It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian

I talk to people all the time who are interested in Jesus, who are drawn to Jesus, who want Jesus, but very few are convinced that they need the church, and probably rightly so. But Acts offers us a different picture to imagine. Not a church that controls or shames, not a church that's all about performance and image, but a church that informs. A place where faith is practiced over time together, where belonging often precedes believing, where maturity is measured not by certainty but by love. [00:44:41] (47 seconds)  #BelongBeforeBelieve

But for Paul, later in the letters, and we'll see this as we move through, for Paul, this is precisely the miracle of grace, that God is including in the family those who were once excluded by culture and practice and language and background. So the Greeks are part of your family. The foreigners who are speaking all these languages that you don't understand are part of your family. The rich, the poor, the men, the women, the slaves, the free, everybody is a part of your family. There are no boundaries and there are no borders when it comes to kin in the church. [00:37:08] (42 seconds)  #ChurchAsFamily

If you think about the fruit of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control, these are collective communal gifts. It's very, hard to think about practicing patience unless there are other people around to try my patience. It's very hard to think about being kind if there's nobody to be the recipient of my kindness. It's very difficult to grow in love if I'm never exposed to somebody who's difficult to love. And the church affords us all of those gifts. [00:33:13] (41 seconds)  #FruitsOfCommunity

Acts is is not primarily the story of heroic Christians doing great things for God. The book of Acts, if you remember nothing else this morning, remember the book of Acts is the story of God forming a community and inviting you to participate in it. A community that is so different and so distinctive from anything else in the world because it is a community capable of bearing the presence of Jesus, of embodying the presence of Jesus in the world. [00:23:15] (40 seconds)  #EmbodyJesus

One of the surprising facts about the book of acts is that the spirit does not immediately send the disciples out on a mission. Before sending anybody out, he gathers them in. Before the mission expands, the community deepens. Before the gospel travels outward, it has to take root inwardly. [00:31:25] (28 seconds)  #GatherBeforeGo

And acts is telling us that the church functions something like that. This is not a performance space. It's not a motivational seminar, but it's a formational environment. Spiritual maturity grows where habits are shared and truth is spoken and life is lived together. It can't just be downloaded. It has to be practiced. [00:31:00] (26 seconds)  #FormationNotPerformance

And this is deeply formative. It shows that maturity is not about the absence of conflict, but it's about the ability to face it without breaking communion. In fact, if we never are exposed to differences and conflict, if every time we feel the unpleasantness of conflict and difference. We run away. Our spiritual growth will always be stunted. We'll never be more than spiritual children. [00:43:24] (40 seconds)  #GrowThroughConflict

The church exists not to produce religious consumers, participants in a program, but to form disciples who are capable of loving God, being awed by God, being oriented with their whole life towards glorifying God and loving our neighbors, even those who are profoundly different in doing it for a lifetime. [00:45:48] (38 seconds)  #MakeLifelongDisciples