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SECTIONS:
Evangelists
The issue for the apostles
The issue for us
Action |
WE HAVE focused on evangelism
recently, and that is vital. We have to evangelise. We have to
be in mission. God has a plan, and our part is clear: everything
must come under Jesus’ rule.
Evangelism is part of mission.
We must be clear on that. Mission means bringing everything under
the control, under the Lordship, of Jesus. That means that we
are charged with bringing the inequalities of our world under
Jesus’ control so that things can be evened up. It means
bringing the injustices of our world under his rule so that justice
can replace it.
What does the
Lord your God require of you but to do justice, to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God?
When we focus that down on the
individual, when we seek to persuade each human being to come
under the rule of Jesus, we call that activity evangelism. It
is about bringing good news to people in a way that they can
hear. It is about transforming their hearts and minds and attitudes.
I know that many of you cringe inside when speak about evangelism.
You can't see yourself in white shoes and a shoestring tie with
a cattle horn toggle, can you?
If it’s any help, remember what Conrad said recently: in
any church probably around 7-10% of the people are gifted evangelists.
That means that 80–83% are not. Does that help you relax?
Well, don’t relax, because I don’t aim to relax you.
I am to stimulate your minds and your hearts to serve our Lord.
If you are part of that 80%, there are a few things you need
to think about.
First, not everyone is a gifted
evangelist, but every Christian has a testimony. If you don’t have a testimony,
you don’t have Christ. Testimony is your story about what
Jesus is doing in your life. It’s that simple.
Some people are not gifted evangelists, but they still bring
many people to birth as new children of our God and Father.
A friend of mine had a daughter like that. He noticed a number
of teenaged girls coming to faith in Christ. Now my friend is
not an evangelist either. So he wondered about his sudden success.
It turned out that his daughter was witnessing to what Christ
was doing in her life, and her friends all wanted that, too;
but they were being led to Christ by my friend.
Jesus said
You shall receive
power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you shall be witnesses
to me...
We are all called to be witnesses.
We are all equipped by the Holy Spirit to be witnesses. And effective
witnesses win hearts.
You might not be an evangelist, but you’d better be a witness!
Second, you may not be a gifted evangelist, but you can do
the work of an evangelist.
Paul told Timothy,
Do the work of
an evangelist.
Of course, Paul wouldn't have
had to told Timothy anything if he had been a gifted evangelist
— except, perhaps, not to heavy people; because that can
be a failing of evangelists. Sometimes they don’t know their
own strength.
If your read about Timothy, it seems that he was a very gifted
young man, but not a very strong leader. He needed a lot of encouragement.
But Paul was confident that he could learn to evangelise even
if he wasn’t such a great evangelist. After all, gifted
evangelists are equipped by the Holy Spirit to initiate and lead
evangelism. They are the kinds of people who can take a Timothy
under their wing, and help him to do much better in outreach.
So, maybe you are not a gifted evangelist either, but you can
do the work of an evangelist. You can declare the good news and
lead people to faith in Christ. This is God’s word, and
it is to you and to me.
The third thing to think about is that you can be gifted to
become an evangelist.
This was something I only just realised during the week.
When I was first taught about Spiritual Gifts, I was taught two
conflicting things.
My Pentecostal friends told me to pray for the gift of tongues.
And my fundamentalist friends told me not to pray for any spiritual
gifts in case a demon got in!
In I Corinthians 12–14, Paul teaches that speaking in tongues
is a relatively ineffective gift. People don’t understand
what is being said, so they can’t get anything for their
own benefit from speaking in tongues.
However, he also said that prophecy is just about the best gift
you can get operating regularly in a church, because it is exactly
about telling people what they need to hear.
The thing is that Paul tells the tongues speakers to pray for
the gift of interpreting what is said, so that everyone will
benefit. In effect, Paul tells them, “Pray that the Holy
Spirit will transform your gift of tongues into a gift of prophecy.”
Here's my point: if we can pray for the gift of prophecy, then
we can pray for the gift of an evangelist.
Spiritual gifts are not static and unchangeable. Sometimes you
are even given a gift for one special occasion, just because
it is needed at that time.
So, if a church lacks evangelists, then let’s get praying:
maybe the Lord will make you — or me — into that evangelist
that we lack!
Well, I’ve already started praying!
THE ISSUE BEFORE THE APOSTLES
Now you probably wonder what this all has to do with the passage
about the appointment of the seven leaders to look after the
widows.
I’m coming to that. Just remember the passage isn't just
about appointing the seven. It's about appointing people to facilitate
what the apostles were doing to achieve the Kingdom's goals.
Here's the issue. The church was, in part, growing through reaching
out to needy people. OK, some of the priests believed. But this
is mentioned to contrast with the general outreach of the church
to people who desperately needed the hope of transformation and
new life promised in the gospel.
Among these were widows. In that society, widows were specially
vulnerable. The Synagogues helped widows who regularly attended
the synagogue. But there wasn’t so much provision for Christian
widows, specially foreign ones.
In church, there were many people whose native language was Aramaic,
and who were Palestine–born Jews. They coped alright. Everyone
knew everyone else; and the church helped them effectively.
But there were also many foreign–born, Greek–speaking
Jews in the church. They struggled to be understood; they struggled
to find the help they needed, and the church's welfare distribution
was getting so biassed towards the Aramaic Speakers that the
Greek–speakers were almost ready to set up an opposition
congregation for their own kind. After all, there were many synagogues
for different ethnic groups.
The big problem was that the Apostles, the “out front”
church leaders, were too preoccupied with evangelism and mission
to really pay full attention to the widows and all that situation.
They were focused on the task, and other things were definitely
secondary.
One of our clients at work requires a lot of information from
our firm. We produce many reports on all aspects of their business
every few months. It has been crazy over the past few months,
because we are badly understaffed.
Last week, in the middle of all our producing of reports for
this firm, they decided to completely overhaul the system. This
meant another report. The brief was agreed to on Thursday, and
they paid their money. But they needed 60 or 70 pages of tables,
graphs and charts, with all the description and analysis, by
first thing Sunday morning, so that they could meet on Sunday
afternoon.
The people working on this were flat to the boards.
Around 11am on Thursday, I went into the kitchen to make coffee.
I found Amanda’s cup in there, with a teabag already in
place, and a warm jug. Amanda is the Account Director for this
firm.
I asked if she wanted her tea made. She certainly did. She had
first put the jug on at 8:30, but she had boiled the jug three
more times since, and been unable to get back to make her cuppa.
So I made it for her.
I was facilitating so that Amanda could get on with her main
task, which was to get the report underway for the client.
This was what the Apostles found they needed: facilitators, so
that they could get on with their main task, of preaching the
good news.
The last thing I'm saying is that some of us should get the kudos
and the coffee, while the rest should get the cleanup.
In fact, if you look across the page, and see how Stephen stirred
up the people against Christianity by his preaching. Or you can
go a bit further and see Philip being an evangelist.
It’s not that being responsible for widow welfare cut these
seven men off; but it does mean that their priority was not preaching:
it was pastoral care.
And I’m sure that the Apostles didn’t refuse to care
for people in need. It’s just not the main place where they
spent their time.
Here’s how I imagine it. This isn't how the early Christians
really spent every day, but it’s how I can illustrate to
myself what was happening.
7:30 in the morning, St. Peter has a last minute wash, brushes
his teeth and heads into the city. When he gets there, he begins
preaching at different places around town. Finally, at around
3 pm, he’s well and truly ready to go home. As he gets off
the train at Marrickville, he sees Stephen hurrying up the steps
to get to Platform 1.
“G’day, Steve!” he calls out. “How’d
the day go?”
“Oh, flat out as usual,” says Stephen. “But I've
got about two hours before the afternoon crowds are all gone,
so I am going in to town to preach to them for a while”
“OK, Steve! God bless. Get ’em saved!”
“Thanks, Pete! Oh... you know Mrs Agnosis? She came to see
me today about that problem I mentioned, and I still don’t
know exactly what to do. I told her you’d be home around
tea time. Is that OK?”
“Um... I guess so.. yes, that’ll be fine. We’ll
see what can be done...”
Peter might have said, “It’s not right for us to spend
time waiting on tables.” But it was a question of emphasis,
not of absolute difference. The apostles had their special leadership
role, and so did the seven who helped the widows. But there was
freedom within those limits.
THE ISSUES FOR US
This passage has some important implications for our church.
It’s interesting. When I look at us at Marrickville, I see
an interesting thing. We are very good at supportive roles here,
and yet our lack of supportive ministry has been a hindrance
to our growth.
How can that be? If we support, aren’t we supportive?
Here’s what I am thinking about.
All of us are good at helping. When we had that YWAM Team here
a few years ago, their leader remarked on that fact.
But, by and large, we haven’t defined our roles in the way
the early church did. So I have often found myself in pastoral
care roles when I should have been putting more emphasis on preaching
the gospel; and, in the same way, many of the rest of us have
been more into picking up loose ends than in carrying out purposeful
ministries. Sometimes I have even felt that there have been people
in the church who would have been uncomfortable if I had taken
a more directive role.
In the same way, some of you have been very focused on preaching
the gospel, but have also increasingly found yourselves doing
the supportive thing. I could see the frustrations that people
were experiencing when we had the Sunday School, and some of
you felt trapped there. But I wasn’t seeing some of the
other traps as clearly, because we were all in the same pit sometimes.
To make any group function properly, the group has to have goals,
the directive leaders have to lead towards those goals, and the
maintenance leaders have to be working to support the group as
it moves towards those goals.
The early church had the goals of declaring good news so that
everyone might worship the living God through the Lord Jesus
Christ and in the Holy Spirit’s power. To do that, the twelve
Apostles gave preaching the highest importance. And they selected
the seven men, “full of the Holy Spirit and of faith”
to back up that goal.
And the church just kept on growing!
ACTION
I’m going to run an experiment right now.
I’m going to ask you to make a decision about yourself.
If you feel that your highest priority should be to support
outreach ministries, you will probably also recognise that
you have gifts in supporting and enabling, and would rather do
that than preach and persuade.
On the other hand, if you feel that your highest priority
should be to reach out, to persuade, to proclaim, then you
will probably also notice that your gifts are in proclaiming
and reaching out.
The third possibility is that you feel that you don’t
fit into either of those groups and you perhaps recognise
that your abilities lie in yet another direction.
So I want you to make a decision this morning which group you
belong to. Maybe on another morning you might feel differently,
so there are no dotted lines to sign on.
In a moment, if you are a supporter and an enabler, I’d
like you to come and stand in the space between the front seats
and the amplifier, and if you see your strength as being in outreach,
I’d like you to stand behind where JR sits. And, if you
are in that third group, we are going to be a bit short of space
at the front, so maybe you could come up halfway up the aisle
and stand in a group there.
I think we'll find that the outreachers and the something else
groups are smallest, and the supporting group is largest, but
I might be wrong.
So can you move please?
Then, we'll spend 5 minutes while, in each group, we just share
and pray for each other to fulfil the kinds of ministries we
are choosing.
AMEN |
