Introduction
At the end of last year we went through a whole church exercise together looking again at our mission and vision as a church. After all the upheavals of moving venue with some folks not moving with us and getting used to this wonderful building, it seemed good to re-focus on what we were about as a church. You can see the results of this exercise on the front of your orders of worship. Our new logo sums up what we are as a church. We believe we are:
Raised up by
God
To be transformed disciples
Following Jesus
Using our gifts
So
that our people may be saved.
In a nutshell, this is what our church is about. Over the next four weeks we are going to look, together, at what this mission statement means in terms of our growth as a church.
Prayer
Loving God,
We
thank you that you have raised us up,
That you have called us and turned us
around.
Help us as we follow Jesus and use our gifts,
That you may
continue to transform us into being
The people and church you dream of,
So
that our people who are lost, hurting, lonely and guilt-ridden
May be
saved.
Amen.
Growing as
a Church
Over the years MCC around the world has talked a lot about church growth, and in Manchester we have listened to what has been said, we have read the books by the latest guru on the subject and thought and pondered about how we could be more effective. Now I groan when I hear there is to be another conference on church growth! Don't get me wrong, its not that I am disillusioned by the subject - who could be disillusioned by the Lord's call to go and make disciples of all nations? I groan because I think the most valuable lesson I learnt was from the very first book on church growth I read when I was still at university! This book, written by an English priest, said that church growth is what churches should do naturally and consists of just four things.
Eddie Gibb, the writer of the book, said that churches grow in four ways:
* In
spirituality,
* In maturity,
* In service of others
* And in
numbers.
At different points in our life together we have looked at these areas, but, more often than not, we have ended up focussing on growing in numbers and not the other areas. If you think of Church growth as a stool or chair with four legs, if one of those legs is much longer than the others, then the chair is not usable. Similarly, in a church if one of these aspects of church growth is much more developed than another the church looses much of its God-given purpose.
Over the next four weeks we are going to be looking at this idea of growth. I am not going to call this a sermon and service series on church growth as that has too many associations with what we have done before. Instead, I am simply calling this series: Growing in God. Over the next four weeks we will look at these four ways of growing in God - growing in spirituality today and then growing in maturity, growing in service of others and finally growing in numbers. Each week we will look at practical things we can do to grow in each of these areas, as individuals and as a church.
Growing
Spiritually - the Foundation
Whilst it is true that each of these four aspects are important, it is also true that the foundation upon which everything else is based is this idea of growing spiritually. Everything else fails if we get this wrong.
In the past we have had great numbers, but not much evidence that, as a church, we were striving to grow in our relationship with Jesus. In the past we have had wonderful outreach opportunities, with excellent press coverage - including radio and TV, but we have failed to excite those who came and visited with our radical relationship with Jesus. We have had different programmes to reach out and serve others but our failure to grow in God meant these programmes ran out of steam.
It is vital, therefore, that we get this right, that we learn to grow spiritually as we follow the command of Jesus in today's reading.
The Reading
Today's reading, from St John's gospel, sees Jesus urge his disciples to maintain their relationship with God through him. The image Jesus uses is of himself being a vine and of his followers being branches which draw sustenance and nourishment from the vine. Jesus sees God as the gardener who prunes unfruitful branches and throws them into the fire.
The reading reminds us that we cannot bear fruit without remaining grafted to the vine - Jesus. We are also reminded that those who sever themselves from Jesus wither and become useless.
Remain in Me
So Jesus tell us to "remain in me", but what does this mean. Our experience of vines and branches is more to do with the fermented fruit of the vine rather than actually tending those plants! So what does this reading mean for us practically? I think there are three things we can do to respond to this reading.
Pray
The first is to pray.
When I was a kid computer games were just coming into their own. One plugged a computer into the back of a portable TV and played on the screen. My favourite game was pacman. This was a fast moving game where one moved a little gobbling circle around the screen getting him to eat up power pills and avoid being eaten by ghosts. Every so often there was something extra to eat which earned more points.
Many Christians see Sunday worship a bit like the pacman game. They come to worship and gorge themselves on the spiritual nourishment on offer in the service: the songs, the readings, the sermon and, most of all, the Eucharist. But then they fast for the rest of the week! I don't mean a godly type of fasting which seeks to build us up spiritually, I mean they don't speak to God for the rest of the week!
In the journey from Egypt the Jewish people were given bread each day. They were told, however, that if they collected too much, it would go stale and become inedible. So each day they had to go out from the camp and collect the manna from heaven which God provided. They couldn't survive on this once a week or even on yesterday's bread, they had to ensure they were fed by God each day.
We too will not grow spiritually unless we develop a discipline of daily prayer. Growing spiritually is the single most important thing we can do as a church and is the single most important thing you can do for yourselves and for the church - and yet it is the one thing that only you, and God, will know if you are doing!
If we are to grow in God we need to nurture that relationship with God. I will talk a bit later about some practical ways you can do that.
We remain in Jesus by making time each day to pray.
Attend
worship
The second way of remaining in Jesus is to attend worship each week. We need both the experience of private prayer and also the experience of prayer and worship as a church. We are more than the sum of our parts when we come to worship for Jesus promises to meet us here. We meet Jesus and we find rest for our souls, encouragement when we are feeling down, strength from each other and, above all, spiritual nourishment as we take Jesus' very self into ourselves through the Eucharist.
It is easy to get out of the "holy habit" of attending worship - especially if we feel a bit low. Yet my experience is that it is when we are feeling at our lowest that we need worship more. Even on holiday in the Orkneys we made the effort to go to church, even though the church we went to wasn't to our taste - it was still important to maintain the habit of worship.
We remain in Jesus by meeting each week for worship.
Disciplined lives of holiness
Meeting each week for worship and spending time each day with God in prayer is meaningless if it does not have an effect on how we live our lives. Our spirituality should be seen by others, not by how often we close our eyes in prayer, but by how often we show radical holiness to others. When we sign letters Steve produces on behalf of Amnesty international, we show our holiness, when we give food to the poor, or work for justice we show our holiness. When we support others who are feeling low or estranged, we show our holiness. Whilst we need to spend time on our knees in prayer and worship, we are also called to get up off our knees and serve others.
We remain in Jesus by living lives of holiness through serving others.
Prayer, the central and most difficult discipline
Of all these ways of remaining in Jesus the most difficult, it seems to me, is to establish the habit of praying each day. We might start with good intentions and then lots of things get in the way. We might find it difficult to know what to say, that urgent phone call we need to make gets in the way, our lover announces our mother has just rung, the dog needs walking, the ironing needs doing, we sleep in late so we don't get up in time, we are too tired at the end of the day. The list could go on and on. Or we might start and then find that the distractions seem to outweigh the benefits. We might not know what to say, we might want to read the Bible but are not sure where to start or if we will understand it.
So we want to help you. On your pews you should have found a prayer resource. This is a little booklet which we will be producing each week. On the first few pages is an outline of a little prayer service. You can use it for prayer in the morning or the evening, some of the set prayers differ depending on when you use it. Then after this there is a psalm, reading and thought for the day for every day of the week. On the last page is a short form of prayer for night prayer, for just before you go to sleep.
The booklet is designed to be a resource and we want to hear about what you think about it and how useful it is for you as you seek to grow spiritually. Another good reason for being in church each week as we will give them out weekly!
Please use them, please use the prayers in them, set ones, special ones for our community and your own prayers. Know that all over this city, other people are reading and praying the same things. If you have prayer requests let us know and we will include them. But above all start using them, let them be a way for you to explore both remaining in Jesus and growing spiritually.
Why?
At the start of the sermon I got you to look at the front of the order of service and read our mission statement. We believed we are called to be transformed disciples who, in turn, go about the business of transforming our world. Our world needs transforming.
It is time to
deepen our journey, by working on all these four areas of growth at once. It is
time to reach out to others in service and this means reaching up to Jesus. It
is time to grow in our maturity and this means being disciplined and serious
about our relationship with Jesus. It is time to grow in our spirituality and
this means spending time each day in prayer.
Growing in spirituality is an
antidote to seeing church as a club where we can critique the policies, the
personnel and the members, to seeing church as the body of Jesus in Manchester
called and anointed with a purpose. A divine purpose of bringing salvation to
our people.
Will you pray with me?
Loving
God,
Help us to grow,
Help us to remain in Jesus,
By praying each
day,
Attending worship each week
And living lives of service and
holiness.
Help us as we grow in love and service of you,
To become the
people and church you dream of.
Amen.
This sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church
of Manchester. Click here for further information.