Christianity is an invitation to maturity in Christ, it’s time for us to grow up.
Christianity is an invitation to maturity in Christ, it’s time for us to grow up.
When I was in second grade, I can remember coming home from school to the same routine
My mom would have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich/warm blanket waiting for me
I would watch my favorite afternoon cartoon, bundled up eating my sammich.
Very happy, vivid memories for me.
That’s sweet, amen? That’s a good mom. I’m grateful for that memory and experience.
Now, I’m 39 years old. I’m married, I have 3 children. I own a house.
I preach here most Sundays, and walk home after.
What would you think if I told you my mother was there waiting for me,PB&J with the edges cut off, big blankie waiting for me, Netflix open to my favorite cartoon?
How would that seem to you?
It would seem off. Same action, but different stage of life.
My mom treats me different as a grown man than she treated me when I was 8.
I hope that’s true for you, too. And if you’re a parent, one of the great challenges you’ll face is learning that as your kids grow, your parenting needs to grow, too.
The fact that my mom doesn’t meet me at the door with a PB&J doesn’t mean she’s a bad mom now, and it doesn’t mean she was a bad mom then.
It simply means we have both matured, and maturity requires new behaviors to meet new challenges.
To make a shift in what we do is a sign of maturity and health.
Look at this verse in Philippians with me
I want to know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead. I want to suffer with him, sharing in his death, 11 so that one way or another I will experience the resurrection from the dead
-Philippians 3:10-11
When you look at the life and ministry of Paul, he holds so much loosely.
Sometimes, he worked a day job. Other times, churches paid him for his work.
Sometimes that mean great joy, sometimes it meant great suffering.
Sometimes it meant preaching in gorgeous places to a rapt audience
Sometimes it meant writing letters chained in prison.
One way or another, I will experience the resurrection from the dead.
That was his singular goal, the mission of his life: know and be known by Jesus.
Listen to how he described his ministry to another church:
[Jesus] is the one we proclaim, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone fully mature in Christ.
-Colossians 1:28
To know Jesus, he told others about Jesus. Did you catch the M word there? Mature.
Like a good parent, he helped people grow over time.
If you want to know Jesus, and can recognize that life is a journey towards maturity, we can hold so many things more loosely.
Over the next few weeks, we’re going to talk about ways we are maturing as a church and ways we need to mature as a church.
We want to keep Jesus as our first love, not any system or program or structure.
We recognize that who we are today is not who we were 10 years ago…and if you’ve been at Sojourn for awhile it’s not who we were 20 years ago, either.
Let me get a little practical.
Sojourn began as a Bible study with mostly teenagers more than 20 years ago in the highlands of Louisville.
These kids felt out of place at their parents’ church, or they didn’t go to church at all.
We talked about the over churched…people who had been “should-ed” to death
And the under churched…people who were not welcomed at churches around here
Which meant that, in those early days, we basically had people with tattoos and attitudes
Young, angsty, and broke…but hungry. Captivated by this person Jesus.
Many of those people are still here, still with their tattoos and attitudes…
But also 20 years of life. They have jobs and kids. That Bible study has grown into 6 locations stretching from here to S. Lou all the way into Oldham county.
As a church, we have to recognize who we are today is not who were in 2000.
One way I think we all experience this is how much we expect from pastors
I was speaking with a dear friend recently. Mid 70s, was a pastor for 40 years.
Did you have to be an expert in finances, organizational management, parenting, politics, epedemiology, sociology, history…?
“No,” he said to me. “I helped people understand the Bible and see God in their life.”
How did we get here? For our church…most of us came as kids.
Most of us came without spiritual fathers and mothers.
Most of us came from situations where we were never given clear instructions no how to manage all of this
And, on the flip side, we had a lot of pastors that really wanted to be seen, wanted to be experts in everything.
Didn’t understand with much clarity the calling of a pastor
Many of us got mired in culture wars, looking to politics or power…we wanted bigness, we mistook the movement of God with splashy, showy events.
This swirled and combined to create a culture where pastors think far too much of themselves and congregations expect far too much of their pastors.
This is true of us. Each of our pastors have genuine expertise in certain fields.
Others do not. There are three things we are each uniquely equipped to do, though:
At the heart of it, that’s what we do.
The further we get from that, the further we get from what we uniquely do.
Some of the fruit of our need to mature here is revealed in a survey we sent out in the Fall
The survey was questions we asked to see what we value and how we’re doing when it comes to maturing as Christians
We learned that 77% of us almost always gather on Sunday. That’s wonderful.
Our family gathers consistently, we see it as very valuable. It is!
80% give regularly to support the work of our church. Incredible.
We see a real desire to be here, to invest here, commit to being here.
That’s fantastic. We are here on Sundays, and we are by and large bought in.
Those two statistics are pretty unusual for churches, I’m proud of us there.
We also learned that half of our church doesn’t serve in our church in any way
Only 22% of us read the Bible every day, 25% rarely read it at all.
The majority of our families don’t have any kind of devotional time together, praying or reading the Bible.
Yet, 80% of us said it’s very important to do those things regularly…what does this reveal?
We are expecting someone else to do it for us.
Not everyone, but a lot of us. Too many of us have outsourced our Christianity
The pastor will give me my Bible on Sunday and the Kids’ team will disciple my kids
This is all of our faults. It’s on the pastors as much as the congregation.
But we’re looking at this now and saying…it’s time to grow up.
Let’s keep pressing. The primary avenue we’ve had for service, Bible reading, and prayer has been Community Groups.
These were amazing for many people for a long time.
Five years ago, we had around 20 community groups. Today, we have 3.
The groups we have are beautiful. The’re meaningful, good stuff is happening.
But we’ve learned that, for many people, CG has become a burden, not a blessing.
You could teach a bible study, lead a prayer meeting, do service projects in your neighborhood, try to be a counselor…when you were single, had a P/T job, and no kids.
But we’ve grown up. For many, it’s unrealistic to expect parents with young children to do all this during bed time while 30 adults wait in the living room.
No one wants to lead a community group, many who have left their time leading CG exhausted and lonely…so is CG wrong? Absolutely not.
Are we killing CG? Absolutely not…but it’s also not working like it has.
We have to grow up here, and create new avenues to read the Bible together, pray together, and fellowship together.
Historically at Sojourn, we have expected a “leader” to do it for us.
Maybe a pastor. Maybe a CG leader. Maybe a podcast preacher or an author.
We’ve expected too much of our pastors…and this has led us to expect too little of each other.
Listen to me very clearly now: a church is not a brand or a building.
The church is a household, it’s a family, it’s people.
When it comes to all of our strategies and systems, you’ve heard for years
Our best program is our people
Our mission has always been about people, because God’s mission is about people.
In another letter to a church, Paul puts together his core passions of knowing Jesus and helping people mature by giving us the clearest job description of pastors.
He says Jesus gave the church pastors…
to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ
-Ephesians 4:12-13
As we grow up, this church cannot be about any pastor, or group of pastors
This church is us. It is OUR Sojourn!
Which means, together, we have to stop outsourcing our Christianity
This must become our Sojourn in ways it hasn’t before.
When I said, “we expect too little of each other,” I mean we see ourselves too low on the org chart, or we think we have too little to offer.
This is our Sojourn. This must become the work of these people
I’m not saying what’s gone before us wrong, or bad, or was sinful…have any of you long timers stepped back and considered what we’ve witnessed?
THOUSANDS of people baptized, literally hundreds of churches being planted…missionaries being sent out. People knowing Jesus and experiencing his nearness.
So, over the next few weeks, and really throughout this next year, we’re going to be talking about ways we’re growing up.
Some of them will be real practical…we’re bringing all of our administrative services here locally rather than sharing them across churches. Made sense to do that for where we all were developmentally, but now it’s time to grow up.
I’ll be sharing some other things we’re real excited about over the next two weeks…and next week we’ll talk about something that has not changed, our mission.
The mission has not changed. Who we are has not changed.
We, our Sojourn, the people of God, exist to reach people with the gospel of Jesus Christ, build each other up as his church, and send each other to follow him into the world.