Matthew 3:1-12
Some years ago I was in my office at the university where I served as campus minister – and a student named Brad came in. He told me he was working with a congregation in a nearby town, called ebc – that’s all lowercase letters. Previously, they had been known as Emmanuel Bible Chapel, but the new name, ebc, was a part of their rebranding effort. He told me ebc is much more “user friendly” than their old name.
Brad explained to me that he was a marketing major and was working with the church to help them grow and achieve their goal to become a multi-campus church. This is how it would work. The church establishes satellite congregations they call campuses where they have a local worship team, which is primarily responsible for music and also prayer. The head pastor is at the flagship campus where he preaches every Sunday to an in-house congregation. But his sermons are also broadcast to the other campuses on a jumbo screen.
What Brad wanted from me was help in getting a church campus established on the university campus. They wanted ebc to be the university church. He struck me as an unusually confident young man; all armed with marketing research facts. Brad had a plan, and the confidence that it would work. In the end it didn’t work. They didn’t get to plant a church on campus. But they didn’t give up; instead they went to our local public elementary school. The school gladly rented them the gym on Sunday evenings so they were off and running. New stylish banners were hung out around the school every Sunday afternoon with their logo – “ebc: re-discover church.”
They recruited some university students to become a part of their worship team there, including one of the students from my campus ministry leadership team. One day I asked him to tell me what this church was like. He told me this: their whole focus is on getting the Word out – the good news of Jesus Christ, so they don’t do extras…like service. You know, feed the hungry, clothe the poor, comfort the afflicted – that sort of thing. Because their sole mission is getting the gospel out to the people. That, they believe, is their entire purpose, and they don’t want anything else to get in the way or detract from it.
And I thought – excuse me? Are you saying that serving the needy is an extra? Are you saying that feeding the hungry is a frill, which the church of the 21st century ought to seriously consider getting away from?
I wanted to know what this “getting the word out” consisted of. I thought about attending one of their services. A friend of mine, the Christian Education Director at the local Presbyterian Church was also curious. She had encountered them in the halls of the elementary school one day when they were doing some advance work, and she managed to corner one of the guys and asked him what kind of church they were, what sort of doctrine and practices they had – that sort of thing. The poor guy squirmed and hemmed and hawed. He was like, I just play in the praise band. So my friend thought she might stop in on a Sunday evening and see for herself.
Neither of us did, though. It just seemed too weird to go spying on their worship gatherings.
We would have been like the Pharisees and the Sadducees skulking down by the river bank among John’s disciples to check things out.
You have to wonder why those Pharisees and Sadducees were there. It’s clear they weren’t really welcome. John knows they haven’t come for the most authentic reasons.
Were they checking out the competition? That’s a possibility. Because John was a wild man and didn’t seem to be wearing the Rabbinic seal of approval on his camel-hair tunic. I don’t think his ministry had been blessed by the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was doing something new and radical. And it was really catching on.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the Pharisees and Sadducees were a little worried, about what John was doing. Because he was doing something different in the name of the God of Israel. And it wasn’t just superficially different – it was radical.
And this scenario bears more resemblance to our world today than you might have thought at first glance.
Change is happening in the church – this is fact. I like to talk with people about change in the church, but it’s interesting to me that the conversation always seems to go right to the same place: music. Whenever we talk about changes in the church the first thing we think about is music – different music styles. Worship wars are fought around the topic of music, because so much is invested in it. Once I had a woman tell me, “If this church becomes a clapping church then I’m leaving.” I can imagine some people saying the same thing about drums, or electric guitars, or big screens.
But on the other hand, we seem to think that it’s the music that must change if we want to connect with a younger generation. So we dread the day when we walk in here and see the giant screen over the cross, or a rock band up in the choir loft.
The great concern behind all this is being relevant. Of course, being relevant is important, because being irrelevant is not good. But changing out the organ for a praise band and a big screen doesn’t make you relevant. You don’t have to copy what some other church is doing in order to be relevant. There’s nothing authentic about that.
The change that we are asked to make in order to be relevant, to be preparing for Jesus, is much bigger than bringing in a praise band and a big screen.
The church of Jesus Christ is all about transforming lives. New songs are good, but it takes more than new songs to transform lives. It takes more than a slick new logo and colorful banners to transform lives. It takes real connection with people and the lives they find themselves living in the world we all find ourselves inhabiting together.
ebc was sincerely trying to reach the people of their region with the gospel message, but the problem was they were doing superficial things when what was really needed was much, much more. It didn’t last. Sunday night worship at the school fizzled out in the spring when the college students went home and I guess by the fall, when they returned, everybody had moved on to something new.
Our worship needs to really connect with the gospel (and of course, serving those in need is at the heart of the gospel. What else is good news?). And our worship also needs to really connect with our lives. That is to say, our worship needs to connect our lives with the gospel.
And if we’re doing that, we are as relevant as we need to be.
So that is why the Pharisees and the Sadducees had come skulking around to see what John was up to. John was doing something real; he was offering the people a baptism of repentance – an invitation to change their hearts and their lives; an invitation to prepare for the new things God was getting ready to do in the world. It was totally new, what John was doing, and it was totally authentic. So much so that Jesus, himself, came to John for that baptism.
This was a new thing for a new age. And we, my friends, are also standing on the threshold of a new age; a time when the old practices, the old songs and, yes, even the old doctrines, will need to stretch and live into a new age.
So I want to get the Word out, too. I want to get the word out that we must shed our complacency. It will not be enough to say, “this is my church,” no more than it was enough for the Pharisees to say, “Abraham is our father.” I want to get the word out that God really is doing a new thing in the world today and the Spirit wants to stir you up. The Spirit wants you to dream dreams and see visions. The Spirit of God urges us to know that there is much more than what we can see around us, that God wants to do in the world.
I want to get the word out that we must prepare ourselves for our Savior, who is as near to us as our next breath. I want to get the word out. The Spirit is here; the Spirit is calling us. Let us prepare our hearts to listen and respond.
