“Do You Know What the Church Is Called To Do?”

Sermon from Sept. 8, 2013   First in the Missional Context Series

Text: Matthew 28:16-20

            Here is the checklist for doing church:

1.      Are we worshipping Jesus with joy and wonder? ___

2.      Have we spelled “Presbyterian” right? ___

3.      Do we have a clear and compelling vision statement for the church?  ___  Is it easily remembered?

4.      Do we have a plan for church-wide response and implementation ?

There, I think we have gotten stuck.

It is time for this church to begin its Journey to implement our vision.  Step one is to discover our ‘missional context’.  That is technical jargon for how a congregation “does church”.

             Our church has been participating in the Jeremiah Journey process with sister churches in our Presbytery.  The first portion of that Journey was done more behind the scenes, setting up a team, getting to know one another, considering where this church comes from.

That culminated in our church’s “conference on the past”, conducted at our 210^th anniversary celebration.  Generations of church members have strong affection for their time as youth in this church, from our current group on back.  Best memory: Shirley Petersen calling the Session members the ‘bully boys’.

Now, our Jeremiah Journey is going to become far more visible in the life of the church.  JJ comes out of the Center for Parish Development, an organization doing the best work today helping churches do what God is calling them to do.

Our aim is to take their materials, connect them to Scripture, and consider seriously where we are and what our context is as we take the next step on our checklist. 

            Using the JJ definition, a church comes together to do its work out of ‘common view’, a ‘collective understanding’ as Christians.  The challenge is trying to define that common view when we, as individuals, come out of such divergent backgrounds.  Is the Biblical ‘bottom line’ that we are called to work from?   

            I believe it is the Great Commission, Jesus’ final words to his disciples in the gospel of Matthew.   He begins, “All authority on heaven and earth has been given to me.” His disciples work in the earthly to make disciples of all nations by 1. Baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  2. Teaching obedience to Jesus.   

            That is the Bible’s “common view” of the church, its “collective understanding” for the church.  Each individual church is then challenged to figure out how to do that work in their own context.  Different people, with different backgrounds and differing needs, they come together in a church environment, they unite to achieve something bigger than themselves.  Achieving this unity is a common human experience.

            This kind of unity can happen on a grand scale, organized and spread across nations.  Remember the Cold War? US vs. USSR?  Before we were enemies, we united against the greater evil of Nazi Germany in the Second World War.

            This kind of unity can be spontaneous and organic.    Remember the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid?  The Soviet Union was the power house hockey team, built on soldiers, therefore ‘amateurs’, but full time hockey players.  And the Red Army Team was consistently one of the five best hockey teams-including the NHL-in the world.   Then came along a team of true amateurs, young men from the United States, who took those Russians to school American-style, and took the country along with them.  

            This kind of unity can bring together the strangest bed-fellows.  In the last months, when reports of how the National Security Agency is conducting broad-based spying operations on American citizens went public, Liberal Democrats and Conservative Republicans joined hands, to protest. 

            This kind of unity can simply be people reacting to a situation.  I am thinking of how Miley Cyrus’ onstage antics at the MTV Video Music Awards united people in disgust and distaste.

            Now, come back to church.  This unity is brought to us by Jesus.  Each of us is called into a personal relationship with him, each of us coming to the foot of the cross, each of us surrendering our lives to him, each of us born again into new lives of grace and salvation in Him.  

            Then, as a congregation, we reach out with the gift of grace and salvation to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all Jesus’ commands.

            This is the Bible’s common view, the bible’s collective understanding of what it means to ‘do church’.  The next step is to figure out how to do that.  And we start with our vision, ‘being a neighborhood in God’s Kingdom’.  Now, back to our checklist.  What’s next?  JJ encourages us to figure out where we are.  What’s our context?  There are questions we have to answer.  

            “Who do we say we are?”  What is our particular identity as the First Presbyterian Church of Perth Amboy, New Jersey in September of 2013.

            “What is going on out there?”  We do not live in a vacuum.  There are particular challenges and circumstances going on in the community around us, in the nation around us, in the world around us that affect who we are and how we react to things.

            “What is going on in here?”  We are the church.  What are we, in fact, doing or failing to do at this time in this place?  What attitudes, what fears, what hopes, what expectations, what stuff, mental and emotional and spiritual, do we bring to the table?

            These are the same questions the disciples faced when Jesus commissioned them.  They too needed to know who they were and needed a plan to move forward.

            Seen the movie, “The Avengers”?  Captain America and Iron Man have a crisis.  Cap is thinking ‘team’, thinking united effort.  “We need a plan of attack!”  Iron Man replies as the lone sentinel, the solo hero, “I have a plan…attack!”  But in the end, Captain America is right.  They need the team and they need a plan to win the day.

            Here at the giving of the Great Commission, the disciples are the team.  These words are their Vision.  And when they receive the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, they will have their plan to carry out Jesus’ vision.

            We are the team of the First Presbyterian Church of Perth Amboy.  We have a Vision.  And we are going to use the Holy Spirit to inspire us with the truth of Scripture as we test these best practices for a church to discover its missional context laid out in the Jeremiah Journey.  We will take what God gives to us, and discard the rest.

            And don’t be scared, because we are not alone.  Jesus’ final words to us are a guarantee.  “I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Amen.