kind-of-church-that-is-both-here-there-part-1-study-notes

The Church Here AND There

What Kind of Church is Both Here and There, Part 1? Acts 11:19‑24

There were 7 billion people in the world at the end of 2008, that's 7.000 million. Of those, over 2 billion would call themselves "Christians." But that's not a figure most of us take too seriously because, as almost everyone in our society knows, not everyone who professes Christianity actually practices it. It's difficult to determine what proportion of this "nominal" Christian group that we should consider as being truly spiritually alive. In my opinion, perhaps the best figure to reckon with would be something like 8-900 million, i.e., 8-900 million "committed Christians" in a world of 7,000 million people.

From one point of view, even that lower number is quite an encouraging statistic. That means, for instance, that there are seven times as many "committed Christians" in the world today as constituted the entire population of the world in the day of Jesus and Paul. It means that there is one committed Christian for every 8 uncommitted as compared to the 1 to every 200 at the end of the first century. In fact, that ratio of committed Christian to non‑Christian has been steadily improving over the last several hundred years.

However, there's another side to the story that is less optimistic. Of that 7.1 billion in this world who may not be practicing Christians, over 25% are what we would consider "unreached." By that, I don't mean that they would consciously say that they are not Christians. They haven't rejected Christ. I mean that this large group still hasn't even had an opportunity to discover what a Christian is. By "unreached" I mean that there are no churches within the orbit of their social existence that might tell them about Jesus Christ.

Indeed, many of those 1.8 billion "unreached" lie behind walls of cultural prejudice and even ideological antagonism to Christianity. They include 650 completely unreached people groups. They include at least 18 mega‑cities, some of them with populations larger than Los Angeles or New York. And many of those unreached people live in one of the 70 countries that have, within the last 100 years, closed their borders to normal, conventional missionary activity.

The line, then, between the 5+ billion in the world who are within the range of the local evangelism of Christian churches and the 1.8 billion who lie beyond that range represent for us in 1992 the boundary of Christian influence.

When you read the Book of Acts in the NT, one of the things that becomes apparent is that the world is eventually going to be reached by ever‑increasing circles of testimony through local churches who carry out their mission of communicating the message of Christ and showing the love of Christ. It was to happen first in Jerusalem, then Judea, and Samaria, and then to the ends of the earth. Well, that work has not been finalized. The circles are expanding even today, 2,000 years later. And that line between the "reached" and the "unreached" represents the edge of the wave front. That is the frontier of the church's unfinished task. You see, there is no way that that 1.8 billion can be incorporated into the "reached" people except as the result of missionary endeavor. Adventurous Christians must leave the emotional security, and sometimes the physical safety, of their own society and deliberately seek to plant churches and win converts in cities and in cultures where as yet there are few or none of them and show the love and compassion of Christ where it has never been seen. And those who stay at home must make sacrifices to make it possible for them to go.

That's why the passage we are beginning to look at this morning is so vitally relevant to understanding God's purpose of world evangelization as well as the biblical method for that evangelization. This passage shows us the early Christians facing this enormous challenge of impacting the world for Christ. It portrays for us the birth of missionary vision in the church. To be more accurate, it has to do with the birth of missionary vision in a church‑‑because, according to Luke, the first pioneering step toward planned cross‑cultural mission of the sort we're talking about was taken by a single congregation, the church at Antioch.

This church is a model of the kind of church that can have an impact for God beyond it's own walls. It's the kind of church you should want to be a part of. It's the kind of church I want ours to be. Therefore, my task over the next two weeks is to examine this church and see what happened there that made it effective. Maybe, if we can be clear about that, we will be affected by it ourselves.

I. We dare never forget that the mission we embrace is a global mission (11:19a).

Vv.19‑21. Now, this is quite a section because earlier in Acts the anger of the Jewish authorities against the church, which came to a head when a young Christian man named Stephen, was stoned to death, led to a dispersion of the young church in Jerusalem. In chs. 8‑10, first Philip and then Peter carried the seed of the Christian message into new soil as a result of this centrifugal explosion following Stephen's death. Philip went into Samaria and then to an Ethiopian eunuch, and Peter went to the home of a Gentile named Cornelius in Caesarea.

What happens in ch.11 is that Luke is highlighting another zone of the expansion of the Gospel. Luke tells us here that some of these persecuted believers went even further away from Jerusalem, way up to the far north, to Antioch, the Roman province of the capital of Assyria, the third largest city in the world at that time. Unlike Jerusalem, it was a cosmopolitan, secularized city. Like cities in our day, all kinds of cultures converged upon Antioch. It did have a Jewish community but it was a multi-cultural pluralistic city.

Japanese church sending people to Vietnam and to the Japanese business communities of US and Europe. Chinese sending people to Tibet and to countries Westerners may never be able to enter. Congo EFC congregations sending people to unreached people groups in other parts of Africa. More missionaries in UK from Africa and Asia than other parts of the world. All Christians must be outward focused – and all congregations must be as well. Energized by involvement bigger than ourselves. God’s glory made known as different people groups demonstrate oneness in Christ.

II. We need God’s eyes for all people – beginning with those near us.

In a pluralist, urban environment like that, it was difficult for a preacher to limit his target audience to Jews only ‑‑ even if he wanted to. And some of the young Christian immigrants to the city refused to even try. In their enthusiasm for their new‑found Christian faith, they shared the Gospel, Luke tells us, not only with their Jews ‑‑ but with Gentiles also. And that move which violated their own cultural law. Rabbinical law forbade Jews to have social relationships with Gentiles.

Luke doesn't tell us the names of these Jewish Christians who defied the cultural taboo and spoke to these Gentiles but he does tell us they were of Cypriate and Cyrenian origin. This is significant because it means that unlike the conservative Palestinian Jews who had grown up in the closed Hebraic culture of Judea, these Christians who carried the Gospel out to others were men and women of the world. They preferred to speak Greek rather than Aramaic. And almost certainly they didn't have the same degree of reservation about relationships with Gentiles as someone like Peter would have had. They didn't need a divine vision to persuade them that it was O.K. to speak to a Gentile. They were almost certainly business people in the Roman Empire. Therefore, they would have been speaking with Gentiles all the time ‑‑ whatever the rabbi may have thought about it.

But I think that even they may have been caught off guard by the degree of the response which their witness to the Gentiles produced. 11.:21.

There are several things I think we should note about that prolific response they experienced that might help us in our mission today:

Large cities have strategic importance in the fulfillment of God’s mission.

Breaking through cultural walls and barriers with any change is invariably easier in an urban setting like Antioch. Openness to the claims of the Gospel is greater among diverse urban people. Change has almost always happened in cities and then the ripple moves out into outlying areas. Rural settings are influenced by what first happens in metropolitan areas.

The reasons are not difficult to grasp. People who live in large cities are already less attached to their parents' culture. Rural communities develop deep and traditional roots. People in the city have to come to grips with the pluralism of the city. In a place like the greater Los Angeles area, we soon know that not everyone is like me; not everyone thinks like I do. The city exposes people to new ideas. One potentially healthy point for a church like our own is this: In metropolitan communities like our own, we often are forced to think about what is central to the Gospel – and how that is to be communicated to others who do not share our own backgrounds.

Now, cities have their harsh realities. As was the case in Antioch, all the darkness of a society often is concentrated in urban areas. But, with regard to our God‑given mission to proclaim the Gospel to the world, the fact that cities have difficulties does not keep the cities from becoming the places in which people will be open to hearing about Christ and respond to him. The early Christians certainly found it so at Antioch. And living in multi-cultural urban areas like our own is often a fantastic training ground for our Father’s Revelation 7:9 cross-cultural mission. But, strategically speaking the increasing urbanization of our world today presents an enormous potential to us for the advancement of the Gospel.

Our own city is an Antioch-like training center and one strategy we must consider for the future is continued outreach to cities like Phnom Penh and Bangkok. It's cities like these that are the Antiochs of our modern world. These are the cities that hold the keys to the completion of the missionary task. I have little doubt about that.

It highlights the strategic importance of being a church that is both “here” and “there.”

This, of course, is the main point I want to make. The thing that caused Antioch to have an impact in the world is that it had a zeal to reach its own community. It cared about the people of its own community.

Now, I think you have to see that Luke emphasizes that the church’s growth is God's work. It wasn't just human enthusiasm and activism. He says it was "the Lord's hand" that was primarily responsible for their success. It was he who was multiplying the church in Antioch just as it was he who had added to the church daily in Jerusalem. But that doesn't negate the fact that it was the personal witness of these Cypriate and Cyrenian Christians that he chose to use to accomplish that sovereign purpose.

Earlier in Acts 11, a man named Cornelius had had an angelic visitation ‑‑ but the angel hadn't told him the good news. He insisted that it had to be Peter who would do that. So too here. God could have used supernatural means to tell these people in Antioch about himself ‑‑ but he chose to use the testimony of Christian people. That's God's appointed means to communicate his truth to the world.

That's how God plans to change the world through the gospel ‑‑ it will happen through the testimony of Christians in local churches. And for that reason a local church will never have an impact in the world, will never become a force for world evangelization, unless it possesses a vigorous passion for communicating the gospel to the community where it is. If it isn't concerned for evangelism and cross‑cultural evangelism, where it is, it's not really going to have a concern for evangelism thousands of miles away.

Many churches, I'm afraid, in this country try to be a bit like lighthouses. They want to illumine distant lands but are content to leave the area around their base plunged in darkness. It doesn't work that way. You can't generate missionary vision in a congregation that is inward-focused in its own local ministry.

The first requirement for having a world impact is that there is a body of people in the church who are passionately committed to reaching people – all people – for Jesus. Clearly, these Christians in Antioch were. Personal witness was a part of their lifestyle. They didn't need to organize visitation teams or go to get formal training at a Bible school or seminary before they felt qualified or motivated to tell others about their faith or to show others that they cared as Christ cares for us.

Perhaps the fact that they didn't grow up in a strict religious setting like those in parts of Jerusalem and Judea may have helped them in being this open with an unbelieving world. Those who grow up in a setting where their only friends are churchgoers, their only social contacts are churchgoers, often find themselves having to overcome all sorts of inhibitions in evangelism. It's often true. They're often extremely negative and even fearful of that unbelieving world that they perceive as being so hostile. The fire for sharing the faith is almost always strongest in those who have grown up in an unchurched environment. They feel at home there. They also know personally the enormous difference that their newfound faith has made in their lives‑‑and they long for others to have it. I've noticed it again and again.

And that's why many people believe that the greatest fire for world evangelism in the 21st century may not be found in the Christianized West any longer but from the new, burgeoning churches in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In these churches we have those who are most like those Christians from Cyrene and Cyprus who gave such fire to the church in Antioch. They are the ones most enthusiastic about using whatever they have to carry the gospel to the world. They don't just think of doing missions in the "way we've always done it before" for they have no tradition in this ‑‑ just a desire to share their faith.

But I say‑‑we dare not allow ourselves to be left out. I don't want us to simply be a church where we can come and comfortably do what people in America have always done in church. We must touch our community. We must love our community as Christ did. We must share our faith with this as the church in Antioch did. Only then will we have the heart to make the sacrifices necessary to touch our world.

That's the second quality that a local church must have if it will impact our world ‑‑ an evangelistic zeal for its own community.

III. We need humble hearts willing to sacrifice personal acclaim to further God’s mission.

I wanted to say – we need a humble but God’s-mission-centered pastor. That’s true. But the issue is bigger than that.Let me see if I can explain what I mean. See 11:22‑24.

It's not hard to imagine that the church at Antioch must have been a very different kind of church from the one in Jerusalem. By the sound of it, the number of converted Greeks may have exceeded the number of Christian Jews. So here for the first time is a congregation that is primarily Gentile in its makeup. It's no wonder that the brothers down in conservative Jerusalem were concerned to send someone to make sure that all was in order.

When the Samaritans had come to faith in Acts 8, the Jerusalem church had done the same thing, i.e., they had sent the apostles Peter and John to look at what was happening. Well, now they seem to be a little less paranoid. Instead of sending two heavy weight apostles, they send one rather gentle spiritual leader. And what a wise choice he turned out to be!

Barnabas. It's not his real name. In ch. 4 we're told his real name was Joseph. But the apostles called him Barnabas because it fitted his character so well. In Aramaic, Barnabas means "son of encouragement." And encouragement is what this man excelled in.

We read, "He saw the evidence of the grace of God." Almost certainly, we have to read that against the background that there were things happening in Antioch which many conservative Christians back in Jerusalem would have frowned upon most seriously. Almost certainly, Jews and Gentiles were eating together. Almost certainly, Gentiles were being welcomed into the membership of the church without circumcision. Almost certainly, there was a loosening up of the Kosher food regulations in the Jewish homes. Almost certainly, church services were being conducted in a way considerably less influenced by synagogue liturgy than would have been the case in Jerusalem.

Things were less formal, I'm sure. They probably sang different hymns. Perhaps the husbands even sat next to their wives ‑‑ which would never have happened in the synagogue. In a cosmopolitan city like Antioch, the church would almost inevitably have a more radical, experimental feel to it. These were city Gentiles ‑‑ not rural Jews. They would do things differently.

And many would quickly condemn all the differences. But we hear no "ifs" and "buts" from Barnabas' lips. It would have been so easy for him to be a wet blanket. But no, his spirit and his values were in the right place. He "saw the evidence of the grace of God and he was glad."

You see, here was a man of wide vision and accepting heart. He observed in Antioch lives changed from pagan immorality to Christian holiness. Circumcised or not; kosher or not‑‑this was the grace of God at work! But so many who are knit‑pickers, and legalists and so proud as to think that "only our way is right" would have killed the joy that was evident there instead of encouraging it. But Barnabas lived up to his name. He was as excited as they were.

What a boost that must have been to this young and enthusiastic congregation! To have a man of this kind of stature and maturity pat them on the back and endorse their work. It's little wonder that we read that after he arrived a great number of people were brought to the Lord.

You see why this kind of leadership is so necessary and important, don't you? He added to their zeal by providing a mature and stable Christian example. He further inspired their evangelistic outreach by his enthusiasm for what they are doing. It's unlikely that any church will really impact our world unless those who are in authority encourage the work of others like that. It must be encouraged when new churches we support do things in different ways while still holding on to the unchangeable truths. It must be encouraged when various members in the church do a work for God's kingdom that is a little different from the normal approaches of the church.

But I have to say that one of the reasons why some of the most biblical and conservative churches in our country are lacking in their impact is because their pastors and leaders remind you not so much of Barnabases but of Caiaphas the High Priest. He was known as a man of rigid and inflexible mind. They may have been innovative themselves at one point. But their own success has made them think it has to be done my way or else its no good. Instead of fostering grassroots outreach by their members, they feel threatened by it. Instead of recognizing the evidence of God's grace in enthusiastic young lives, they are suspicious of it. Instead of enjoying new elements in worship, they are critical of it. Instead of welcoming the new ways of expression which newcomers bring with them, they often turn them away with their severity and holier than thou attitude.

This happened occasionally in the missionary outreaches of the past. Inflexible missionaries went in to cultures and directed the people to wear the same clothes, sing the same hymns‑‑and the consequences of that kind of thing were often quite damaging. We desperately need more Barnabases.

We need to be people more interested in furthering authentic commitment to Christ than in the proliferation of our own traditions. We need the kind of openness and generous heart that we see in Barnabas. We need to be "sons of encouragement" to future generations and to other people rather than people with fixed ideas only instructing people to do it our way.

To His Glory,

Dr. Greg Waybright
Senior Pastor