A Church for the New Millennium
Ephesians 1:3-14
Tonight I want to address some thoughts to the theme of a church for the new millennium. Some of these things of course will be familiar to us but I just want to kind of pull them together in the context that faces us as we enter into this that many are calling the new millennium. There is so much discussion and I am engaged in it regularly by reading articles, reading books, discussing things with pastors, church leaders, theologians. Tremendous amount of discussion on what it's going to take for the church to reach this generation. The generation itself is incessantly being defined and redefined. Familiar terms - yuppie generation, the generation X and all of those kinds of terms are used to describe something of the cultural attitudes and morays of our society which are moving so very rapidly and churches are scrambling to try to react and find a place of relevancy in the culture under the feat that if they don't, they will not be able to reach that culture.
It was some months ago now, quite a few months ago, that I told you about a book which I read, which has become very popular among church leaders that essentially says the church is going to be out of existence in the next 50 years if it doesn't re-invent itself. By the mid-21st century, the church could literally be out of existence unless it redefines itself in terms of cultural expectations.
And so there seems to be almost a sense of panic among people in the church to scramble around and find a point of contact with the culture or sort of fade away into obsolescence. The church continually trying to redefine itself under the terms that are defined by culture, puts itself in a very difficult position since culture is going in the wrong direction to start with and it's going there very, very rapidly. We have always believed at Grace Community Church that the church is defined not by the culture but by the scripture. That it is God who defines the church not the society around us. And certainly not the prince of the power of the air, who is the source of the culture, morays attitudes and philosophies so even religious. So we are different than other churches.
In fact, I received a great compliment recently from some body who said you know the thing that's remarkable about Grace Community Church is that while everything in our society seems to be changing rapidly over the years, you haven't changed at all. In fact, he said to me you are doing the same things you used to be doing in about the same way you used to be doing them. And I said this is true. And of course, the question comes up aren't you concerned about being relevant? Well I'm only concerned really about being obedient to scripture and leaving the consequences to the Lord. So you know we've never been caught up in this scramble to try to adjust to the culture. And our church has grown and that's kind of turned us into something of a curiosity.
Because we don't grow in the normal way that churches say you should grow. We used to have the people from Fuller Seminary come here with the Church Growth classes and because our church was the fastest growing church and the largest church in Los Angeles, they of necessity would bring students here to show them a rapidly growing church and then they stopped doing that because they said we confused the students because we had no regard. We don't have any information about how churches grow and we grew anyway. And that was confusing so they felt that selective research that reinforced their point was more useful for them and so they stopped coming here.
But we have grown and we have drawn no small amount of attention. This church has been the subject of magazine articles and thesis. Doctoral dissertations have been written on our church and on my preaching. There have been all kinds of reports about our church seminars, newspaper articles, journals, tapes, books, all undertaken to analyze our church. And our ministry have been examined and analyzed every way possible. Studied, labeled, categorized, copied. We have been blessed. We have been cursed. We have been defended. We have been ignored. We have been endowed. We have been publicized and we've even been sued. So just about a little of everything has come against us and the church itself can be rather simply defined in a lot of ways.
Grace Community Church is a haven, a home, a harbor for those in need. It is a family for the lonely. It is a school for the untaught. It is a fortress of protection for the fearful. It is an open door for those who are shut out. It is a place of love for the unloved. It is a place of peace for those in chaos. It is a place of acceptance for those who are rejected. It is a place of forgiveness for the guilty. Hope for the hopeless. It's a place of a light for those in darkness. It's a place of life for those in death. And when we said all of that we have said something about how we are viewed by people but we really haven't gotten down to the core of what we are.
I think the key to understanding the amazing history of this church is not to analyze it, not to analyze its pastors or analyze its numerical growth in size, analyzing its staff or analyzing its sort of demographics, its location, its programs, etc, etc. The real key to the story of Grace Community Church, I think, is its name. Not Grace, as good a name as that is, that is really not distinctive. There are some ladies named Grace. There is a petroleum company called Grace Petroleum. There's Grace Shipping Company. There is Grace Trucking Company. There is Grace Fertilizer Company. There is Grace Investment Company and there's even some place called Grace that makes lemon cakes. So Grace is a good word but it really is not definitive enough and the word is not community. There are so many community organizations that it's just endless. Community is really sort of a generic term that refers to any coming together of people for absolutely any reason.
So our distinction does not lie in the word grace, although we believe that theologically it is a marvelously distinct word. Our distinction does not lie in the word community although we believe Christian community defines a theological and spiritual reality. The key to understanding our church is to understand the word church. That's what sets us apart. That is the key to our identity. We are not Grace Community Club. We are not Grace Community Recreation Center. We are not Grace Community Self-Help Association. We are not Grace Community Divinity School. We are not Grace Community Convention Center. We are not Grace Community Theater. We are not Grace Community Philosophical and Religious Advancement Society or any of those or any other of those things.
We are Grace Community Church and the very name church immediately defines us. And we are compelled by that name because it is not a human name. We have had the privilege of choosing our name and the people who basically founded Grace Community Church chose well. They chose the word grace and that's a wonderful word but they weren't mandated to choose that word. That was an optional word. There are other places called First Baptist and First Presbyterian and Second Baptist and Last Presbyterian and this and that and our Redeemer Church and Savior Church and Faith Church and Bible Church. You got a lot of options there. And community is not really mandated. It's certainly not a divine mandate. It's a good idea to call us that because it gives us some sense of breadth and identity in our local area.
But what is mandated for us is the word church. That's what we are. We aren't anything else but a church. That is what we are. By definition we are a church. And if you understand that word means then you understand what this church is. That is the key to understanding Grace Community Church. It is the key to our identity. We are not like any other institution in the world. We are absolutely and utterly unique. And when you understand church, then you have a definition of what we are and what are to be in the world.
And it is really an unchanging definition. It is no different for us in the 20th century than it was in the 2nd century AD. It is not different for us than it was in the 10th century. It is no different for us than it was in the 15th century or any other century. We are defined by a divine designation church, not by anything cultural, not by anything contemporary, not by anything that society developed but rather by the word church, which is biblical. Now when you say church to most people, they think of a place. They think of a building. So you need to define it a little more than that. But everything we are committed to, everything we do is basically because we are church and that is distinct.
In English, the word is usually used to refer to a building. In fact in most people's mind, an old building that maintains a sort of outdated kind of institutional Christianity or some other religion. When people today think of church, they think of some building, some old building with old people and out of date antiquated approach to religion. They think perhaps at best some pleasant architecture and some well-intentioned people. They may think of hierarchy. They may think of the Catholic Church or some other church they may have experienced as a child that is hierarchical and they think of some sacramental or sacerdotal functions.
In Korean, in Japanese and in Chinese, the words for church all have the same root. And in those cultures, the word for church speaks of a teaching society. It's suggests the idea of an educational group being lectured in a classroom by a professional religious teacher. And some years ago there was a book written, one chapter was devoted to our church and we were identified as a classroom church by someone who was unfamiliar with our church but nonetheless took the liberty to define us in that way.
And that is consistent with some linguistic words that refer to the church that's something like an education society where people are lectured in a classroom by a professional religious teacher. But that doesn't really get to the issue of what a church really is. It doesn't truly encompass