This sermon gives the rationale for our relaunch and sketches out the path forward.
We have made it up to chapter 22 in our journey through the book of Acts this morning, but I want to take a detour. I will pick up on the story of Acts 22 next week. The reason for this is that I want to address the situation we find ourselves in as a church. I want to think about the church as a whole. For many of us this is not our first concern. We consider ourselves followers of Christ and we gather with other believers on Sundays in order to connect with God and to get our needs me. It is more or less an individual thing. But this is not the whole picture, for as we have seen in Acts, God is not just concerned about his people as individuals but also as a group. In Acts we see the use of the word, Ecclesia, which is often translated for us, church.
This word was not originally a religious word. In Acts 19:29, that word is used to describe the town assembly in Ephesus. It was a secular term, used of people who have been officially summoned and coming together for a specific purpose. When the Biblical writers used it to describe the collection of Christ-followers, they were saying that we have been chosen and called together for a specific purpose. Those purposes are the great ends of the church:
“The great ends of the church are the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind; the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God; the maintenance of divine worship; the preservation of the truth; the promotion of social righteousness; and the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.” – The Book of Order G-1.0200
We people first think of what they look for in church, my guess it would be the middle three: 2) Fellowship, 3) Worship, and 4) Teaching. These are about internal matters. These are things that we get out of the church. They are our service to God, of course, but they fill our cups.
But there are three others: 1) proclamation of the gospel, 2) promotion of social righteousness, and 3) demonstrating the Kingdom to the world.
These three are about the world outside of the church. They are more about what we give than what we get.
Half of the reason why the church exists is for those who are outside of it. If we think about the church, we have to think about the purposes and ends that are outside and not just inside.
I point all of this out because it is not all that obvious that at the outset that should be a church, a larger entity. It doesn't seem necessary to have this organization. After all, ask most people they will tell you that they hate organized religion. That is exactly what a church is organized religion. There is no way to have a gathered group of people without organization. Actually, you can, but they call it a mob, and mobs aren't known for doing many good things in history.
Nevertheless, this has always been God's method -- to accomplish his purposes through a people. This church thing is his idea. We will return the question of why that is later.
Let's think about the church this morning, specifically about this particular congregation. One of the most prominent images in the Bible for the church is a body. Take a look at your body. Take a look at your neighbor's body. Not too long, unless it's your spouse. This is the analogy for the church. It is a whole made up of all different parts that work together.
Just as there are principles that you follow that lead to a healthy body, like eating fruits and vegetables, getting enough sleep and exercise, so there are also principles that we follow to have a healthy and growing church body. Most people don't think about this, as they usually just think about church from a spiritual perspective, but it is true nevertheless. There are principles that govern churches as they begin and as they grow. If you ignore them, you will have a hard time having a healthy, growing church. In some ways they are very similar to those of a new business or organization. If you violate the principles, it makes it much harder to succeed.
One of the principles is "Don't launch to early."
The idea here is that in a new church, you are gathering people who are interested in starting a church and being involved in a new work of God. The more people that you can gather the better. The reality is that just like most new businesses, most new churches don't make it into a healthy, thriving, self-sustaining church. Research has shown that:
"Churches that begin with less than 50 people are 3x more likely to fail."
They fail because it takes too much effort to keep them going.
"Most new churches that have been in existence for over 4 years are under 100 people."
What does this mean? The more people the better in order to generate enough momentum.
To think about this, I offer you an analogy, that of a rocket launch. For a launch to succeed, it must escape the earth's gravity to achieve orbit, or to wax scientific you must achieve escape velocity.
What is escape velocity?
"escape velocity" is the initial speed required to go from an initial point in a gravitational potential field to infinity with a residual velocity of zero, with all speeds and velocities measured with respect to the field.
That's complicated, here let me simplify.
Ok, that's not much better. Let me just say that Escape Velocity is the speed you need to escape the gravity of the earth. Here is a picture.
If you don't get enough speed, you might make it into the air, but you will come crashing down. If you can get higher, you can achieve orbit. This is the minimum that you want to achieve. Once you achieve orbit you can stay there for a long time. There is one other possibility. You can escape orbit altogether and keep going, or KEEP GROWING.
This is what happened in the early church. We read in the first chapters of the book of Acts that thousands responded to the preaching of the good news. They grew and just kept growing and expanding. They achieved escape velocity.
What I want to put before you this morning is a RELAUNCH for our congregation. That is going back to square one and getting back on the launch pad and getting a better start. After much discussion and prayer, that is what the Steering Committee believes that we should do. See, the first time that this church launched, about 5 years ago, they didn't it with a small group of people. We just don't have the kind of momentum that we could.
Before I tell you what that would look like, let me read you an encounter that Jesus had with one religious teacher, named Nicodemus. Because you might be saying, "What? You can't start over!" and that is exactly what Nicodemus was saying.
1 After dark one evening, a Jewish religious leader named Nicodemus, a Pharisee, 2 came to speak with Jesus. "Teacher," he said, "we all know that God has sent you to teach us. Your miraculous signs are proof enough that God is with you." 3 Jesus replied, "I assure you, unless you are born again, you can never see the Kingdom of God." 4 "What do you mean?" exclaimed Nicodemus. "How can an old man go back into his mother's womb and be born again?" 5 Jesus replied, "The truth is, no one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit. F16 6 Humans can reproduce only human life, but the Holy Spirit gives new life from heaven.
Nicodemus approaches Jesus at night, when everyone else has gone away. He tells Jesus that it is clear that God is with him. But then Jesus startles him with this bold declaration: He cannot enter the Kingdom -- that is, he can't get close to God -- unless he is born again. Nicodemus responds to this like any rational person would: You can't be born again! It is impossible to reenter the womb!
But God is in the business of new beginnings. And Jesus has something else in mind, for the word that means "born again" also means "born from above." There is a power that makes all things new, but it is not our power. This is a message of great hope for everyone who feels like they have made bad decisions. Maybe you are in this category. You feel like you have to live with your past mistakes. What God is telling you in this passage is that there are always new beginnings. In fact, our God is a God who takes our past and makes it new. He does this by using our past for his purposes. Just offer your past to God and ask him to use it. We will talk more about this next week.
In light of this, I believe we should embrace this idea of a new start and claim it for our church.
One of the principles that was not followed was that of a premature launch, that is launching we too few people. The second principle that was violated was launching without a crystal-clear vision of where they were going and what exactly the church was going to be like.
Over the last year we have had several people leave because the church was turning out different than what they expected. A crystal-clear vision was not settled on and communicated.
To give an illustration we could say that all rockets were not firing in he same direction.
Here is a picture of a firework called a pinwheel. You make one by putting a lot of rockets but have them face all different directions. It is a spectacular display, but it doesn't really get you anywhere.
The health principle for any body is that all of the parts have to been working for the same thing and wanting to go in the same direction. You can't walk if one foot wants to go one way and the other wants to go someplace else.
What is a relaunch? First, let me tell you what a relaunch is not. It doesn't mean scrapping everything that we have done. It doesn't mean changing much about our worship, our children's ministry, or our mission projects, or our care team.
What it does mean is getting together as a group and praying and discussing what God would have us do and who he wants us to be. We engage in deliberations and we share thoughts and ideas until God makes it clear to us what his vision for the church is. Then, we go public in a new way. It is like withdrawing inward and then exploding outward.
We want to begin this process by meeting together after worship over the next two Sundays. We want everyone to bring some food so that we can have a covered dish. Then we want to begin discussing and discerning. The following Sunday we will order pizza's so that people will have less of a hassle and we will continue the process. After that is July 4th and so we will take a break and see where we stand at that point.
What can you do? A lot, actually. It is going to take everyone to pitch it in. What we really need is for everyone to take ownership. This is a chance for a brand new beginning, but we need everyone's help and commitment to pull it off.
I said that I would come back to the question of why God's plan is centered on the church; why it has organized religion at the core. And I believe that it is because we can accomplish more together than we could do individually. The body really is more than the sum of the its parts. We have this longing in our hearts to be a part of something larger than ourselves. I believe that God has put that there so that he can fulfill that desire by our involvement with his people.