What Kind of Church Will We Be?

Would you take your Bibles, please, and turn to the first chapter of the book of Acts? There you'll find our verse that we've been using as the theme for this year's missions conference. Be my witness. It comes out of that famous version of Dr. Luke in Acts 1, verse 8 of the Great Commission. You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judeans, Samarian, even to the outermost parts or the ends of the earth. We've asked our speakers, each one of them, to address a different facet of that Great Commission. So Al Bart, last Sunday evening, he kind of gave us a grand panoramic vision of what's going on in the kingdom of God to the ends of the earth, and it was both, as he said, good news and some challenging news. And then Donnie St. Germain talked to us about Samaria, about what's going on in Haiti, a place where he divides his time between Miami and the Haitian community there, and down in Jeremy where the Haitian community is in Haiti, and the suffering and poorest of all nations is right on our doorstep, equivalent to us as Samaria was to Jerusalem and to Israel. And then Randy Neighbors came today, this morning, and talked us about Judea, about mercy ministry to a metropolitan area, about reaching out to people who were different from us and not as fortunate as us, and yet because of their poverty, both of body and spirit, God has a special place for them and wants to include them into his kingdom work, and into his church, and into his mission in the world. And so there's only one thing left to talk about, and that's Jerusalem, that's my job to talk about what kind of church we're going to be in the midst of these challenges from Judea and Samaria and the ends of the earth. It seems to me, I just would say this by a way of introduction, that over the past 50 or 60 years, my lifetime, that the church in the West, especially it seems the church in America, has been going through a multiple level catharsis. That's what I call it. Multiple levels of crisis, trying to determine what it will be. It began when I was a little boy, although I didn't know it was beginning then, and what was called the church growth movement. That movement was born out of actually missions, mission work in South America, and a combination of mithiological techniques and business, marketing principles, and programming to cater to a certain demographic coming out of college. The baby boomers led to the mega church, and people like Donald McGavern and Peter Wagner and went on, wrote dozens, or literally hundreds of books about church growth that I and Harry Reader and Tom Henry and others studied while we were in seminary. And the whole idea was to build mega churches, churches that had something for everybody and were driven by the multiple power of its many programs. Well, it wasn't long until a new generation was coming out of college and entering into the working world, into engagement and marriage and children, and they were called Generation X by sociologists, and they wanted something a little bit different than church growth and the mega church. They wanted something they called seeker sensitive or seeker driven, and they were led in that thrust in that movement by a famous fellow named Bill Hybles, by another man named Robert Shooter, who taught him a lot of his principles, by Rick Warren and others who wrote books like The Purpose Driven Life and Purpose Driven Church. And their view was that we had to make the church as comfortable with the world and the world as comfortable with the church, and if we gave people who were unchurched what they asked for, then they would come to the church, and in the long run Jesus Christ would kind of rub off on them, and they would discover Christ and become a Christian. And you know, in many ways it worked, except in 2007, three people who worked at the Willow Creek Church, because it became known as the Willow Creek Model, Cally Parkinson and Greg Hawkins and Eric Arnson did a multiple year study, and they published it in a book called Reveal Where Are You? And they came to the assessment that when it was all said and done, their secret driven program had attracted many visitors who came into the program, and many of them were converted. But the problem was they didn't go on and grow in their Christian faith. So Bill Hybles, having read the study and having talked to his staff, issued a statement that said, and I quote, we have made a mistake. What we should have done at the beginning, at about this point when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become self-feeders, should have gotten a hold of people and thought them how to read their Bibles between our worship services. Our dream, he says, is that we fundamentally changed the way we do church. So the church in America had an influx of millions of people who professed the name of Jesus Christ. You know, it is amazing, folks, that almost 50 million Americans professed to be born again. And yet, look how little impact we've had on our culture for Christ. So something's missing. And about the time that we began to say, you know, the mega church is a dinosaur, and the secret, driven church is fundamentally failed, well then there came a third model. We don't know what to call this yet, but they're calling themselves the emerging, or the emergent church. And they are led by people like Rob Bell and Brian McClaren in a network of churches called the Emergent Village. They've written books like The New Kind of Christianity. And this is a church that is almost defies labels because it's so eclectic. They have what they call Cregate with Spirituality, where you can draw a little bit from maybe Zen Buddhism or Transcendental Meditation or Roman Catholicism, Evangelical Piety, and put it all together and grow spiritually. They have what they call a center set, which means no theology except the relationship with Jesus Christ. They're heavily dependent upon technology. And in a lot of emerging churches, they have a communion table that's set out 24-7. You can go in and serve yourself, communion at any time of the day, at any time of the week. In many emerging churches, anybody can baptize anybody else. And it really is a challenge. These churches, by the way, they're usually discernible because they have just one word in their name. One of the churches that I read about was called Liquid Church. I'm not sure what that meant. But that was its name. One was called Rubicon over in Dublin, Ireland. They have words like Revolution or Crossroads or the Portico. One is called Crisis, Crisis Church. And they're usually led by very charismatic, very dynamic, kind of edgy in your face pastures to very autocratic. It's the senior pastor and his team that run everything, and they're drawing a new generation, not the baby boomers, and not the generation X, but the millennials. And they believe that they're representing new Testament Christianity. Now, I'm not here to criticize or to commend any of these. I really don't endorse any of those models. Although I have to say that all of them brought certain strengths to the church of the 21st century, as they all brought certain glaring weaknesses. But they have affected us more than we want to acknowledge. Your church was born out of the church growth movement, and our founding pastor, Harry Reader, applied church growth principles, and built here a mega church. Tom Henry who followed him, I had lunch with Tom just on Tuesday of this past week. We were talking about the ministry here in the Michigan's conference, and he wanted to take the church more in a secret-sensitive, secret-driven way, and that meant with some resistance and some acceptance here. Many of our members have left with a young people to attend emergent churches in our city, that we've all been affected by these movements, and where they all bring their strengths, they all bring their serious flaws. What I would like to examine tonight is the simple question, do we need all these models? You'll say to me, Pastor, the church has always been morphing and changing, and that's true. I mean, you can't say that the church that the apostles began was the exact church that say St. Augustine was in, it was not. He can't say that Magustin's medieval Roman Catholicism was the church of Martin Luther and the Reformers, and their church was not the same as the church of the Puritans, or the great revivals in America, or the church growth movement, or the secret-driven movement, or the emergent church. The church is always adjusting to the changes in its culture and to the various generations that come in with various demands and needs and wantson and different kinds of crises they're facing, but do we need to do surveys and turn to marketing techniques and look at various models, or do we trust the Bible that the Bible gives us an awful lot concerning the church? I mean, folks, there's three letters called pastoral epistles, first empathy, second empathy entitus, to talk about what the church should be, and in great detail. Church government and issues of preaching and church discipline and all sorts of things. We have 19 epistles, all of them written to specific churches about different theological and ethical and even mis theological issues they faced. We have a whole book called The Book of Acts that models for us what basic paradigms make up Jesus Christ New Testament church, and if you allow me to be provocative at the beginning, I think the fundamental problem, this is my one observation, is that we are constantly revising the way we do church because we have changed the focus, listen carefully, away from Christ and the world to us and our kids. We have changed the focus of Jesus Christ church away from Christ centered, reaching the world to me centered and my kids, and that is fundamentally deadly and it's unbiblical. Jesus Christ has given us several sets of marching orders. Here they are, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you and low. I am with you always to the end of the age. Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation, whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. This it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise again from the data that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all the nations beginning from Jerusalem, your witnesses of these things. Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so send I you. And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached to the ends of the earth and then the end shall come, you will see power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you. And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judean Samaria and even to the ends of the earth, all of those different versions all point to the one great marching order of the earth, which is what? The great commission and in their orders they focus on things like all the world, all the nations, Jerusalem, all Judean Samaria to the ends of the earth and it defies me to find anything in there where it says go and build the church that satisfies you and your children. And that is what we have done with the great commission. And so tonight I want us to look at a passage of Scripture, just one chapter over from chapter 1 verse 8, chapter 2 beginning in verse 37 about what the church should be and the question is what kind of church will we be? And I'm not asking for a label where they're going to be emergent or secret sensitive or church growth. I don't care if we're a church for baby boomers, baby busters, millennials or their little kids. That's not the issue. I'm asking what kind of church will we be? Will we be the kind of church described in the book of Acts or something different? Will we accept this challenge set before us or will we seek to improve upon God's method of the church? So I want to look at two things tonight, a church that reflects the New Testament dynamic and the church that reflects the New Testament mission. Look in this passage, if you will, at this text that's before us. Your elders by the way, about five years ago, four years ago, they studied this text at length. And they arrived in a mission statement for our church. You've seen it. We've preached on it before. You see it on our website and we've recited parts of it in our worship service. But it goes like this, Christ's covenant church is a reformed congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America committed to making disciples who worship God, grow in community, love others and serve the world. Christ's covenant church seeks to develop disciples of Jesus Christ by helping them move towards spiritual maturity. And then we describe these three steps, or these four steps, or these four phases of spiritual growth. One, we will enable people to encounter the living God in the context of his worshiping community and to hear the proclamation of the gospel and its full counsel. In other words, we will worship God too. We will encourage those who have come to saving faith, to become members of Christ's covenant church, and to fold them into a community or class or small group in order to learn and apply God's Word to their lives. We will teach them to grow in community, three. We will equip members for deeper and more practical levels of discipleship as they learn to love Christ and others more deeply and to live out the gospel in every arena of life. We'll teach people to love others. Finally, we'll teach them to serve the world. We will engage members in the advance of the kingdom of God, both near and far, by sharing the gospel and the power of the Holy Spirit with lost persons and by reflecting the beauty and holiness of Christ to lost cultures. Now, if you want to check out now and take an app, it's okay, but before you do, I want you remember one little thing. This is the heart of the whole thing. Listen to this. In other words, not programs, but process. I think the New Testament teaches us that the Church of Jesus Christ is not built by or upon programs. It's built by a process. And God's way of taking people from unconverted and headed hell to entering the kingdom of God and living for ever in heaven is not to take them through a different menu of ever changing programs for each new generation, but to take them through a process of discipleship. And that process, it's hard to simplify it or to speak of it more comprehensively than he wants them to worship God. He wants them to grow in the community of the Church. He wants them to love and to serve others in ministry, and he wants them to serve the world. I mean, Jesus said that. These are right out of Jesus' own mouth. Number one, the Father is seeking those who will worship Him in spirit and in truth. He wants us to worship God too. He wants us to grow in the community, go and make disciples of all the nations by baptizing them into the Church and by teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you wear in the Church community. He wants us to love one another. By this, will all men know you are my disciples if you love one another as I have loved you? And he wants us to serve the world as the Father has sent me, so send I you. You will be my witnesses. This is not what Peter Wagner or what Bill Hybles or what Brian McClaren say is the mouth. This is Jesus Christ, the head of the Church saying, this is what I want. This is what's best for you and your kids. This is what the world needs. They need to learn how to worship God to grow in community, to love others and serve the world. And you're going to see that unfolding in this chapter 2 of Acts, beginning in verse 37 now. When they heard this, when they heard this sermon of Peter about Jesus Christ, they were cut to the heart. And they said to Peter until the rest of the apostles, brothers, what shall we do? And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit for the promises for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself. And with many other words, he bore witness and continued to exhort them saying, save yourselves from this crooked generation. So those who received His Word were baptized and they were added that day about 3,000 souls. They devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers. And all came upon every soul and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all that any need, day by day, attending the temple together, breaking bread in their homes. They received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people and the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. I want to show you 10 different characteristics of this church of Jesus Christ. Once you write them down because I'd like you to pray these for our church, 10 different things that this text says, first of all, this church was born out of revival. It was a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit. It was born on one cataclysmic day that can, upon the earth in this great pentacostal outpour in the Spirit, but the ripples of this revival went on for 350 years. So this was the church born out of a baptism and outpouring of the Holy Spirit. It was the church focused on Jesus Christ. In fact, their word for preaching was simply to preach Christ. That's what Paul said, I've determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and to preach Him. Thirdly, this was a church focused on repentance and faith. Those were the two key things that characterized the lives of early believers. Repentance from sin and faith in our Lord Jesus, not one without the other, but both. That was the key to being born again, to being converted, to getting into this kingdom called the church, to repent of your sins and to put your faith in Jesus Christ. Fourthly, they were church committed to baptism and church membership. They were not baptized into Christ. They were baptized into Christ in the church. There was a level of accountability, a desire to live together and be rubbing up against one another in this church. They were also a multiple generation of people. There were older people and younger people in this church, but look at what Peter says. This promises for you and for your children and all those who are yet to come. He's speaking of multiple generations in the church. I wasn't a church for old gray-haired baby boomers and pot-bellied middle-aged generation X and sexy little spike-haired millennials. Come on. You know, spike-haired. This was church for all generations. Mom and dad and old geezers and the babies coming right out of the womb all in this community because it was called the family or a household of God. It was a church committed to the means of grace, to the apostles teaching the word, to community in fellowship, to the breaking of bread, the Lord's suffering, to the prayers worship and liturgy and to praying together. It was also a church series about body life. There was a commitment to membership in ministry and they were sharing all things they had in common. There was this coin nenea from the word coinos, which means common. Coinenea is what you have in common or communion, what you share together. They had a body life like a family. They were church practicing stewardship. They were liquidating assets and helping themselves and others outside the church with anyone he says here who might have a need. They were church known for mercy ministry that caused them to grow in leaps and bounds in the early years. And finally they were church in which people were being saved. See, that's the whole thrust of this little pericopy, this passage, verse 47. And the Lord was adding, it literally reads like this in the Greek. And the Lord was continued to add to them daily those who were being saved. I want you to listen to the words. The Lord was continuing to add who was adding them. It wasn't their programs that were drawing people. It wasn't the preacher. They didn't have a preacher. They had multiple preachers. That may be one of the things big mistakes were making. One preacher with a whole church was around one human personality. Now the Lord was adding on an ongoing basis day by day those who were being saved. It doesn't say those who were saved. They didn't get saved outside the church and then come in. They came in as unconverted people. Their neighbors brought them to church. Their families brought them to church. Their little friends in school brought them to church. And they saw people worshiping God. They saw people in a loving community growing together and ministering to each other and concerned for others out in the world. And they said, this is really neat. And as they fell in love with the church, they fell in love with Christ and they were saved. They were being saved because the way God evangelizes the world is through this process of spiritual growth in his church, of worshiping God and growing in the community, of loving others and serving the world. It's a process. You come here because you sense a need. You sense maybe something is nebulous as things aren't right in your life. And so why not go to church and get somebody to pray for you? Or maybe you feel guilty because your mother keeps fussing at you. You're 25 years old and you haven't been in church for a decade. Or maybe you just had a baby and you know how kids need religion. It doesn't matter what brings you here, but you come just like they came. And you hear the gospel being preached and the gospel being sung and the gospel being prayed. You experience the spirit's presence. You can't describe it at that moment, but you know that these people are oddly attractive. There's something different about them. Then you focus on Christ. You see images and symbols have been all over the place and you're drawn to him, Vaky becomes the focal point of everything. Pretty soon you come to realize that everything they're saying, singing and praying is all about this one guy. And so you focus in on him. And then you trust him. You turn away from yourself. You turn to him and you're a new creature. And then you want to be part of this community and so they say we have to be baptized. We've got some water on your head and make you kneel down and make a fool out of yourself. Everybody you say it sounds good to me. So you get baptized and then you continue to come to worship. And you want to be experienced of the dynamic of body life. And so you say, is there something I can do to help out? You start out teaching the first great boys. End up being a senior pastor years later. He doesn't day this on the front end because you wouldn't have joined. He's smarter than we are. But that's how it goes. And pretty soon, you know, you're concerned about all your drinking buddies and your ex-girlfriends and your mom and dad and your siblings. They don't know the Lord. They haven't been church in decade either. And so you go and you say, why don't you come to church with me? And the process, not the program. The programs look different in different churches. The process begins all over again. And you sit back after 40 or 50 years of this and you say, you know, Lord God, this process really does work. It's the gospel dynamic. And one of the problems, the reason why folks, we're not seeing a lot of people converted today is because we've done two things. We have such a low view of the church that we think that it's attendant to. It's an appendage to being saved to Jesus Christ. And we've got so many different ways to program this that we programmed ourselves right out of the process. We've taken away all the difficult things. To tell people they have to humble themselves and admit that they're going to hell unless they trust in Christ. In fact, two leaders of the emergent church in the last year have come out with two books saying, hell doesn't exist. Everybody goes to heaven in the end. Well if everybody goes to heaven, why am I doing this? Let's eat, drink and fornicate for tomorrow, we all go to heaven. We program out the thing about membership because membership's accountability. It's great to be a regular attender. I don't find that little phrase in the Bible. But here's a regular attender. I drop in and say, how did Jesus went? I want to when I don't. Well, that's my life. But a member has made a commitment to other people. Okay? It's kind of like telling your parents you'd like to be a regular attender at the meal. And when laundry's done, but you know, no other responsibilities in the family, what mother and father would agree with that, raise your hand. Know you want accountability, you want relationships, talk about holiness, things that we cannot do. Well, we call that legalism now, but Jesus Christ calls it learning to love me and your neighbor is yourself. It's being a disciple saying that I can't just do everything I want to with my body or say whatever I want to with my mouth or spend my money anyway I want to because a lot of times that hurts other people. Father's God. And that's what this process is all about. Those who desire to become steady, fruitful, well-balanced, mature Christians used by Jesus Christ must go through this process. There's no escaping it. You must learn how to worship God, grow in community, love others, and serve the world. And that all takes a death to self, and that's something that just can't be programmed. I wish it could be. I wish they could just take us in a room, strap us down, put a piece of leather in our mouth and say, no, this is going to hurt worse than you ever imagined. And turn on electrical shock thing that for 15 minutes would absolutely fry us, but when we got up, we were totally sanctified. I do it. I need to lose the weight anyway. We do great for my figure and my soul, but it's not like it is a long process of the church of Jesus Christ slapping you around until you like a piece of clay, you've been molded into something that's absolutely magnificent, and because we have a low view of the church, we don't want to face these four basic realities, number one, the Jesus Christ, great love of his eternal life is his bride, the church, and I'm not talking about some invisible, nebulous church, some concept. I'm talking about people in human bodies, in the body of Christ that he can get his arms around, he loves them. Number two, we ignore the fact that his main program for reaching the world is his church. I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. He calls the church his kingdom. He says we've been delivered from the domain of darkness to the world and transferred to the kingdom of his beloved son, the church in which we have forgiveness, redemption and the forgiveness of sins. Thirdly, the Jesus Christ expects every true believer to become a baptized and active member of the church. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations by baptizing them and teaching them. That's what he expects us to do. And fourthly, Jesus Christ has constructed the church so as to be his discipling program, and that is what the church is here for. For years back, maybe 20 years back or so, two guys out of campus crusade for Christ, a pair of church ministry, got convicted that they had a low view of the church, so they dropped out of campus crusade for Christ ministry. They went to seminary and they began to work in the church. Ron Jensen is one guy, Jim Stevens was the others. They wrote a wonderful book called The Dynamics of Church Growth. It's got a bad title because you would think it would be about all these slick ways to get people in it, but it wasn't. It was just an practical exposition of what the book of Acts looked like. It's a great book. And in the 13th chapter called Discipleship, this is what they say. It is imperative that we understand the way in which the church makes disciples. The church is its own discipleship model. It has an internal organization, structure and climate which blend together and a supernatural way to develop disciples. They go on to say that there are two processes that God uses in the church to make disciples. Here's one, spiritual gifts. They say that the only place to experience the full range, the full continuum, the full rainbow of spiritual gifts is in the church, where all the different spiritual gifts are creating spiritual dynamic and spiritual growth in the lives of people. The other element is what they call the reciprocal commands. There's 27 commands in the New Testament, one for another, love one another, greet one another, forgive one another, pray for one another, be patient with one another, so it's in the spiritual gifts and in the spiritual body life the disciples are made. They ask the question, does the church have a discipleship program? The answer is no. Not technically, but everything the church does disciples its members. And therefore, not the discount, they said, individual one-on-one discipleship or small group or Sunday school programs, but all of that together becomes the discipleship process that God takes people through. You can see it in your own life. I can see it in mine. That most of the things that happened to mature me to the point where I am now happened almost inadvertently, at least not through some program, but through the life and the relationships and the process of worshiping God, growing in community, loving and serving others, and reaching out to serve the world. It's just a natural process. This process of church contributing to the growth and the discipleship, and they say at the end of this chapter that the great need of our time is for discipling churches who will provide a climate for growth and opportunities for the fallen ministry, and the great failure of our times is people who never avail themselves to the process that the church has in place. I'll tell you the one reason we'll go down to history for this. You'll say in heaven by cracky, he was wrong on everything but this. The reason we're failing in our culture today is because we don't like this process. We'd rather have a spiritual, smorgasbord of programs that we'd like that we could pick and choose from, and I guarantee you when you do that, you'll always pick the things you're already strongest in. You'll never be forced to grow in the areas where you're weak. And that's why Jesus Christ was smart enough to say, my church is not a program. It is a process. So that brings us to the second thing. What is our mission? Because part of that process is to serve the world. We put at the end of our mission statement, we will engage members in the advance of the kingdom of God both near and far by sharing the gospel and the power of the Holy Spirit with lost persons and by reflecting the beauty and holiness of Christ to lost cultures. Now how do we do that? Well, Acts 1, 8 kind of tells us, you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth. Let me point to four things, I gave you four things we need to do. To be part of this process of disciples, we need to worship God, grow in community, so if you haven't joined the church time to do so now, love others by getting involved in some kind of ministry and serve the world by getting involved in some kind of outreach. That's discipleship. Now there's four arenas in which we do this. First, we're to be God's witnesses in our own Jerusalem. That's our hometown. Plus that's Matthews or Mint Hill or Charlotte, North Carolina, wherever we live, geographically it's where we live as a people and as a church, ethnically and culturally it's people who are like us and spiritually it's people from the same Judeo-Christian background. So our first mission field is the people like us, people from a Judeo-Christian background who probably are used to going to church or went to church somewhere in their background and we invite them to be part of our church. Now what's that mean for us? Write these down. For each one of these four things, you've got five things you need to do. You need, first of all, take spiritual responsibility for your family and friends because you're their number one missionary. You need to take spiritual responsibility for your lost family and friends because you're their number one missionary. They were put in your life and you and their life, not for someone else to lead them to Christ but for you to lead them to church and into this process and to salvation. Number two, to that end, you need a prayer list of all your family and friends that you know are lost. I'm not trying to lay a guilt trip on you, but sometimes feeling burdened about things is biblical and I think we should all feel burdened. It should bother us that our brothers and sisters, our mom or dad, our grandma, grandpa, our cousins, the people that have lived next door to us for 20 years, our cool workers are headed straight to hell and we're afraid of either being embarrassed or shunned by them without telling them about Jesus Christ. So you pray for them. That's the best thing to do to send them up, to open up their hearts. It's just to pray for them. You may pray for them for six months and to find it, they give you some opening in the conversation and you can take responsibility to share the gospel with them. That's the third thing. You need to learn a simple gospel. We're taking this through all of our Sunday school communities, a simple gospel, a simple way, if someone said to you, James, how do I get to heaven? You should be able to tell them from front to go. Here's what we do. From front to back, this is from go and this is where, this is how you become a Christian. Simple gospel. Number four, you need to invite people to church. You think, and let's just be honest here, I won't take it personal. I'll turn my back as I say this. You think that if you bring people of this church, that old man, the people will offend the Dickens out of him. And you know, he will, but that's not true. People who are unconverted are spiritual. They're just spiritually confused. And they will not, most of them, come into a strange church they'd ever been into, but they'll come with you. They'll come with you to campus outreach. And they'll come with you to youth group. They might be unconverted and they'll go with you to seek the city. We've had unconverted people go on mission trips with our folks. They'll come to things you invite them to. And when they finally get over the shock, that we're going to tell them what we think, rather than what they want, the majority of them continue to investigate. The majority, not the minority. And fifthly, you need to be involved in Christ's covenant churches increased focus on Matthews. I've asked Mike Miller and the people who lead and outreach in missions, Alan Gay and others who are helping there to kind of focus our church on Matthews. This is our Jerusalem. And honestly, we're pretty passive in our community. And we need to reach out and show them that we're a friend. We love them. We're here to serve them. Serve them first, lead them to Christ second, and see what happens. Then we have secondly, to be the witness in Judea. That's our region, Charlotte metropolitan area, maybe if you look at Ecclesiastically, the Central Carolina Presbyterry, but that's our spiritual investment in our region. And so geographically, it's North Carolina, ethnically and culturally, it's people who are near to us, but not exactly like us. Basically it's people from diverse church and ministry backgrounds. And there are five ways for us to do that. We can, number one, each one of us adopt one of these mercy ministries and become involved in some way to reach out to some people who are not quite like us, but in our area. We can recapture sore. I've asked Jason Miller and Mike Miller to reconstitute sore so it sports outreach and recreation. Not sports social club to keep the bad people away from my kids. Thirdly, we can purposefully and proactively plant churches. Churches talk about planting churches. And the reason we don't do it is because we're afraid that if we plant churches, we'll run out of people and money. You know the opposite happens. You send people out and you send money out and more people come and more money comes because the Lord knows you're a funnel and not a bottleneck. And since he wants to multiply churches, since the Lord was never into the mega church, but into many church, church planning is blessed by him. Fourthly, partnership with campus outreach and Charlotte and all that they're doing with our own central Carolina Presbyteria in their church planning. And finally, fourthly, pray towards ethnic, racial diversity in our church. Our Judea is no longer white suburban, white flight Charlotte. That's not true. Matthews has changed. We need to change with it and welcome these people into our church thirdly. To be God witnesses in our Samaria, this is a little tougher. Because if in Jerusalem we're reaching people who are like us. And if in Judea they're not that much like us, but close to us, in Samaria, we're reaching people that don't like us and we all like them. Now let's not dance around this. Samaria was a region, but it was also a group of people whom the Jews absolutely despised and vice versa. There's real tension between the half breed, half pagan, half Jews Samaritan and the pure bread Jewish Hebrew. And there are tensions like that in our community and in our culture, in our country. So these are people beyond our region, but in our nation. These are people who are different than we are. They are black. They are Mexican. They're immigrants. They're liberals. They're Democrats. They don't have a lifestyle we like and they don't trust us and we don't trust them. It's a huge barrier. In fact, it's harder to reach people in Samaria than the ends of the earth because you can send somebody to the ends of the earth. You don't have to live with them. You got to live with the Samaritans next door to you all the time. And they irritate the sin out of you. You want to bring them to Christ who'll take the sin out of them. How we do that? Well, let me give you five suggestions here. As we support, Joe Naramore, in campus outreach, the Northeast region, because Joe is taking campus outreach into the most unchurched post-Christian liberal peg in the area of America, New England. That's where he's headed. That boy is walking, singing with Jesus straight into the buzzsaw. And we're going to support him. And in Mission Utah, there's an example, planning churches among Mormons out west. Support for our own denomination. I know it's not glamorous to send money to the headquarters, but you know what? The peace case reaching all kinds of people that we couldn't reach in this Samaria known as America, giving assistance to reform seminary, covenant day school, covenant college-wide because they're producing the missionaries to our country for the next generation. And they're producing missionaries who are African-Americans and Hispanics, women who be involved in missions and all different sorts of things, and continue our partnership with the likes of Donnie St. Germain and El Shaddai reaching out to the kind of people that we would never be able to reach without his help. And finally, the fifth goal is to reach to the ends of the earth. We've talked about that. Those are people who aren't like us at all. They don't have the same God, they don't have the same religion, they don't speak the same language. In fact, sometimes the very nations they live in would like to go to war with us and obliterate us and sometimes they are, but they're people who are at the ends of the earth. Now, it's interesting, if he asks them, they're not at the end of the earth. They think they're at the center of the earth and we're living on the end. It's a prospective thing here. To say that the ends of the earth means that they're so far from us that it takes a special effort to reach them. And here's the five ways we can do that, through faith promises, through adopting a missionary to pray for, we have these cards in the back. Somebody who said, you know, you stay and pray and send me support and all go to the ends of the earth and reach these people for Jesus Christ with your help. Sadly, to adopt a focus area, we have seven different focus areas. And there, anything from Haiti, to Kenya, to Peru, to China, Germany, areas where we're investing more and more and most of these are accessible to you to adopt as a short-term focus. You can go overseas on a short-term trip, you can give extra money for these things, you can pray for these ministries, you can get to know the people involved in these things. And that's a focus area of ministry. We want to encourage you to pray for the world. There's things online, some search engines online where you can go and pull up an area of the world with a list of, or you can buy a book like Operation World that will help you pray through literally every single people group in every country on the face of the earth. To take a year is to pray through it. But we need to pray for them, especially as Alibarth reminded us, and Donnie St. remained reminded is praying for the persecuted church, and again, you need to yield your life up to the Lord and say, Lord, hear my, if you want to send me, send me. Now this is not about style of worship. This is not about how you organize your programs or what you call your church, whether it's church growth, mega church, or it's a secret sensitive or secret driven or it's emergent or it's techno herb or whatever you want to call, this is not it. This is about the soul of the church, that's what it's about. I want to end, just take one minute to tell you what church I was saved in. It's called the central church in Memphis, Tennessee. It was an independent church. It had been a Cumberland or many in Presbyterian church, it dropped out because that church delamination had gone liberal, and so in this church, we never argued about baptism because we had a minister who was a Cumberland Presbyterian minister, we had an associate who was a Southern Baptist, we had one who was a PCA minister and two Methodist ministers, so you could be dedicated christened, dunked, sprinkled, poured upon, or you could go down to swimming pool and stay for five minutes at bottom. We never argued about baptism, we never argued about it because we just didn't care about that. We had kind of a pseudo Presbyterian form of government. We were probably three-point Calvinists. This thing was different, but I tell you what was great about it. When I was 25 years old, I was one unconverted, immoral, angry, foul mouthed, rebellious, belligerent, cocky, obnoxious, young man, I am the young man that your most rebellious daughter would never bring home to mother, never. When I walked into that church, those people never asked me my sexual orientation. I'm sure they wondered about it. I was 27 and not married. They never asked me if I was a Republican or a Democrat. I really had made up my mind at that point. They never asked me my church background, whether I believed in the five points or what form of baptism I thought was correct, they didn't ask me what kind of music I liked. I didn't know any of the hymns they sang anyway. They all sounded like when we all get to heaven to me, just that romp and stomp and old Southern gospel thing. I thought every Sunday morning I was going to attend revival and I thought this is the weirdest thing I've ever been involved in, but you know what? These were the most lovely people I'd ever met. They loved me and they knew I was a mess. They never brought it up and they prayed for me by the hundreds I later found out and they took their time to share their lives with me, to invite me into their homes for meals, to bring me to Sunday school. I remember one time the pastor asked us to turn to the book of Habakkuk and two minutes later some elderly leaned over and said, let me help you with that son. She got right to it. I couldn't find it. I knew where Genesis and Revelation was in the gospel of John and anything beyond that I was in deep weeds. But they never embarrassed me, but the Sunday I walked down the aisle and confessed faith in Jesus Christ, that church wept as one body. And then they went on to the next, unconverted, immoral, angry, foul mouth, rebellious, cocky obnoxious young soul that came in and said, you know Lord, this is what church is all about. Let's bring Mike Ross in and teach him how to worship God, how to find Jesus Christ, how to grow in community. We'll give him a job teaching the first graders, then teaching the college kids, then teaching the new members class, and then we'll lay hands on him and his new bride, we'll tell them what seminary to go, we'll commission him on a Sunday night service, we'll send him out to Columbia Biblical Seminary and send him his support and pray for him till the day he's ordained. And that is the kind of church I want us to be. Sound good? Let's pray. Father, we do want to be a church in which you are adding daily to our number, those who are being saved. People who are like us, people who are not very much like us, people we don't like, and who don't like us, and people that we're not at all like because they're on the opposite end of the world. Send them to us and us to them and help us to be the kind of church that realizes that the problem in the world is not necessarily all those people outside of us, but the man inside of us, the man who is in the process of becoming like Christ which takes a lifetime. We want people at different stages of their spiritual journey to come to us and to find a worship service that is engaging to them and lifts them up above the routine of life to focus on the kingdom of heaven. We want them to like our community and to feel welcomed into it. They can grow, it's okay for them not to have the right answer, to not have the right lifestyle, to still be in bondage to some sins and still find a place with us and encouragement. We want to teach them how to love people and their relationships and how to serve through the gifts and abilities you've given them and we want to empower them and encourage them and equip them to go back to their relationships, home and neighborhood and friends and work and lead people to church, to Christ, to eternal life and into this gospel service. This is the kind of church you want us to be, so this is the kind of church we want to be. Help us as we move together as a body in this way is the leaders lead and plan and strategize and as we are able to give and to get involved and to go and then enrich us and give us the faith to do so and encourage us, we pray, in the years and months and decades to come to see sons and daughters brought to glory through all generations and from all walks of life and all races to this church becomes a kaleidoscope of your grace and your glory and your goodness because we have brought people to your church and Jesus Christ was here waiting for them. And so we ask this for Christ's sake and to Jesus' name, amen.