Broadway Christian Church ·Columbia, Missouri

Morning Worship ·September 25, 2005

Prayer of the Day

Lord, we come to worship today bringing with us a sense of expectancy, a vision of high hopes, a glimpse of future possibilities, and a vivid imagination.  Enable all of us to be your farsighted people.  Amen.

Scripture

Psalm 48:9-14

Here in your temple, your house, your place of worship, O Lord,

we meditate and think about your unfailing love.

Like your name, O God,

your praise, your fame reaches to the ends of the earth;

because of your mighty acts of righteousness.

Mount Zion will celebrate,

all Judah, all of your people, will be glad

because you bring justice.

So let us walk around Zion, the holy place,

let’s count its towers,

See its strong walls,

so that you can tell the next generation, the future generations,

That this is God, your God and our God, forever and ever;

The God who will always, always guide us.

Message
A Farsighted People
Rick Frost

I was trying to think of how best to get into this particular text and theme for today.  Let’s start, if you would, with me by taking out your mental pen or pencil and writing down in space somewhere the Mission Statement of Broadway Christian Church.  Just do that in your brain.  You remember that.  Don’t you?  Everybody has that down? 

Now, don’t peek.  I know some of you are looking right now.  It is in most of the places we print things.  It is in newsletters, letterheads, brochures, even worship bulletins.  Now you’re looking.  I can tell.  Just write down in your mind that mental Mission Statement.  I’ll give you a hint.  It begins like this: “The mission of Broadway Christian Church is to…”  OK.  That was really helpful.  Wasn’t it? 

It is one of those things I want to ask you to really think about really committing to memory.  It is sort of like the Pledge of Allegiance.  Most of us know the Pledge of Allegiance.  Just for fun today, I’m going to ask you if you are willing to stand where you are, and could we say the Pledge of Allegiance together?  Can we still do that in church?  We can do that.  Can’t we?

All right.  Stand where you are, and I want you to say from memory the Pledge of Allegiance.  You can cover your heart if you want to.

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of Americaand to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Now don’t sit down.  Get your worship bulletin.  Find that Mission Statement.  Let’s read it together.

“Our mission is to enable persons to encounter the living God as disclosed through Jesus Christ, to serve and celebrate God in an ever-changing society.”

Thank you.  God bless you.  Please sit down.

See… We know the Pledge by heart, and I’d like for us to get to the place where we would know the Mission Statement of the Lord’s church by heart.  OK?  I think that is really, really significant.

“To enable persons…”  “To encounter the Spirit of the living God…”  Awesome!  What God are we talking about?  We’re talking about the God who has been revealed to us in Christ Jesus.

Folks, looks around you today.  Take it in.  See whom you see.  Look at what you see.  I want you to have a little bit of a focus today, just some nearsightedness.  Get up close and personal.  Look around to see the people who are here.  Look and see what you see in this place, right here in front of your nose.  What I see and what I hope you see is good.  It is really, really good.  Good people.  A good community of faith.  A good number of folks who are doing wonderful work.  People who are growing in Christ like we are reminded every week.  And people who are enabling other persons to encounter the Spirit of the living God.

Now we have been doing that for a long, long time in this community of faith.

Do you realize that on October 8, just a couple of weeks down the line, we will be celebrating 48 years as a congregation?  That was the day in 1958 that we chartered this congregation.  There are persons here today who were at that event.  Now it doesn’t matter whether you just walked in to this place for the very first time or whether you were actually part of that group in 1958.  I want to share something with you today. 

This is Vision Awareness Sunday at Broadway Christian Church.  I am honored to have the opportunity to share with you what I believe to be the vision for this congregation for the foreseeable future.  It is what I believe and what, I think, many of you believe is what God wants this church to do in the foreseeable future.  I have some things I want to tell you.

Number One, you don’t know it yet, but one day – one day very soon – this church, which is your church, which according to the Bible, is the Church under the head of Jesus Christ, some day very soon, this church is going to pick up…  It is going to make explicit what has been implicit in the life of this community for nearly 50 years.  We are going to pick up the most important challenge confronting our families, confronting our community, confronting our country, even in confrontation with the world in which you and I live today.  We, I believe, are going to become part of one of the greatest reformations, one of the greatest spiritual awakenings in history.  Did you know that?

We, and millions like us, are going to become much more intentional about reaching out to everyone that we encounter and with whom we have influence.  We are going to do it in new and refreshing ways, and we are going to intentionally make disciples of Jesus, the Christ.  Persons who are boldly, unashamedly, unapologetically equipped, trained, devoted, committed followers of Jesus Christ and his saving, healing, loving perfect way – a way that you know and I know is being challenged at almost every turn by a steady encroachment of what the world calls today “the secular.”  Now that is just a ten-dollar word for those who might not know what that word means.  What the word “secular” means is life – the culture, the community, the politics, the business, the law, the arts, the education, the science – life devoid of the holy.  That’s what secular means.

That is the greatest threat going on in our culture today.  Life without God.  As Bill Moyer, that great journalist of Public Television days, who happens, by the way, to be a wonderful, deep, devoted Christian and an ordained clergy person, prophesied, and I use that word advisedly and intentionally.  He prophesied several years ago.  He said, “Religion is going to be the story of the next 50 years.”  The story!  He said, “I sense such a deep and powerful stirring in the world that is, in fact, religious in nature, it’s spiritual in nature, it’s exciting and it’s hopeful.  And I am hoping that my colleagues in journalism sense this and that they will report on it, because it is going to be the story of the next 50 years.”

Did you know that?

Folks, I believe, you, under the guidance, the authority, and the power of the Spirit of the living God will continue to grow in Christ, and as you grow in Christ, you are going to grow in your ability and your willingness to do the good thing, the right thing, the loving thing, and the just thing.  I believe you are going to continue to reach out to those persons that you encounter almost daily, that you have influence with, that you can touch in a variety of ways, and I believe that you are going to become deeper, and stronger, and more committed disciples of Jesus Christ. 

I believe the way you are going to do that is you are going to continue to become and continue to create what is called the cellular church.  Now that is not the cell-phone church.  I want to make sure about that.  OK?  Don’t pull out the cell phones right now.  I’m talking about the cellular church, those little church cells of ten to twelve persons meeting in one another’s homes, in apartments, in business settings, and social settings wherever during the week and doing essentially five things.

First of all, you are going to get connected with people who need and want to make friends.  I’m talking about real friends.  You would be amazed at how many people in this community don’t have really good friends.  Friends of like mind and spirit.  People who get together and feel comfortable learning how to share their joys as well as their burdens.  People who take care of each other when certain needs arise.  People who choose to study Scripture and/or Christian literature together so that they learn more all the time about their faith.  People who come together and intentionally, as adults, pray with one another.  They pray for themselves.  They pray for each other, and they pray for their world. 

My church, Jan’s church met at our home last Wednesday night with ten other Christians.  We’ve been doing that for nearly eight years.  It is a very tight-knit, highly personal, very flexible, informal group.  We sit around in a circle.  We take turns leading.  We worship.  We learn.  We connect with each other.  We catch up with each other.  We pray, and we party together, and we know ourselves to be “church.”  We are church.  OK?  We are one of at least 40,000,000 Americans today and countless Christians elsewhere who are part of faith-based small groups this very day.

I believe the day is coming when you are going to continue to grow and mature spiritually, and you are going to do that in a cellular setting.  I believe the day is going to come when that happens that your church, which is the Lord’s Church, which is the broader community of faith at Broadway, is going to grow.  It goes together.  When people grow spiritually, the church grows numerically.  When the people do not grow spiritually, it does not grow numerically. 

Christianity is contagious.  Christianity is magnetic.  It draws people together.  And with that comes resources and influence. 

One of the reasons, in fact, the only reason I can find in the Bible why the Church is blessed with resources and influence is found in Psalm 72.  Do you remember King Solomon, David’s son (David the great king of Israel), his son Solomon set up to be the king during Israel’s glorious days, had absolutely everything any person could ever want or need.  But when King Solomon prayed, do you know what he prayed for?  He didn’t pray for resources.  He prayed that, given the fact that he had resources, he asked for wisdom.  Not only did he pray for wisdom, he prayed for influence.  And you know what he received in terms of a prayer response from God?  He asked, with God’s help, that with all of the resources he had, and with all of the influence he had, that he might be guided and directed to support the widow and the orphan, that he might be guided to care for the poor, to defend the defenseless, to speak up for the immigrant, to be a friend to those persons in prison, and to heal those whose spirit has been broken and beaten down and some of them not even developed yet.

You don’t know it yet, but I believe that as you grow spiritually and as you reach out to others lovingly, your community of faith is going to grow.  The Lord’s Church is going to welcome the stranger, is going to help those persons who are sitting out there on the margins, and you and I together are going to disciple those persons who choose to respond. 

Those over 2,000 verses in the Scriptures about the poor are going to come alive to you and to me in new and powerful ways.  New ministries are going to come on line in this congregation in the days to come.  We are going to try out new ways to do new work on a whole host of social problems that, in fact, are not being handled well in the world today. 

Every week – every single week – all of our little church cells are going to come together, and we are going to do that and come to be part of the body of Christ, the larger body of Christ which is right here this community of faith.  It is called the Church.  We are going to come together, and we are going to worship.  We are going to teach one another and learn from one another.  We are going to listen to and be lifted up by inspiring music.  We are going to receive the power and the energy that comes when we gather around the Lord’s Table and take our place there, and when we get together and have fellowship with one another in the dining hall that we are going to create.  That’s why one of the things we are going to build is called a Christian life center.  We’re going to build additional Sunday School rooms that we need to teach young and old alike.  We’re also going to create a multi-kind of flexible space where it will be big enough for 500 or 600 of us to come together and eat together, to meet together, to do things together. 

We don’t know each other.  It’s amazing.  I’m the one person, maybe there are two or three others, who gets to see this whole congregation every single week.  We don’t know each other.  We have to find ways to get together and become mutual sources of support and encouragement as a community of faith.  We’re going to build that together. 

The second thing we are going to do is build a youth center.  You’ve been hearing about that over there in the old sanctuary, the present activities area.  We’ve got a ton of kids in this community.  Many of them are part of this community of faith, and they have friends.  They want a place they can bring their friends – a safe place where they can learn, and grow, and mature as Christian young people, so they can learn to serve together and to do it together.  We are going to build that for them and with them.  By the way, we’re asking them to contribute to it as well.  They are already starting out there as you have heard.

Third, we are going to build a center that potentially is the second most powerful thing we do around here when we worship.  Folks, every single reformation, every great awakening, every serious renewal in the life of Christian history has employed the power of music to inspire, to encourage, to motivate, and to lift the human spirit.  We have asked, for way too long, for our wonderful music ministry to operate for years out of a closet.  We are going to build that ministry center, and the power of music that is going to feed our spiritual lives is going to grow in ways that we have yet to even imagine.

So, what I want to ask you to do is come.  Come have lunch with us today.  Come see the plan.  Come take a look at what is going to be Broadway’s next step.  It is an absolutely awesome thing.  It’s amazing.  You can literally walk through it in your mind, and you can visualize it.  I know it is huge, huge step. 

God is asking us to do an amazing thing in faith.  It’s going to be a stretch for this community.  But I have been told by many of you that if Broadway wants to do it, it is more than doable.  It requires all of us doing what we can. 

You see, I think good old Bill Moyer was right.  I believe there is a deep power, a very powerful stirring that is going on in the world today.  I think it is spiritual in nature.  I think it is essentially religious, and I think – I really believe – that if we do not step up and do what we can where we are to meet that spiritual need, I will guarantee you that someone else will.  Someone else will.  There is a deep, powerful spiritual stirring.  There is a huge void.  We are on the edge of the greatest spiritual awakening in our history.

I think that is exciting.  I think it is hopeful.  Even more important than that, it is huge challenge for you and for me.  I believe that most of you know that. 

I know there are some dangers in the things I am talking about.  It is just like the Bible.  It is just like prayer.  It’s like evangelism.  It’s like missions.  It’s like almost anything religious you can name.  We’re going to have to rescue this awakening from the Fundamentalists.  OK?  But every religion is having to do the same thing.  That which is good, that which is beautiful, that which is right, that which is just, it is up to us to define what that is.  We’re going to have to rescue what’s going on in this world from the Fundamentalists. 

In order to do that, we are going to have to make some things happen.  We can play our part right here at Broadway Christian Church.  I believe it is going to be “the story of the next 50 years” of this planet.  I believe that being the farsighted people that I know you to be, you want to be a part of that.  You want to be right smack dab in the middle of it.  So, as the Scriptures said today: “So that you can tell the next generation that this is God, your God, and our God is the God of Scripture forever and forever.  That is the God who will always guide us and always lead us.”

And we all say together… “Amen.”

Benediction

God, please make us strong; a people you call durable. Please call our many gifts to be used to serve; a people you call versatile.  Please bend our ears, hearts, and bodies to hear and respond to you with flexibility.  Thanks for the vision of our home here that is the same: durable, versatile, and flexible.  Amen.