St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church
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Being a Disciple Making Congregation Acts 2:1-21 May 15, 2005 (Pentecost Sunday)
1. Today is Pentecost Sunday. Our Easter celebration ended last Sunday. We put away the white Easter paraments, and we finished our Easter focus on effective discipleship. I want to take this public opportunity to thank Rodgers for arranging the six marks of an effective disciple into a hexagon-turned-circle. What a grand way to create for us an image to carry with us into the future. The six marks simply will not form any other shape! Certainly not a pyramid, because there is not a hierarchical order, with one being most important and another being least. Having a heart for Jesus alone, a mind transformed by God’s Word, arms for love, knees for prayer, voices for speaking, and spirits to serve and manage are equally important. Brilliant! I even made this replica of his idea for us to see. But now that we have it, what can we do with it? I’ll answer that question in a minute. 2. We have been guided all through these past six weeks of Easter by Glenn McDonald’s book, The Disciple Making Church. He ends it with a chapter he calls The Habits of a Disciple-Making Church. He identifies seven distinct habits, but it seems to me those seven can be boiled down into two: stay focused on the goal and be disciplined about moving toward it. Stay focused; be disciplined. Isn’t that true of everything we do? We can have the best goal in the world, we can want to play a keyboard like Kathy, or bring the best out of a choir like Dan, but if we don’t stay focused and disciplined, it’s not gonna happen! Jesus had a goal for his disciples, the goal of making the circle bigger, making disciples of all people, baptizing them and teaching them to do everything he had taught them. It would have been very nice if Jesus had gathered his disciples together and presented them with a book entitled something like Making Disciples in 12 Easy Steps. But he didn’t. All he said was "Go and make disciples of everyone, baptizing them and teaching them what I taught you." And they did it! We are heirs of that effort. If it had not been for the work of those first disciples, God would have had to find another way to make the Church. We owe our very faith to those first "effective" disciples. 3. It was the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on that Pentecost Day that gave those first disciples the energy they needed to move ahead. They had come out of Jesus’ crucifixion experience shaken to the core. For six weeks they must have done nothing. Luke tells us they met to replace Judas, but there is no other record. They had no sense of direction, no real idea of what should happen next. Then the Day of Pentecost came! Remember, at this point they were still Jews, doing what every good Jew does, coming together fifty days after Passover to celebrate the early harvest. Although they had done it all their lives, it had never been more than, say, our Thanksgiving Day. A nice family get-together. Nothing more, nothing less. But this Pentecost would be different, so different that the Church would begin to mark this day as its "birth day." 4. The folks in the crowd that day seem to have been divided into two groups – those who sensed something significant happened, but didn’t know quite what to make of it, and those who didn’t have the sense to realize something significant happened, so they put it down to too much wine. I don’t know if they ever did catch on, but I do know that many others did. The Book of Acts goes on to tell how effective those spirit-filled disciples came to be. 5. That was them, then; this is us, now. How effective will we be as disciples? That’s a very good question, and brings us "full circle" back to our hexagon-turned-circle. And it also brings us to the answer of the question I asked, "Now that we have it, what will we do with it?" There’s an old child’s game called "hoop rolling." Have any of you every played it? Kids would create a hoop out of something, whatever they had, stand it up on its side, and roll it along the ground with a stick. The challenge is to keep it going. It takes focus – you cannot take your eye off of that hoop for even a second. It takes focus, and it takes discipline – practice every day of the week. A hoop-roller can watch the hoop constantly, and practice every afternoon for two hours, but if the hoop gets bent, it must be straightened. The same thing is true of us in our journey to become effective disciples ourselves, and make disciples of the people we bring to join us. We must stay focused through prayer, constantly asking if what we are doing is what God wants us to do, and we must remain disciplined, challenging ourselves to work on these marks so we can move forward easily. As we enter the next 50 years of our congregational life, my prayer is that we can pick a section to work on, maybe one each year, until we really do become effective disciples. The Grace of God will keep us centered, and the life-giving, energy-producing Spirit of God will keep us moving ahead. Thanks be to God! |
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