Bringing the Streams Together

John 17:20-26; Colossians 3:9-17; 1 Thessalonians 5:19-24

I decided to do a fourteenth and concluding sermon in the Six Streams of Living Water series. Let’s assess what we have learned and how we can apply it in the life of our church.

We have learned that in the early nineteenth century founding days of our Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement and in our period of most rapid growth in the early and mid-19^th Century, all Six Streams were operating within our movement. This was true in the other mainline Protestant churches such as Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian. Most mainline churches were built (1) on the authority of inspired Scripture and the compelling Great Commission characteristic of the Evangelical Stream, (2) on the focus on personal transformation into Christlikeness characteristic of the Holiness Stream, and (3) on the guiding and empowering presence of the Holy Spirit characteristic of the Charismatic Stream. The other three streams were present also. Then, settled middle class spiritual complacency and the influence of skeptical higher education on the training of clergy caused mainline churches to become less friendly to the streams on which they had been built, causing the less comfortable and less educated members of mainline churches to withdraw and start their own denominations. These new denominations tended to be primarily One Stream denominations, either Evangelical or Holiness or Charismatic. Without the checks and balances of the other streams, they fell into excesses and abuses, but they still had a dynamism that caused them to thrive better than the old mainline churches.

Meanwhile the old mainline churches focused at the congregational levels on respectability and at the leadership levels on the Social Justice Stream which they eventually overly politicized and inadequately grounded in personal morality, driving even more believers from their folds. The result of all this is that the old mainline churches in this country are in precipitous decline. Is there hope for recovery? Perhaps, but it will take bold action.

While Judy and I were in Indianapolis, we became acquainted with a United Methodist congregation in Ginghamsburg, Ohio, a bedroom community outside Dayton. About 15 years before we became aware of it, the congregation was in rapid decline and down to 90 members. We were told that the Methodist hierarchy wanted to close the church and so sent them the pastor that they thought least equipped to renew the congregation and most likely to alienate their members. The bishop appointed Michael Slaughter. At first, it looked like the hierarchy had it figured right. Slaughter arrived and announced his program for attempting to renew the church. The membership dropped to down to 45. But then it started to grow. In a few years it reached 300. In a few more years it reached 2,000. According to its website, the congregation is now 4,500 strong in weekend worship attendance, the largest United Methodist Church in Ohio.

Don’t worry, that won’t happen here. We are not sitting in the path of urban sprawl. In our setting, topping 300 combined in two or three worship services by 2020 is a plenty big goal. But the principles on which Slaughter renewed a mainline church are still valid for us.

More than on any other Stream, Slaughter built on the Evangelical Stream with its focus on the authority of the Bible, the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the bringing of people to faith in Christ. Slaughter announced that the first principle of growth would be to move from the vague theism that was being taught in the church before his arrival to clear proclamation of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Further, he asserted that telling people about Jesus was the business and purpose of the church and that this purpose would govern everything the church did, even how it worshiped. He wanted to be clear from the beginning with every person to whom the church presented the gospel that following Jesus costs us everything that we might want to claim as our own rights. In other words, a believer in Jesus Christ holds no area of his or her life back from Jesus’ command, from dedication to Jesus’ mission.

Also in line with the Evangelical Stream, Slaughter announced that scriptural truth would be the primary source for everything they preached and taught, for everything they believed and did.

Going beyond the Evangelical Stream to the Holiness Stream, Slaughter insisted that their scriptural foundation was not just for information, but for transformation. To support this transformation he asked new members to covenant to follow certain practices that are typical of disciples of Jesus Christ, things very similar to our 9 ways, including belonging to a small group that incorporated accountability to the covenant and to spiritual honesty.

In line with the Charismatic Stream, Slaughter saw a major function of the church as helping members identify their spiritual gifts and to respond to the callings, leading, and empowerment of the Holy Spirit.

He insisted that strong spiritual leaders were part of the Holy Spirit’s work, that they were not managers, but Spirit-led visionaries who must hear and articulate the vision and mission of the church and then embody and model important aspects of that mission and vision. In other words, the leader must tie together the Contemplative, Charismatic, and Incarnational Streams… listening to God in prayer, discerning the leading of the Holy Spirit, and living it out in daily life, and that the pattern set by the adventurous leaders was then to characterize the whole membership.

Slaughter did not neglect the Social Justice Stream, but moved it beyond ideals, positions, and stands and moved it into tangible commitments. Slaughter insisted that the mission of the church included serving the least and the last. For starters, he asked each church family to consider connecting to one underprivileged inner city Dayton child and buying the same kinds of gifts, clothing, and school supplies for that child that they bought for their own children. That’s where the rubber (of expensive athletic shoes) met the road. He then used these connections to inner city life as the foundation for building vision for all sorts of missions to address the underlying problems. He encouraged members to find their individual callings to social service and to pursue them. In short, Slaughter led his church to a well-rounded approach that brought together every one of the Six Streams, and it was very fruitful. I don’t know if he even knew about the Six Streams concept. He just did them, and it worked.

Does that mean that we should imitate the Ginghamsburg church? Not in the details. God led Slaughter and the members of his church to do what was right for Ginghamsburg and Dayton, Ohio. God will lead us to do what is right for Berryville and Carroll County, Arkansas. But I believe that the healthiest of churches anywhere will have all six streams flowing together, with appropriate checks and balances.

I began by talking about the fact that what led to success for the early Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement was lost, fragmented in mainline churches. I am suggesting the Six Streams as the corrective for that decline. The great thing is that it is not only a moving forward, but also a return to what made our movement (and the other mainline churches) strong in the first place.

How do we bring the Six Streams back together? We do it with a combination of openness and caution. We drop our prejudices against the best parts of each stream. We guard against the worst parts of each stream. For instance, for the Evangelical Stream, we develop an enthusiasm for the richness of inspired Scripture and for obeying the Great Commission to go and make disciples, but we guard against angry crusades against those we identify as sinners. For the Holiness Stream, we take very seriously the purpose of God to restore our lifestyles to fit with the image of God, but we guard against legalistic self-righteousness. For the Charismatic Stream, we welcome the leading and empowerment of the Holy Spirit in all its Scriptural actions, but we guard against undiscerning fascination with all things supernatural and spectacular and speculative. And so on.

The Apostle Paul demonstrates this open and cautious pattern with regard to the Charismatic Stream in 1 Thessalonians 5:19-24. Paul establishes two guidelines for openness: do not quench the Spirit; do not despise prophecies (that is, Spirit-given messages). He establishes a basic rule for how we evaluate prophecies: test everything; hold fast what is good; abstain from every form of evil. He puts the measuring rod before us, our wholeness and maturity in Christ: Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely (or make you totally holy), and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus. He makes clear that this is the work of God: He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.

That kind of sane balance is what we are aiming for with all Six Streams, and we are aiming for the result of wholeness in our church life and wholeness in our personal lives. May it be so. Amen.

I Know Your Deadness

A Sermon Based on Revelation 3:1-6

November 1, 2009

The Church in Sardis

We are in a series of sermons in which we are looking at Jesus’ messages to the seven churches of the Revelation to John. Today we come to the fifth church, which was located in Sardis in what is now western Turkey.

The city of Sardis was capital of the ancient kingdom of Lydia. Like nearby Thyatira, its wealth rested largely on the textile industry. It had reached the peak of its wealth and grandeur in 700 B.C. The main part of the city was located on a high cliff which was thought to be invulnerable. A city or portion of a city located in such a situation was called an acropolis. Nevertheless, Sardis was captured five times, including by Cyrus of Persia, Alexander the Great of Macedonia, and Antiochus the Great of the Alexandrian empire. In the cases of Cyrus and Antiochus, their troops at night scaled the precipice on which the city sat and discovered that the city had posted no guards. In other words, the city in its complacency was asleep.

There were in Sardis, as in other Asian cities, temptations and pressures for Christians to participate in the cults of the emperor, of the trade guilds, and of the Asian Great Mother Goddess. But these are not the issues Jesus raises as he addresses the church in this town.

What Jesus Said to the Church in Sardis

3:1“And to the angel of the church in Sardis write: ‘The words of him who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. “‘I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. 2 Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God. 3 Remember, then, what you received and heard. Keep it, and repent. If you will not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come against you. 4 Yet you have still a few names in Sardis, people who have not soiled their garments, and they will walk with me in white, for they are worthy. 5 The one who conquers will be clothed thus in white garments, and I will never blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels. 6 He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’

The Sardis church has the reputation of being a strong and vital church. To the outward eye, it is faithful. But something is seriously wrong. Jesus has little good to say about the Sardis church except about a small faithful remnant within it. To the church as a whole, Jesus says, “You have a reputation of being alive, but are dead. Wake up!”

Since there is no specific listing of their misdeeds, it seems that their devotion is halfhearted, that their hungering and thirsting for righteousness is never more than a vague yearning, that their avoiding of blatant sins does not lead them into daring adventures for God, that there is not enough reality and vitality to their spiritual life to make an impact for Jesus.

He warns, “If you do not wake up, I will come to you like a thief in the night, and you will not know at what time I will come to you.” Why will they not know? Because like their city historically had been, the church in Sardis is spiritually asleep. They are sleeping through the spiritual warfare of their times. As Rip Van Winkle missed the American Revolution, so they are missing the point of their Christian lives.

As Paul wrote to the nearby Ephesian church, Jesus in effect speaks to the Sardis church, “Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

To What Does Jesus Want the Sardis Christians to Awaken?

Allow me to suggest some things that sleepy Christians typically do not understand. I could list dozens, but I only have time for three. Sleepy Christians do not comprehend:

1. the holiness of God and the perfection he has planned for us.

2. the wonders of the costly grace of God.

3. the power and presence of our living Lord in our daily lives.

Let’s look at these one at a time.

1. Sleepy Christians do not comprehend the holiness of God and the perfection he has planned for us. God has a perfect plan for his creation. His plan leads to love, harmony, freedom, justice, peace, beautiful variety, and endless creativity. That is not the condition of the world in which we live. Our world is filled with hatred, strife, oppression, injustice, war, ugliness, and dullness. So are our hearts, which have been filled by our world. God cannot forever tolerate our compromises with sin, the compromises by which we hold back from living the perfection he has planned for us. God cannot let sinners carry their sin into eternity. As long as sin reigns over our lives, death reigns over our lives, and we cannot enjoy God’s perfect plans for eternity.

Anyone who says, “I was brought up in the church. I was never lost,” just does not yet grasp the holiness of God, the perfect plan of God, does not yet grasp what must happen in our lives if we are to enter eternal life. Being brought up in the church and never being unbelievers are wonderful things but they are not sufficient to address our holiness gap. However, if we wake up to the holiness of God, we will know that it is not sufficient to linger complacently in our shortcomings as children of God. Something’s got to give. Let’s wake up to God’s holiness!

2. Sleepy Christians do not comprehend the wonders of the costly grace of God. The fact is that we cannot by our own efforts alone root the sin out of our own lives, let alone out of anyone else’s life. Without a miraculous and incalculably costly redemption, we are lost in unholiness, and so is everyone else. Nonetheless, God has in Jesus Christ provided the miraculous redemption; Jesus took the cost of our sins on himself; we may be saved by sheer grace—a gift we do not deserve-- through our faith in Jesus’ righteousness. He will cover us with his righteousness while the Holy Spirit works in our lives to grow our actual righteousness degree by degree. This is wondrous good news for us and for all who will believe and open themselves to the process. This is a matter of eternal life winning out over an eternal living death, of righteousness winning out over sin; it is a matter demanding our deepest response of gratitude, of joy, of celebration, and of love. It must express itself in our highest worship and in our deepest service. Let’s wake up to the wonders of God’s costly grace.

Brief Intermission: The Relation of Holiness and Grace

Let’s take a brief intermission before we go on to the third thing that sleepy Christians do not understand. No, this is not a time to go get popcorn and a soft drink, but to consider the relation of holiness and grace. Holiness does not cancel grace, nor does grace cancel holiness. They must be held together.

Those of you who have been reading James Bryan Smith’s The Good and Beautiful God have been giving thought to this in the past couple of weeks. In Chapters 5 and 6, Smith describes two young women who show to us the importance of grace and holiness.

In Chapter 5, he tells the story of a young woman who as a teenager had wandered away from the ways of right living and had ended up pregnant. Later, having recognized the errors of her ways, she returned to her church only to face several harsh and judgmental rejections from the pastor, not only of herself, but also of her baby. She went to a different church that graciously accepted her and her child. In time, she and her daughter ended up serving as missionaries in Africa. What a wonderful transformation was made possible by the graciousness of the second church!

In Chapter 6, Smith tells the story of a young woman thanking him for his sermon on the grace and unconditional love of God. What she had gotten from his sermon was this: “You see, I’ve been living with my boyfriend for the past six months, and I was raised in a church that said that this was a sin, and I felt really guilty. But this morning you said that God loves us without condition and that Jesus has forgiven all our sins, and then I realized that my guilt was unnecessary. Jesus paid it all! So I just wanted to say thank you for such a liberating message.”

Smith was crushed because he had no intent to say that our behavior is of no consequence. He got a second chance to talk to the young woman a few months later. He explained how important and good for us God’s holiness is. He explained that the reason premarital sex is wrong is that God designed sex to be a sacred act of intimacy within a marriage covenant, and that the reason to wait is that we are created to be sacred and special people. The young woman saw that her boyfriend was not viewing her and their sexual activity in this way. Smith advised her to cut off the sex until she was married. She foresaw that her boyfriend would leave her, but did it anyway. She was happy to spend the next couple of years discovering her sacredness as a child of God. Then she looked up Smith to tell him that she was headed into a marriage based on true and mutual respect.

In thinking about this sequence of events, Smith concluded that the young woman had to hear him affirm the unconditional love of God before she could begin to deal with his more challenging message about the holiness of God. It is a practical reality that many people will not hear a message of holiness until they have been assured of a message of grace, but it is also true that in this culture, in which the predominant cultural religion involves an imaginary teddy bear God who has no moral concerns, many people cannot really understand the significance of grace until they understand the perfect, holy standards of God and how far they have fallen short of them, and hence how much they need grace.

Holiness and grace go together. Leave out either one and the cross of Christ at the center of Christian faith has no meaning, and we have no saving, transforming, compelling message. Grace and holiness, holiness and grace, you can’t have one without the other. We must wake up to both! End of Intermission.

3. Sleepy Christians do not comprehend that we have a living Lord whose power and presence we can experience in our daily lives. In our cultural religion, God is a remote and impersonal force governing the universe toward total love and acceptance. Christian faith is quite different. The God of the Bible has specific purposes, reveals his will through inspired Scriptures, has sent his perfect Son to demonstrate his reign over all life and to deal with our sin issues. His Son Jesus was crucified, entombed, raised from the dead, and exalted as living Lord of the universe. Jesus continues to make himself known to his followers through the Holy Spirit, guiding, transforming, gifting, and empowering us, working supernatural miracles in and through us, embodying his love for the world through us. Being empowered by Jesus does not make us any more invulnerable to human suffering than he was, but it does enable us to live extraordinarily meaningful lives. Knowing that Jesus is involved in our history, in our biographies, in our daily experience of life, makes every day a great adventure.

This is my testimony. I had a dead faith until Jesus with the Holy Spirit came to wake me up and to become a living force in my life. I cannot claim to have awakened myself. Jesus did it. My part was that I had studied the Bible and was prepared by that study to recognize and to welcome what was happening when it happened. Let’s all wake up to our living Lord and to his powerful presence in our lives.

Conclusion

Our part in waking up is to study, pray, and be ready. Jesus will do the rest. In this letter, the one who wakes up to holiness, wakes up to grace, and wakes up the living Lord is described as one who conquers and receives a great promise from Jesus: The one who conquers will be clothed in white garments, and I will never blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels. That’s a good thing! Claim it! Wake up to all that Jesus can mean for your life.