New Hope: Bring Them In or Send Them Out?

Matthew 2:1-12

• One of the funnest things people do around Christmas time, in addition to going to parties and shopping, etc., is take a little time off to do some touristy kinds of things. In this part of the country many people love to travel to Chicago to see the windows on State Street.
• People love going to Chicago’s Christkindl Market at Daley Plaza and sampling all the German food. And Chicago is not alone. Nothing beats New York in December, with the tree and the skating rink at Rockefeller Center.
• But imagine what it would be like for you if you were tasked with the responsibility of bringing in tourists to a place like Belgium. Belgium is a way popular place for tourists, especially at Christmas time. Sure, the lights are beautiful in East Peoria, but think of what Christmas would be like if your town looked like Brussels does for Christmas.
• If you think the Christmas Market at the Lindenhof is nice, imagine what it would be like to go to the one in Belgium. Tourism directly contributed 9.4 billion Euros to Belgium’s economy last year, over two percent of its total Gross Domestic Product. These pictures give you an idea of why.
• But these days tourism ain’t so great in Belgium. Some of the attackers who shot up Paris last month were from Belgium. And there has been a credible threat of another attack in Belgium. The place has been on lockdown ever since.
• All of this pleasantry just in time for Christmas. The folks in charge of bringing in tourists have a complete disaster on their hands. How do you convince people to come and spend their money in Brussels if they’re worried about an attack by ISIS?
• One thing the tourism board noticed was that when the police asked the Belgian people to stop posting about what they were doing on social media (as a way of protecting people from an attack), people responded by posting pictures of their cats instead.
• So the tourism board picked up on that idea and made a short video designed to get people talking about visiting Belgium again for Christmas. They decided to feature all of the cool places you can visit in Belgium, but instead of just showing you the scenery, they have all these Belgian cats dancing around.
• As a cat lover, I have to say that the cats were pretty cute. But I’m not quite sure they’re enough to bring tourists back to Belgium for Christmas. As beautiful as that place looks, I think they’re going to have a hard time convincing people to come back.
• It’s interesting how similar that situation is to the situation many churches find themselves in, even during a “churchy” season like Advent. So many churches are faced with the problem of not being able to bring people in.
• I’d like to be able to say that at least churches don’t have terrorist attacks like Paris did. But after the attack in South Carolina this year, not even churches can claim to be immune from violence.
• But that’s not really why churches find it so hard to bring in new people after decades of decline. I was talking this week to someone who used to attend here fifty years ago before moving out of town. She was lamenting the fact that her kids and grandkids don’t attend church.
• She wanted me to explain to her why not even she could “bring them in”. It was clear to me that it was going to take a lot more than a cat video to get her family to start attending church again.
• I want to make the case this morning that our problem isn’t so much that we can’t bring people in. I think our problem is that we haven’t done a good job of sending people out. I’ll explain what I mean by that in a moment.
• The passage we looked at today is an excellent example of what God can do in the world when people are sent out into God’s service. This passage is actually set just after the time when Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
• Mary and Joseph are living in a home in Bethlehem, having been told that the child they brought into the world was God’s son, and that he would be the savior of the world. I’m sure they were thinking to themselves, “You know, for being the savior of the world, this kid’s diapers don’t smell any better than the next kid’s diapers.”
• But they were about to get confirmation of what the angels had told them about little Jesus. The passage says that a group of men called Magi came to the capital city of Jerusalem, not far from Bethlehem, to visit King Herod.
• Magi were astrologers who watched the stars in an attempt to understand what the gods were about to do in the world. At that time people believed that the stars were controlled by the gods, and that the movement of stars gave people insight into what was going on between different gods.
• In the Old Testament God commands the people of Israel not to follow the stars in an attempt to know what God was doing. In Deuteronomy 4:19 God commands the people: “And when you look up to the sky and see the sun, the moon and the stars—all the heavenly array—do not be enticed into bowing down to them and worshiping things the LORD your God has apportioned to all the nations under heaven.”
• Studying the stars was associated with other religions, which the people of Israel were not allowed to practice. But that commandment was given over a thousand years before Jesus’ birth. And by the time Jesus was born most Jewish people had come to believe that they could get some idea of what God was doing by watching the stars.
• In the centuries leading up to Jesus’ birth Jewish authors wrote a number of books explaining how to understand what God was doing by watching the stars. In fact, we know that even the curtain in the temple in Jerusalem had the symbols of the Zodiac.
• So it isn’t surprising that when a group of Magi come to Jerusalem to clarify what they were seeing in the stars, they received a warm reception, even from the King. But Herod’s welcome of the Magi had a sinister double motive.
• They told him that they saw something in the stars which convinced them that a royal baby had been born in Judah. This shouldn’t be all that surprising. Most people figured that if God was going to send the people of Judah a savior, that savior’s birth would have to be accompanied by some kind of astrological event. They couldn’t conceive of God doing such a thing without some kind of display in the stars.
• The problem is that this news comes as a complete surprise to Herod. He has no idea that any new heir to his throne has been born. If you know anything about Herod, you know he’s extremely paranoid about staying in power. He had no problem sending his henchmen out to kill anyone who tried to overthrow him.
• So when he gets news that a possible rival to his throne has been born, he goes into panic mode. And since everyone knew how paranoid he was, the entire town went into a panic. Herod needed to know where this child was so he could kill him.
• He goes to his religious advisors and asks them where the Bible says the Messiah is to be born. They find an obscure passage in Micah which talks about a ruler of Israel coming out of the city of Bethlehem.
• He called the Magi together and said, “The royal baby has been born in Bethlehem. God find him and let me know which house he’s in so that I can honor him too.” Now ask yourself, do you see anything wrong with this picture?
• If you’re one of the Magi, aren’t you wondering why it is that Herod doesn’t know where his heir is? If anyone knew, it should be Herod. And yet he wants them to come back and tell him where the child is. Something doesn’t sound right.
• So Herod sends them to Bethlehem. They are led by the same star which guided them to Jerusalem in the first place. They find Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus at their home. You can just imagine how bizarre it must have been for Mary and Joseph to be visited by these Magi. But their visit confirmed what God had told them about their baby: that he was going to be the savior of the world.
• That was really the point of their visit to Bethlehem: to reaffirm for Mary and Joseph that God was indeed working through this situation to transform the world and bridge the gap of sin between God and humanity.
• What I want to point out is the way in which Herod deals with these Magi. Because I think there’s a lesson for us as a church. when they show up at the palace, Herod realizes that these men have some real gifts and some value to him. They can make him a better king by giving him special insight into what God is doing in the world. Leaders would have given their right arm for someone who could advise them about God’s work in the world.
• So when they come, he has a couple of choices. One, he can ask them to stay as part of his court. He can pay them to live in Jerusalem and advise him and, in some ways, give him more control so that he can stay in power.
• Or on the other hand, Herod can send them out, and in some ways, use them to help him hunt Jesus down. Now Herod was a brutal, selfish, power hungry king. But he didn’t stay in power for 40 years because he was stupid.
• He realized that there was more value in sending these Magi out to find Jesus than there was in bringing them into his administration. And that’s the point I want to focus on this morning.
• I think many churches have been lured or scared into thinking that the way to reverse the decline in attendance that so many churches have suffered is to figure out what program they need to use in order to bring new people in.
• In response to this mentality a whole cottage industry has sprung up of church consultants, workshops, products and church growth gimmicks. Guaranteed to “bring them in.”
• This way of thinking is rooted in the idea that everyone should be in church, and it is especially powerful to those of us who remember the days when almost everyone in town was in church.
• It’s also a nostalgia based in a sense of loss: the choir isn’t as big as it used to be; the important people in town don’t belong to church like they used to; in fact they barely acknowledge that we exist anymore; we don’t have the same sense of the Holy Spirit like we used to when the sanctuary was filled on a Sunday morning.
• Financially the need to “bring them in” is rooted in the need to have people here to underwrite our budget. We can’t financially survive with the same people we have known for decades. We’re forced to bring strangers into the church to help us pay the bills.
• Underlying all of this concern is the sense that the decline in attendance at so many churches is evidence of a dismal failure on the part of churches to fulfill the purpose that God has given them. Everyone seems to accept that notion, even if no one ever says it aloud.
• I want to suggest that in today’s world, where institutions like churches face so much distrust, bringing in new people and getting them to become members can no longer be the primary motivation for what we do. It is not what matters most, even if we’re scared that the church will close in a few years.
• What matters most is how those of us who are already here are being equipped and emboldened to bring God’s love to the world. Church growth will be a byproduct, but it cannot be the purpose.
• So let me propose a different model, one which has proven highly successful for churches that have taken it seriously. And I’ll compare it to the model most churches use. In the traditional “bring them in” system, churches seek first to have people become members, usually soon after they start attending.
• As they attend more, they become more informed about the church’s way of doing things, how things work; how the boards work. Who is in charge of what. Once they learn enough about that, the church feels ready to nominate a new member to serve on a board or committee, usually not one of the more important positions.
• As they serve in the new position, that newer person is supervised so that they carry out their responsibilities in the way they have been carried out before. If they are able to do that, they will be given more influential positions in the church, with the intention that they will be kept.
• The purpose of the whole process is to maintain the institution of the church, keep its programs going, and keep the church financially viable. But notice that throughout the process no one is asking what God is calling the new person to do. No one is even asking what the church is called to do. And the consistent result has been decline.
• I want to contrast that model with something called the “send them out” system. People come into a church because something in their life has changed. God has worked in their lives, and they cannot go on with life as they did before.
• As they participate in the life of the church, they come to realize that God has gifted them in special ways. But because the church is focused on ministry, the new attender realizes that their gifts do no one any good unless they are used. So they discover that they are called to serve in the world in a way that uses their gifts.
• When they understand their sense of calling, they also realize that being in ministry is a lot harder than it looks. So the church is very involved in equipping them to be effective in living out God’s call on their lives.
• Finally, the church sends them out, not out of the church, but out to do ministry. That’s a lot of what we will be doing next year as we try to implement the church’s long term ministry plan. We will be sending people out to do the good works which, as Ephesians tells us, “God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.
• The question I want to challenge you all to consider as we ponder this story is whether or not we want to focus on bringing people in or sending them out.
• If you look at the way Jesus did his ministry, it’s clear that while he spent his life trying to bring people into the kingdom of God, he did that by training people and sending them out.
• His focus was not on building up a following for himself. His focus was on training people to follow their calling and sending them out to do it. Can we be that kind of congregation in 2016?
• Bill Hybels – Harvard business school
• Can we help non-believers become missionaries? You bet. I’ve seen it happen. God certainly wants us to bring them in. But we have not been and will not be successful in doing that unless our purpose is to send them back out into ministry.
• If we make it our purpose to send people from our church out into ministry in this community, we will be giving our church the best opportunity to grow numerically and financially. But that isn’t the point. Guaranteeing our church’s survival as an institution isn’t the point.
• The point is to send people out to follow God’s calling on their lives. People are aching to find a church that will help them do that. They’re tired of churches simply trying to entertain them to keep them attending just so that they can have a big congregation. They’re tired of churches that just want to use them to maintain their institution.
• They want to be sent out like these Magi. They want to discover what God is doing in the world. And I believe our congregation is a great place to get them ready for that all important journey.