Why Did Last Sunday Work
1. Our collective experience of God is directly proportional to our experience of one another. The less estranged we are with each other the more that we will experience God. (Ill. Youth choir trips, youth camps – always there was a breaking point in the week. Our inhibitions were decreased and then God moves in.)
There are those who would like to create a more formal environment. I believe that anything that a person creates that further inhibits honesty and substitutes protocol decreases intimacy. There has to be a freedom for people to express themselves with a minimal form.
At the turn of the century, James Burns wrote the book Revivals: The Laws and Leaders. In the opening chapter he discusses "laws" of revival, as well as the "laws" of the absence of revival. "The first tendency," he writes, "Is for the doctrine of the church to lose its power of convicting the conscience, convincing the mind, or moving the heart." He goes on to point out that spiritual decay brings with it a formality of worship in which the "ritual" is so exalted that it crushes the spirit.
John Fawcett was preparing to move. At age 32, he was leaving the small Baptist church in Wainsgate, England, for the prestigious Carter's Lane church in London.
Fawcett had worked hard. Orphaned at 12, he was forced to work fourteen hours a day in a sweat shop. He taught himself to read by candlelight and studied continuously. When he was ordained at age 25, he moved to Wainsgate. For seven years he served the tiny church of 100 members before receiving the invitation in London.
However, Fawcett never moved to London. He couldn't break "the tie that binds." The last possessions were loaded on the moving cart as Fawcett began his good-byes. Tearfully he bade farewell to those he had loved for the past seven years. They returned his tears... and his love. It was too much for the young preacher. London would have to wait. Unloading the cart, he decided to stay in Wainsgate a little longer. Fawcett never moved to London; he never even left Wainsgate. He died there 54 years later.
Fawcett was destined to become one of England's greatest preachers. He wrote hymns, published books and opened a training school for young ministers. His "Essay on Anger" so impressed King George III that he offered Fawcett "any benefit a king could confer." His love for the people and their love for him not only kept him in Wainsgate, but it also prompted the writing of a hymn we sing even today:
Blest be the tie that binds
Our hearts in Christian love;
The fellowship of kindred minds
Is like to that above.
-- Norm Petersen
Strategy #1 – If we want to see God move when we are together in services we must do everything that we can to “connect” with each other apart from these service times. Anything that we can do to get to know one another better will enrich the experience that we have together in service.
2. We have to learn to wait for God. In prayer, we are aware that God is in action and that when the circumstances are ready, when others are in the right place, and when our hearts are prepared, he will call us into the action. Waiting in prayer is a disciplined refusal to act before God acts.
n Eugene Peterson, Leadership, Vol. 8, no. 2.
The trouble with nearly everybody who prays is that he says "Amen" and runs away before God has a chance to reply. Listening to God is far more important than giving him your ideas.
-- Frank C. Laubach in Frank C. Laubach, Teacher of Millions. Christianity Today, Vol. 35, no. 10.
Second only to suffering, waiting may be the greatest teacher and trainer in godliness, maturity, and genuine spirituality most of us ever encounter.
-- Richard Hendrix, Leadership, Vol. 7, no. 3.
God
Grant me to be
silent before you--
that I may hear you;
at rest in you--
that you may work in me;
open to you--
that you may enter;
empty before you--
that you may fill me.
Let me be still
And know you are my God.
Amen.
-- Sir Paul Reeves in a prayer at the WCC Seventh Assembly in Canberra, Australia. Christianity Today, Vol. 35, no. 11.
Eugene Lowry gave this advice to young preachers:
I try to teach my students how to trick themselves into hearing. You have to be out of control. When you're in the driver's seat, it doesn't work. It doesn't matter where I open this thing up, I already have my theology. I just superimpose it. I don't tell the folks I do; I just do it so automatically I don't even notice. So you have to trick yourself to get out of control.
One of the things I tell my students at Saint Paul is sometimes to take a text that you're hoping to use in a sermon, underline all the important parts, and then look at what you did not underline. That's where God may speak. The Spirit may get real active at the point of confusion or at what we don't notice.
If it's a narrative with several characters, find out with whom you're identifying. Then put yourself in somebody else's shoes, and see if the Lord might speak.
Don't open a text or start first working on your notes--"What's the theme? What are the points I can make?" No. Don't start looking for points. Start looking for questions. Look for trouble. In the confusion of trouble is where the Lord may speak a new word. If we don't hear that word, how will anybody else hear it through us?
-- Eugene Lowry, "Listening to the Dark," Preaching Today, Tape No. 125.
I was reading the story of the Exodus – it seems to be one supernatural encounter on top of another and some were miraculous and positive, others were God’s people in an adversarial relationship with Him. The truth is that we’d rather do most anything else in the world but wait. The book of Exodus chronicles 40 years of history. When you think about that, the book becomes a sketchy description with very few details. It’s sort of like a policeman’s job – 95% boredom and 5% sheer terror. There are the mundane routine activities that we need to learn to live and to express our faith in.
Strategy #2 – We need to learn about God’s priority scale. There are times when the church does not need another program. We don’t always need another Bible Study or another potluck, we need to wait to find out where God is moving and then to get there. If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus Christ His son cleanses us from all unrighteousness.
3. We need to learn to accept the move of God as it begins to unfold. I was thinking just this morning, when did God ever do the same thing twice. When did he ever duplicate miracles. Was each blind man healed the same way? When God moves and brings something new to his people, it will be in a new way. The revivalists among us understand this and they take risks to see God become free to move. I talked with Rev. Trafton about some of the stories of the tent revivals that he and Randolph Nicholson held in Doaktown. It was a new way of planting and establishing a church.
Strategy #3 – There will always be some of God’s people who oppose His moving. We cannot allow opposition to cause us to assume that we are on the wrong track. If we have intimacy in our relationship with God and with people and if we have waited as we should then we need to to step forward as God guides regardless of the opposition.