1. Our Shared Ministry

There is an enormous spiritual hunger in the world at large, but specifically in America today.  It is a deep spiritual hunger that people are seeking to satisfy in all sorts of ways, many of which are very counterproductive. Many who are writing in the fields of social psychology are writing relative to what they see as this deep spiritual hunger and attributing much of the increase in the use of alcohol and the return to hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD and even something as deadly as Angel Dust, the enormous turning toward cocaine by the socially acceptable and the elite classes of some segments of society, the assumed pleasure and use of marijuana, the enormous inroads of almost any kind of cultic activity that takes place in the United States. Crazy things.  Not too long ago, four thousand people met just south of here a few miles and they paid $350 a piece for two and a half days where they practiced, among other things, imagining that they were frozen yogurt, and came away describing the "marvelous religious experience" that they had had.  Now this would be funny if it wasn't so sad, but it is desperately graphic of the spiritual hunger that is in mankind at large and that is in our society into which we, as a church, must address ourselves.  And, to which, we must be sent.

Krister Stendahl who is a professor of Theology at Harvard Divinity School, in fact he's Dean of Harvard Divinity School, says that the growth of such things as transcendental meditation and other things of this nature, suggest a genuine hunger for a mystical and a religious experience.  And what troubles me is that in the church of Christ there are many people who look for the same thing - a mystical experience.  And the whole return to the mystery religions of the ancient middle ages is an evidence of the fact we are undergoing an enormous spiritual revolution.  A revolution where people are saying "I am hungry spiritually" and they are admitting it and they are looking for it at great cost to themselves, at great risk to themselves spiritually, but they are looking for it and the churches have not really been the kind of provider of this new spiritual life that they hunger for, so they look elsewhere.  And its our task.

Now, I start today to return the to subject of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which I started last year just before Christmas.  And I can tell you right now, that when I finish this series there are some of you who are not going to be at all happy with me. Because I am not going to stroke you where you want to be petted.  And I am not going to scratch where you want to be itched. Some of you are going to walk out of the church on some Sundays with some anger in you, unless you agree with me right now that we have one standard by which we are going to bind ourselves.  It is not your experience, and it is not my experience - it is the sure and certain word of God.  And the men and the women who in this whole area of the Charismatic renewal are writing and I'll be very specific: one of them is the head of the Melodyland School of Theology, who are writing and saying that it is time for us to recognize that God, by His Holy Spirit, is still speaking today in relevant and in revelatory terms that transcend and go beyond and fill out and complete the word of God.  That is heresy!  And I don't care where it comes from.  The scripture makes it abundantly plain that the word of God is sure and certain and complete and nothing He will say by His Spirit to us in this series or to us in our own personal lives, can in any way improve or add to or take away from the sure and certain word of God once and for all delivered to the saints.  Jesus Himself said "Heaven and Earth will pass away but not one word, not one jot or title, of My word shall pass...".  Now that has got to be the ground of our understanding, or we are off to a bad start right now.  Because my experience and your experience varies and within a congregation like this, especially within the Covenant church, which has doors wide enough to open to all whom Christ accepts, there is going to be a vast variety of experiences.  And we must bring ourselves under the authority of God's word - not under the authority of my experience or your experience.  What does the word say, and how do I live in obedience to that?

Now there are places where the scripture's open to interpretation and my interpretation under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit may differ from yours.  That's okay.  There's room in the Body of Christ for variety.  But we must agree that our standard is not experience.  And our standard is not the quotation of all kinds of writers who frequently write ex-cathedra and assume it should be accepted as scripture.  We need to return to the reformation theology that says "solely the word of God", because beyond that we are led to heresy.  Let me illustrate it.  Every time we have begun to assume that God is still speaking in new ways, we move beyond scripture and what is the result?  One result is the book of Mormon.  Another result is Christian Science: science and health and the key to the scriptures.  And another result is some of the writing that is being done today on the scene both by Neo-orthodox and by some who are very much in the Charismatic movement, and some who are very much not in the Charismatic movement.  And they are claiming the same kind of inspiration of the Holy Spirit that the book of Mormon claims for itself and Mary Baker Patterson Glover Eddy claims for her "science, health and key to the scriptures".  And that's the path of heresy.  It has been throughout all of church history, and it continues to this day.  And unless we are ready to recognize God gave us His word and it is His word that is normative and it is His word that is authoritative then we are all in trouble!  And some of the craziness that we see on the American church scene today will simply continue and get worse.

I love experiences.  You people know me well enough to know that if there's a new experience around that is legal and safe (relatively safe, its got to be legal but it doesn't even have to be that safe), I want to try it.  Because I love experiences.  But let me tell you something brothers and sisters!  If you base your walk with Jesus Christ on your experience, you are headed for a fall.  And you're going to be teaching and demonstrating heresy.  Now the scripture says, in the passage which we started about four months ago (something like that), in Ephesians 4, that His gifts were until we attain to the unity of the faith of the knowledge of the Son of God to mature manhood.  Now mature manhood says "I may not like it, it may not feel good, but it is right and I will obey."  Now that's maturity.  The child's reaction to an order is "I don't wanna!"  And some Christians are running around with this kind of childish attitude that says "I don't wanna!  It doesn't feel good,  I want a warm fuzzy!".  And the scripture says "this is the word of God, hear ye Him!"  So that, verse 14, "that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro with every wind of doctrine by the cunning of men, by their craftiness and deceitful wiles. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into Him who is the Head - into Christ, from Whom the whole body joined and knit together by every joint which it is supplied and when each part is working properly makes bodily growth and up-builds itself in love."  Now that is the goal and purpose of the gifts.  God did not give by His Holy Spirit gifts in order to "turn us on".  He gave us gifts to equip us.  And that's the basic premise on which we have to base it.  Now, if you're in my confirmation class, and you've been having all kinds of trouble with outlining my sermons, that was the introduction, believe it or not.

This is point one: if this is going to take place, you as members of the body of Christ are going to have to change your concept of yourself.  You have got to get rid of your second-class psychosis.  Do you ever watch television and take a look at what they do to guys in my profession?  They are usually just about this far from a rubber room.  They are dumb, they are stupid, they always say the wrong thing, they are bumblers, their theology is incredible.  I ought to file a class-action suit if I believed in it.  And that, really, is a reflection to some degree of the way society views clergy.  I get involved in a heavy discussion sitting in the coffee shop or at a rotary club or Kiwanis club meeting and then somebody asks me, what I do for a living.  And I say "I'm a minister".

"You mean you're a preacher?"

"Well yeah, I'm a minister - I'm a pastor."

And I immediately see everything that we have said in our interchange before, rerun through their programmer with a 20% discount added.  Because the idea is "that poor guy! He's a nice enough fellow, and he seems to know what's going on, but everything he says is just a little bit lacking in relevance.  He's not where I am. He doesn't know what its like to work where I work."  I know that.  I don't believe it.  It's a lot of baloney, but I'll live with it because I have to - its a part of my job description: deal with people who don't understand.  Who think you don't understand.  Therefore, ever since the beginning of time God has so arranged His body that you would carry the weight.  Not me.  And yet, you've got to get rid of that second-class psychosis that sees the word "laymen" as a synonym for "part time, untrained, uninformed, not quite really dedicated amateur Christian."  That is not the case.  You see it sometimes, in contrast with "dedicated, trained professional, full-time men of God".  You know, something really, really real.

Let's get back to the beginnings. What is the Biblical portrayal?  The Biblical portrayal is: lay movement.  Who did Jesus call? When He called twelve disciples, He did not go to the latest class of the Hebrew seminary.  He went out and He called fishermen and He called tax collectors and all the rest.  And then He said to His disciples at the end of his public ministry, just before His ascension, "Go back to Jerusalem and tarry there and when the Holy Spirit comes, He will give you power.  To do what?  "To be My witnesses in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and the uttermost parts of the world".  And so they did.  They went back, they waited, the Holy Spirit came.  They received power and a whole lot of other stuff. And then they were His witnesses in Jerusalem.  And in Jerusalem.  And in Jerusalem.  They never left town! Their order was Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and they stayed right there.  And you read through the first part of the book of Acts and you say, "boy they had a good thing going."  And they're sitting around there saying "isn't it great to be blessed like this? Oh, God is so blessing us!"  And they had these "bless me" services, and they had just a super time. And God is saying "What about Judea and Samaria?"  And then finally you see it coming: in chapters 5 and 6 you see that persecution starting to come on the horizon.  Then chapter 7 we see the first guy, his name was Stephen, the first man to die for faith in Jesus Christ.  They drag him outside the city walls (chapter 7 is Stephen's sermon, by the way - he was a layman - terrific sermon, the whole chapter), then they kill him. And then it says in Acts 8, in the last half of the first verse, "from that day a great persecution arose against the church, and they that were in Jerusalem were scattered everywhere"  And then you jump on down to the fourth verse and it says, "and they scattered, went everywhere preaching the gospel"  Now wait a minute.  Back up to the first verse again, "and they were all scattered - except the apostles".  So who got scattered?  It was the laymen.  And who went everywhere preaching the gospel?  Those who were scattered - the laymen.  And so in God's Divine order and plan, the order was "stay in Jerusalem, receive the Holy Spirit and power to do what I told you to do."  And they didn't do it.  And persecution came and scattered them throughout that part of the country and notice where they went.  Turn to that passage and you will discover: Judea and Samaria.  They're on their way! But under persecution.  The interesting thing is, it was not carried on the shoulders of the preachers. It was the laymen.  It has validity, you see.  Because you don't get run through that discounting procedure.

Now, take a look at denominational history.  Some of you don't know too much about the Covenants. Some of you don't even know that the Covenant's a denomination - you call us "The Covenant".  "Where do you go to church?"  "I go to the Covenant." That's great, I like that.  That's a good Biblical term.  But we are a denomination.  And what is our history?  The Covenant was born out of the revivals that swept through Sweden during the last part of the nineteenth century, the 1850's, 60's, and 70's.  Its started down there outside of Stockholm where a guy by the name of Scott, who was kind of influenced by Moody and Sankey and anglo-American revival technique of mass meetings. But he took a whole lot of young fellows who would come down to Stockholm and the area looking for jobs in the industrial revolution and hadn't found any, and he won them to Christ.  And he gave them a little bit of Bible teaching and he handed them a cardboard suitcase full of cheaply printed Bibles and Swedish magazines called the Pietista, which had sermons in it, and sent them home.  Now Sweden had just passed a national literacy law and you had to learn to read and if anybody knows what its like to be snowed-in for five or six days, and not have enough to read stored up in the house, you're reading the wallpaper after a while.  And now the law says everybody's got to learn to read.  So everyone learned to read, but nobody had enough to read.  God in His mercy and through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit moved old Scott to train these guys and they went all over to their home towns with this little cardboard suitcase full of goodies to sell.  And people would buy it and nobody cared what it was - it was something to read.

And then these people simply shared what Christ had done in their life - how they had been changed.  How Jesus had come into their life and they new very little theology, except they knew the basic statement.  Now the church at Corinth, I Corinthians was written to a church that had all of the gifts, but if you look at the I Corinthians 15 you'll see that Paul has to go way back to the basics and teach them the gospel all over again, cause they were running around chirping about their gifts, and Paul says "You've left behind the gospel. You're majoring in experience. Let's get back to the basics." And so these little booksellers, these coal porters are running up and down Sweden hustling their books and their Bibles and sharing what they knew about Jesus Christ and pointing to His word.  And revival fires were lit up and down Sweden.  Traveling not on the silver throated tongue of some great Swedish preacher, but in the semi-literate stammering of booksellers!

And then they came to America, those Swedes, by the boatload - my grandmother among them.  They lit on the eastern seaboard and they leapfrogged into the midwest and them some got as far as Yakima Washington where they raised apples.  And I never understood how they got that far.  But a bunch of them stopped in Iowa.  And in a town called Swedebend, Iowa.  Exciting metropolis.  And in Swedebend, Iowa there was a shoemaker - just a plain cobbler.  All he did all day long was put soles on shoes and repair shoes and all that kind of stuff.  A cobbler, a man who had worked with his hands. But a man who loved His Lord and read his Bible well.  And he poured himself into the study of the word. And gradually this little group of immigrant Swedes started to get together where they shared the joy that they had found in Jesus Christ.  And where they sang the hymns of the revival and they shared together and old brother Bjork, because he seemed to have special leadership qualities, they asked him if he would kind of be their lay preacher.  And so Bjork would get up there on Sunday morning in his little one-room schoolhouse affair that they called a church and he'd open up the desk and he'd take out his Pietista - his Swedish magazine - and he'd read them a sermon.  That's what he did: he'd read them a sermon.  He'd spend some time with it - they'd written illustrations from life in Swedebend and all that sort of thing if there was any life in Sweden then and he kind of made it his own.  But one Saturday a couple of ladies are out there cleaning up the place and they open the desk and they find the Bible and they find the copy of the Pietista, all ready to roll tomorrow morning and one of them says to the other, "you know, brother Bjork knows the word of God so well.  Its a shame he doesn't just preach from that instead of read us these dry sermons."  And so they hid his magazine.  And the next morning, brother Bjork got up there, and after they'd sung the hymns of the revival, this shoemaker stood up and he opened the desk and found nothing but his Bible with a note that said, "brother Bjork, preach from this."  And he did!  And that shoemaker became the first president of the national evangelical Covenant church of America.  It, and the body of Christ, have been a lay movement from the beginning.  But somehow we have gotten this second-class psychosis among our laymen who says "we'd better hire another gun because we can't handle the outlaws." And the gospel calls us to be His ministers. That's why the Holy Spirit was given in the first place - to equip us.

Laymen, the Old Testament doesn't know those kinds of distinctions in the future.  It sees it ahead in Exodus 19, It says "You shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests and holy people." And Isaiah 61 says, "You shall be named the priests of the Lord.  Men shall call you the ministers of our God."  Now that's in the old testament, when they had very clear distinctions between the priesthood and those who were not of the priesthood. And then Peter says in the New Testament, "You also as living stones are built up a spiritual house - a holy priesthood to offer up acceptable spiritual sacrifices to God by Jesus Christ."  You see, lay people, you are not called to conserve and support alone, but you are called to initiate and propagate.  When you say "I'm just a layman," you're not being humble - you're being disobedient.  You're to take the inspiration and the insight and so forth and draw together to gain and then to go.

Now, secondly, confirmation class.  You've got to change your concept of the church.  Now we're starting to understand this a little bit more.  It's starting to come together a little bit more, but people say "where's your church?" and you say, "the corner of 78th and 32nd."  Well that's accurate right now.  But it won't be accurate in another two or three hours.  Because the church will be all over the place.  And tomorrow morning, I know part of the church that's going to be on a golf course (the ground's frozen - you get great distance).  Part of the church is going to be on United Airlines. Part of the church is going to be flying with Continental.  Part of the church is going to be working at Boeing.  Part of the church is going to be cleaning up the kitchen.  Some is going to be getting the kids off to school, and some's going to be at school, because the church is the body of Christ and is where ever His people are.  That's an exciting concept.  You see the new testament word for church is "ecclesia" which means the "called-out ones", "the assembled ones", "the gathered-together ones". Now that doesn't mean "gathered together in a location".  It means gathered together in a common love - a common relationship with Jesus Christ. And so any time you sit down with a brother in Christ and share Him, over a cup of coffee, that's the church.

When Matthew 18:20 says "where two or three are gathered together in my name", that's not a build-in excuse for lousy attendance at prayer meeting like we sometimes make it.  You know, two or three people come and get together they say "well, 'where two or three are gathered' ", we kind of feel better about that.  What that really means is that where ever the body is, whenever two or three are together, Christ is there - its His body - it's the church, and functioning.  We need to get rid of the idea that the church is a building.  This is a building, but it is not the church.  This is the headquarters.  You're the church.  The Scottish people are right when they say "what time does kirk go in?"  What time does the church, which is the body of Christ, go into the building where they meet?  I'd like to put another sign up out here in front, if the design commission would let us, that said "headquarters of Mercer Island Covenant Church".  Because when people call me on Monday and Tuesday and ask where the church is, I just really have to choke back the desire to say "well, what time is it?" Because I want to tell them that "you know, the church is here and there and everything," and I've tried it a couple times.  It really confuses people.  Once in a while they hang up.  And I don't want to mess up any opportunities by being cute, but its not just being cute, it's accurate.  You see, throughout church history, we've had some wrong and mistaken ideas of what the church is.  Before the Reformation, in the 16th century, the Roman church thought that the church is institutional.  After the Reformation, in a response to some of the leadership of John Calvin, the idea was that the church is doctrinal.  And then in modern day society you've got a couple different ideas: you've got an idea that the church is liturgical and other people who see the church as kind of a subculture holding to certain outdated ethical taboos.  And it's not that.

The church is the body of Christ.  The church is a redemptive society.  The church is a redemptive fellowship - a theocratic society with Christ at its head, with no set form of its life except a dynamic fellowship of love and vitality infused with the power of the Holy Spirit and enthused by the living reality of Christ's resurrection power.  That's what a church is.  And the true Christian fellowship is bound together in love for Jesus Christ on that basis.  And what we see today, when so many people are saying to us, "Yeah, I love Jesus Christ, but no, I want nothing to do with the church" is a reaction to a false understanding about what the church is.  And that's why the choir sang "If My people, which are called by my name" (that's the church) "shall humble themselves and pray and turn from those wicked ways, then I'll hear from heaven and I'll forgive their sin and I'll heal their land."

Third, you need to change your concept of what discipleship is.  Jesus calls us to a life of separation, but understand what the Bible calls "separation" is not to be interpreted as "isolation".  In Jesus' day there were a number of religious parties. One of which was the Essenes.  And the Essenes felt there's only one possible way you can live up to God's standard as represented in the laws of Moses and live in this world, and that is to withdraw from the world.  And so they go trucking outside of Jerusalem - just on the outskirts of Jericho - they establish themselves a little commune down on the Dead Sea and it is a community called the Qumran community.  It's really the one responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls, which has given so much archaeological evidence of the authenticity of scripture, etc, etc, etc.   But these were people who simply withdrew from life.  They said there's no way I can live for God out there, so they wanted to withdraw.

There are a lot of people who want to do that today.  They have a fortress mentality when it comes to the church: "They say, you know what we ought to do?  We ought to all sell our homes, and we all get out of our businesses, and we ought to go outside of Carnation someplace and buy forty acres.  And the first thing we do is build a wall all the way around it.  And paint the roofs the same color so Jesus can find us when He comes."  This kind of fortress mentality that says, "you and me, boy, we got to get together, we bind ourselves together" and Jesus did not say that.  Read what He said in that long discourse in the upper room.  Start from John 13 and 14 and 15 and 16 and 17.  And when He gets to the 17th, He prays for His disciples, and He says to His Father, "I pray for these men You've given to Me.  Everything You've given to me, I've given to them. And now Lord I pray for them.  I'm not asking You to take them out of the world, I'm asking You 'Keep them in the world'".  That fortress retreat mentality has never served the gospel.  It has not served it well on the world mission scene.  It will not serve it well in the kind of Christian commune mentality that we see growing around us all over today.  

Christ's will for His disciples was not withdrawal, but penetration.  And that's why He gave the Holy Spirit, and that's why He gave His gifts.  Look at that: "His gifts were that some should be apostles and some prophets and some evangelists and some pastors and teachers."  Now these gifts, in contrast with the list in I Corinthians 12, are to do with ministering gifts.  But notice: why?  "For the equipping of the saints for the work of the ministry for the building up of the body of Christ."  And I grew up thinking that that was a description of the minister's job - a pastor's job.  Three fold: 1) to build up the body, that is to make Christians mature - and you do that by preaching long sermons, and holding confirmation classes, and seminars, and that sort of stuff.  2) The second part of the minister's job is to do the work of the ministry, now everybody knows that means visiting the sick, and preaching, and running committees, and invocating and benedicting everything that happens.  3) And then the third aspect of the pastor's job is to build up the body, and that meant that the trustees and the pulpit search committee have looked around until they found a real hot dog who could be the best member-getter on record.  Because his job was to build up the body, and everybody knows the statistical report is going to headquarters. And then I discovered that is wrong.  You've heard this so many times that its not new to you, but the Greek makes it very plain that the task of those that have been gifted with these gifts is to equip the rest of the saints to do the work of the ministry.  Why should I do the work of ten, if I can get ten to do the work?   Its much more efficient.  It spreads it out much more wider area.  And so I praise God that the job of these who have been gifted in these areas is to equip the saints to do the work of the ministry and thus build up the church.

And today's clergy/lay distinctions have just obliterated the functioning of gifts held by all believers.   Somebody asked me one time, "why don't you wear your pulpit gown all the time?  You look so nice in it!"  I think I look pretty nice in this.  "Why do you get up there and look like an insurance salesman?"  Partly because insurance salesmen are ministers too.  We are all ministers.  I want as few things to separate us from one another as possible.  And when I wear the pulpit gown, it is to set apart the sacrament of baptism and the sacrament of communion from the normal round of things.  Its not to set me apart.  Because, you see, I am just as human and real as you are.  You struggle with temptations to pride, and temptations to shade the truth, and temptations to dip into the petty cash, and temptations to cheat on your income tax, and temptations to lust and act upon that lust.  That's no different than the man that stands up here either.  The only distinction that we have is that God has given me the enormous joy of getting paid for doing what you do free.  He has gifted me and trained me and holds me responsible for a specific aspect of ministry, but we are fellow ministers.

And so it was, Bob Rocksford says, "Now I've come to see that on the local church level, there is no greater evidence of leadership weakness and spiritual pride - not to speak of organizational inefficiency - than to see the pastor running everything, attending, initiating everything, invocating, benedicting everything.  This creates all kinds of clergy/lay tension and causes the thinking layman to throw up his hands in despair and let the pastor get on with his one-man band."  Now its a relief to me, you see, to know that I am not the repository of all knowledge and power and wisdom and ability.  But, of course, you've suspected that for some time.  But its a joy to know that this is a shared ministry.  You know of a weakness in this church's ministry, oh I know a lot of them.  Don't lay the blame at my desk.  Its not my weakness any more than its yours.  Its our shared need.  Its our shared ministry.  We are called to be one in Christ, to be His disciples.  Its our privilege to accept one another in love and forgiveness - not in conformity to each other - but in acceptance of one another.  Its our joy to help the helpless and the thankless and its our thrill to minister to the people who are hurting, and to bring a kind of elbow-rubbing closeness of the gospel into our world.

Where's your ministry?  Well, part of mine is standing here on Sunday morning.  Part of yours is sitting in that carpool all week long.  What do you talk about?  What do they talk about?  Are you alert?  Now, don't start beating them with a Scofield Bible on Monday morning, or you'll just burn it out in a hurry.  But be ready.  Be alert, and let the quality of your life create curiosity in theirs because you walk with Jesus.  You see, the world does not relate to the church.  The church and the world just keep banging up against each other, but there's no real point of contact.  But you relate to the church because you are the church.  And you relate to the world because that's your area of ministry and so you become the point of contact.  And so the scripture says that, "we have been called to do the work of the ministry and build up the body of Christ until we attain to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God to mature manhood.  To the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ."  Not me or you.  "So that we may no longer be tossed around like children."  Now that's why the gifts were given.  Next week we're going to talk about why is it super important to find out what gifts are and what gifts you have.  There's some very important reasons why we should.  The week after that, we'll talk about what's the difference between the gifts of the Spirit and the fruits of the Spirit.  I mean what really, is the difference?  And then we'll get into the lists.

Now go home and start to pray for your pastor.  And start to pray for yourself too that our hearts will be open so the Spirit of God can really teach us.  But meanwhile know this: you have been called to a ministry.  And the result of that is that you are held responsible for your ministry too.