Moving from 2019 into 2020, it was my sense that we had some really good momentum here in the church on a number of levels: Small groups were going strong, kid and youth ministries were doing well, Message+ was having great post-sermon conversation, the worship team was clicking, we had a new stage and a new sound system, the Mission Board had new life. Then, COVID-19. Granted, COVID hit everyone. That wasn’t unique to us. Still, it felt like going virtual derailed a church train that was picking up some steam.
Then election tension was everywhere. Once again, not unique to us. In that sense, between COVID and politics, the church in the United States has had a refining year –or at least the opportunity to be refined. And since we are a church in the United States, we get that opportunity too.
We started meeting using our outdoor space in May, I think. It was a beautiful summer and our facility enabled us to get back together in a way that observed safety and fostered community. There were some bumps, then we settled in. Then we moved indoors in September. Some bumps again, but we settled in.
The first Sunday we had a full band back on stage in December - the third week of beautiful Advent decorations - was the day of the fire. So not only didnwe lose the gym space and a few more weeks of holiday cheer, we lost the full band just as it was coming back.
A bunch of us had a meeting the Monday night after the fire, and the working assumption (based on some discussion that day with contractors giving estimates) was that it would be a 10 week process. “We will be back in the gymnatorium by the beginning of March.” That was 8 weeks ago and we haven’t started yet. It’s probably going to be at least two more weeks before we can start doing anything. It’s already going to take twice as long as we thought. Honestly, May seems realistic.
So here we are in the lobby. And people who had legitimate concerns about meeting in person because of health or job concerns but or the ripple effect for people around them if they got sick were okay with how much room we had before now aren’t comfortable with this cozy experience (that’s not a criticism; it’s an observation). And while the family of those who consider this church home is significantly larger than those who are here on a Sunday (around 300 vs 50), it still feels like community steps backward also.
Some days I feel like we’re in a 21st century update of Job: God says to Satan, “Have you seen my servants in the world? (pandemic) In the United States? (election tension) At CLG?” (Satan cracks his knuckles and says, “Do they still have Advent candles?”) I don't mean to say that is how it went down. I’m just saying it feels like it.
I have an opinion: I am increasingly convinced that God is using this season to deconstruct us individually and corporately so He can reconstruct something better. Because do you know what all of this sparked at CLG? A huge, messy sanctification process.
Most of us drained our emotional reserves last year, with the result that we burned through all our filters and just kind of started saying what we probably should have been saying for years. So it got messy. It was hard. Is hard.
But what if it was a gift? What if God’s intent is to strip away all our routine and comfort and facades and get our eyes refocused on him for our good and His glory? In a sermon a while ago I quoted the poet Auden, who once said, “We who must die demand a miracle.” What if it’s not that dramatic? What if it’s simply God’s intent to get us as a congregation to the place where we say,
“We who are frustrated and angry at half the people in our own church and in despair about our ability to do life together because we are sooooo different and this lobby will only feel cozy for so long before it gets crowded... We need a miracle. We beg for a miracle.”
And God’s like, “I think that’s a great idea, so if we are going to do this, let’s do it right. Settle into the lobby and settle down. I'm going to need this time to work with y’all. All y’all.”
That’s where I’m at right now. This trial, this test, is a gift that God will work for our good if we indeed love him, and are indeed called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28). I believe He plans to rebuild something beautiful and better from the ashes (fire pun intended). We can’t rebuild this with merely our own power or intelligence or personality, or it will fail. Unless the Lord builds it, our labor is in vain. (Psalm 127:1)
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Today’s sermon is about cooperating with the Lord’s rebuilding. I’m going to use a ship analogy because why not?
In the business meeting, we are going to talk about how we are restructuring and reorganizing in a way that we are patching holes in the infrastructure of the ship of CLG. The ship needs not only maintenance, but some remodeling. Someone last week who thinks about ships more than I do said, “We’re in dry dock: scraping barnacles, patching things, scrubbing off algae.”
The best sailors in the world are going to have a hard time getting to their destination (or even staying afloat) if they are constantly bailing water and fixing communication coms. So we are restructuring and reorganizing a lot of things in ways that I am convinced were Holy Spirit inspired for this time in this season of CLG, and I am really excited about where we are moving. I don't think it would have happened without the Holy Spirit using last year to shine a glaring spotlight into the shadowy overlooked and ignored corners of CLG’s structure and organization. Because I believe this is the Lord’s inspired rebuild plan, I think you will see ministerial and relational fruit in our church and in your life from this.
But I am also reminded of something T.S. Eliot once wrote: “They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within, by dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.” I’m really excited about the system we are moving into, but it’s not our savior. It will be as good as the people who are a part of it.
As we have begun to address that need more honestly, something else very important has come into focus: the passengers and crew have some issues and unresolved tension, and by passengers and crew I mean the people on the ship, and that’s all of us.
The business meeting will show you what’s happening during dry dock so that the ship of CLG is more seaworthy. This sermon will be about sanctifying the passengers and crew.
So, here’s the sermon.
This church is a ship that has set sail. It will either be a Disciple-ship (yay!) or a Disaster-ship (boo!). I am going to give 5 ways both courses can happen, building from what Paul said to Timothy in 2 Timothy 4: “I have fought the good fight; I have finished the course; I have kept the faith.”
How to create a Disaster-ship
1. Don't take ‘keeping the faith’ seriously.
First, don’t take orthodoxy seriously. How do we know what orthodoxy is? The Bible; the Creeds; two thousand years of Christians wrestling with how to properly keep the faith (note: their are open and closed hand issues, open hand being they ones on which Christians in good faith can disagree as they continue to seek clarity and truth grounded in the things around which they have closed their hands – the divinity of Jesus, his atoning death, his bodily resurrection, etc.). Latest polls among evangelicals show only 52% strongly agree that the Bible is their highest authority; only 58% believe that Jesus’ death is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of sin; only 48% believe that only those who trust solely in Jesus will receive eternal life. That’s building a disastership. That is not a sustainable faith, because it’s not built on the faith.
Second, don't take orthopraxy seriously. Don’t live as if we take God and His path of righteousness seriously. Remember: obedience is a means of getting to know God. Disobedience is a means of getting to know “not God.” This speaks to integrity and character, consistency and commitment, not perfection. Paul knew what was true and knew what to do. If you don’t want to keep the faith, keep yourself in the dark about what is true and ignore what God has called you to do.
2. Fight all the secondary fights in church instead of focusing on the good fight
. I talked about this last week also. We can get so busy fighting skirmishes off to the side that we are distracted from the course of the race: spreading in the good news of the grace of God. The fact is, we can get very good at winning battles that feel super important while losing wars that are far more crucial. There is a scene in Wonder Woman where she is being taken to the front lines of the battle. She keeps seeing heart-wrenching scenes and wants to stop, but they keep reminding her: “We need you in the front. If that changes, the rest of this changes.”
It wasn’t that what broke her heart wasn’t important. It was. It just wasn’t going to change if the source of the problem didn’t change. She could fix that, then be back to fix it again in a month. True change flows from truly changed people. We can get so busy directing the hands and feet of people that we forget that if their hearts are in the right place, their hands and feet will go in the right places. It’s not an either/or – it’s good to stop hands from doing evil and feet from taking us there– but clean hands are connected to a pure heart (Psalm 24:4).
On Disasterships, people spend their time butting heads over the wall color in the galley and the kind of wax to use on the floors (silly), or how to best protect and secure the sails (serious), but they happen at the expense of the most important thing, which is to know the captain, love the crew, and sail toward those who need the good news the ship carries.
3. Hide from each other.
Lack of honesty and transparency is like a cancer in the church. A couple weeks ago Tom Gordon talked about ‘choosing our hard.’ Often the courses laid before us are all hard. We want to choose the hard that bears good fruit. In some ways, dishonesty or lack of transparency or failure to confront biblically is its own kind of hard. We develop bitterness and anger and judgment and it undermines friendships in community. That’s hard. Walking into tension is another kind of hard, but it's a hard that has the potential for good fruit if both parties are committed to being focused on fighting the good fight.
4. Be too near sighted or farsighted (inwardly/outwardly focused.)
It's like either having a magnifying glass or a telescope as we look at the world. It's seeing the things right in front of us but being very blurry about what's far away, or being crystal clear about what's far away and being very blurry with what's right in front of us.There are probably two ways that churches can veer off course with excellent intentions and for excellent purposes.
• One is to get so outwardly focused (on other people or other places) that discipleship fails to happen within the church and within ourselves.
• The other is to get so inwardly focused (on ourselves and our church) that evangelism and ministry fails to happen outside our lives and our church.
Granted, it is not easy to balance those two things. Often the history of churches will look a bit like a pendulum as they continue to self assess and respond. However, a sure fire way to head toward disaster is to ignore the tension and settle unthinkingly into one side or the other.
5. Don't take love seriously.
Love is the heart of Jesus’ teaching.
• Love of God first, which manifests itself in love of others. (Matthew 23:27)
• If we love him we keep his Commandments. (John 14:15)
• If we say we love God and hate our brothers and sisters we are liars. (1 John 4:20)
• The greatest commandment involves love. (1 Corinthians 13)
• Love covers a multitude of sins. (1 Peter 4:8)
Without love, we are just loud, obnoxious cymbal crashers. The noise will drown out our words. The noise will overshadow our actions.
How to create a Disciple-ship.
1. Keep the faith.
First, take orthodoxy seriously.
Study the Bible. Bible Gateway is a good place to start. There is a cheap membership that gives you access to a ton of commentary that you can read side-by-side with a passage. Read a passage and prep a class. Take notes. Put together an outline. Make an application.
Study the creeds , which represent two thousand years of Christians wrestling with how to properly keep the faith. Generally, the further back you go in history, the more they focus on ‘closed hand’ issues. When you get into modern denominational creeds, they will sometimes include what you need to at least tighten your hand around to be a part of that denomination, so just know the difference. Our church has a Statement of Faith, which is different from a creed, but is worth absorbing.
We are evangelicals. Go to the National Evangelical Association and check out their statement of faith, and then click on “topics” and “resources” for a boatload of helpful information.
Second, take orthopraxy seriously.
Live is if we take God and His path of righteousness seriously. Remember: obedience is a means of getting to know God. It’s also a means of honoring his image bearers. Become part of a small group or a circle of close friends in which you genuinely hold each other accountable – not telling each other what we want to hear, or complaining about common causes, but surrendering our privacy to trusted people for the sake of discipleship. What two things did Paul land on? He knew what was true, and he knew what to do. Let people help you discern if that is in fact happening in your life.
2. Focus our primary effort of fighting the good fight.
Wrestle on behalf of the Honorable Cause, which Paul described as “testifying to the good news of God’s grace” and displaying a God whose perfect patience is good news for even the worst of sinners (1 Timothy 1:12-17). God knows that I know how easy it is to become distracted. I think you do too. Once again, it’s not an either/or, because there are secondary causes that are deeply intertwined with our primary calling. This is a question of focus, time, emotional investment, guiding principles. Our prayer should be that God gives us the wisdom and strength to engage in wrestling primarily for this Noble Cause while always asking the question: “How is this creating more or better disciples?” Do righteous secondary causes speak to the nobility of our primary cause? Sure. Just don’t make a good thing the ultimate thing. That’s idolatry.
3. Be honest with each other.
We commit to being fully known and fully knowing so that we can be fully loved and fully love. It is impossible to do this without the grace and the love of God filling us. I mean, look at us.
We are too politically, socially, and psychologically diverse for CLG to work by any cultural standard. So was the early church, and God brought them together for the express purposing of displaying His glory by unifying un-unifiable people.
We are too broken. We are too easily offended and too casually offensive. Let’s be honest: for about a year now, we have felt it whenever we walk into a room with masked and unmasked people. We fill up this room with our baggage on any given Sunday.
The range of backgrounds and preferences and quirks and strengths and weaknesses is simply too much for us on our own strength to go about creating this New Humanity that the Bible talks about that is found in Christ.
Ephesians 2:4 “For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15 by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, 16 and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. 17 He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.19 Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. 21 In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. 22 And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.” Let’s be honest: forming a closely knit community from this group will take the same kind of miracle now that it took then. We who are called to be a new humanity beg for a miracle! We cannot do it on our own.
Remember how Paul said God’s perfect patience was revealed in Paul, as if anything less than supernatural, miraculous patience would not suffice? We are the kind of people who require the perfect patience of a long-suffering God to transform us into his image, let alone into a cohesive body ☺ But that’s part of the way we testify to the good news of God’s grace. “Look what God has done. We thought it was impossible. With God, this is one of the many impossible things that becomes possible.”
4. Get bifocals.
Pray that God helps us to see clearly near and far away. How do we do this as a church? Those of you who are nearsighted do the work of nearsighted people and draw the rest of us in with you so that we see what you see. Show us how to be and make better disciples, to do the hard work of sanctification in ourselves and in our church. Those of you who are farsighted, do the work of far-sighted people and draw the rest of us in so that we see what you see. Show us how to make more disciples, how to go into the highways and byways and compel them to come in, so that the house of God is full. (Luke 14:23) This is part of the diversity we need. It will cause tension because it’s easy to get really frustrated with others whose vision is blurry when ours is clear. But it’s a necessary and good tension as “iron sharpens iron.”
5. Take love seriously.
While this love has aspects of friendship and being nice to each other (and even ideally liking each other!) it's much deeper than that. It's what I mentioned last week in talking about those who ‘have loved the appearance of Jesus.’ It's being committed to thinking God's thoughts, and preferring what God prefers, weeping and rejoicing over the same things that caused Jesus to weep and rejoice. I'm not sure where to go with this other than to ask you to wrestle with, from day to day, what love looks like in this moment and with this person and in this situation. What are the most loving words I can say? What is the most loving attitude I can have? What is the most loving action I can take?
1 Corinthians 13 What if I speak in the most elegant languages of people or in the exotic languages of the heavenly messengers, but I live without love? Well then, anything I say is like the clanging of brass or a crashing cymbal. 2 What if I have the gift of prophecy, am blessed with knowledge and insight to all the mysteries, or what if my faith is strong enough to scoop a mountain from its bedrock, yet I live without love? If so, I am nothing. 3 I could give all that I have to feed the poor, I could surrender my body to be burned as a martyr, but if I do not live in love, I gain nothing by my selfless acts. 4 Love is patient; love is kind. Love isn’t envious, doesn’t boast, brag, or strut about. There’s no arrogance in love; 5 it’s never rude, crude, or indecent—it’s not self-absorbed. Love isn’t easily upset. Love doesn’t tally wrongs 6 or celebrate injustice; but truth—yes, truth—is love’s delight! 7 Love puts up with anything and everything that comes along; it trusts, hopes, and endures no matter what. 8 Love will never become obsolete.”