By Rev. Dr. Charles J.
Tomlin, DMin.
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist
Partnership
4nd Sunday After
Pentecost, June 28th, 2015
“….and
it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called "Christians." (Act
11:26 NRS)
Today we conclude these messages
from Acts. My hope has been to start a
serious conversation about what it means to be ‘a Church in the Spirit’. Hopefully, the conversation will not end,
but has only begun. Next week, we will
begin our summer series of messages from the book of Galatians, entitled, “Got Freedom? How the gospel of Jesus Christ helps us get
and stay free. ”
Now let’s get back to today’s
message. As we started out 11 weeks
ago, Jesus left the building, but then, the Spirit came to empower the church for
its work in the world. But this
empowerment came only as the church of Jesus Christ followed and obeyed the new
leadings of the Spirit. Thus, the church
only came alive and continued to thrive because it was a church in the Spirit.
Our final message comes at the place
where the church made its first, big, very important move: It has moved from being a stationary church
located only in Jerusalem, to becoming a mission-oriented church in Antioch of
Syria. This new location puts the
church on the edge of the world, ready to launch out as it preaches, teaches
and prepares to take the good news out into the world where it can be heard,
seen, accepted or refused. It’s risky
business being a missional church in the Spirit, but this risk is necessary for
the church’s future life. It’s the good
kind of risk that enables the church to take Christ’s mission of hope, faith,
love into the world so that the world can be saved.
DISCOVERY: BEING CHURCH
ON MISSION
What I want us to especially focus
upon how the followers of Jesus, who make up the church, finally get their name
as CHRISTIANS. It wasn’t until moved
out from its home base, moving from Jerusalem to Antioch, “… that the disciples were first called "Christians."
(Act 11:26 NRS)
Do you find this a little
peculiar? Isn’t it rather strange that
no one knew what to call the new baby until it left home? The parents couldn’t name it. The other siblings didn’t know what to call
it. How do you name a baby anyway? Well, if you do it right, you always put
some thought into what you should or shouldn’t name the baby. I’ve
heard that some people don’t have the baby named until they get home from the
hospital, but waiting until the baby grows up and leaves home, now that’s a little weird, don’t you
think?
In some countries of the world, you
have to get the babies name out of a book of suggestions. They
won’t let you name the baby just anything. You couldn’t name your baby Zebra or even Nelson
unless that name was in the government’s book.
Of course, that kind of government regulation sounds oppressive to us,
but you shouldn’t name your baby anything you want, now should you? If you do whatever you like, as we sometimes
do here in America, you can get some
mighty strange, weird, sounding names. Ok,
you asked for it, how about naming the baby, Zzyzx (pronounced Zay-zix).
This baby was born, of course, in California and is actually named that
after town on a road with the same name, aka,
‘the last place on earth’ . http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/bizarre-baby/story?id=23439916. If you give your baby a name like Zay-zix, or
as ABCDE, pronounced, ABseeDee, of course I won’t call it strange, but don’t
expect me say is correctly. Whatever you name your baby, I hope you’ll
pick a name that fits.
In the book of Acts, the name ‘Christian’ did not come all at once. Early on these followers of Jesus were given
some other names. They were called part
of the ‘apostle’s fellowship’ (2.
42), those who preached the ‘message
about this life’ (3.15), ‘people who
belonged to the way’ (Acts 9.2). Those were all good names, but they didn’t
stick. Luke didn’t even call them ‘church’ until Acts 5:11, after it proved itself to be ‘honest with
money as a ‘community of truthfulness’ (Willimon,
p. 53). Interestingly, the church did
not know what to call its members until it went out on the road, away from
home, moving out to answer its true calling and purpose.
Maybe this isn’t an accident. Maybe this is how the church really does
make a name for itself. Only when the church
moves out its own little world does it really make a difference or get
attention. The name the church got was was
“Christian¨,
which means ‘little Christs’. Here, we see the church being defined, not
by the people within it, but by those who were on the outside, looking in.
The church that gets its true name,
has to be a church that leaves its own Jerusalem, either figuratively or
physically, and it must become a mission station in the world, launching follow the Spirit on mission in the
world. The church that follows the
Spirit does not get its name based on location, but based upon it´s mission. Have
you noticed what´s been happening with new church names lately? If you compare the names of churches that
want to be on mission today, many of
them have dared to give themselves names that define their mission, like Collide,
Revolution, Elevation, Restoration, Sanctuary, or Journey. What you notice is that these churches are
defining themselves to the culture why they exist and what they want to do---be
on mission for Jesus Christ. While I
don’t think the actual name of a church matters that much the living church
must be on the move, always learning, always experimenting, always reaching
out, and always being a church that is launching its mission.
DISCIPLESHIP: BECOMING
THE CHURCH
But how do we launch, and keep on
launching? Who is it that we ‘become’
or want to help others to become? What
is the core purpose or mission we have be handed to be the a church made up of
people who are called Christians?
Maybe the answer resides in the very
text we’re focusing upon. Notice again
that “it was in
Antioch that the disciples were first called "Christians" (Act
11:26 NRS). Is it not simply this word
‘Christian’ nor the name ‘Church’ that gives us our true name, but it is that
we focus on our main mission—a mission that is nothing more and nothing less
than the great commission where Jesus
told his very first disciples to ‘go,
and make disciples….(28.19)
Remember that this was not just any commission, nor was it a mere
suggestion, but it was also a commandment of Jesus that his disciples are to receive
Christ’s power and authority---through the life he lived, the death that he
died, and through the resurrection power was given and now gives, so that we
too are commanded to go out into the world, not just to teach polite people,
nice lessons about God and life, but that we are to “Go, making disciples of all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
OF course, there are many ways the
church of Jesus Christ can catch on to the seriousness of this great commission. This
is a commission that right along with ‘great-commandment’ to ‘love God with all our heart, soul, and
mind, as to love our neighbor as ourselves, but it is also a great commission
that is also a commandment too. The
early church took disciple-making so
seriously, that it did not understand its mission to just to win converts, nor to
get members to fill up churches or Sunday School classes, but the church went
into the world as people who had been made into ‘disciples’ who also had the commission to ‘make disciples’. Unfortunately, many churches today may not
survive unless they become more intentional about making disciples as the main
part of being church.
How do become the church by ‘making disciples? ´Part of the answer comes right here in our
text. Our text gives insight into the
disciple-making process when it tells us: “Then
Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul, and when he had found him, he brought him to
Antioch. So it was that for an entire
year they met with the church and taught a great many people (11: 25-26),
Think about this? How long would the church have survived or
how far would the church have gone into the world, if it had not made a
disciple out of Saul, who was later named Paul? Here, in this brief description, we can see
the two most important things we could ever learn about what discipleship
means: Discipleship is a process that takes time (here is it about
a year), and it is a process that is about
people (not programs) making people into life-long followers of
Jesus. It is not about keeping or
maintaining buildings or programs (that is secondary), but it is about a
personal ‘teaching’ and a personal ‘learning’ process where people are
intentionally made into disciples who learn
to follow Jesus, as opposed to people who simply come to a church to learn about following Jesus. While discipleship can happen in many ways, it
must come down to at least this one way; it must be intentional, personal and
relational just like it is here, with a person teaching and a person learning,
sometimes even teaching and learning from each other, about who, about why, and
how one actually follows Jesus Christ as a way of faith and a way of life.
Years ago, I went through a process
of discipleship called “MasterLife” which Southern Baptists put together. I had to become certified in that program to
become a missionary. It was a good
program, but it was still only a ‘program’.
A year or so in our churches, we went through another good program of
discipleship, which the Methodist church put together, called, “Disciple.” It’s a good program too, but it’s still just
a program. Such ‘programs’ are good for
passing information, but don’t seem to be personal nor intentional enough to
make disciples by themselves. At times the church has done a good job of being
and teaching others to become Christian,
but because the world is less impacted by our faith today, even becoming more hostile toward faith, we must become even more intentional, get more
personal, become more relational, be more serious, and have more intentionality
and accountability built into the process of making disciples. Whatever we must not do, is reduce being
Christian to ‘getting people to come to
church’. If we want to be a church
in the Spirit---which is the only kind of church that has a future, then we must learn from Antioch that making-disciples
is the greatest calling and command for the future of the church.
DEPENDANCE: BELONGING
TO CHURCH
Finally, what might this actually look
like when the church makes a disciple? Jesus
himself said it will look like a tree bearing good fruit: “You will know them by their fruits. (Mat 7:16 NRS). While discipleship can be accomplished in
many ways, the only true test of a disciple making church is whether or not
people actually become “doers of the word and not hearers only”(Matt,
7,22 & James 1.22). Can we define what
it means to be a ‘doer’ of the word?
What happens at Antioch helps us. When prophets came down from Jerusalem to
Antioch and one of them predicted that a severe famine would soon take place,
the ‘disciples’ at Antioch then
become concerned that they wanted to ‘send
relief to believers living in Judea” (11.29). Because they were true disciples of Jesus,
and because these were their fellow brothers and sisters, they could not imagine following Jesus
without helping letting others know how much they belonged and depended upon
each other. As someone has rightly
said, “There are NO lone ranger Christians”. That pretty well sums up what it means to be
Christian: to belong to Jesus in a way that we know we belong to each other.
In a book about the Hope for the
Church, Church consultant Eddie Hammet tells about a social experiment he did with his Sunday
School class in Hendersonville, N.C.
They sent out people to ask “why” they didn’t come to church. Do you know what one overwhelming answer was? “Those
people in the church don’t believe in the church either!” It’s interesting to realize that the one
thing that convinces the world that we are really who we say we are is not how
much we care for the building, nor it is
how much we care for ourselves, but it following Jesus means that we care and
believe in each other---that Christ is in us, and wants us to care for each
other as he cares for us.
Wanda Kidd, a Baptist minister of
youth in North Carolina tells of working on her project for her Doctor of
Ministry degree. She was doing the
project how to do evangelism in a world where the majority of people, even
believers that are living around us, don’t have a clue what church means. She gathered several youth in a study group
that went on for several weeks and took them through a discussion-study group
where the young people listened as other told stories of how the gospel had
impacted their lives. One young woman
was struggling and suffering through the process. She sat in the corner all balled up, in a
fetal position. She was often detached,
and disinterested, but still wanted to continue with the group. In the final session, another young man saw
her pain and her inability to tell her own story, and then he basically said to
her, in front of all the others:
“You know, I was bad in English grammar and
sometimes my life is like sentence fragments that don’t make sense. But what does make sense in this whole
gospel thing, is that I see in your pain
you are looking for Jesus and Jesus is looking for you and that one of these
days the both of you are going to find each other.” With that word of compassion the woman got
out of her chair, went to him and embraced him saying, “thank you Charlie”. Do you know what that boy gave her, he gave her hope. Isn’t that what it means to be a
Christian---that we give each other hope?
Amen.
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