth as his body. We are called a “holy temple” in which God lives by his Spirit. In other words we are the place where God is known and worshipped. We are the "bride of Christ" and thus a people who are loved by Jesus and who love him back. The second most common way that Christians are referred to in the NT is as "disciples." That is, we are in the school of Jesus and learning from him who God is and who we are and how we are to live in his world. However, the most common way that Christians and the Christian church are referred to in the Bible is as God’s family. Jesus first used this metaphor by calling God our Father on hundreds of occasions. As we heard read for us he calls all who do the will of God his brother and mother, that is, members of his family. He explicitly says in Matthew 23 that God is our Father and we are all brothers. That term, brothers, is used to describe Christians over 300 times in the NT. The only other word that even comes close is “disciples” which occurs around 200 times. Viewing the church as God’s family makes perfect sense in light of what we saw last week in 1 Peter 1:22-25. If each of us have been born again by God’s seed, that is, his word, made effective by the Holy Spirit, then of course that means that we all are the children of God and thus brothers and sisters, members of the same household, as Paul put it in Ephesians 2:19. In fact, this metaphor is so pervasive in the NT that Paul when instructing his young protégé pastor Timothy in how to relate to people in the church at Ephesus said to him, “Do not rebuke an older man but encourage him as you would a father. Treat the younger men as brothers, the older women as mothers and the younger women as sisters, in all purity.” It is without question that we are to think about our church and the relationship that we have to one another in familial terms. This isn't merely a metaphor but we really are God's family and thus brothers and sisters. There are a few things that are necessarily true if we, River Hills Community Church, are God’s family. First of all, we do not get to choose who is or who is not a member of our family anymore than you got to choose the members of your family of origin. Every biological family is formed without the consent or determination of any member of the family. Husbands and wives in our day can decide to not have children but once you decide to have children you have no control over whom will be your sons and daughters. Additionally, children did not pick their parents. God is the one who has made us his children and put us in this family. We don’t get to pick and choose whom we are going to treat as brothers and sisters anymore than biological children get to choose. Each of us is to consider every other professing Christian in this church as a brother or sister in Christ. Second, every local church should presume that God intends to increase the size of the family until Jesus returns. There is a fascinating editorial comment by the apostle John given by divine inspiration in John 11:51-52. It immediately follows John’s account of the meeting where the Jewish religious leaders plotted on how they were going to kill Jesus. Caiphas the high priest says, “You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.” John then inserts this comment: “He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God to bring them together and make them one.” Do you see what he is saying? God’s children are scattered all over the earth, both Jew and Gentile. Christ, by his death and resurrection, is bringing them all together into one family. He’s doing it in and through local churches. Therefore, unless you are prepared to say that God has no more children in Janesville, we should expect that our family is going to keep growing. We will grow through our biological children becoming Christians, through our non-Christian neighbors and friends and co-workers becoming Christians and through other Christians who move to town or are seeking another church joining us. This means that we must always be involved in making room for and warmly welcoming all those other children that God is gathering through us. It is a bad thing when families are not excited about the arrival of a new child into the family. It is a bad thing when a Christian church refuses to plan for and welcome the children of God whom he sends to us. We must always be excited about God’s adding to our family. Every new addition to the family needs to be welcomed and nurtured in and by our family. It seems that God is adding to our family here at River Hills Community Church. We do not currently have adequate physical space or numerical leadership to take care of all those whom he is sending to us. Therefore, this next year we are going to have to make some changes both to our building and to how we are organized in order to welcome and nurture all whom God sends to us. For many of us, thinking of our church as being a family is not a pleasant thought because our experience in a biological or adoptive family was not very pleasant. And it should be admitted that much that is dysfunctional in biological families also is present in God’s family because there are sinners in both institutions. We should not be sentimental and naïve when we think about the church as a family. It takes hard work and forgiveness and patience and good communication and acceptance of differences to make a strong family, whether it is a biological one or a spiritual one. However, as each of us grow to know our Father and older brother better we will discover the motivation and ability we need to be the family our Father wants us to be. Every local church is God’s family, therefore…
II. We must love and encourage each other as brothers without partiality (Romans 12:9 & Heb. 3:12-13) Romans 12:9 says, “Be devoted to one another in brotherly love.” Then in Hebrews 3:12-13 we are commanded, “See to it brothers that none of you has a sinful unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God but encourage one another day after day as long as it is still called today...” Next week Derek is going to talk about the nature of our love for one another. Today, I want to concentrate on the fact that our love and encouragement is to be directed at one another without distinction, without partiality. The affection we are to have for one another is not to be limited by any of those things that distinguish people from one another. As in a family, we are all obligated to love and encourage all the other members within the family. We are not to limit our affection to those who are just like us in some way but to have a mutual affection one to another. This doesn’t mean that all of us perform the same functions in each other’s lives but it does mean that we are open to and accepting of and interested in everyone who belongs to Christ. It does not mean that any one of us is able to know and care for every other person in the family. As families grow everyone has to pitch in and help out to care for one another. What this does mean is that there is to be no prejudice and no favoritism among us. Paul expresses the theological basis of this non-segregated, impartial love in a couple of key passages. In Galatians 3:26-28 he says, “ You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” In Ephesians 4:3-6 he says, “Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to one hope when you were called—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.” We are together as God’s family by a work of God’s grace and what we all share in common is his life and a mutual love for Christ. As I have said on many occasions, our love and unity is not due to a shared sociology but a shared theology. We are not in the same family because we all like the same music or the same football team or the same leisure activities or the same political philosophy or the same educational philosophy or the same parenting style or because we are in the same marital status or the same profession or the same age group or the same socio-economic group or the same race. We are in this family because we all have the same Father and we all love the same Savior. The organizing principle of the church, which is God’s family, is the shared life of God, which is manifest in our shared faith in Christ. This flies in the face of the organizing principle of our culture and of most churches. For all of our cultures vaunted “multi-culturalism” we remain a segregated culture not only along racial lines but along every other kind of line you can imagine. Our culture continues to splinter into smaller and smaller kinds of associations, aided by the internet and cable TV and all manner of technology that permits individuals to only associate with and listen to people who think and act and love exactly like themselves. And this segregation has infected the church as well. For the past thirty years the accepted wisdom of church planting and growth has been that you must organize churches on the basis of common sociological characteristics. Just like every business, each church is to identify its preferred market niche and then tailor its programs and structure and marketing strategy to that particular niche. This is the opposite of how God wants his church to be organized. We are a family and families are not segregated institutions but united by their common life and care for one another. One of the evidences that you belong to Christ is your delight in knowing and loving those who are sociologically different from you but like you in their love for Jesus. It is a dangerous thing to want to only hang out with Christians who are like you in some sociological category because that is no different from every non-Christian in the world. Everyone wants friends just like themselves. It is only the cross of Jesus that destroys every dividing wall between people and thus has the power to motivate people to be with those who are unlike them. One of the ways we are trying to express this as a church is through our intergender, intergenerational small groups, called Discovery Groups. We are seeking to intentionally organize these groups by including people from different age groups, different marital status, different spiritual backgrounds and different genders into the same groups so that we learn to care about others because they are Christians and not because they are in the same life situation. We are also seeking to implement this organizational principle in our Next Generation Discipleship strategy. We want our teens to be part of the whole church, not segregated off into some youth ghetto. We want our teens to want to be part of the church for the same reason we want adults to want to be part of the church, because they love Jesus or at least want to want to love Jesus. We expect our teens to be aiming at becoming adults and we expect our adults to engage with our teens as if they are adults in the making. This is not easy. It goes against the way we have been raised and the age-segregated culture we live in. It requires everyone, regardless of your age or life situation, to work at welcoming each other into our lives, as well as our homes. It requires that we take an interest in others even though they are interested in things that we have no interest in. We know how to do this because we do it in our biological families. How many parents have attended recitals and concerts and other events that they had no interest in attending but only because their children were involved? How many books have you read or TV shows and movies have you watched that you had no interest in but happily did so because your nieces and nephews wanted you to watch or read with them? When our family is at an extended family gathering, my brothers and sister talk with my children and I with theirs to find out what is going on in their lives. We take an active interest in their progress and in what they are doing because we love them as members of the family, even though they are in entirely different life situations from us. This is how it is to be in the church. We are interested in what others are interested in because we love them, not because we love what they love. Our Next Generation Team hosts events throughout the course of the year to provide opportunities for us to be together as a family. We have a canoe trip and picnic in the May, square dancing in the fall, an Uno tournament and other events. We don't participate in these events because we like the event but because we like the people. We come because our family is there and we love our family and enjoy being with our family. Every local church is God’s family, therefore…
III. The training of the immature is the responsibility of the mature (Ephesians 6:4 & 1 Thessalonians 2:6-13) God specifically commands parents to bring their children up in the training and instruction of the Lord. Every parent is to view themselves as God’s first instrument in the instruction of their children in the word of God and Christian living. Every parent is to view himself or herself as a pastor in relation to their biological children. Parents are to view the raising of their children not in isolation from the church but as an extension of the ministry of the church. Parents are part of God’s family and work to bring their children into the life of that family. You are parenting your children not first for their sake but for the sake of Jesus who has given them to you to bring into his church. The church, on the other hand, is responsible to motivate, equip and support every parent in that vital work of teaching his or her children the gospel. So parents should read every instruction given to pastors/elders/overseers in the Bible as given directly to them in relation to their own children. It is our aim, as a church, to motivate, equip and support parents in this work in several ways. First, twice each year we conduct the Faith Training Seminar which lays out the theological and practical basis for parents teaching their children the gospel in the context of the church as a family. We also have lots of resources available in the library and on the information table. We encourage the use of the Westminster Shorter Catechism as a tool for teaching children at home. Our next generation team has begun hosting a parent’s night once each quarter at the church so that parents can get together and talk about how it is going in passing on faith to their children. We hope to be able to provide mentoring opportunities in the future where we pair older, experienced parents with younger parents to assist and encourage them in this work. In addition to parents passing the faith to their own children, the Scriptures clearly teach that in every church there are first of all pastors/elders/overseers whose relationship to the entire church is that of parent to children. The apostle Paul clearly uses this metaphor to describe his relationship to the Thessalonian church as a model for pastors/elders when he says in his first letter to them: “As apostles of Christ we could have been a burden to you but we were gentle among you, like a mother caring for her little children. We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well since you had become so dear to us… we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children, encouraging, comforting and urging you to live lives worthy of God, who calls you into his kingdom and glory.” Every pastor/elder/overseer must view himself as a parent in relation to the congregation and the congregation is to view them in this way as well. We just sent out letters informing the membership that we are now taking nominations for elder. I would encourage you as you consider who to nominate to remember that elders are to be parents to the congregation. However, God does not only call those elected to the "official" leadership positions of the church to be parents in the church. God also calls other individuals from within the congregation to become spiritual mothers and fathers. These individuals are not parents in regard to the entire congregation but to certain individuals within the congregation. Every church needs a growing number of growing spiritual "parents" who take it upon themselves to invest time and affection and attention into other members of the church in order to help them grow up in Christ. This will become increasingly important as God gives new life to those who are currently outside the church and have not grown up within the church. Baby Christians need a "parent" who will nurture them and give them the word of God so that they can become established in the faith and grow into maturity in Christ. Over the thirty years I've been involved in ministry I have been privileged to watch this happen on numerous occasions. I met Tom shortly after he had become a Christian through the influence of a former girlfriend. He had not grown up in a church and was struggling to live like a Christian. I offered to meet with him to go over the basics of the faith and to help him get established in his faith. As we met he began to grow and out of his joy in Christ he began to share his faith. God used him to lead another young man named Jon to faith in Christ. Tom became Jon's friend and met with him to go over the same things that I had gone over with him and as Jon began to mature and to grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ he also began to talk with his friends about Christ. One of his friends, Mike, came to faith in Christ and Jon spent time with him and shared with him the same things Tom had shared with him and so Mike grew up in his faith and began talking with others about Christ as well. All of these men became involved in the same local church and in the same campus fellowship and gave leadership within those contexts as they continued to grow. Today, Tom and Mike are pastors and Jon is a lay elder in his local church. Each of them are leading their own families to Christ and continuing to be spiritual parents to others. While it is not God's will that all who "parent" others within the local church will end up as pastors/elders, this is the basic pattern by which the church of Jesus has grown through the years. God calls some of the older Christians in every church to intentionally pursue those who are younger in the faith and to be a "parent" to them, helping them to grow up in Christ. This is happening among us, but it needs to happen more. To that end we are continuing to develop and implement a process for identifying those God is calling to this work and then equipping and supporting them to be mothers and fathers among us. We aim to nurture all those scattered children of God that the Lord Jesus gathers through us by means of loving parents, both biological and spiritual, who deliver the life-giving and sustaining word of God to them. Every local church is God’s family, therefore…
© Copyright 2008 John Swanson.
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