Vital Signs of a Vital Church A California Social Security Office sent a notice to a man which read: “We want to talk to you about a notification in our office that you are deceased. Please let us know that you are.” Here’s a letter with a grave message. Think of the possibilities if they ask you to call and you’re alive, how would they know if you’re telling the truth? This leads to an important question: What is it that makes a church alive? As congregational development facilitator, I keep asking myself that question as I go from church to church in the diocese. Some churches are struggling, barely hanging on by a thread; others seem vibrant and active. So what is it that makes a church alive? We have to look to the New Testament for an answer to that question, and the logical place to start is the second chapter of the Book of Acts. On that first Pentecost Peter told the crowd, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ,” and according to the text about three thousand persons were baptized that day. Acts then goes on to describe the quality of the Christian community that resulted from those baptisms, indicating just what makes a church alive. Acts 2:42 reads: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” Here you have four vital signs of a vital church – what I characterize as Preparation, Participation, Pastoral and Public Witness. Most basic is preparation. The newly baptized Christians at Pentecost “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching… and prayers.” John Stott says in his wonderful commentary on Acts that after Pentecost there were 3,000 Christians in kindergarten! They were learners; they were preparing themselves. The reality is that all of us are always in preparation, seekers after truth, learners. The Christian life is not a one time event. It’s a continuous journey. We must always be growing, because if we quit growing, stagnation comes to you, to me, and to the church! It always interests me that some people who are members of the church think an occasional attendance at Christmas and Easter is all that’s required. That’s not going to cut it in this secular world where Christianity is constantly being pushed to the margins of society. We need to be constantly drinking deeply from the springs of the spiritual life – regular reception of Holy Communion, Bible study, Alpha, Via Media, EFM, the Disciples program, prayer and worship – all of those things that make us the church. If the Anglican Church in the Diocese of British Columbia is to meet the challenges around us and beyond us, we will have to be more and more a church where people are in preparation – learners! I love the story about Harry Truman, who at the time was a newly-elected United States Senator. Truman made a visit to the home of retired Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who was then 92 years old. He found Holmes reading Plato. Surprised, Truman said to Holmes, “Mr. Justice Holmes, why would you be reading something like that at your age?” Holmes replied, “I may be old, but I never stop learning.” What a wonderful attitude for a Christian! All of us are learners – and the moment we stop learning is when we start declining in our effectiveness as the church of Jesus Christ. The vital signs of a vital church require discipline, hard work, preparation, being learners. A vital church must also have participation. I like the way the verse in Acts captures it: “They devoted themselves… to the breaking of the bread.” The verse also says, “They devoted themselves to the fellowship” – in Greek the word is koinonia. Koinonia means “common” – it speaks to their common life together. I remember Bishop Michael Marshall saying that the church is a group of people who have nothing in common except Jesus Christ in

whom they have all things in common. No one in this church lives for themselves alone; we are in this fellowship together! We work together, we pray together; we cry together, we help others together! The church is a family. None of us can go it alone. We need each other. My friend and mentor Bishop Bill Burrill is fond of saying that the church that lives to itself dies by itself. In the Province of British Columbia where the mission field is right outside our church doors, no single congregation can do the work of mission alone. To be effective in sharing the gospel today, we need to bring together our spiritual gifts, our strengths in ministry, our resources for mission, and our passion for the work God has given us to do in this time and in this place. And you know something? When Christians come together, good things begin to happen. I’ve always liked the way the poet E. E. Cummings put it, “I am blue. You are yellow. Together we make green. And green is my favorite color.” That may sound a little corny, but it’s true because it is only in relationship with one another that we can become more than we could ever be by ourselves. Vital signs of a vital church is our subject. The church is a place where people are always learning and growing, in preparation for whatever life throws our way. The church is place where there is participation in a common life together because none of us as Christians can go it alone. Third, a vital church is a place that is very pastoral. This is closely related to the sense of fellowship – koinonia – a sense of life together. Acts 2:44 says, “All who believed were together and had all things in common.” I like the way the Contemporary English Version puts it, “All the Lord’s followers met together, and they shared everything they had.” Here we have an example of Christians caring for one another – what today we would call “every member ministry.” In this type of ministry, no one is allowed to feel unwanted or unloved or cut off from the community-at-large because members minister to members. Everyone cares for everyone else, and so everyone is cared for. Several years ago Dr. James Lynch of Johns Hopkins University wrote a challenging book with the title, A Broken Heart. In the book he makes the startling assertion that “loneliness is the number one physical killer in society today.” He uses actuarial tables from a decade of research and the tables reveal that persons who live alone have premature death rates from two to ten times higher than those persons who live with other persons. We need each other. The church, of all places, must be a place where people reach out in loving, supportive ways to one another. The church is family. Think about that concept for a moment. It is in the family that we learn to reach out to others and not be centered on self. The church as family just enlarges all of that. We find ourselves touching the untouchable, reaching out to strangers who need us, all because we take the time to care. The church must love, in Christ’s name, like a family. Perhaps the most poignant moment in the 1992 Olympics at Barcelona took place in the semifinals of the men’s 400-meter race. Britain’s Derek Redmond fell on the backstretch with a torn right hamstring. Despite excruciating pain, the injured runner struggled to his feet, fended off medical attendants who raced to help him and started to hop to the finish line. When he reached the home stretch, a large man in a T-shirt emerged out of the stands, pushed aside a security guard, ran to Redmond and embraced him. It was Derek Redmond’s father. “You don’t have to do this,” he told his weeping son. “Yes, I do,” Derek shot back through his pain. “Well, then,” said his father, “we’re going to finish this together.” And they did. Fighting off security men, the son’s head sometimes buried in his father’s shoulder, the two men stayed in Derek’s lane and crossed the finish line, as the crowd rose and cheered and wept. Isn’t that a parable about the church as family – reaching out and helping one another – and not just ourselves – but reaching out to all the nameless people out there who need someone to lean on, to give them a helping hand, to listen to their pain, and to show the caring and compassion expected from the church? God knows, in Victoria there are so many lost souls walking the streets, desperate people who don’t know which way to turn, people without meaning, without hope, without any purpose in their lives. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the family of God could reach out to those people and say to them, “Whoever you are and wherever you are on your journey of faith, you are welcome into our family!”

A vital church has some vital signs. It’s a place where people are open to learning and preparation. It’s where people are participating in a loving fellowship – a place where love is operative in pastoral ways. And lastly, it is a place of public witness. Those early Christians had established a beachhead for Christ in hostile territory. They won the world to him because of how they lived, and their joyous living and loving and sharing drew people to come and stand with them. No wonder Chapter 2 of Acts concludes: “And day by day the Lord added to their numbers those who were being saved.” Management guru Peter Drucker was fond of asking every company CEO, “What’s your business?” That’s a good question for the church in Canada today. What’s our business? Are we a social service agency? Are we a cheaper version of the country club? Are we a landlord with tenants under our wing? Are we a religious version of a political party? Are we a place for people who like classical music? Are we a museum? What’s our business, anyway? Sometimes we can lose focus on what our business really is. Granted, there are many good things that the church could be doing, but what is the one essential thing that the church must be doing if it is to be church? You can answer that question by asking another question: What do people need? People are hungry for many things today. They are hungry for food, housing, employment, for recreation, for financial security, for good health, for more stable marriages, for companionship and for God. We as a church can and do help meet those needs to one extent or another. But in all of them except one, they are aided by other social institutions, some government and some private. The one acute human need that churches and only churches can meet is the desire to relate to God. Churches are places where people encounter God. No other social institution can match that claim. Here in the church, and only in the church, will people come to know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. To put it another way, if the church does not have a passion for Jesus, who will? Not the government. Not the public schools. Not the social services agencies. Not the big corporations. Only the church is called and constituted to proclaim the good news that in Jesus Christ God loves the world and everyone in it, completely and unconditionally and forever – and that through Jesus you can have a new life that will transform your old life in ways that you can scarcely now imagine. I think the times in which we are living present the church with its greatest opportunity ever, because at the heart of Christianity is the concept of grace. We see that grace at work in today’s gospel when Jesus points to a tax collector and says that he was justified before God and not the Pharisee who boasted of his own righteousness. Grace is the unearned, unmerited love of God given freely to every human being. Every one of us is loved by God. Every one of us is a child of God. Every one of us is precious in the eyes of God. With God there are no outcasts. With God there are no throw-away people. Quite simply, there is nothing any of us can do to make God love us more, just as there is nothing any of us can do to make God love us less. It’s what we call grace, amazing grace. If you believe that at the heart of the Christian Gospel is the reality of grace, then the fundamental task of the church becomes to communicate this grace – to live it, to share it, and to help other people experience it as fully and effectively as possible. Imagine the possibilities if all the people in British Columbia could experience God’s amazing grace in their own lives. Imagine the kind of society we could build, the kind of relationships we could foster, the kind of love we could demonstrate to all those hurting, lonely, empty, broken people who come our way – my, what a time to be the church! Perhaps a story will illustrate my point. John Sculley relates in his autobiography Odyssey the scene that took place with Steven Jobs, the founder of Apple Computer.

Apple Computer was struggling and Steven Jobs had decided that John Sculley was the man needed to pump new life into the company. Jobs made numerous trips to New York to persuade Sculley to leave Pepsi Cola, where he was head of one of the divisions of the company. The crucial conversation took place high over the city as the two men from a picture window in a skyscraper took in a view of the New York skyline. Steven Jobs put the question to John Sculley, “Will you come?” Sculley responded, “I thought it all through, and I just can’t. Financially, you’d have to give me a million dollar severance if it doesn’t work out.” Steven Jobs asked him, “How did you come up with those numbers?” And John Sculley responded, “They’re just big round numbers!” Steven Jobs persisted, and John Sculley resisted and made a counter offer to be a consultant! Steven Jobs the founder of Apple Computer then confronted him with a crucial choice: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” It knocked the wind out of Sculley and he went on to Apple Computer. The rest, as we say, is history. That’s the challenge before us as the churches in the Diocese of British Columbia. Do we want to continue to live just somehow, or would we like, in Christ’s name, to live triumphantly and be part of changing the world, our lives, and the lives of others? The ball is in our court; hit it back – or let it die there bouncing slowly, slowly, slowly, while we hesitate and procrastinate. Which will it be? Dr. Gary Nicolosi October 28, 2007 Text – Acts 2:42-47 Joint Service: St. Mary’s, Oak Bay, St. Philip’s, Oak Bay, St. Alban’s, Victoria