Change or Die

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Change or Die 4 - Change and Live
Dennis Mullen - 10.14.07

14 "You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven. Matthew 5:14-16

A mental exercise. I'll say a word and you see what is the first thing (picture, idea, slogan) that pops into your mind.

Starbucks. For me it's that little green circle, the Starbucks logo, that I have learned to look for when I'm approaching an exit on the Interstate on a long trip.

McDonalds. Maybe it's the golden arches, or a Big Mac or maybe it's the images from the documentary Super Size Me about a guy who ate nothing but McDonalds for 30 days and almost wrecked his health.

Wal-Mart. An image of a store? Low prices? Big crowds? When Sam Walton was alive it was “Made in America”. Not anymore!

The thoughts that immediately come to mind make up the BRAND of each of these businesses. They have all spent millions to burn their logo and their chosen image on your brain, so that makes up part of their brand. But in addition, you may have had hours of experiences, some good, some bad, with each of these stores, and your experiences, including the speed of service, the smell of the store, the cleanliness of the restrooms and the quality of their products all go into forming their brand in your mind.

Last week when we talked about the image that younger adults, especially 16-29 year olds, have of the church, we were talking about the BRAND of Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity which means Bible-believing, praying, Sunday-school-attending, potluck-eating Christians like us.

Now we know that if Jesus was really in charge of the church and our lives, the Christian brand would be made up of concepts like love, compassion, truth, LIFE. But when Barna Research Group did an extensive study of what the younger half of the adult population thinks when someone mentions Christianity, they said our brand was:

● Anti-homosexual – 91%

● Judgmental – 87%

● Hypocritical – 85%

● And to a lesser extent, “Only concerned with converting people” (not really interested in real friendships – they see me only as a project); “Sheltered” (out-of-date, anti-intellectual, spouting some cliches they heard in VBS instead of thinking for themselves...); and “Too political” (more concerned with getting candidates elected than real service, and too closely aligned with the Republican party).

This research was recently published in the book unChristian, which backed up the data with many stories, like the one about the young woman who said: “I decided to go to a women's Bible study at my church and when I asked for prayer for a friend of mine who was thinking of getting an abortion, and I said that her boyfriend left her and she was all alone and I could see why she thought an abortion would be a good idea, the women spent the rest of the study trying to change my mind about even seeing my friend's point of view.” She went on to say that she decided then and there to never say anything personal in that group again, and certainly never share with them that she had also had an abortion years ago, which she described as an awful thing, one of the worst moments of her life.

Or, the story about the teen girl who worked and worked to get her friend to come to youth group, a homosexual young man, and she says that the Youth Minister, who knew this fellow by reputation at the high school, decided to work into his lesson three times that night the old joke that “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” even though his lesson had nothing to do with that.

These six words don't describe the essence of Christians that I know. I DO know of a lot of people here who exude love and truth and compassion and genuine, Christ-centered life. And yet, I too have seen enough of this kind of stuff to see where young people get these ideas. What I'm saying is that their perception is more real than I want to admit.

And just in case it hasn't struck you yet, please realize that when they're talking about Bible-believing Christians, they're talking about MHCC. Increasingly, this is what people expect to find if they walk though OUR doors and into our services or youth groups or Bible studies. This is OUR brand. I'd LIKE to think that people who have tried us out have a different view, but I really don't know if that's true or not. But after I laid these six descriptions out last week, someone came up to me and said “You just described MY teenager. This is EXACTLY what they think about Christians.” This is someone who knows us well.

At the end of the sermon last week, I said that there is really only one thing left for us to do to begin to reverse this awful reputation we have, and that's to put into practice the words of Jesus where he said:

To put it another way, they have seen our actions and heard our careless talk and it has damaged us and damaged the Great Commission and damaged the reputation of Christ. NOW they need to SEE us in action. They need to see us obeying Jesus, loving our neighbors, leading the way in helping people who have truly messed up their lives, being the least materialistic people on the planet, showing love for people we have never met, such as future generations, by cleaning up the mess our lifestyles create, taking an interest in the people who make our food or build our iPods or who otherwise may be sacrificing their health and their lives for our luxuries. We need to be friends of sinners, a label that was applied to our Lord, and we need to be full of grace and truth, just as was said of Him.

I'm currently reading Good to Great, the 2001 bestseller by Jim Collins (which I have parodied on your bulletin for the series I plan to start next week). It's a fascinating study on companies who plodded along for years in mediocrity, and then suddenly began a long and sustained climb into market leadership in their industry - and what caused that turnaround. One of the most interesting comparisons, one that is highly relevant to church, is the one between Kroger and A & P. In 1950, these two grocery stores had been around for decades and both were successful and both were about the same size. But Kroger realized something. They could see that the post-war economy was taking off and America was changing, and their research showed them that the things that had helped them succeed in 1925 and 1950 wouldn't work in 1975 and 2000. They saw that Americans increasingly were looking for a different kind of store – not the small, utilitarian store of 1950, fairly dark with wooden floors, six aisles, and the basics. That was great in the 30s and 40s when people didn't have much money, but now money was flowing and people wanted big bright stores with bakeries and seafood and a florist and 15 kinds of raisin bran.

Now A & P had the same information available to them. The difference is that Kroger faced this brutal fact – and it was brutal because it meant that every one of their stores was out-of-date and had to be replaced – and A & P essentially ignored it. Kroger set out to replace every one of their stores (and BTW, it seems that this is exactly what they're doing right now, again, in 2007). A & P basically said, “Hey, this worked before. It ought to work forever. Kroger came a market leader. A & P preserved museums all across the country of how grocery stores were run in the 40s.

In the late 80s when I started in ministry, and through the 90s, it was an accepted fact that, though it was hard to keep our 18-23 year olds coming to church, when they hit 23, 24, 25 and got married and started having children, they would see the need for the faith of their youth and return to church. Many of the young families that we have now, where Mom and Dad are in their 30s or early 40s, followed exactly that pattern. It wasn't perfect. No one wanted to give up on people after they graduated from high school, but we just didn't have many good ideas or resources for them, so we applied the Little Bo Peep philosophy to these lost sheep – we said: “Leave them alone, and they'll come home, wagging their tails behind them.” And for the most part, they did!

But this survey printed in unChristian seems to indicate that those days are over. If 91% think that the church's main product is people who are anti-homosexual, and 87% say that the church is a place where you'll find judgmental people and 85% of this generation thinks that “hypocritical” is the word to describe us, then they aren't coming back – not unless they SEE something different. Young adults in the 90s thought we were a bit out-of-touch, I suppose, but they saw the church as a place that taught something pretty important, and many of them returned to it if they ever left. It's a different world. September 11 raised in the minds of this generation the danger of religion, and now they have come to believe these things about us. .

Now it doesn't really concern me at all that Kroger faced the brutal facts and A & P didn't, and Kroger won out. Who cares? All the stores carry my favorite peanut butter!

But what happens when the church, our church, ignores the brutal facts and says “It worked in '85!” What would happen if we chose to deny our terrible reputation?

If the church doesn't respond, we leave a whole generation as sheep without a shepherd, separated from the one who is Truth, because we have made him out to be a lie. That is a terrible sin. Some of them, those who move to Knoxville or Atlanta mostly, will perhaps find a different kind of church, often called an Emerging church, where Jesus is first and where the needs of this generation are addressed AND where nearly everyone is 18-29. I'm grateful for those churches, but I think any church where everyone is in the same age group is second-best, whether the age-group is twenty-something or seventy-something. What kind of family is it where you don't have grandparents to learn from and sometimes to care for, and where you don't have young children and teenagers bringing life and perspective to everyone?

Still I'm grateful for the young adult churches because they lift up Jesus Christ for people who don't find him here (a brutal fact for me to face). But when the church in general lets a generation down, many of the people we choose to ignore (if not “cast away”) end up permanently separated from Jesus Christ. They might embrace another religion or philosophy or some other cultural movement that is contrary to God, or they may cut off this God-given desire within them to love and be loved by Him, and live completely secular, completely materialistic lives. The word for it that Jesus used was “lost”.

Can you live with that?

Do we still believe that only Jesus has the words of life? Do we still believe that people need exactly what Jesus offers – forgiveness, healing from sin, purpose in life, grace and truth?

Now, even though I say these things (to quote Hebrews) I am confident of much better things from you. This church is a great church (or at least a very good one) because we have quite a few people who are NOT described by these six ideas in the survey, people who do let the light of Christ shine through them. Therefore I have a lot of confidence that most of you will be on board as we turn our attention outward and let the light shine so that people who have previously heard our politics and mean-spirited jokes and arrogant self-promoting can now see our good deeds and give glory to our Father in heaven.

To make the change (and here is where you can fill out your insert), we need…

1. Unbounded devotion to Christ.

Maybe when I talk about going out and serving others, you think of this as a substitute for a relationship with Jesus Christ, or a substitute for the practices that develop such a relationship – Bible study, prayer, worship... So let me say in no uncertain terms that apart from that relationship with Christ, we have NOTHING to offer anybody.

In Matthew 7:21, Jesus said this: "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” He means that there is such a thing as knowing him and such a thing as not knowing him, and not everyone who drops his name to impress someone or sanction some action is really his follower. One of the problems that the authors of unChristian drill down into is the fact that churches put a lot of stress on getting people converted and then very little stress on what conversion MUST produce – a radically different lifestyle. What we have to stress, especially if we want people to quit seeing us as hypocritical, is that the entry-point to the faith is just that – an entry point. If you don't journey beyond the front door, there is a huge inconsistency. What people need to see is the unbounded devotion to Jesus Christ that he calls for when he bids us to take up our cross and sacrifice our own lives for His sake.

Matthew 7:21 actually appears in the context of Jesus teaching about false prophets, which is an accurate description of how outsiders see us. He says in Matthew 7:15-23 - 15"Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. 16 By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? 17 Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.

21"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' 23 Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!'”

I want you to see that he isn't condemning people who accidentally didn't do enough for him, but rather those who used his name and maybe even did great works in his name, but were connected to a very different root system.

People who have never read this verse seem to know this truth instinctively, and they ask: “What kind of root system produces such a judgmental, gay-bashing, hypocritical bunch of people?” And they know it isn't the True Vine we're drawing such things from.

The fact is that as our church enters a new day of serving others, we HAVE to be more devoted to Christ than many of us are now, and we HAVE to expect more from ourselves and from one another in terms of purity, forgiveness, the ability to resolve conflict, kindness and compassion. And these are the things the Holy Spirit produces in us. It's an easy discipleship, a cheap grace that has got us to where we are now. This is the time for total love for and unbounded devotion to Jesus Christ.

2. Undeniable love for people.

Matthew 22:34-40 – 34 Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. 35 One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:

36 "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" 37 Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

The entire Old Testament, and indeed the entire Bible, is all about these two things – loving God (hence unbounded devotion for Christ) and loving others (hence, undeniable love for people). C. S. Lewis said that he had a hard time putting up with other people, being gentle with them when they sinned and patient with them as they tried and failed to improve. But then he realized that there was one person that he treated with great patience and compassion, one person with whom he was most understanding and gracious and always willing to give another chance and hope for better things tomorrow...and that one person was himself.

What does it mean to love yourself? It means that if you're hungry, you find food. If you're cold, you get someplace warm. If you slip up and sin and embarrass yourself, you may be disappointed, but you give yourself another chance, and another and another.

What does it mean to love others? Treat them the same way.

There is an old cliché that says that people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. The survey said that younger outsiders think we care about them only so long as we think they're potential converts (if that long). Otherwise we ignore them or condemn them. That's why we need a love for them that they can't deny, and that comes (also) as the fruit of the Holy Spirit – hence, the unbounded devotion to Christ which produces an undeniable love for people.

3. Unbridled creativity in service.

It's in this practice that our reputation, our brand, will begin to change. Back in August when the Remote-area Medical event came to Roane State, we put out a call for volunteers. After the first announcement, Amy S. suggested to me that we think of essentially moving our church gathering out there to RAM for the weekend and trying to get everyone to volunteer. As it turned out, this wasn't needed, and some of the many here who volunteered got sent home early. But what a great idea. I'm looking for the next opportunity to do something that big.

Amy is also a leader in another example of creative service, The Refuge, which will provide low-income housing and discipleship for low-income families (BTW The Refuge got 501 c 3 status last week, many months ahead of schedule). It's my prayer that people will see over time what The Refuge does and their negative perceptions about Christians will run into some hard facts to the contrary.

Last year, we asked you to bring in shoe box gifts for Operation Christmas Child, and you did. This year we're asking you to do the same, but for a group of people who are part of the Lakota tribe in South Dakota, people that some of you are building relationships with, starting this past summer on a missions trip out there. Before Christmas, we'll send a small group of MHCCers with a large trailer full of what you bring in. Kristen Laprise is putting this effort together – an effort of creative service.

These examples just begin to scratch the surface. The challenge before us is to move from where we are now – a program here, a fund-raiser there – to a lifestyle of service where, out of our unbounded devotion to Christ and our undeniable love for people, we give up money and time and self-interest and even the dream of a profitable and comfortable future so that we can serve others.

The invitation: Always to become a Christian. But today: To become Christian, to pursue as never before Christlike purity, love, character and sacrificial living for others.

Morrison Hill Christian Church
P.O. Box 59 - 1008 E. Race St.
Kingston, TN 37763 (865) 376-5205