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     A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan,  as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. 

-Luke 10:30-33 (NIV)

When Corpus Christi Police Senior Officer Richard Olden arrived at a bank to answer a call, he was pretty positive he was responding to a joke. The call, after all, was that there was a man trapped in an ATM. Trapped. In an ATM. 

     Obviously, a joke. 

     He wasn’t the only one to think so. When he arrived on scene, he found a series of handwritten notes that had apparently come out of the receipt slot of the ATM. The notes were all some variation on this theme: Please help. I'm stuck in here and don’t have my phone. Please call my boss at 210-XXX-XXXX. One bank customer finally took one of the notes seriously enough to call the police, but based on the number of notes laying around it was clear that several other customers had assumed, like Richard, that it was an elaborate prank.

     Richard was convinced, though, when he heard a voice coming from the ATM.

     A contractor had been changing the lock on a small service room attached to the ATM when he accidentally locked himself inside. Having left his phone in his truck, all he could do was push notes through the slot and hope it wouldn’t take long for someone to take him seriously.

     Unfortunately, it took three hours.

     Officers were able to kick down the door and rescue the contractor, who wasn’t hurt and who understandably didn’t want to give his name. I’m glad he’s OK and all. What I’m wondering, though, is what I  would have done if I was one of those customers. I mean, I get that it might be hard to believe someone could be stuck in an ATM. But you’d think that it wouldn’t take three hours to get some help.

     I wonder how long the injured man in Jesus’ story laid by the roadside waiting for someone to save him. I wonder if he could even cry out for help. I wonder if he was conscious enough to feel frustration when two people who might be expected above most others to offer help not only refused but crossed the street to avoid him. They didn’t even alert someone else to his predicament. At least those customers at the bank had a reason for their disinterest. All we know about that priest and that Levite is that they had a massive failure of compassion. With no compelling reason not to help, they still crossed the street and passed by.  

     Yet, perhaps it’s not all that surprising. They’re neither the first nor the last to suffer compassion failure.

     The punch line of Jesus’ parable, of course, is that the last person his hearers would expect to be compassionate is in fact the only one to show any compassion. That subversion of what’s expected confronts Jesus’ followers in every time and place with the moments when we’ve crossed the street to avoid getting involved when we should have been first on the scene with compassion. Even people who are religious, who identify themselves with God’s people and imagine themselves as rather good, generous, caring people, can find themselves crossing a street — or not answering a phone, or avoiding a conversation, or inventing an excuse, or creating a justification — to escape taking responsibility for those in need. 

     Sometimes it’s because we don’t trust the person in need. It’s true that sometimes people want help on their terms, and theirs alone. It’s true that they can take advantage of our generosity. Neither of those things, of course, means that there is no need present. When we’re honest, we might admit that doubting the person is just a convenient way to side step the responsibility to help. Perhaps you can best help in a different way. Perhaps you can take the opportunity to get to other needs that are more basic, but maybe going overlooked. 

     Certainly, when appropriate we can expect those we help to take responsibility for themselves. Look at helping as a way to give people breathing room so that they can heal, or improve their situation, or make some changes in their lives. We do no one a favor when we make them dependent upon us. We should, in collaboration with those we help, come to an agreement about how long the help will be for and what the landmarks on their way to self-sufficiency look like.

     Sometimes we cross to the other side of the street simply because the need seems too big for us alone. It threatens to suck us in and drag us down. It will require more energy, more resources, and more involvement than we feel that we can muster. Just recall that the Good Samaritan — the guy who helps — in Jesus’ parable doesn’t do it all himself either. He has somewhere to be, after all. Commitments that can’t be disregarded. So he helps as he can with emergency first aid and getting the injured man off the side of the road and to an inn. But he can’t stay, and so on he travels — after first getting the innkeeper involved and leaving some money. 

     Never forget that each of us is only one part of the church. Others have resources that we don’t have, expertise that is beyond us, opportunities and contacts we’ll never have. None of us is self-sufficient. This is why it takes the whole church to give presence to Jesus in the world. When you’ve done what you can do, bring in someone else. In this way, we can more adequately be neighbors to those in need while showing more completely the presence of Christ in our communities.

     Note, too, that the guy promises to stop back by. Needing for the moment to hand off responsibility to the innkeeper doesn’t mean that he sees his connection to this man ending. Yours doesn’t either. When you’ve hit the limits of your expertise, resources, time or energy, you can certainly bring in others with a clear conscience. But check back to see how the situation has changed. Continue to pray, to remember those in need, and to believe God does amazing things through the combined efforts of his people.

     The story arises out of a question: “Who is my neighbor?” But it changes the question in the process. By the time Jesus answers the question it’s not about those other people who might or might not be neighbors. It’s about us, and whether we’ve been acting as neighbors or not toward people in need.

     They’re there. And it’s no joke.

Pity

The end is now upon you,

and I will unleash my anger against you.

I will judge you according to your conduct 

and repay you for all your detestable practices. 

  I will not look on you with pity; 

I will not spare you.

I will surely repay you for your conduct 

and for the detestable practices among you. 

     Then you will know that I am the LORD.

- Ezekiel 7:3-4 (NIV)

When Jim Hellrood sees a car parked illegally in Wausau, Wisconsin, he knows what he's supposed to do. It’s in his job description, after all. It could be pretty black and white, if he wanted it to: Jim is a parking enforcement officer. His job is to ticket illegally parked cars.

     So when he saw a car that had been left overnight in a metered lot near three bars in town, he walked over to do his job. As he got nearer the car, though, he noticed a note, written in blue ink on a page torn from a spiral bound memo pad. The note read simply, "Please take pity on me. I walked home ... safe choices. :)”

     Pity. That’s a double-edged sword, isn’t it? Sometimes — maybe most of the time — we think of pity in negative terms. Most of us don’t want to be looked at with pity. We consider it humiliating, maybe, to see that look of pity in someone else’s eyes. “Don’t pity me,” we might say. “I don’t need your pity.”

     Oh, but then sometimes pity is exactly what we want — usually when we know there’s no good excuse for our actions. When we know there’s no way to escape the consequences of what we’ve done, when we know there’s no good reason anyone would forgive us or let our behavior go without some kind of action. When we’re looking down the barrel of our own sins and feeling the heat of punishment, suddenly pity doesn’t seem so bad.

     Pity is what that anonymous driver wanted, and pity is what Jim Hellrood offered her. He left her a warning ticket, along with a note of his own: “Pity Granted. Just a warning.”

     Jim says that he actually gives out more warnings than tickets on most days, so he probably didn’t think much about that. But the driver was certainly impressed. She posted her note, along with Jim’s response, on Facebook. It went viral. The story was picked up by news agencies all over the country, and even in a Korean newspaper. 

     Which might suggest that there’s a hunger in our world, with all its coldness and harshness, for pity. That people look for it in whatever form we can find it. That we want someone who knows our flaws and failures, and yet understands us and recognizes our best natures, even when buried under layers of bad choices. 

     It suggests that we keep within us somewhere the hope that there is forgiveness, mercy, and grace for us somewhere. And, beyond that, there is pity for our pain and grief — even, and maybe especially, when it’s self-inflicted.

     That’s what pity is, and that’s how it’s different from grace and mercy. Pity is sorrow. Pity is that feeling you have in the pit of your stomach when you see someone suffering. It makes you want to help, to stop the suffering. Sometimes you might be able to, and sometimes you can’t, but you still feel pity. But, and here’s the thing, pity is usually short-lived. You can’t muster the emotional energy to maintain it for long. So when the news story passes, or the immediacy of the need is gone, or the person for whom you feel pity isn’t right in front of you, the feeling may recede a bit. 

     You may have experienced this, too: we weary of pity when we see someone make the same bad choices again and again. Jim says if he sees the same car parked illegally again, he won’t hesitate to write the ticket. 

     The Bible says that God feels pity sometimes. But it also says, at least as often, that his pity can come to an end as well. “I will not look on you with pity / I will not spare you,” he says there in Ezekiel. He’s talking there to his people, those to whom he’s promised to be faithful. But he says he’s done with pity for them. He’s had enough of their bad choices, their “detestable practices.” And he won’t spare them from the consequences of their actions — consequences that have been spelled out for them for centuries.

     Understand, God’s love for them doesn’t end. He’s going to remain faithful to his promises to them. But he’s had enough of their cycle of ignoring him to pursue their own selfish interests, getting into trouble because of it, and crying out to him for rescue. Early in Ezekiel, God leaves his temple. He just picks up and moves out, leaving his people to the enemy armies who are the consequences of their sin. 

     I think we sometimes depend too much on God’s pity. After years of selfish decisions, we beg him to save our marriages. After a lifetime of bad decisions, we ask him to restore our health. We get angry at him for allowing children to go hungry without reckoning with the mass of greed, selfishness, corruption, and failure of community that has contributed to it. We get frustrated at him for making us face the consequences of our own sins. 

     I’m not saying it’s a one-to-one correspondence, or that every time we go through pain it’s because of our own sins and bad choices. Jesus suffered though he never sinned. But the fact is that even God’s pity apparently fails sometimes. We’ll never know how often it motivates him to protect human beings from the accumulated sin of our race. But sometimes he refuses to show pity. We suffer for it. Others suffer for it — even those who are innocent. 

     And yet his grace never fails. Ezekiel ends with a vision of God returning to his rebuilt temple. He preserves a remnant of his people to eventually return to the promised land. While he chose not to show them pity, he never forgot them. 

     He never forgets us. In Christ, there is always the promise of forgiveness and mercy. To trust in him is to find that we’re never out of the reach of his grace, even when we’ve exhausted the depths of his pity. 

     So, on the one hand, it doesn't make sense to imagine that God sees you always as a helpless victim at the mercy of your circumstances. You have the choice, you have the agency to live in obedience to him, whatever else is going on around you. Don't presume upon his pity; others of his people have done so and found themselves living with the consequences of their bad decisions and actions.

     But don't imagine, even when we're undeserving of God's pity, that we're completely bereft of his grace. God's glory will return to your life, too, even if for now he seems AWOL. The only way to shut ourselves off from God's grace and mercy is to refuse the gift he has offered us in Jesus.

     God won't always pity us. But he'll never stop loving us.

     You can park there.

The Reports of the Church's Death Are Greatly Exaggerated -- Part 7

    I know your deeds. See, I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut. I know that you have little strength, yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.

-Revelation 3:8 (NIV)

Some years ago now, I remember a group conversation with some church leaders in my area. We were talking about church growth, and the conversation had degenerated into comparisons of all the ways our churches were growing. (Thus validating our existence — though we wouldn’t have said that out loud.)

     I was one of the younger people in the room (that happens less and less), and probably a little more insecure about my own church’s size and growth rate, and so I pointed out that growth doesn’t always have to be about numbers. (A classic case of saying the right thing for the wrong reasons!) 

     One older minister bristled at that. “If your numbers aren’t growing,” he fairly shouted, “then the Holy Spirit’s not at work in your church. Read the book of Acts!” 

     I wish I’d pointed out that Acts also has stories about folks being flogged and stoned and shipwrecked. 

     Earlier in this series, I suggested that at some point we needed to take on the question of what growth looks like. If it isn’t swelling by attracting more of the existing religious “consumer base” than neighboring churches, then what is it? Is it true that the Holy Spirit isn’t at work in a church that isn't growing numerically?

      If you’re a small church in small town with a population that is static or shrinking, are you doomed to be a static or shrinking church? 

     If you’re a medium-sized church in an urban area and you don’t look much like your surrounding community, are you destined for a slow decline into irrelevance?

     If you’re a church of limited resources that can’t compete with the big-budget Sunday morning productions of the church down the street, are you fated to be a haven for the last traditionalist holdouts in town?

     If growth is only a numbers game, then each of those churches is in a difficult position. Not only that, but the statistics for the church as a whole don’t paint a very rosy picture. They suggest that the rapid growth of some churches has more to do with the shifting of the existing religious “consumer base,” and that explosive growth in one church is offset by the losses in other churches — and may even represent the movement of large numbers of believers out of smaller churches and into a few large ones. 

     Because, as we all know, large numbers of people have always marked where God is at work. (I wish there was such a thing as sarcasm punctuation marks.)

     Maybe part of the reason that some of us perceive that the church is dying is that we equate health with size. To be sure, there are troubling signs. But the fact of the matter is that America has been moving in the direction of becoming less churched and less monolithically Christian for a long time now. The numbers may never again look as impressive as they once did.  

     So I suggest that it’s time we consider a different set of criteria for health, and acknowledge that churches can and should grow in all sorts of ways. One caveat: I’m not suggesting that the sharing of faith isn’t important. I’m not saying that we should lose our interest in seeing people follow Christ in the life of the Kingdom. But I want to say that small churches can be growing churches too, and that they contribute something to the body of Christ in the world — even if it isn’t butts in seats.

      So here’s how we might think differently about growth in the world in which we live. 

     Churches can grow in ministry. One of the great things about a small church is the ability to adapt quickly. Large churches sometimes turn about as nimbly as a cruise ship with a busted rudder. With small churches, you can much more easily branch out into new works of service. Want to partner with a food bank to start a food pantry? Want to start a new Bible study in the neighborhood? Want to have a back-to-school child’s clothing drive, or set up a safe place for kids to get homework help or use the internet, or collect food and medications for a refugee camp? In a small church, you don’t usually have to go through two committees and three pastors. Think less about how many people show up on Sunday morning, and more about the number of people you serve, and you may begin to see that increasing the ways in which your congregation serves might be as important as increasing the number of people in the doors.

     Similarly, churches can grow by equipping each other for ministry. That’s what Paul seemed to think churches should be doing anyway. In a larger church with a huge staff, sometimes professionalism sets in. When you pay people to do certain tasks of ministry, the church can start to think that no one else can do it, or not nearly as well. In a smaller church, though, the need to equip one another for ministry is necessary. If the regular preacher is gone, someone has to fill in. Sharing the gospel is something everyone has to do. Taking care of the building, or putting together the visuals for worship, or visiting the sick — someone has to do all of that. Equipping becomes not as much a nice idea as something that’s necessary for survival. 

     Churches can grow by multiplication. A few churches do this as a matter of course. Most don’t. With the emphasis on numerical growth, it may seem counterintuitive to imagine growth by shrinking. Try to imagine it, though, because if you’re a small church that isn’t growing where you are, then one of the things you might consider is planting a new church in another neighborhood. In fact, some statistics indicate that two smaller churches will grow numerically more rapidly than one larger one. At the very least, starting a new church in a nearby neighborhood — or on the other side of the world — increases the number of communities potentially impacted by your church.

     Churches can grow by sending. If you’re a church in an urban area, you especially know the frustration of having people move into the area, attend your church for a few years, and then leave with a job change or corporate move or whatever. I get that frustration. We need to consider, though, the influence those people will have for Christ in the new places where they live. When someone moves into your church, and you know the odds are good they’ll be there for 3 or 4 or 5 years at most, invest in them like they’re going to be there for life. Love them, help them find their place in the body of Christ, help them develop their gifts and strengthen their faith and grow to maturity in Christ. When they land somewhere else, then, they'll be ready to bless the church they become a part of and the community in which they live. 

     Churches can grow in love. Love is the hallmark of the presence of God’s kingdom. If a church loves each other, and is willing to have that love stretched to include those outside its walls, it will become apparent that it is a community of Christ. If love isn’t evident, it doesn’t matter what they do. But love always takes discipline and effort. It requires us to be involved in each others’ lives, to have some knowledge of each other beyond our Sunday gatherings. In some ways, a small church is best suited to be a laboratory for the love of Christ. 

     In short, your church can grow. If it isn’t numerically right now, then consider some other ways to grow.

     I think the Holy Spirit will be just fine with that.

The Reports of the Church's Death Are Greatly Exaggerated -- Part 6

How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news,

who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation,

who say to Zion,“Your God reigns!”

                                 -Isaiah 52:7 (NIV) 

So, if the ubiquity of information in our world means that it’s less significant than ever for making important decisions, the church has an obvious problem. Whatever else it may be, the gospel is information. 

     The word itself denotes “good news,” and we know what news is. And our struggles with news as a culture actually makes my point. How do we know what’s real news and what’s fake news? And from what perspective is the news reported? When the church proclaims the gospel, we can expect the same questions: “How do I know this ‘good news’ is real?” “For whom is it good?” 

     The gospel, however, isn’t just good news. It’s surprising news. Startling news. And perhaps part of our problem in communicating it is that we aren’t surprised by it anymore. We’ve domesticated it. We think it’s information that we’re supposed to master, and when we’ve mastered it we can communicate it to others. Like a proof in geometry, or a sequence of events in history. 

     It’s more a stunning, out-of-left-field announcement. It’s the Miracle on Ice. It’s the PEACE! headline in The New York Daily News on August 15, 1945. It’s the breaching of the Berlin Wall. We don’t master it; it masters us. We don’t make the gospel good news any more than the media created good news out of any of those stories. It just comes crashing into the world and redraws our maps. 

     That’s what I mean when I say the gospel is surprising and startling. Look at Isaiah’s “good news,” for example. The next chapter begins, “Who has believed our message?” Well, who could? Israel is suffering under foreign rule, so it doesn’t look much like her God is reigning. But that suffering is actually the means of God’s action. Through his servant’s punishment, Israel is given peace. The suffering of Israel’s righteous ones is brought to its full measure. The unrighteous are given the chance to see how their actions have added to the servant’s wounds. In all of this, somehow God is returning to Zion to comfort his people and redeem his city. No, it isn’t easy to believe. But, if you can believe it, it changes everything.  

    This was the gospel of Jesus: “The Kingdom of God has come near.” Again, tough to believe. It didn’t jibe with the facts on the ground, and still doesn’t. But that’s why Jesus said “repent and believe the good news.” It isn't the kind of news that claims to add something to an already pretty good life. If believed, it changes the way we see the world, ourselves, others, God….everything.

     Here’s where, perhaps, the church has made a misstep. We’ve made the gospel into a nice additive to our lives, a way to have our cake and eat it too. We’ve boiled it down into something that can coexist happily with our jobs and marriages and stations in the world, as though God is acting merely to redeem our own choices and save us from our own bad decisions. The problem with this gospel is that it doesn’t reorient anyone. It doesn’t call into question the assumptions of the world around us. It doesn’t rebel against the status quo, and it certainly doesn’t require real repentance to believe. It doesn’t ask us to see the world differently, to buy into a new vision of reality where God’s reign has commenced, his kingdom has come near, and everything is new.

     Our salvation is not just protection from the consequences of our sins. It’s being startled and shocked into seeing all the ways in which we’re complicit with the powers of the world, and not the kingdom of God. This is the repentance needed to believe the good news. We must see our world, and ourselves in relation to it, more like God sees these things, and this requires that we be startled out of our comfort with the way things are.

     But we tend to arrange things so that we’re not surprised. Take, for example, the American church’s association with a particular brand of right-wing politics that wants to preserve the majority culture’s stranglehold on the privileges and wealth of our society. Or its association in other circles with a particular brand of left-wing politics. In both cases, the church suffers blind spots in which we can’t see how our political philosophy of choice takes the place of God’s work of salvation in the world. We’re not shocked, we’re not startled, in fact we’re quite comfortable and at peace with the main assumptions of the world around us. And so there’s no repentance and thus no believing in world seen through God’s eyes.     

     Or we see poverty, for example, as a plight endured by those who haven’t been able to secure their own lives. And, if we’re being honest, we might even entertain at least a sneaking suspicion that there are moral causes: they aren’t smart enough or good enough or hard-working enough. And if someone showed up in our churches to say “blessed are the poor,” we’d be puzzled. And that would turn to outrage if this person said to us, “you have your reward, and it has nothing at all to do with God’s kingdom.” 

     And that, of course, was Jesus’ gospel.

     And that suggests something of a starting point. 

     If the gospel we proclaim in our churches is more often than not the message that Jesus has made it possible for good folks to go to heaven when they die, then perhaps we need to be startled. And, if our world thinks that the church has nothing to offer and has in fact sold itself to political expedience (and they do, in increasing numbers), then they need to be startled too.

     And the way we do this is by preaching the gospel. 

     Not some “good news” that affirms that things aren’t so bad, and all we need is a little help to make ourselves all we can be. Not just “good news” to the wealthy, but to the poor. Not to the religious insiders, but to the perpetual outsiders. Not to those who have it all together, but to those for whom it’s all falling apart. The gospel of Jesus is the startling, surprising news that the kingdom of God is for folks just like that. 

     To preach that convincingly, though, we have to make sure that folks like that are the centerpieces of our churches. For most churches, though, they don’t feature on our websites. They aren’t represented among the leaders. They don’t figure in our planning, they aren’t asked to teach or to lead ministries, and their stories don’t get told. They sit, week after week (if they will), and hear talk of God’s blessings from people who look on the outside like paragons of success and wonder “What’s wrong with me?” and “Do I have a place here among these people?” They suffer silently, hoping that maybe one day they can get it together enough that God’s blessings will be for them too.

     And the gospel shocks us all: God’s blessings are for them, right now. 

     And they don’t know it, because the rest of us don’t make it concrete and real in their lives.

     “Blessed are the poor,” said Jesus. “And blessed are those who weep, and who are hungry, and who are hated and excluded and insulted. Yours is the kingdom of God.”

     And Isaiah says, “blessed are the feet of those who run to them, bringing that good news.”

     May our feet be blessed.

The Reports of the Church's Death Are Greatly Exaggerated -- Part 5

    Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.

     When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”

                                 -Acts 2:36-37 (NIV) 

When I was probably 14 or 15, I was in a church van on the way to some youth event or the other. We went to pass another van, and when we did we noticed that they were from another Church of Christ. We knew this because the name of the church was painted on the side of their van. Our church name, however, was not on the side of ours. We waved, but there was no way for them to know who we were or why we were waving. 

     That is until someone had a brilliant idea. They wrote a Bible verse on a piece of paper and held it up to the window. Just a reference, that’s all. And if you’re from Churches of Christ, you know exactly which verse. 

     For the rest of you, it was Acts 2:38 — “Repent and be baptized,  every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.  And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

     That’s our verse because it answers the question “what shall we do” with the very thing that we’ve always kind of felt made us different from other groups. While other Christian groups practiced baptism without repentance (infant baptism), or have converts say the sinner’s prayer without baptism, we’ve always connected repentance, baptism, the name of Christ, the forgiveness of sins, salvation, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. 

     In fact, when I was growing up every preacher among us had a go-to sermon based on “What Shall We Do?” or “What Must I Do to Be Saved?” (from Acts 16:30). The answer to that question, of course, tended to focus on the supplying of information that the preacher assumed his audience didn’t know — that they needed to be baptized to be certain of their salvation. It was assumed that all a person needed to come to Christ in baptism was this knowledge that we possessed. 

     It worked for us, too, at least to some degree. But that approach was based on a worldview that exalted knowledge, logic, and rational argument. In the early and mid-nineteenth century, when Churches of Christ became a recognizable group, this was the dominant understanding of how the world worked. The Bible was largely seen as a collection of propositions, syllogisms, and arguments that would convince the minds of rational people. Those rational people would all agree, Christian unity would be restored, a golden age would ensue, and Christ just might come again. 

     All people needed was the right information.

     We don’t live in that world anymore. As I’ve said previously, we live in a changing world. We’ve looked at two important factors in our world that push against the kingdom of God and make it difficult for the church to be heard: distrust of biblical authority and a widespread failure of institutional loyalty. But perhaps even bigger than either of those is this: information is easily available to anyone. Information has been made available to the masses in a way unprecedented in human history. That’s a good thing. But it also means that the church is no longer the sole or even the most respected authority on spiritual matters. The religious and spiritual wisdom of the ages is now accessible to literally everyone on earth.

     This is problematic if the church still thinks that the main problem human beings are dealing with is a lack of knowledge about Scripture. If we think we can simply supply the knowledge our audiences lack and they will respond with changed lives, we may be in for some disappointment.

     Two things happen when knowledge is readily available to anyone. On the one hand, folks know and understand theological dispute now. They can research questions sitting in their pajamas that used to be the province of seminary students and academics. 

     The other thing that happens is that knowledge tends to be devalued. The more folks have it, the less it matters. When a firehose is hitting you in the face, the last thing you need is a glass of water. And yet, in many cases, the church is offering waterlogged people just another drink. 

     It might be helpful to point out that Peter’s response in Acts 2 is a heart response. It isn’t that his hearers were just one piece of information away from knowing everything they needed to know. It was that they had been cut to the heart. They had, in other words, been convicted by the news that they were complicit in the rejection of the One through whom God was doing his work of saving the world. It wasn’t new information that drove them to Jesus. They weren’t rationally convinced that baptism was a good idea. They came to the water because their hearts were laid open and they were left shaking, convinced of their own sin and helplessness and that somehow this risen Jesus might offer them hope.

     For many decades the American church existed in an atmosphere of general acceptance in regards to the basic premise of the gospel. The world in which we lived and moved more or less believed in the idea that we needed God to save us, and that in Jesus he has done so. There were differences of opinion as to how that happened, or what it means for us, or what we should do about it. But those were matters of discussion and debate, rational dialogue, the exchange of information between believers who already accepted at heart level the premise that Jesus had died for our sins, that God had raised him, and that our hope was in him.

     But that isn’t the world we live in today. There’s much more diversity of opinion. Many, perhaps most, don’t necessarily believe there’s anything fundamentally wrong with the world that we can’t fix on our own. And more information won’t convince those today who don’t believe. When we come to unbelievers today trying to convince them that they are caught up in the fallen nature of this world and need God to rescue them through Jesus, it’s one more glass of water. And their experience doesn’t necessarily reinforce our message.

     Because experience rules when information is devalued. That’s the only way to tell what’s true from what isn’t: experience. Rightly or wrongly, and often wrongly, people look to their experience to evaluate truth.

     So our proclamation of the gospel today must be experiential and not just informational. We need to tell people not just to sit and listen, but to come and see. Come and see the gospel that we’re preaching lived out in our community. Come see us love each other, accept each other, honor each other above ourselves. Come see us forgive when we’re sinned against, and ask for forgiveness when we’re wrong. Come see us work together to address the problems of our community and our world. Come see us worship joyfully and thankfully. Come see us offer our lives to the One who offered his to us. They need to be welcomed into our lives so that they can experience first-hand the presence of Jesus among us.

     That’s an intimidating responsibility, I know. And yet we’ve always called the church the body of Christ. This just requires that we live that out practically and consistently. 

     This is one way that the church can come back to life: by creating communities in which the gospel can be experienced first-hand. Only then, perhaps, will they come to accept as true the gospel we proclaim.