Sabbath, March 24, 2007 Pastor Tom Hughes, M.A.

Seventh-Day Adventist Church

Newark / Zanesville, Ohio

“The Present Future”

(Part Two)

Are you experiencing an abundant life and a missionary lifestyle or are you just going to church? The New Reformation is about freeing God’s people from church institution and decentralizing ministry from the church building to the community. Church members are no longer willing to have some clergyman script their personal ministry journey. The church is to be closer to the world and not aloof from it but not of it. This new movement will distinguish between merely religious church people and Jesus people.

The initial Reformation was about church. What kind of church: rejection of the Catholic Church, starting new churches, Catholic light – where they teach the same things except for one or two minor issues, but they’re basically a Protestant version of the Catholic Church: the Episcopal Church, the Lutheran Church – Martin Luther would turn over in his grave today if he new what the Lutheran Church has become; the way they have made accords with Roman Catholicism and (have) abandoned all the principles that Luther was so encouraged and exasperated about.

The old Reformation was about the church; the New Reformation is about the mission of God.

The printing press spawned the first Reformation and new technology is spawning the second. The Internet, cell phones, laptops, MP3 players, iPods: they have spawned a new information revolution and it’s hard to keep up. The Baby Boomers all have their big, old clunky laptops and the twenty-something’s today have their hand-held with their single screen and they do all their e-mail and everything on their cell phone. They take pictures, and they take movies and they e-mail them back and forth in the palm of their hand. They’re not looking around some big, clunky laptop; and they’re not like Baby Boomers who like nothing better than to sit in front of a stupid screen and watch movies and DVDs all night. You see, the Baby Boomers, they grew up in a tough time where there wasn’t a lot of TV. TV just began when they were young; so, when VCRs and DVDs, and all these modern wonders burst on the scene they were enamored. “Wow! Look at that! Wow! Gone With The Wind in my own living room! Wow! I can stick it in, push a button! I can sit here and watch it!”

But kids today look at that as boring and dull; just sitting around doing nothing! They want to interact.

The new church member no longer will rely on some clergyman for interpreting the scriptures or for information about theology or Christian activity in the world (that) they can get on the Internet. And on their cell phone they can punch a few buttons and pull up the Bible and translate it into almost any language anywhere, anytime. If you go on our webmaster’s, Mike Riebel, website that he does on behalf of me and the church and everyone else, you will find that it can translated into any language! He has language tools on there; they can take my sermons and translate them into Chinese, and off it goes!

Now if you want to witness and say, “You need to meet our pastor,” or “You should have heard our pastor’s sermon.”

And they say, “Oh, I’d like to.”

You don’t have to do that! All you have to say is “www.PastorTomHughes.com.” Just tell ‘em, “Type in: www.PastorTomHughes.com.” [snaps fingers] Bang! A hundred sermons. Right there. Any subject they want – (they can) pull it right up. Or if you’re talking to a biker, you can say “www.BibleBiker.com.” Bang! (If your’re) Talking to a church person: “www.LivingWord.biz.” Pastor Tom’s the “com.” PastorTomHughes.com, BibleBiker.com, and LivingWord is “biz” because living God’s Word is our business; and don’t you forget it either.

So today, these kids can translate the Bible into any language. They don’t need Pastor Tom to tell them what the Greek means. They can look it up for themselves! They don’t need me to tell them what the Hebrew means. They can look it up for themselves. Congregations that understand this will help followers of Jesus live abundant and missionary lives. Those who are simply institutional loyalists trying to make the church successful will lose out when their money runs out in about a generation or so. Eighty-five percent (85%) of the money is coming from people 60 years of age and older. Thirty years from now, 85% of the money will be gone.

Then what? What I’m trying to say to the Newark church is: Are you going to be a people with a vision or are you going to be a hospice care center for dying Christians and when they’re all gone close the doors and go home or are you going to have a vision for the future that is going to make you different than ninety (90%) percent of the churches that are going to disappear?

There are major “earthquakes” in the Christian world. The tectonic plates upon which our Christian culture rests are being ripped apart and shifting in ways that will change the church culture in ways that will never, never, never be the same – and it’s only a generation away. We have to think about these things. God will send a prophet among you to prepare you for this and to open the door so that new and better ways of doing things can begin that will make you not only relevant but necessary in the lives of your people.

“Institutional” church people are more concerned about making the church successful than worshiping Christ. It’s an interesting thing. People today do not wake up on the weekends and think, “Hmmm. Where can I go and find a church (that) I can help make successful?” If people do church at all, they are looking for a platform that they can run their lives on. Institutional success is the furthest thing from their mind. They don’t want to simply be recruited to help get the church work done. And I’ve heard people say, “I am getting so burned out from doing all this church work. And I’m the only one doing it and nobody’s helping me.” They don’t simply want to be recruited just to do church work!

Most churches talk about spiritual gifts and then they use the spiritual gifts to fill the church jobs! These are seen as recruiting tools to get people to do the church’s work. The church culture paradigm is collapsing. The kingdom growth paradigm looks at people as individuals with a mission. They’re called by Jesus to live an abundant live and to be directed by God’s Spirit partnering with Him to build up His kingdom!

People don’t want the church making decisions for them about what their mission in this world is! They don’t want to work for the church. They don’t warm up to the idea of being lay ministers: “Every member a minister” because of the way they see ministers in their roles. They see ministers as simply institutional. Many lay persons see minister’s roles as the complaint department for disgruntled club members who want to be catered to. They see their roles as “missional” and they don’t want to be tied down to just a church that is bickering or arguing or fussing or fighting or spinning their wheels when what they want to do is reach the world for Christ.

Often, the typical church strategy for recruiting and deploying ministry is missionary counterproductive. The idea that God has gifted people in our midst only for church jobs flies in the face of His redemptive mission to the world. We ask people to leave their place of greatest connection and influence – their homes, their businesses, their schools, their communities, and their community organizations and we ask them to come to church and do some church work. For many of these people the church as become increasingly irrelevant to their workday and home lives. Church ministry to them is an activity that they have to add in to their already crowded life and they wonder why God can’t just use them where they are already embedded! Whey can’t God use us in our homes, our workplaces, our schools and communities? Why do we just have to be used in the church and do church work?

Are we calling people out to use their true potential in the world rather than trying to make every member a minister in the institutional sense? We need to call every member to be a missionary and bloom right now, wherever they’re planted. How about your neighbors? How about the people you work with? How about the people in the Rotary Club or the people in the quilting club or the photography club? How about the people who live next door to you on the right and the left, and the three across the street? Might I suggest that when you go next door (that) you leave your Amazing Facts pamphlets in your desk.

There’s nothing wrong with an Amazing Facts pamphlet. Now let me translate this.

Now we don’t see it like that, do we?

Now let me make a suggestion. Leave your Amazing Facts pamphlet at home and call ‘em up and say, (Ex. #1)“Excuse me, Mildred. I noticed your lights were on rather late. Is there a problem?”

(Ex. #2)“Hello, Marie. Here’s a loaf of bread. We baked a loaf and we really enjoy having you as neighbors and we’d like to have you over for dinner next Sunday at two (‘o clock). Here’s loaf of bread. Can you make it? Come on over.”

Two years later, you’re friends, you’ve watched their kids, you’ve babysat their dog while they went on vacation. Now they know you, you know them. You say, “Hey, we’re having a Valentines’ Day Dinner to benefit our Pathfinders. They’re like our church’s Boy Scout Club. Would you like to go?”

Okay, now a year later, after you’ve met them and ministered to their needs and helped them to understand that you care about them as people, then you share your faith with them!

So let’s take the cart and stick it behind the horse! What a great idea! Cheers! Here’s to carts behind horses. May you ride behind them and never walk.

Nothing indicates our institutional paradigm like the word “Church-ianity.” Ahhh! We love church! We love, we worship church! Church-ianity is what it’s all about. Amen?

Life in the church bubble can shrink-wrap your vision down to the size of your church. We have a need for “mission-ology” to shape our vision and our plans.

Let’s look at some glaring examples:

The church worship wars. Now we didn’t have any wars here. I didn’t really take anything away; I just added a few extra things. And at first, some people were a little nervous because they thought I was going to not only go as far as I did but probably a lot further! But when they realized that I was just going to sing a few happy songs and not bring a big drum set in here or something, then they relaxed! I do have one drum that I’d like to play someday but I haven’t worked up to that yet. It’s called a “darbooka” and it was an Israeli drum that they played in Israel. I might have played it here once. And then I have another one called a “djembe,” which is my all-time favorite, and I’ll show you that someday. But it’s played in a very quiet, worshipful way. It’s not in any way rock ‘n roll or anything. But the usual goal of the discussions that people have in church today about music and the worship service is to find something that the club members all like. Is that what our worship service should be about – pleasing the club members or winning souls to Jesus?

Now missionaries understand that being culturally relevant is critical to an evangelism strategy. But often when we try to be culturally relevant, we are beat up for having catered to the world or abandoning our faith. Where does this criticism usually come from? For instance, if I had a Christian rap group like D.C. Talk come in here and invite all the kids from the wrong side of town to come to our church and hear a Christian rap group it might make some of us a little nervous. “What up homeboys and girls? Wuz up?” [singing in rap style: Love is a Seven-Letter Word]

And you would say, “Pastor! You have lost your mind. What are you doing?”

Doesn’t the Bible say the gospel will be preached in every language and tongue? Rap music is a language. Country music is a language. [singing: Jesus Take The Wheel] It’s a language! Now here in beautiful Ohio in the hills of this gorgeous Licking County, Jesus Take The Wheel might appeal a lot more to you than Drop-kick Me, Jesus, Through The Goalposts Of Life! But in your culture here in Ohio, they have rules, they have ways of communicating. And if you don'’ communicate and fit in with their way of looking at things you’re not going to reach them because they don’t speak your language and you have to speak their language. If I got here and you know, [speaking German] “Guten tag… and preach my whole sermon in German would you know what I was talking about?

I think we have to be culturally relevant. We have to speak in their language. We have to put our stuff in The Advocate and we have to have programs that appeal to the community and in our Community Service Center we have to get a room set up where we can be in there while all the people are coming in and maybe singing some songs or talking about things about health or doing blood pressure checks or cooking schools or something so that while the people are coming in they can also observe and see Seventh-day Adventists who are willing to minister to their needs; not just physically, but spiritually as well. You can’t just give them clothing. At some point, you have to make friends with them.

You have to build a bridge, and you have to share the gospel – and you have to come up with a way to do that. Now you have to do it in a way that’s natural and that isn’t phony but it can be done. It can be done just by becoming friends. And over the years and months as you develop relationships with these people you minister – and I’m so very proud of your ministry (on) Tuesday and Thursday there is an awesome ministry going on. If you want to be part of it, go down there and check it out. They could use all the help they can get. But the people that work at that Community Center are awesome. They’re doing a tremendous ministry. And while I’m over doing worship at (the) Zanesville (Church), sometimes I’ll just drop in and they really are helping a lot of people. But we’re not just there just to clothe ‘em, are we? What good is clothing if we don’t tell ‘em about Jesus? At some point we have to make a bridge don’t we? We have to learn their language (and) speak it.

Do you want to be culturally relevant? The fact that you cannot be faithful to the Great Commission without being culturally relevant is often missed by people. We’re not pandering to the culture. When we criticize people who reach out in a relevant way, we are ramming against missionaries just like the Apostle Paul because they don’t fit our clubhouse mentality. And who usually starts saying things like “It’s too worldly. You’re abandoning the faith.” Where does this criticism usually come from: the church crowd! The only people without a mission-ology disdain attempts by people at being culturally relevant because they would rather throw stones and condemn them for not being what they should be than to light a candle and alleviate the darkness!

This shows up dramatically in the worship “wars.” Missionary-minded people know that people must worship God in their own “heart” language. North American church “club members” are quite willing to deny this privilege even to their own kids in order to preserve the club culture. “We’ve never done it that way before!” I call that “the seven last words of a dying church.” The seven last words of a “hospice church” – trying to not rock the boat and gently nurture all the members across the great divide.

Now you do need a chaplain for a hospice church. So maybe you need to call Hospice and have them pastor a church like that. I’m so glad that our church isn’t like that. I’m so glad that our older members are zippier than me! They have more energy than I have and they give me someone to look up to and admire and strive to emulate.

Are we willing to let our kids be kids? The answer in the Newark Church is yes. We put our kids first. We let them minister, and we let them do it in their heart language.

A continuing failure to engage the culture will doom our church into a death spiral as the members of the church culture die off in the next 20 to 30 years.

Part of the problem with the modern church is this head-trip. Everything is intellectual. Everything is scientific. Things had to be proven as fact in an imperical sense. The church bought in to this mentality and adopted many of the same methods. The Bible in print has become the fourth member of the Trinity. The church in print is all that’s relevant. The Bible is the supreme manifestation of the Word of God. Oh, I thought Jesus was the supreme manifestation of the Word of God.

Our preaching reflects the Newtonian world that approaches everything including the Bible as a text to be dissected into shreds of words and even part of words. And we call that exegesis and this approach to spirituality in the modern church has been to adopt the world’s education model. Sabbath School reflects the basic assumption that the path to Christian maturity involves acquisition of Biblical information. We teach our club members to sign off on various doctrinal positions and then we welcome them into the club. Contrast this with the medieval mystics who sought personal intimacy with God. We teach that unless you know the Bible and a lot of it you can’t really serve the Lord.

Remember, in the early church, they did not have a textbook called a Bible. The Bible wasn’t even made until 400 AD. For the first 400 years of this church, there was no Bible! During the Dark Ages, the Bible was chained to the monastery desk. People didn’t engage in “Bibli-olatry” they worshiped the living God – they worshiped a person, a divine being who was in their midst in the church. When I say “Jesus is here in person; personally, Christ Himself is literally here in this Sanctuary,” people look at me as if I’ve lost my mind! It’s not about your head. He said we’ve got to worship Him with all our head, but with all our heart and all our mind and all our soul – all of it – everything! He wants our heart not just our head.

Spirituality was not based on a bibli-olatry where we worship knowledge or even the thing of the Bible itself but we worship God the God it speaks of the result of all this form of modern spirituality is that the North American church and I include all Protestants in this is on a head trip. Our test for church orthodoxy rests typically on doctrinal stances rather than on character or spiritual “connectedness” to God. We’re not worried about whether the person is actually spiritually connected to Jesus whether they have a spiritual power that is evident, oh no. It’s “how much do you know?” It’s not about what you know, it’s about whom you know!

Doctrine is important but Christ is far more important. The Bible is important but Christ is the Living Word. Because the church has become a head-trip, we tend to segment it from the rest of our lives like business, family, and so forth. Because we have clung to this modern paradigm, the church is now more secular in many respects than the world. The post-modern world is far less interested in mere doctrines and theory. They are far more interested in the “connectedness” of the individual to the community. The Internet is a testament to the interconnectedness of everyone and the power of just one person to affect millions (i.e. our brother, Mike, on the Internet has reached out to over a hundred and some countries. My sermons have been translated into dozens of languages and he is literally touching thousands of people by getting our message out into that cyber sphere. And remember the “I Love You” virus that shut down millions of computers all around the world and cost billions of dollars? One bozo sat in his little office and made that virus and shot it out to the world and caused all that chaos. It’s a different world).

In the modern universe it can be broken down and examined, piece by piece, and examined intellectually. That’s the way Martin Luther and Isaac Newton looked at the universe – something you could intellectually analyze and break down. But in our day today the quantum universe is not about explaining a thing it’s about the whole. The universe of relationships, quarks that exist in relationship and not as individual particles. The post-modern man is more interested in how thins integrate. Room for God is growing in the post-modern world.

The number of scientists who believe in Creationism is on the rise. The Hard Rock Café’s motto is “Love all and serve all.” How do you like that? They believe everything is purposely connected. The “new church” will be an interactive church. Young people want interactivity. If you’re not willing to let them take part in your church service, if you’re not willing to let them interact, they’re not going to be interested. Young and old alike are involved in doing things that serve the community and will demand that the church be culturally relevant and not just some fortress to protect them from a world that the church does not understand, does not want to interact with, just condemns.

Traditionalists that don’t get this will find themselves presiding over fewer and fewer people who are just like themselves. And in a strange psychological twist, this will further confirm their views that they are part of the last faithful remnant. The smaller their numbers, the more traditional elitists will tell themselves (that) it just proves them right. People aren’t willing to make the sacrifices necessary to separate from the world and rise to their elite level of Christianity.

The fortress mentality is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more culturally irrelevant they become the more they pat themselves on the back and tell themselves that they are superior in their dedication and are part of the chosen few. In reality they are judgmental elitists with more in common with the Pharisees of old than the religion of Jesus Christ who came not into the world to condemn the world but that the world through Him might be served first and saved at last.

Next time we’ll discuss the role of the church and the role it will play in the last days. And we’ll talk about how to get beyond the religious club mentality where God is conspicuously absent and instead begin a genuine Christian missionary movement right in our own town that will arrest the attention of the community and draw them into the religion of Jesus Christ.

I leave you with this directive for missionary work by your own esteemed prophetess.

Christ's method alone will give true success in reaching the people. The Saviour mingled with men as one who desired their good. He showed His sympathy for them, ministered to their needs, and won their confidence. Then He bade them, "Follow Me.” {Gospel Workers 363.2}

There’s your:

There’s your Bible study ministry.

There’s your counseling ministry.

Are you mingling with men? Are you mingling with your neighbors, the people at work, the people in your community? Are you part of the community you live in? Are you reaching out? Are you serving your neighbors, your friends, the people at work or are you just building this little Adventist world that gets more and more small, and more and more isolated every day? Are you a missionary or a club member?

We’ve got to ask ourselves: What is the purpose of our church – to delight the club members or to reach the world for Christ? You can do both! We’ve got the best church and the most fantastic loving church members I’ve ever known! And I’m braggin’ but I’m allowed to. We are going to rock this county for Jesus and we are not going to stop until they hear the message God has given us to preach today. And I can see the Lord getting everything in place. He’s preparing. There are billboards coming, radio programs coming, unbelievable outreach ministries coming – and we can see it all by faith. God is preparing the way.

Do you think He’s getting this church ready and renovating this church so quickly and in such a miraculous way just for us so (that) we can make our clubhouse more comfortable? Oh, no! We’re getting ready to move on this community in a way that they’ve never had happen before, and you’re a part of it! Let’s hurry up! Get ready to go. And when we’re ready, God will unleash His message upon this community. And He will bring dozens of people here. Just like the Givens (family), you’ll see many, many more who will walk in as well.

Hymn of Dedication: “Blest Be The Tie That Binds”

Are you really bound to your brothers and sisters in this church? Do you really love everyone and are you really connected? Is there really a tie that binds you? Well then, act like it as you leave today!

Congregational Response: “May God Be With You”

Transcription: Wendy J. Riebel

This sermon is also available on cassette tape.

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Zanesville Church