Today we officially begin our series on Acts, and a summer of sermons and classes around the theme of “The Church in Mission.” For the last year, most of our efforts as a congregation have been focused internally. I have centered my ministry around the development of congregational unity, purpose and organization. We still have a ways to go, but I believe our congregation is showing real signs of strength. While we continue to pay attention to our own spiritual growth, I believe our congregation is ready to look outward so that we are salt and light in our community. For the rest of the summer, we will study, pray, serve and worship together around this theme. I will be preaching from the book of Acts this summer, largely from the missionary journeys of Paul. I look forward to discovering our mission together this summer.

If we are going to be a church on a mission, we first must be clear about the kind of church God wants us to be. I believe we can most recover that ideal, not by our idealized fantasies of what church should be, but by returning again to the mundane routines of that first church of the New Testament where we will discover again the life, adventure and joy to be found in really becoming the community of Jesus.

Dr. Richard Halverson, former chaplain of the United States Senate, once wrote, “In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centered on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece where it became a philosophy. Then to Rome where it became an institution. Next, it went to Europe where it became a culture. Finally, it moved to America where it became an enterprise.” Listen to how it was in the beginning.

Read Acts 2:42-47

Prayer – God, as it was in the beginning with You, may it be so with us. May we be a safe place of belonging, worship and generosity for our community and world so that we enjoy Your favor, and the favor of all the people. In Your Son's Holy Name. Amen.

Most of you know that I am a coffeeaholic. I do not drink much; I just drink it often. Ha. I often question why I have developed the unique ability to smell out a Starbucks or Coffee Bean anywhere within a five-mile radius. Some of you smell a Costco, or a Pottery Barn, or a Home Depot. I smell Starbucks. There is nothing I like better than a morning with some Verona blend, with a splash of half-and-half, a hello from the blonde girl at the register, and my Los Angeles Times. Heaven might be better, but I am quite sure that The Kingdom has come over at Starbucks (or Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf – your choice). I am not the only one who feels this way. Starbucks has become one of the most successful companies in the world. Why is that? Surely it is not just the coffee – it really isn’t all that special. Yes, you can’t buy café lattes, breve, with soy, and vanilla flavoring at Denny’s. But I sense there is something else to the whole trend.

Go by Starbucks or the Coffee Bean on any given afternoon, and you will find young people huddled around tables in conversation for hours. Business meetings take place. Friends catch up over a frappucino. Sometimes the kids play music and write songs. The art of employees and customers is displayed on the walls. The person behind the register comes to know us by name, and our name is even placed on our cup. It is safe, personal and simple – to some extent, routine– and that seems to be what keeps drawing us back over and over again. Though it robs our pocketbooks, Starbucks has found the favor of all the people. Why have people found at Starbucks what they should have found at church?

There are a myriad of reasons that we are not, including the fact that we are not a coffee business but a place that calls people to carry a cross. Yet, there sometimes appears to the world that there is more community to be had at Starbucks than at church. It is my hunch that what Starbucks is selling is not merely a cup of coffee – it is an experience of community and conversation. The coffee stores sell coffee because they recognize that community breeds loyalty. People will buy coffee when they find a place where it is safe for them to belong.

Acts 2 describes the events that immediately follow Pentecost when the Holy Spirit took control of the church. The Spirit fell upon the Apostles, and 3,000 people gave their lives to Christ in repentance and baptism. The church was born when God added them to His family, and the church began to live out its Spirit-filled life together. Two passions characterized the early church:
1) they devoted themselves to learning the faith (Acts 2:42); and
2) they committed themselves to life in community (Acts 2:42-47).

Too often in the Protestant tradition, our experience of church has been a cup of Joe that is only half full. We have tried to sell the coffee without providing the community. As children of the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, our understanding of the church largely has been that we are a group of people drawn together around common convictions. “Who is the true church?”, we ask. “It is the people who know and believe The Truth.” “It is those who teach sound doctrine.” Therefore, many churches have contented themselves to be a center of education and learning. One assumption lies behind this understanding of church: If people know and believe the right things, they will do the right things. And community will just happen by default when a bunch of people with common convictions find themselves in the same room or the same building together.

Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. Not only does that not happen in reality; it is not even Scriptural. Let me be clear: a devotion to the knowledge of The Faith is an honorable devotion. It is critical that we grow in the knowledge of Scripture if we are to become disciples of Jesus. However, we cannot stop there. The identifying mark of the “New Testament church” in Acts was not so much its Truth as it was its generosity. Did it teach the Truth? Absolutely. But what caused the world to wake up and smell the coffee in the midst of many religions who claimed to have a hold on the truth? When I read the book of Acts, it was not The Truth that the church possessed but the generosity the church demonstrated that turned the world upside down. There is nothing distinctive, at least to the world, about an organization whose invitation basically consists of: “Come join us because we know the truth.” Every religion claims that they have the truth. What made the early church distinctive was that The Truth they knew made them glad and generous people. And in a world of selfishness, depression and isolation, that truly is a distinctive community.

This first church devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the experience of community (v. 42). Fellowship, or koinoneia, means to “share with somebody” or “to share in something with somebody.” It was not a religious term really, but in the New Testament it came to mean the spirit and action of sharing when we have been made common through the uncommon act of Christ for us. Sharing – in faith, in possessions, in gifts – that was at the very heart of what it meant to be church. Because they shared a common faith in the common grace of God in their lives, they shared in a community of grace and giving that the world could not resist.

What distinguished their life together? Devotion to growing in their knowledge of the faith. Devotion to community. Lord’s Supper. Eating together. Prayer. Powerful works of God. And Generosity. Nothing fancy here. You won’t often find them in church growth manuals, and certainly not in books on how to grow a successful business. Eating, worshiping, healing, praying and giving – that is the “stuff” of God’s family. One of the things the first church did was to develop a routine. Luke even adds that the church did these things “day by day.” Worship. Praying. Teaching. Community. Giving. Those are the habits of The Faith, and it is as we engage in those habits together that we become the church of Christ. It is one of the mysteries of our faith that as we do these activities, day by day, week after week, that we become more and more the church that belongs to Jesus.

So how are we doing at being a Church of Christ? One of the things I love about our Restoration tradition is our devotion to the teachings of the apostles. But we are not a Church of Christ simply because we believe the right things. That is a great place to begin. But even the demons believe the right things, Jesus said. Jesus said people who know His Presence are not merely those who know to call on His Name but those who are able to recognize His Presence in the hungry, and the thirsty, and the immigrant, and the sick, and the prisoner, and the poor (Matthew 25:31-46). Want to find a real Church of Christ? Show me a church that has come to discover The Presence and Truth about Christ as it gives itself away to the world. We are a Church of Christ when we share together in The Truth that calls us into a community of worship and giving. Table and Towel. That is what makes us distinctive.

I have spoken with many of you in the last year about our church and its future. One of the most common concerns to be expressed is our fear that we will lose our distinctiveness. Most of the time, that distinctiveness is described to me as doctrinal purity, the authority of Scripture, or the identity of the church. Those are real and honorable concerns. Yet, I can honestly say that no one has come to me concerned that we may lose our identity because we are not living in generous community with each other. Perhaps that is because that has never really been our distinctive. Yet, as I read about the church in the book of Acts, it was not their name but their deeds that turned the world upside down. When God chose a remarkable act of striking down people in the New Testament, it was not for failure to be doctrinally pure. It was for their failure to be authentically generous. God struck down Ananias and Saphira because they represented that they wanted to live in a community of sharing but they really were still living in the falsehood of selfishness. There is nothing more uncharacteristic of God’s family than pretentious selfishness.

God wants His church to be a generous community of sharing. The problem is that too often His church is a rich, selfish church. We give to God, to others, and to the church with the leftovers after we have satisfied every other material desire. But the early church lived according to needs, not wants. And when you begin to live that way, there is plenty left over to share.

What if I started making my tithe the first thing I budget and not the last?
What if we became a church of liberal generosity and not merely doctrinal superiority?
What if our reputation in Camarillo and in Ventura County was not our lack of instruments but our wealth of compassion?
What if all of us began to sacrifice so that no one in our church has to drown in a sea of financial debt?
What if we just gave up one Starbucks a day and sponsored a child with Compassion International?

My guess is that the church contribution would not be half of what we need. I believe that if we become a church of generosity, our community and our world will find themselves confronted by a church that surprises them with their compassion. They might not write us off so quickly.

It is my guess that it is our selfishness and not our Savior that has been the greatest barrier for the conversion of the world in our age. Luke says that when the church began to live and worship together in community and generosity that they “enjoyed the favor of all the people.” That is not how I would describe the perception of the Churches of Christ or even Christianity by most of the world. In some parts of the world, we are perceived as militaristic, violent and perverse. But in America and in Europe, we are not so much hated as we are ignored. And we are ignored because The Truth we know has not resulted in a community we share. When those in our culture come to know us, they see people just as anxious, just as selfish, and just as ambitious as they are. They sense that something must be wrong with that picture. The church they see just does not look like The Jesus they know.

“Glad and generous hearts” are the result of knowing a gracious and generous Savior. Perhaps we are not sharing because we think we are deserving. But the truth is that we are deserving of nothing. We are obligated up to our ears to a God who died for us, even when it was us who drove in the nails on that dreadful day. We cried out in our great desperation, “What can we do?” And the gracious gift of God in Jesus Christ was offered to us in baptism. Now we are free from living false lives that center around ourselves and now we live in the shared reality of Jesus Christ. As we share in Him, we come to share with each other. People who are glad become generous. That is just how it is.

This morning I want to call us again to be a New Testament Church. Let’s devote ourselves wholly to the study of Scripture and to the knowledge of Jesus Christ. But as we do so, let’s give ourselves to the love of God and each other so that we are known more and more as a distinctive community of people whose glad and generous hearts have earned us the favor of all the people. Worship. Learning. Praying. Community. Giving. Starbucks can’t even match those qualities. They are not generally found in institutions and enterprises. They begin and grow in shared belief and in a shared life. They are really just the routine habits of a people following an extraordinary Savior.


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