religious, he would respond, Yes, I am a Jehovah bystander. It is comfortable being a religious bystander isn t it? I fear that the church that I know

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1 Are we really serious about making disciples? Second sermon in series: Contagious Christianity Preached on Sunday, May 3, 2009 By Rev. David Tinney Text: Matthew 28: and 1 Peter 2: 9-12 Theme: For a vast majority of believers, Christianity is a spectator sport and not a participatory one. Are we really serious about making disciples and transforming our world? I would like to thank you for the overwhelming response to last week s sermon on Contagious Christianity. So many people said they got it and the whole idea of evangelism changed and was not as frightening. For some of you it was the first time that you recognized that you were in the lost and found stories of Jesus and that there was a time in your lives that you were lost and in need of being found. Some of you told me about people in your lives that were lost and had pulled away from your love and you could understand how much God yearned for us to return. For some you realized that contagious Christianity is really about taking part in God s plan of searching for those who are spiritually lost and empty. Many talked about the idea of being contagious and that tension you had between being excited and wanting to share and that feeling of what happens if I do. One of you shared a cute joke about contagious enthusiasm which I thought bore repeating. It seems that a woman walked into her local meat market and ordered two pounds of sausage. The young clerk yells back to the butcher, Send me up two pounds of enthusiasm. Bewildered the woman asks, Why did you call it that? Because he puts everything he has into it, the clerk said. If that is the case I would like to order two pounds of spiritual sausage from each of you today. Can you imagine what that would look like if we were to live our spiritual lives putting everything we have into it? Over the last few weeks I have really been pushing this notion of contagious Christianity and asking people in subtle and not so subtle ways why are we not as contagious as we could be? What prevents us from being contagious disciple makers for Christ? I will have to say that even my more subtle questioning created some major ripples. I started making a list of some of the responses that I received and perhaps you might find a response that resonates with where you are in your faith journey. I fear being rejected. I hate it when I share something that means a lot to me and someone rejects me. One person in last week s Say What class, when discussing the things that stop us from sharing our faith said, We feel a deep sense of humility and don t feel good about giving advice to others concerning spiritual matters. I fear being labeled different or one of those fringy, fanatical Christians. I fear confronting someone who has more Bible knowledge than I do. If I really started getting contagious and sharing my faith then I would really have to know the Bible better and I am not there yet. I fear having to act differently. If I am going to start sharing my love and faith in Jesus Christ then I should start looking like him. I don t know if I am ready for that yet. I fear that I will have to move out of my comfort zone. I don t like asking people about their faith. I think it is between them and God. I don t like talking about my faith. I don t want to leave my comfort zone. Kind of reminds me of the response Flip Wilson used to give when someone would ask him about his religion. When someone would ask are you

2 religious, he would respond, Yes, I am a Jehovah bystander. It is comfortable being a religious bystander isn t it? I fear that the church that I know and love would change. I don t want it to grow. I don t want this church to become a mega-church and me to become a number. I already have a hard enough time knowing the people in my service let alone know the people in the other service. I don t want to be a church focused on numbers. I want to be a church focused on people. Did I happen to hit any of your responses? I imagine there are a lot more that I could add but these are the ones that came up several times over the last month. I guess if there is a silver lining in all of these fears it is that every church that has ever tried to grow has had to face each one of these issues. The good news is that the churches that were able to look beyond these obstacles and stay focused on the vision of making disciples and transforming the world stayed strong and grew. As I was preparing this sermon a good friend of mine sent me a link to a blog site for Methodists and an article with the title, Do United Methodists Want to BE Disciples? The author of the article is Dan Dick, an ordained elder who spent 14 years working for the General Board of Discipleship in Nashville in areas of stewardship, leadership, and disciple making. He is now the Director of Connectional Ministries for the Wisconsin Annual Conference. This past week I was in a meeting with our new bishop and he mentioned that church leaders ought to be reading some of Dan Dick s books. I only tell you all this because the man has great credibility. So he began his article with the mission statement for the United Methodist Church which states that we are to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. In many ways the vision and mission statement of our church is about equipping the people of our church to be the transforming presence in our community. Throughout the United Methodist system we proclaim that we are in the kingdom-building, world-transforming, disciple-making business. So he asks the simple question: Do United Methodists Want to be Disciples? He sent out a survey to fellow Methodists and received more than 7,000 responses, which is substantial. He discovered the answer to that simple question was not all that simple. You see there are various ways among United Methodists to understand what it means to be a Disciple. 71% of the respondents defined a Christian Disciple as someone who believes in Christ and confesses to some sort of belief statement like: Jesus is savior, or Jesus is Lord, or Jesus is the Son of God. 16% defined discipleship as a person who followed the teachings of Jesus Christ. 8% defined discipleship as reorienting and reorganizing one s life to live like Jesus. 4% defined discipleship as radically changing one s life to become the Body of Christ with others. You can see the progression of intentionality and obedience. Approximately 87% of the respondents believed they were living as Christian disciples because they simply believed in Jesus or tried to follow his teachings. When the definition of being a disciple was more demanding and more sacrificial the numbers feel like a rock. When the definition moved from believing to changing or from embracing to transforming the numbers went to single digits. I know numbers are cold and surveys can be manipulated to say all sorts of things. But let me explore these percentages with you because I think they reveal something that is affecting mainline churches today. I would like to set up a continuum to show the relationship between definition of discipleship and expectations not to cast judgment. I believe there will always be this continuum

3 hopefully with different percentages but this continuum shows spiritual journey and the work of the church. On this side we have the 71% respondents who said that discipleship was believing in Jesus Christ. Their expectations were low. As disciples they felt that all that was expected of them was coming to church and praying occasionally. The next category was the 16% who defined discipleship as following the teachings of Christ. Their expectations increased to include: being kind to others, reading/studying the Bible, helping in church, and giving money to the church. I am going to combine this final 13% under the category of radical reorientation where the disciple believed that he or she needed to start changing core behaviors and practices to look more like Christ. In this category words like daily and regular were added to worship and prayer. Study of the Bible was expanded to sharing your faith. (Did you notice this was the first spot on the continuum where sharing faith was mentioned?) Being kind to others grows to doing good to others and giving to the church elevates to sacrificial giving of money, time, resources, and gifts and talents. But there is more. In this category people are willing to risk comfort, security, health, and safety to reach out in ministry. They are willing to be accountable in small groups where they will vulnerably share their faith journeys. They are willing to reorient their lives around the cross. (Move back to the first position) In this position Christianity is passive. Over here it is active. Here it is a spectator sport. Here it is full contact, participatory. Here it is watch and occasionally get excited. Here it is play and be contagious. Again this is not a judgment of churches or this church. I believe every church should have this kind of continuum. We should always be having people coming in the front door who are over here. Our job is to move them over to here. Our job is to shift the percentages and to raise this from 13% to 20% or 30% or more! Can you imagine what the church would look like if that were to happen? Can you imagine? If we are going to be a church of contagious Christians it means we need to move more people down the continuum where transformation and then sharing takes place. Centuries before this church ever was an idea in anyone s mind there were dozens upon dozens of small house churches that dotted the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The early followers of Jesus were under great persecution and it would have been much easier to be one of the 87% who could silently slip under the radar than one of the 13% who had to risk it all to follow our Lord. It took guts, vision, and faith to be in one of those churches. The words that Peter used to fortify the leaders of those churches are relevant to us today because they call us to continue the work of disciple making. Listen to the words as if they were being read to you right now. [My sisters and brother] you are the ones chosen by God, chosen for the high calling of priestly work, chosen to be a holy people, God s instruments to do his work and to speak out for him, to tell others of the night-and-day difference he made for you from nothing to something, from rejected to accepted. These are words that transcend time. These are words for every church and every Christian that wants to be a contagious disciple maker. Notice Peter did not say that it was work left to the ordained or the paid staff. He said YOU have been chosen for the high calling of priestly work. We are part of the priesthood of all believers. The kingdom message is too big to be left to just the ordained.

4 Notice what it is that we are to proclaim. We are to tell the world about the night-and-day difference God s love has made in our lives. We are to talk about how we were lost and now found, rejected but now accepted, unworthy in the eyes of culture but now a treasure to be celebrated. Peter goes on, Friends, this world is not your home so don t make yourselves cozy in it. Remember that fear that was expressed in the beginning of the sermon about leaving our comfort zones? The same zone was trapping believers 2,000 years ago. Leave the comfort zone and not only live a life where others can see Christ at work but tell others about it because they need to hear the word proclaimed. LIVE AND TELL. I believe from what I have heard and seen in this church and in the United Methodist Church in general, is that we do a good job showing living our faith but we have a hard time telling others about our faith. I see examples everywhere in this church of living our faith. The SIBs lived their faith by caring for the planet and sharing that with their children. The rummage sale was more than getting rid of old things it was raising money to help the marginalized. We have group after group participating in ministries like Habitat, Share House, Washington School, etc. We could always do more but we try to live our faith. We have a hard time telling it. We live in a culture where everyone else is TELLING the message about their product, service, or group and we must not keep quiet about our own message. We must learn how to tell. We must learn how to share the gospel with others. I remember asking a person many years ago why they didn t come to church and she simply said, No one has ever asked me. We need to tell our message. We need to get over our fears and tell it. This last week I had two meetings with our new bishop and in the first meeting he declared his expectations of us as pastors and of the churches we serve. By the way this was the first time any bishop I have served declared expectations. I think we were all shocked. One of those expectations was that we needed to grow. He was not going to allow the same patterns of attrition to continue. Then he did the unthinkable for a Methodist. He put goals on our growth! He put a target out there and said I expect you all to meet it! Well you can imagine what the response was. Immediately people resisted the idea of a goal or percent and said we are talking people here. He was unphased. If we don t have targets we don t know what to shoot for. If we don t set goals we don t know how to measure progress. Let me ask you. If I were to say to you, let s lose some weight together. Would you get excited? With that kind of generic goal you and I know that we would both quit when we lost our first pound. Am I right? But if I were to say that in the next four weeks you and I are going to commit to lose 10 pounds and that I was going to hold you accountable in the process, don t you think the results would be better. Of course they would. I work best when I have a goal in mind. I am reminded of the story of Florence Chadwick who was a powerful woman swimmer. She swam the English Channel twice and in 1952 was attempting to be the first woman to swim from Catalina Island in the Pacific Ocean to the shore of California a 26 mile journey. After 15 hours of swimming she suddenly gave up and climbed out of the water. A fog had drifted in and she could not tell how close she was to the coast. When she got out she realized she had less than a half mile left. Two months later she completed her goal because she could see the goal. As contagious Christians in this church I would like to propose a few goals and then ask others around us to help us stay accountable and to not lose sight of the goal.

5 Goal one: I would like to move people down the continuum. Think about where you might be and commit to moving towards greater transformation. Commit to someone. Form a plan for daily prayer and study and join classes. Goal two: Share your faith with someone or someones. Break out of your comfort zone and find people to tell about how important your faith is to you and what it has done. Remember the words from Peter you share how Christ has made a night-and-day difference in your life. The more you do it the easier it is to do. Goal three: Think of the people you work with, go to the gym with, bike with, or who are in your family but not in a church. Set a goal of bringing at least one, two, three or more to church over the next year. Set a number or you won t do it. Make it a goal and commit it to a friend who will hold you accountable. My sisters and brothers I would like to grow this church so that it can change the lives of those within it and those outside the walls. I want to grow this church because I know the night-and-day difference that Christ has made in my life and I want others to know it as well. I want to grow this church and my goal is easy to see and hard to reach. Every year I would like us to look at the Easter crowd and commit that by our next Easter that number will be our average attendance. That is not a hard goal. What it means is that each of as the priesthood of all believers reaches your goals. All it would take is each of you committing to replicating yourself at least once over the next year. Go forth and replicate.

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