Tag: gifts of the Holy Spirit

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A superb definition of the Church

The Principal of Melbourne Bible Institute (MBI) when I was a student there (1968–1970) was Rev. Dr J Graham Miller. Dr Miller, a Kiwi, had spent time in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) where there was a significant revival, then as a minister in a Presbyterian church in New Zealand where he also saw the Spirit move.

Amongst his legacy is a treasure trove of sermons recorded at his last parish, which was St Giles in Sydney suburban Hurstville. Listening to one such sermon, I came across this truly magnificent description of the church, drawn from Scripture. I don’t think I have ever come across a better description. Here it is.

We are embodied in one fellowship with Christ as head, and every member necessary to every other so that every member then is gifted with particular charismata, spiritual gifts, exactly fitted to the total outreach and effectiveness of his people. There is no ungifted Christian. There is no Christian whose gifts overlaps needlessly with that of another. All are marvellously integrated by the great head of the church into one body, in which there is to be no disharmony, no grinding of gears. It was expected that the local church would exhibit in its own life, the quality of love as the oil which will keep any discord from the fellowship. Reaching out from such a fellowship will be the witness of such a church to the community. In such a community, we will find the effectiveness of its witness right to the extreme of the nation in which we live.

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A home church Oasis

My friend Phill Brown, who runs Oikos, an organisation dedicated to promoting and helping the house church movement in Australia, in a recent newsletter included an account of a group that meets in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. The approach is creative and quite novel, and very attractive. I asked Phil’s permission to reproduce it on my blog, and he has graciously acceded to my request. You can read about Oikos, sign up for their newsletter, subscribe to their quarterly magazine, and prose their many books at www.oikos.org.au.

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Greetings from Switzerland,

Today I awoke to snow on the ground as I enjoy some care at a holistic well-being clinic and feel very grateful. I’m reminded of our Oikos friends who operate a café in outer suburbs of Melbourne – who call their café meeting place like a ‘Switzerland’ a neutral space, be encouraged by their story….
Blessings

Phil Brown

“Are you weary, carrying a heavy burden?” ‘Come to me and I will refresh your life for I am your Oasis” Growing out of Matthew 11:18, Martin and Cher operate a Cafe in SE Melbourne that is used for workplace skills training, and also use the space to invite friends and make disciples in a caring and nurturing space – a safe oasis.
As they reflect on their values; they say – “We fall in love with Jesus and trust when we do our part, we let Holy Spirit and the Word do its transforming work”

They are growing in numbers, locations, leaders and the spiritual depth of people involved. Our vision is “making Jesus disciple makers”. Here is a glimpse of their journey and approach to reaching people:

“We operate a cafe so we use the cafe as a primary meeting place. Its neutral, safe and non-religious so people feel safe to come”. We call this “Switzerland” because it’s a neutral space to do Simple Church. Our simple process is: Connect in the cafe and invite customers into casual, enjoyable and sincere conversations.

Next, we invite them to a social gathering to eat with and meet likeminded people make friends. And then we invite them to a Jesus meal where we gently structure the gathering with prayers, devotion and dedication to Jesus. Someone different will lead the meeting and bring testimony, scripture, story or songs that gives honour to Jesus.

We regularly run a men’s breakfast and a women’s breakfast which has been much appreciated and bought meaning connections.

The group has been going 2 years and we have tried and failed on a few things, but persevered with what seems to be working for us.

Here are a few ideas that we have found work for us.

Consistency

We meet every 2 weeks and publish a calendar on a whatsapp group to let others know when and where we will meet. We have dates set for 3 to 4 months in advance to help everyone make plans.

Food

We pivot all we do around the relaxing joy of eating together. Hospitality is a command and we do our best to host and feed guests well.

House to House

We deliberately and intentionally move the meetings from the cafe into people’s homes. We began with a BBQ at our house and now pass the baton from house to house. Now every alternate gathering is in a house. We have a “respect” rule that when we are in the government of someone’s house they get to run and lead the meeting however they see fit. We have had glorious times.

Day and Time

We choose to not meet on a Sunday so we typically meet on a Friday or Saturday night. Some nights can be noisy with so much chatter and laughter… always a good sign. Also, the more impactful an evening the later everyone seems to leave. Some just don’t want to leave which is another signal it’s been a hearty night.

Leaders

We prayed about 9 months ago for leaders and what has happened is people are approaching us, asking can their house be the next venue. This has been an electric answer to our prayers.

Inviting

What we have noticed over the last 6 months is that people like the gatherings, and feel safe enough to invite friends. We are now about 4 generations deep in invitations which is a very exciting signal. We always have new people tagging along for the first time… who then become regulars… who then start inviting their friends. We call this “stickyness” or being “sticky”. When people “stick” they start inviting others naturally with enthusiasm and growth occurs organically.

Growth

We are growing in numbers and fast out growing the cafe for us all to fit. What is more important is the spiritual growth and maturity we see in the group in terms of attendance, generosity, Godly conversation and honesty. Its normal for members to ask for prayer or share a struggle so others can administer some wisdom and care. The core group has grown with 3 existing houses being used, and with 3 more houses opening up soon. We desperately need to keep the gatherings small and intimate between say, 8 to 14… so all can talk and participate. Managing larger groups at the cafe is a bit easier, and the gatherings in homes seem to default to the perfect number leading to great encounters.

Demographics

Our group is made up of diverse people from unsaved searching folks to well established Christians from a variety of church backgrounds all enjoying fellowship together. All united in a caring, loving, safe learning space. It’s very sweet.

Plans

We plan to move from house to house so that each house becomes its own regular venue with its own growing group. We like the Discovery Bible Reading (DBR) method which is simple to do and easy to replicate and have plans to test and implement that as a regular feature of our gatherings. Finally, we have emerging leaders who we will coach and resource to ultimately lead their own groups using the cafe as a central mission base of sorts.

Geography

Since our group was birthed from local customers, our group is hyper-local, meaning, most members can walk to the cafe. It’s not unusual to see members at the cafe in groups during the week for coffee or lunch enjoying deep and meaningful conversations. We may open up a migrant worker group in Cardinia and also possibly support a couple moving to Geelong who are keen to start another group. We follow the leading of the Lord “as the wind blows” so to speak.

Evangelism

None of this happens without an outreaching “heart”. To model any form of healthy discipling we need to be able to model the process of engaging strangers into powerful and trusted kingdom conversations. Building trust with authenticity are very important ingredients to our outreach efforts. We use and train our own ” Harpoon Method” of biblically based one-on-one evangelism which has a very high success rate and always leaves relationships intact. We have a deep heart to see any church doing small groups to add an outreach element to the group to mature the discipleship pattern.

Our values are:

Empower the Priesthood of every believer
Every conversation from the start of a relationship is a discipling conversation
Love each other, be king, patient and gracious to each other
Fall in love with Jesus
We do our part and let Holy Spirit and the Word do its transforming work

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Ephesians 1:1-14

Studying Ephesians some time ago, I had cause to revisit the extensive notes I took at the time. The notes are gleaned from Tom Wright, The NIV Application Commentary or P.T. O’Brien’s Pillar Commentary on Ephesians. Rereading them, I found them extremely helpful, re-assuring, inspiring and comforting. I decided to reproduce them as a blog. Here they are!

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The entire prayer, all 11 verses of it, is woven through and through with the story of what God has done in Jesus the Messiah. He has blessed us in the King (verse three); he chose us in him (verse four), foreordained us through him (verse five), poured grace on us in him (verse six), gave us redemption in him (verse seven), set out his plan in him (verse nine), intending to sum up everything in him (verse 10). We have obtained our inheritance in him (verse 11), because we have set our hope on him (verse 12), and have been sealed in him with the spirit as the guarantee of what is to come (versus 13 – 14).

God’s character is best described as a “God for us” (cf. Rom. 8:31), the one who has chosen us. God has always been and always will be this kind of God. God is the God of past, present, and future, and in all three he is at work for us. Our security rests on what he did before the foundation of the world, on what he did and continues to do in Christ and in the Spirit, and on what he has promised for the future. God has intentionally chosen and planned to go to great lengths to achieve salvation for people.

In Christ” with its 164 occurrences, 36 of which are in Ephesians, is much more likely the central motif, or at least a central motif. Just as redemption is “in Christ” (1:7), so justification and every other act of God take place in Christ. In fact, the only way that the atonement makes sense, the only way that Christ’s death is effective for us, is if the union between Christ and believers is so strong that in some way his death is our death and his life is our life. This solidarity is achieved by a double identification via the Incarnation and faith. In the Incarnation Christ identifies with us and by faith we identify with him.

Our salvation in Christ is a vital stage only a stage, on the way to the much larger purpose of God. God’s plan is for the whole cosmos, the entire universe; his choosing and calling of us, and his shaping and directing of us in the Messiah, are somehow connected with that larger intention. The point is that we aren’t chosen for our own sake but for the sake of what God wants to accomplish through us.

This alerts us to the other hidden story which Paul is telling all through this great prayer. It is the story of the Exodus from Egypt. God chose Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to be the bearers of his promised salvation for the world — the rescue of the whole cosmos, humankind especially, from the sin and death that had come about through human rebellion. When Paul says that God chose us “in Christ” — the “us” here being the whole company of Christians — he is saying that those who believe in Jesus are now part of the fulfilment of that ancient purpose.

See also Genesis 18:17-19

As the language of grace and election shows, most of this doxology is really about God’s valuing of us. God blessed us, chose us from eternity, graced us, planned for us, sent Christ for us, revealed to us, will sum up all things in Christ in whom we have a part, gave us the Spirit as a guarantee, and will redeem us as his own people. The threefold repetition to the praise of his glory (1:6, 12, 14) shows the only possible response — worship and thanks to the God who values us and acts for us. The text is both a call to worship and a classic example of what worship should be.

People who know the value God has for them find both worship and obedience natural — not necessarily easy, but natural. The problem is that so many of us have difficulty believing that God really does value us personally and individually. Mere words about God’s valuing will not change the perception of those who already have negative self-images or who have been beaten down by life. The church has a responsibility in valuing people. With their worship Christians attest to the “real reality” where God values and seeks each human, and with their own actions Christians convey value to others by the way they live.

Paul does not spell out here the responsibility that comes with grace, but clearly “cheap grace” is not a viable option. If God has lavished so much value on us, we cannot devalue his efforts by ignoring him or the implications for life. Grace must lead to the very place it does in this text — to gratitude, a gratitude that is both spoken and lived. For Christianity, religion is grace and ethics is gratitude. The first response to God’s valuing us must be thanks and praise to God. All the rest of Christian living flows from this.

In the Old Testament the inheritance was the land of Canaan. What is the new promised land? What is the promised inheritance? The standard Christian answer has been “Heaven”.

However the inheritance Paul has in mind, so it appears from the present passage and the whole chapter is the whole world, when it has been renewed by a fresh act of God’s power and love. Paul has already said in verse 10 that God’s plan in the Messiah is to sum up everything in heaven and earth. God , after all, is the creator; he has no interest in leaving Earth to rot and making do for all eternity with only half of the original creation. God intends to flood the whole cosmos, heaven and earth together, with his presence and grace, and when that happens the new world that results, in which Jesus himself will be the central figure, is to be the “inheritance” for which Jesus is people are longing.

At the moment, therefore, the people who in this life have come to know and trust God in Jesus are to be the signs to the rest of the world that this glorious future is on the way.

And from v14. “But what is the inheritance? Here centuries of Western Christian tradition  have given the emphatic, though often implicit, reply “heaven”. Heaven is our home, our inheritance. We have re-read the story of the Exodus in those terms, with the crossing of the Jordan symbolizing the bodily death that will bring us to heaven itself, the Canaan for which we long. But this is precisely NOT what Paul says. What he says would have been clear had not the whole Western tradition been determined to look the other way at the crucial point. The inheritance is NOT heaven. Nor is it Palestine. The inheritance is the whole renewed, restored creation. I will Say it again: the whole world is now God’s holy land. That is how Paul’s retold Exodus narrative makes full and complete sense. And that, I suggest, is the ground plan for a fully biblical, fully Christians view of creation and of our responsibility toward it.”

Sealed with the Spirit (v13)

Equally, the sign that they themselves have received which guarantees them their future is the Holy Spirit. The spirit is to the Christians and the church what the cloud and fire were in the wilderness: the powerful, personal presence of the living God, holy and not to be taken lightly, leading and guiding the often muddled and rebellious people to their inheritance.

But the spirit is more than just a leader and guide. The spirit is actually part of the promised inheritance, because the spirit is God’s own presence, which in the New World will be fully and personally with us for ever.

Nowhere is the future triumph of God conveyed so clearly as with the gift of the Holy Spirit. Ephesians will later develop several aspects of a theology of the Spirit, but 1:13-14 focuses on the Spirit as the verification that we belong to God and that God will complete his promise to us. Texts like this show that the gift of the Spirit is not some second blessing or higher stage of the Christian faith and life — something for the spiritually elite. Rather, the Spirit is the possession — the necessary possession — of all Christians. He is God’s gift to us showing that we are his, and he bestows on us a sense of God’s presence and involvement in our lives. The obvious benefit of having the Spirit is a sense of peace and security that comes with belonging to God. How does a person know he or she has the Spirit? Primarily in the change that is brought into life, especially love.

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Apostolic preaching . . . and preaching today

Recently in the course of my daily bible reading, I read Acts chapter 17. I was struck by what Paul and Silas in Thessalonica and Athens were preaching about.

The first hint is in verse 7, where they were accused of acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus. This suggests to me that they were preaching about the Kingdom of God.

Then in Athens, in the famous address to the Areopagus, as his hearers were trying to work out what Paul was talking about, Luke records that ‘Others said “He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities” — because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection’.

Lastly, in verse 30, Paul asserts that ‘The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead’.

So Paul was speaking about the Kingdom of God, the resurrection and the final judgement. And note that this preaching was not to the church, but to outsiders, to the unconverted if you like.

I have a very interesting book entitled ‘To Preach or Not to Preach: The Church’s Urgent Question’, by David Norrington.

The author argues that all preaching in The Acts of the Apostles was delivered to outsiders, as part of the evangelistic endeavour, and yes, he does deal effectively with possible exceptions. In New Testament times spiritual growth was achieved not by the use of the sermon, but by a variety of other means, all designed to help produce mature Christians in mature Christian communities. There is nothing to suggest that these means included the regular sermon. He calls for the abandonment of the regular sermon delivered to believers, and for it to be used as it was in Acts — to unbelievers in an evangelistic setting.

He makes the obvious point that: ‘while New Testament and extra-biblical records of these early meetings are sketchy, it is quite clear that first century believers were expected to be fully involved in all of the activities of the church. The practice of small-scale meetings in homes was ideally suited for such one-another ministry. One simply cannot find any support, either in the New Testament or in early church history for today’s professional clergy and specialized church buildings’.

By contrast, the ubiquitous sermon, delivered by a trained clergyman in a specialized church building most often acts as a deskilling agent. ‘By using the regular sermon the preacher proclaims each week, not in words, but in the clearest manner possible, that, be the congregation ever so gifted, there is present, for that period, one who is more gifted and all must attend in silence upon him (less often her). . . Sadly, competent preachers may create dependence more effectively than incompetent ones. This means, ironically, that in the long run competent sermons may be more damaging than indifferent ones!’

And then, these two devastating paragraphs, sheeted home to the practice of preaching: ‘Yet today, in spite of exceptions, the individual Christian is often excessively busy and unused to reflection, unskilled in prayer, more concerned with doing than becoming, lacking in understanding of the relevance of the faith to nearly all aspects of life, ignorant of the past, anti-intellectual, materialistic, welded to the secular thought of the day, timid in the face of social and political injustice, barely capable even of recognizing the enemies of God (or his friends), lacking in steady and forgiving love and deficient in the skills required to detect nonsense—a living monument denying the assertion of Jesus that ‘I came that they may have life and may have it abundantly.’ (John 10: 10 RV). As sociologist Jacques Ellul observes, far from being a model of freedom, most Christians are models of mediocre bondage, simultaneously the slaves of the latest fad and the ecclesiastical and humanistic traditions in which they were reared. The disastrous consequence is that the non-Christian world experiences little Christian influence in any area of thought and has little, if any, understanding of the essence of biblical Christianity.

Christianity is thus inexorably pushed to the margins of society. The end-product is social decay, a rise of unbelief, an increase in cults and non-Christian religions, depression and failure, among Christians, a tarnished reputation for the church as a whole and the wrath and the judgment of God.

And yet, there are even those who assert that preaching has a sacramental quality about it. ‘Preaching is not just a word about Christ; it is a word of Christ’. Uhh? ‘We are asked to believe that when the clergyman (our modern professional replacement for the plurality of elders in the New Testament church) in the dedicated church building (as opposed to in homes as was the practice in New Testament times) mounts the pulpit (that elevated fixture introduced in the 3rd century) and addresses a passive audience (who were not passive in the New Testament) or “laity” (a designation added long after New Testament times) in the pews (13th century addition) via the regular sermon (which did not exist in New Testament practice) then and only then is the event especially pleasing to God, who responds with a special, if not unique channel of his grace.’

I maintain, therefore, that sermons today should be delivered to the same sort of audience as they were in the first century — to unbelievers in an evangelistic context — and NOT to believers in a church setting.

Respected New Testament scholar Richard Hays, in ‘The Moral Vision of the New Testament’ affirms that the growth to maturity of the church has nothing to do with sermons. He puts it as well as anyone when he writes ‘Ephesians 4:1–5:20 presents a visionary description of the character of the reconciled community. The diverse gifts in the church have as their common purpose “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ until all of us come to the unity of the faith and…to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (4:12–13). Thus, as in 1 Corinthians 12, ministry is conceived as the work of the entire community, not of a specially designated class of spiritually gifted persons. The interplay of gifts in the church is designed to bring the community as a whole to full maturity, so that the church might ultimately stand unambiguously as “the body of Christ,” the complete embodiment of Christ in the world.’