S – Strategic Shift from Reaching to
Making
Pastor Mathew Magera – 3/10/19 – Sermon 334
St. Thomas Lutheran Church, Trufant, MI
To God be the Glory!
Grace and peace to you from
God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Culture shock is the feeling
of disorientation experienced by someone who is subjected to an unfamiliar
culture, way of life, or set of attitudes. A cultural earthquake is causing the
Church to tremble, to shake. As Psalm 99 told us last week, the only reason we
should be trembling is because of our belief and trust that God is above it
all, has control of it all, and that God’s will cannot be changed. The Church
is feeling culture shock. The way the world operates is making it more and more
difficult for the Church to become relevant and useful in our communities.
Likewise, the way the Church operates is making it more and more difficult to
make disciples in our communities.
When the culture moved away
from God, He sent Jesus to shock the world. God sent love when there should’ve
been wrath. He sent grace and mercy where they were not deserved. He sent life
where there should’ve been death. Jesus shocked the world by completely turning
it around. It was culture shock for people. It was culture shock for the
disciples, but from this work of Jesus was born the Church. In the midst of a
moving culture, the Church was born. The Church that was growing and thriving.
The ministry and teaching that Jesus brought to us shocked the Church to life,
those who believed what he said, who believed in what he did. If what he came
and said and did was not worth anything, nobody would have cared if he rose
from the dead or not. But, they did care. They did find value in his words.
Jesus started something new. He shocked that culture. Today, as we feel the
effects of that cultural earthquake, that culture shock around us, we need
Jesus to once again shock the Church to life. We need to look back at what
Jesus said, what he did, and what he taught because what he said and what he
did changed the world and has saved countless lives.
Today, we start out with a
very familiar quote from Jesus as we begin to open ourselves up to being
shocked to life by Jesus. Known as the great commission, Jesus says, “Therefore
go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
Back in August at the NALC
Convocation, I was introduced to a short video of a couple sitting on a couch
and talking. The camera angle made it possible to see the man’s face but not
the woman’s. She began to talk about all this pressure she is feeling, that
sometimes is just feels like it’s right up on her. She can feel it in her head
and it’s relentless and she doesn’t know if it’s ever going to stop. She is
scared that this feeling will never go away. At this point the camera angle
changes a little bit and we see that this woman has a nail right in the middle
of her forehead. The man mentions this to her to which she responds, “it’s not
about the nail.” Then an argument ensues. The woman doesn’t want to be fixed,
she just wants to be listened to. She doesn’t want to worry about the nail, she
just wants compassion.
We can get together as often
as we do and talk about what we don’t have, how things just aren’t going right,
how they are not the same as they once were, but do we really want to do
anything about them, do we really want to change something about us that can
potentially make us better? Or is it like we have a nail in our head and all we
want is to share our grievances and for someone to simply listen to us?
Churches today are competing
with each other to have the biggest footprint, to have the biggest reach. We’ve
gotta have something for everyone so that we can reach the most people. We use
reaching as a goal, reaching a certain attendance, reaching the weekly offering
budget. We’re so focused on reaching, so convinced that reaching will make it
better that we’ve come to the belief that it we don’t, the church will die.
This is not true. Jesus didn’t say, go and make sure you reach people so that
you have a growing worship attendance and be sure to reach your offering budget
every Sunday. He didn’t say that. He said go and make disciples. Go and make
disciples. Reaching can’t be the goal. We have to go further.
We need to change our focus.
But, do we want to? I remember once at a council meeting a while back we were
talking about changing something and someone said, “Change is good but we need
to keep the old people happy.” No, we don’t. You could flip it around and they
could’ve said, “Change is good but we need to keep the young people happy.” No,
we don’t. It’s not about making or keeping people happy, it’s about listening
to Jesus and making disciples and any way that we can become better at that is
a good place to start even if there are short term consequences involved.
Jesus calls us to this
strategic shift in this great commission when he commands us to move from
reaching to making. From simply reaching people and pockets to going further
and making disciples for God’s kingdom. This shock first begins with changing
who we understand ourselves, as the Church, to be. Next week, we’ll focus on
the people we are reaching to make disciples out of.
The great commission gives
us the opportunity look at who we are and how change can lead us beyond
reaching to making. The more we are able to open ourselves up to Jesus’
message, the more we naturally become more effective because Jesus’ word is our
way of life, it is life giving, and transformative.
The Church is
Vision/Mission Oriented
Making that shift from
reaching to making challenges us to move from vagueness and mixed messages to
being vision and mission oriented. Jesus has set the vision for his Church
right here in Matthew 28. Go, make, baptize, teach. It’s about being strategic
and focused. The vision is who Christ wants us as the Church to be. The mission
then becomes how we accomplish that vision.
We have a mission statement.
I’m going to recite it for you right now. If you know it I encourage you to say
it with me. To know and share the grace of God in Jesus Christ by reaching out
to the community and the world as the Holy Spirit guides us to love and care
for one another. Did you struggle with that? Did you know any of it? If we don’t
know our mission statement, how will we know the mission? If we don’t know the
vision that Jesus gives us, how will we know where to go?
The ministry of a
congregation is not pieces being randomly put together. It’s not about us
having programs or curriculums, or events. It’s not about being a church for
everyone. We are not going to be everything. There are certain things this
congregation is good at and well prepared to do, but we will not be everything
and we have to be okay with saying no to certain things that just aren’t viable
at the current time. The problem is we are tempted to be a church for everyone.
It’s part of that fear. We don’t want to lose someone because we don’t have a
ministry for this one thing so we’ll go and create it just so they’ll stay.
That’s not being vision and mission oriented.
Becoming vision and mission
oriented also means knowing what part of the body you are. There are people
here that I know exactly what part of the body they are. If I need someone to
pray for something I know exactly who to go to. If I need some absolute honest
and faith-based feedback, I know exactly who to go to. If I would like someone
to teach a bread crumbs series, I know exactly who my options are. Do you know
what part of the body you are? Does everyone else know? Knowing the gifts we
have available to us and finding ways to be able to use those gifts in a
strategic mission-fulfilling way will strengthen the vitality of our
congregation and in our ability to make disciples.
The Church Is
Who We Are
Another way we can move from
reaching to making is to move from the understanding that the Church is where
we go to the understand that the Church is who we are. You’ve probably heard
this before. The church is not a building, it’s a people. How true this is.
Paul writes to the Ephesians
that he appointed Jesus, “to be head over everything for the church, which is
his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in ever way.” The Church is
his body, the people are his body. Paul also refers to us as heirs of the
kingdom. We are part of God’s family. Jesus says wherever two or three are
gathered he is there among them. We’ve used that before to talk about church
being more people oriented than place.
I try to make every effort
to use language that conveys this. I try not to talk about going to church on
Sunday, I try to say I’m going to worship. We don’t have fellowship after
church, the church has fellowship after worship. Like that. When referring to a
location I try to say the church building, not the church. I’ll meet you
tomorrow morning at the church building. I know it’s not the easiest way of
saying it and maybe you can recommend something better, but even a simple
alteration of the language we use can help that shift to take place.
The Church is not a
building, a pastor, a nonprofit, an institution, a business, or an
organization. The Church is who we are. Once it becomes automatic that the
Church is the people we will tend to look at people differently while on our
mission of making disciples.
The Church
Teaches
A third way we can move
beyond reaching to making is by moving from reaching people to teaching people.
What I mean by that is, if we are just trying to build up our attendance, our
membership roster or our offerings, then we’re not really making disciples.
Jesus certainly gathered
crowds around him but when he had crowds he taught them. In Matthew he preached
the Sermon on the Mount. In Luke, it was the Sermon on the Plain. Before Jesus
fed the 5,000 he was teaching people. When he called Peter to fish for people,
he was teaching the people (and Peter to for that matter) right from Peter’s
boat. Even when he was exhausted, he taught the crowds. He came alongside them
and he opened the scriptures to them. He showed them what faith was. He called
people from the crowds and taught them how to be leaders. He didn’t say, “oh,
somebody else will do it.” He did it. He didn’t leave it to the priests of the
synagogues, he did it.
Making disciples is not
something passive that we do, it requires us to do something. It’s an action
word. To make. Are we teaching people? Are parents teaching their kids? I will
always say a faith education in the home is way more valuable than a faith
education at the church building. Just as we read on Ash Wednesday, the Ten
Commandments, actually the entire Small Catechism, was what Martin Luther
intended families know and teach their children. Luther didn’t intend for it to
be the job of the congregation but of the family. Moving from just reaching to
making requires teaching, sharing something that we know and value, passing it
on before we pass on, so to speak.
The Church is
People Oriented
Yet another way to make this
shift from reaching to making is by leaving behind a program oriented church in
order to become a people oriented church. From program oriented to people
oriented. Essentially this means that instead of finding new ways to bring
people in to us we should be finding new ways to bring each of us out.
We can’t read the Gospels
without seeing this strategy put into place. What was Jesus constantly doing
during his three years of ministry? Traveling. We only see him in his hometown
less than a handful of times. Beyond that, he’s going out to where the people
are. He’s going out to the sticks where John the Baptist is. He’s going into
Samaria. He’s going to the other side of the lake which is kind of like our
understanding of the other side of the tracks. Jesus is constantly and
purposefully going out to the people he wants to minister to.
We don’t really see him
inviting people to synagogue with him. We see him teaching and healing,
preaching and performing miracles. His ministry takes place outside of the
synagogue which makes us ask the question, how visible are we as the Church, in
our community? Now, I know many of you are active in the community but are you
seen as an individual or are you seen as the Church? Because we are the Church
even outside of this building. Whether you are at the bar, at a chamber meeting
or getting your mail, are people seeing you as the Church? How often do we go
out and sit with people? Jesus is calling us to go and make, not sit and stay.
Jesus is calling us to leave our comfort zone and connect with people, to walk
alongside them, to really get to know people who are different from us.
The Church Is
All About Relationships
Lastly, another way that can
help us make that shift from reaching to making is that shift that the NALC has
been poised to make since its inception from religious institutionalism to
relational intimacy. I believe the future of the Lutheran Church, specifically,
is in relationships. Relationship with God; relationship with others. The
stronger these two, the stronger the Church is. I’ll give you this situation.
If this congregation suddenly closed its doors one day, aside from the members
of the congregation, would anybody care? Would the community be hurt in any way
if this congregation disappeared? The point I want to make here is that the
community doesn’t care about how much we know or how much we’ve got until it
knows how much we care. The community doesn’t care if we have stained glass
windows, it doesn’t care about our new carpet, our well-manicured lawns. It
doesn’t care who we are or who we know until they get the chance to know us and
know who we are. The community doesn’t want to hear a message about God, Jesus,
or the Holy Spirit until they know who we are. We need to go to new levels to
create relationships.
This is going to be the
launching point for my message next week as we dive into those relationships a
bit more. But, the bottom line is we need those relationships. I’ve often said
the Lutheran Church is a family church. It survived because families passed on
their heritage to their children, who passed it on to their children, and so
forth. Today, with children leaving home or just leaving the church, that
tradition of handing the reigns over to our offspring just doesn’t happen the
way it used to and it is forcing us to make a choice. Either we sit around
saying something is wrong with the community or we change something about how
we do things in order to live into Jesus’ command to make disciples.
* * * * *
This strategic shift is
nothing to be taken lightly. It is something we need to pray about, focus on,
talk about, and plan. But, I do believe it needs to take place in order to
fulfill Jesus’ command to make disciples. I’m sure you would agree that making
disciples is great, but there is always that barrier out there of how do we do
it? How do we overcome our fears of doing it? How do we overcome our not
wanting to do it? Jesus gives us examples. Jesus shows us what he did. Jesus
also shows us it would not be easy. Making disciples is not always a fulfilling
process. It can be challenging at times. But, it is even more challenging if some
people are working on it while others sit around and still others don’t want to
do it.
Jesus would not give us this
command if he did not think it were possible. We can trust this great
commission because we see how successful it was in the early days of the Church
written in the Bible. The Church would never have come to life if they hadn’t
believed in his promises. They were the first witnesses of his promises and
they grew. Jesus will never leave us. He wants to know us more. He wants to
change us. He offers us those same promises. When we think we can’t do it, we
must have faith. If we can’t believe he can shock the Church to life, then how
can we believe that he died for our sins and rose from the grave? It’s time to
take a look at our faith and to use it to make a strategic shift from reaching
to making disciples.
There was a new neighborhood
recently built in the far suburbs of a big city. A lot of young couples were
moving to this neighborhood and one day a husband and wife were sitting in
their kitchen eating breakfast and outside the kitchen window the woman saw
their neighbor hanging up laundry on their line to dry. As she watched her
neighbor, she turned to her husband and said, “that laundry is not very clean.
Maybe she needs to re-learn how to do her laundry or at least use better
detergent.” They went about their business for the day. A few days later the
same thing happened and the woman again made that comment to her husband, “that
laundry really is not very clean. She probably needs a new washing machine.
Maybe they just can’t afford one. That has to be what it is because no one
could possibly consider those clothes clean.” The husband sat and listened for
the next couple weeks as his wife kept making comments on how bad their
neighbor’s laundry looked. Finally after a month or so, the woman looked out
her kitchen window as her neighbor was hanging laundry on their line. But
something was different. The woman turned to her husband and said, “What do you
know? That laundry looks amazing. She finally got better detergent. Or she
finally bought a new washer. Or someone finally taught her how to do her
laundry right. I wonder who it could’ve been.” That’s when her husband spoke up
and said he knew why the laundry looked better. He said, “Early this morning,
before you woke up, I went outside and washed our windows.”
It’s time for us to reflect
on what it means to be the Church. It’s time to reflect on how incredibly
shocking Jesus’ ministry really was and how incredibly shocking it is for us.
It’s time to confess that we may not be utilizing everything we have for
ministry, or putting forth our best effort in making disciples. Fortunately, we
serve a God of forgiveness, of second chances. We serve a God who is renewing
us for ministry and sending us right back out into that mission field. He gives
us each other for support, he gives us leaders to teach and train, he shows us
examples in the scriptures. Reaching can no longer be the goal, we are called
to be making. God will not let his Church fail. So, let us boldly go and make
disciples as we shock the culture just as Jesus has shocked us, His Church. To
God be the glory, now and always. Amen.