Do You Love Me? (Compelling Love 3/3)
[Context: This is also a messy draft, but the actual final delivery was much better due to the intervention of the Spirit. It is actually a textual message, not an exposition.]
Message 3: Do you love me?
Passage: John 21:1-19
Big idea: Loving God and loving one another means loving His church in the Vietnamese American context. We need to consider the situation, the strategy, and then to surrender our lives to love Christ and His church.
1) Introduction
Our English Ministry got started back on an ordinary Sunday in 1989. That morning there was a few teens hung out in the church's playground, while the worship service was proceed as usual inside. These teens were a little bit too old to be in Thieu Nhi, but were too young to understand the adult worship in Vietnamese. So I gathered these kids together in a spare room, six of them in all, and started teaching them the Bible with my broken ESL. The whole ministry for the next generation took shape from that Sunday. That generation formed a High School youth group back in 1991. When graduated, they started an English Speaking College group in 1996. And now, out of college, they are transitioning to careers and couple groups. The ministry grew with them and now we are transitioning to become a church within a church.
Along the way, we faced a lot of huddles. First there were the issues of culture. A lot of people in the church are afraid that we are going to forsake the Vietnamese culture. They are afraid that if we use English in our worship service, the kids won’t be able to speak Vietnamese any more. Then the issues of unity: if the church were to “dividing” between Vietnamese speaking and English speaking congregation, how can we worship together as a family?
[transition is missing here on the idea of what love should be like in God's community]
The main idea of this passage is often used to call us to recommit to love God. But today, I am going to speak on a minor angle on this passage. I am going to talk about our situation, the strategy, and the call to surrender using the light shed from this passage.
2) {The Situation}
"I'm going fishing"
"We’ll go with you" (v.3)
Two thousand years ago, Peter decided to go fishing. The other disciples wanted to tag along. We may think this is just an ordinary action, nothing worth noting about. Not until we consider the extraordinary context surrounding this ordinary action. This happened only a few weeks after Jesus resurrection, the most powerful event in history a person could ever experience. And Peter simply wanted to go fishing afterward. I have always wondered "Why?"
What happened is they were living between Easter and Pentecost. They saw their Rabbi resurrected from the dead, that He’s the Almighty God. But they are not so sure that does it have to do with them yet. They don’t have a direction of what to do next, they were simply lost. They don’t know what to do, so they do what they know: go back to fishing.
Isn’t that the same way in many of our lives and our churches today? Living in limbo between Easter and Pentecost? We might have met the risen Christ but haven’t yet experience the full power of the Holy Spirit. Look at our churches! Is this the community described in the pages of Acts [2:41-47]? Do we see a devotion to Scripture; do we see fervent prayers? Do we see the unity and sincerity among the people? Do we see the awesome miraculous wonders and of God’s presence there? And do we see God changes lives, and adding more and more people into our churches?
Instead what we see is very disheartening. Most of our churches are struggling for survival, many were so buried in fire fighting of various emergent issues that they had no time to look ahead and see what direction they are heading for.
The questions Jesus brought up in the midst of this situation is this: “Do you love me?” Three times He was asking Peter, meeting every single denouncements Peter had with a chance for confirmation of his love; a public reinstatement of His leadership and ministry. And for every time Peter said “yes”; Jesus gave him a similar command; a command to love and care for others. So here we see the same principle we learn last night: If we say we love God, we will need to love His people. If we say we love God, we will need to love His church, even your local Vietnamese Alliance Church.
{Transition}
But the three commands Jesus gave was not exactly identical. The first time He said, “Feed my lambs”; the second was “Take care of my sheep”; and the last time “Feed my sheep”. The slight variations each time actually was significant enough, because in them, I believe we can learn the basic strategy to address our current situation, even for our churches.
3) The basic Strategy…
a) We need to invest in the youth: “Feed my lambs”
This is the first priority. Why? Let’s say if I and my son Timmy is about to get hit by a truck and my wife can only have time to push one of us out of harm way. Guess who she’s going to save? Timmy, of course! Later on, if you were interview her, “Why didn’t you save your husband?” Her answer would be, “Hey, he’s big enough, he should be able to take care of himself!”
This is exactly why invest in the youth must be our first priority. Because they cannot fend for themselves. They cannot must rely on somebody else for their survival. It’s the same way for new believers, and the youth too. Especially people in Jr. High and High School age. Do you know that 83% of people who possessing faith in Christ do so before 19 years old?
So, if we don’t invest in the younger generation, we will not survive in the long run. I remember one retreat we had in 1997. That year, pastor Pham Thanh Vu were pulled from our church back to the district headquarter. He was very supportive of our English Speaking Ministry and he’s the main speaker for our English Service every Sunday. With him gone from our church, we were facing serious issues because from time to time there would be this resentment wave toward English Speaking Ministry. “What’s going to happen to our Sunday English Speaking Service now?” We were discussing a survival plan. “If the church disbands the English Speaking Service (for a lack of leader) and wants us to come in and meet with the Vietnamese congregation, what would we do?” Some of us contemplated going to American churches if that were to happen. But then some people start to put their feet down: “Yes, it’s easy for us to leave and go to American churches. (We are in college now, we can drive, we have our own car.) But what about our younger brothers and sisters? Who is going to make sure that they won’t have to go through what we are going through?” From that moment, we realized that our job was to be pioneers, to pave the wave for the next generation. And so we formulated a plan. If the church disbanded English Speaking Service on Sunday, we will redirect the college fellowship ministry to cover for it, and if that is gone, we will morph into home groups Bible Study. But the next generation needs to survive! Fortunately, the leadership of our church were very wise to see the signs of the time. Within five years, they formally made the English Speaking Service into its own Worship Service.
But the keyword here is “invest”. Casually picking stock would not be qualified as investment. That’s only intention. If you love the next generation and volunteer to teach in Children Ministry, that’s only “intention”. How do you turn intention into investment? When you put the best you have into that intention.
In 2000, our High School youth pastor left to go on with his schooling. We scan our district and begin to realize that it’s going to be impossible to get a youth pastor. At the time our whole district has 83 churches, and they have only three youth pastors (one of them is here, pastor Hoai-An). So our college leadership team met together and discussed the situation. We decided to send our best people forward. Chelsea was the College group’s “president” at the time and we sent her to take over the High School group. A year later she came back and take the next best leader we had (An Nguyen) into the High School ministry. We know that the college group will be unstable because of these “brain-drains”, but we know that it’s the best investment we could have.
But before you are jumping on this, let me remind you a few applicable basic rules of investment. 1) You don’t invest out of deficiency! Make sure that you and your group is at the point of sufficiency first. If you are still struggle with loving God and loving your neighbor, you won’t be able to spread that love around. 2) Investment takes time to grow. Before Chelsea went on to lead the High School group, I was investing in her on our College leadership team for 6 years, she went on all the SonLife training, she was with Campus Crusade, she went to Urbana, OGN and countless other stuff. And when she was leading the High Schoolers, it would take times before her investment to the kids started showing too. 3) Investment is risky and requires constant prayer. Even without the best effort went in to pick a stock, the market could go belly up and you loss your investment. Similar here, we can put our best foot forward in invest our lives into the next generation, but it may not get us any where. That’s why we pray, friends! Ultimately, God has to multiply our investment, God is the only factor between a successful investment which yield returns, or just a royal waste!
Let’s quickly move to the 2nd strategy…
b) We need to care for the young adults: “Take care of my sheep”
Here the verb changed from “feed” to “care” because the noun had grown from a “lamb” to a “sheep”. To the kids in the children ministry, their needs are basic scripture knowledge. If you had a chance to teach elementary kids like my son Timmy’s age, you will be amazed of how tenderly they are toward the things of God. They would just absorb everything. Not so when they were older. The older people are the more diverse their needs would be.
And so, if we settled for just providing the baby food for college and career people, we are short changed them. When kids are taught to have faith in God, that’s the feeding of the lambs; when people are practicing that faith, that’s the care the sheep need. When kids are loved, that’s the feeding of the lambs; when people are cultivating a community of love, that’s the care the sheep need. When kids are memorized the Word, that’s the feeding of the lambs; when people are anchoring in the Word to face the real issues of the World, that’s the care the sheep need.
The postmodern world we live in today is very skeptical with promises. We are not easily impressed with people who spill the Bible out every time they say something. We want to be real faith, even in the struggles of real life. So, our lives must be authentic and transparent so that our faith can be observable, include our struggles to let Christ reigns in our lives. But how can we be willing to be vulnerable unless “acceptance is assured and fear is driven out by unconditional love and the proclamation of forgiveness. Not only is the church to believe that there is no condemnation in Christ but the church is to become a ‘no condemnation zone’”.[i]
I still remember my first encounter of authenticity when I was a small group leader with Intervarsity Christians Fellowship. It was my first semester. All the leaders gathered after Spring Break to share about their experience. Many just came back from a Spring Break conference and was excited. But one guy shared that he didn’t go, and had a miserable time at his home town, a popular student-tourist destination for Spring Break. The whole week, he saw the many college students paraded around, and he had a hard time fighting with the urge to go out there to woo girls and party. I was amazed as I listened, “What? These guys are leaders! And they have no shame to be vulnerable like this?”
But then I understood: In order to care for each holistically, we need to get deep beyond the superficial religiosity. That requires authenticity in sharing all of lives with each others as we following God together. And authenticity can only happened when we minister to each other not only just in truth but in grace as well. From then, I want to be as transparent and authentic as I can on my journey of following God.
My most liberating experience of ministry happened one night toward the end of a routine ministry meetings. We were instructed to write some encouragement note to the person next to us. The girl next to me handed me this note: “Bumble, I know your struggle with lust. But don’t be weary! This bible verse is for you, and I am praying for you, too!” Was it a shame for me to not be perfect in my walk? No! I have my battles just like you have your battles and Paul had his. We are slowly gaining ground and making progress, being transformed toward the likeness of Jesus. Even as people see me as a leader, the last thing I want to be, is to set myself apart on a pedestal, because there in that place is where I will have no mutual support from my fellow companion! What’s liberating for me in that moment, is I know that this person - even a girl - accepted me, loved me, and minister to me, not as her leader, but as a fellow recipient of God’s grace!
Perhaps this lack of authentic care in ministry was the reason why we don’t have a lot of people who would be willing to pastor the next generation church. Which would bring us to the next strategy…
c) We need to raise up the shepherd: “Feed my sheep”
I believe that this is the 3rd strategy: we must raise up the shepherd among for our generation, because “feeding the sheep” is not as simple as “feeding the lamb”. A friend show me a picture of him feeding a lamb with a bottle. He was just a tourist, but with a bit of “how to” training, he could do the job well enough. Not so when you have the responsibility to feed the flock, you cannot feed the sheep by cutting the grass and filling them into the trough all the time. A shepherd must lead his flock to find grass and water in a dry and stony land. He must protect his charges from weather and from fiercer creatures, and retrieve any strayed animal.[ii] So when Jesus charged Peter to “Feed my sheep”, He was calling Peter to the most awesome responsibility of overseeing the community of God’s people.
If you were to ask me that same question a few years ago, I would say “No way! You must be kidding me.” I am willing to help in anything I can do. But feeding the flock? Aren’t you supposed to have a special calling for that? I just don’t feel that it was something for me and my family. So I just sat there in the pew, and griped “our church didn’t pay attention enough to the next generation”. I was frustrated, “we are not relevant enough for the young people, and they are leaving the church in drove!” I was just there, doing what I could, but never think far enough down the road. Mean while, God began to drop some hints. Some old saints in the church started telling me that they are praying for me; some pastor I know started challenging me to consider the next step. Then the whole thing came together as I visit one of the camp a few years ago. We had a Korean pastor as the main speaker. And I seek him out, telling him about my story with my church for the last 15 years, about our English Speaking Service. My question to him was, “Since the Korean church was about 10-20 years development ahead of the Vietnamese church, what’s the next thing that will happen to our church?” And through that conversation, I began to realize that while I sat there and griped, our Vietnamese pastors had tried their best, but they simply will not be able to meet the needs of the next generation. We could sit there and wait for the District to try to find someone and to send them to serve your church. Have you ever scouted around at the Annual District Conference to look for some prospect? We could sit there and gripe about the lack of people, or we could step up to the plate and learn how to shepherd our generation.
Is God calling you to shepherd our generation?
What kind of shepherd are we talking about here? I am not talking about just youth pastor. I am talking about the need for full-pledged pastors for the 2nd generation church. They will need to be able to discern God’s voice as they lead the next generation through the landscapes of changes. They will need to be able to preach the Word relevantly into our world. They will need to be able to care for broken people in our church. They will need to be able to train church leaders. And they will need to be able to interface well with the older generation.
There are 3 things that are needed for the development of 2nd generation church: 1) The youth: if you don’t invest in their foundation, they won’t survive; any movement now would be dead in a few years. 2) The college and young adults: if you cannot care for them holistically, they won’t mature and the church won’t get movement forward. 3) The pastors: if you cannot raise them up, no one will be able to coordinate the direction for the movement.
{Transition} But what is the common motivation for all of this three-tiers strategy? Love. Specifically the love for God. Without this love, you will burnt-out and you will even give-up. But with the love for God, you would embrace His challenge to love the way God loves. Here is what God challenge us to love: to surrender and sacrifice everything to love Him, the same way He have sacrifice everything to love us.
How did Christ love us?
and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. Eph.5:2
25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her Eph.5:25
4) The challenge to Surrender
a) First, God challenge us to surrender our Materials possession and/or Careers to love Him.
When Jesus first asked Peter, “Do you love me more than these?” What was the word “these” He talking about? Some people think that “these” meant “Do you love me more than these people love me?” They could be right. But look at a few verses earlier; I think with the 153 shiny fishes just being counted laying there flopping under the sun, “these” could be what Jesus pointing toward as He talked to Peter. Jesus could challenge Peter to surrender his love for fish, or for fishing in order to love Him.
I believe this is an area where Jesus is challenge us today. We could talk much about our love for God, but how many of us is willing to put money where our mouth is? How many of you is tithing your ten percents of your income to God? You might say, “But I don’t make any money! I work part time! And I am still on Financial Aid!” But if you won’t be able to part with your money when they are still little, will you be able to part with them when they are great? Or perhaps by then your materialism had already formed a lifestyle and it control you?
Let me challenge you a bit. At a Vietnamese church in my region, the budget for youth and college groups is about 20 – 25 thousands dollars a year, this is just operational budget, not for staff or personnel. They have less than 100 people in both groups combine. And what’s noteworthy is that this amount was totally self-support! This is not the budget the mother church allocated for them, but it’s their own contribution. And it’s not from every members either. They have less than 20% of their members who faithfully finance their own ministry!
We talked invest into our youth. But where’s the money get the Bible materials for them? We talked about caring for people holistically. But where’s the money to send people to trainings? We talked about raising up pastors. But if they are available, would we be able to hire them? We talked about loving God; but do we love Him enough to financing His operation?
b) Secondly, God challenge us to give up our Control to love Him.
In verse 18, right after saying to Peter “Feed my sheep”, Jesus followed with a cryptic remark of, “When you are young... when you are old... someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not go”. When we were young, we want a revolution, we want changes, and we want to be in charge! But eventually, we will realize, as the old generation before us will have to realize, that ultimately we are not the one who is in control. Things will not turn out to be the way we want it to be. But that’s OK because God is still in control.
If there is any of you here who are movers and shakers in the church, may I respectably submit to you that perhaps God is challenge you to let go of your control and invest, train and empower next generation of leaders. In the Korean American churches, the control issues were so great that 95% of younger Korean American had left their churches. They even had a name for this phenomenon. It called the Silent Exodus.
And to the younger brothers and sisters among you, I plead that we too need to let go of our fight for control. God is the one who is in control. As David submitted himself under God’s authority, he also submitted to the power God had put over Him. By relinquish his control and observe God’s timing, David was forged by God into the best potential God had for him. Later on in his life, David even relinquish his control even to Absalom, and God intervened and backed him up, restored him back to the throne.
c) Even life itself: “Jesus... indicated the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God”
Ultimately, every Christian will die glorifying God. No, I am not talking about you have to die a martyred death in the jungle of Africa somewhere. Every Christian will die glorifying God when they die in the middle of what God had entrusted them to do.
5) Conclusion
END NOTES:
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[i] Thanks to the idea first expressed by Brad Hightower at http://haloscan.com/tb/bradhightower/111594121098499228
[ii]D. R. W. Wood and I. Howard Marshall, New Bible Dictionary, 3rd ed. (Leicester, England; Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 1093.
Message 3: Do you love me?
Passage: John 21:1-19
Big idea: Loving God and loving one another means loving His church in the Vietnamese American context. We need to consider the situation, the strategy, and then to surrender our lives to love Christ and His church.
1) Introduction
Our English Ministry got started back on an ordinary Sunday in 1989. That morning there was a few teens hung out in the church's playground, while the worship service was proceed as usual inside. These teens were a little bit too old to be in Thieu Nhi, but were too young to understand the adult worship in Vietnamese. So I gathered these kids together in a spare room, six of them in all, and started teaching them the Bible with my broken ESL. The whole ministry for the next generation took shape from that Sunday. That generation formed a High School youth group back in 1991. When graduated, they started an English Speaking College group in 1996. And now, out of college, they are transitioning to careers and couple groups. The ministry grew with them and now we are transitioning to become a church within a church.
Along the way, we faced a lot of huddles. First there were the issues of culture. A lot of people in the church are afraid that we are going to forsake the Vietnamese culture. They are afraid that if we use English in our worship service, the kids won’t be able to speak Vietnamese any more. Then the issues of unity: if the church were to “dividing” between Vietnamese speaking and English speaking congregation, how can we worship together as a family?
[transition is missing here on the idea of what love should be like in God's community]
The main idea of this passage is often used to call us to recommit to love God. But today, I am going to speak on a minor angle on this passage. I am going to talk about our situation, the strategy, and the call to surrender using the light shed from this passage.
2) {The Situation}
"I'm going fishing"
"We’ll go with you" (v.3)
Two thousand years ago, Peter decided to go fishing. The other disciples wanted to tag along. We may think this is just an ordinary action, nothing worth noting about. Not until we consider the extraordinary context surrounding this ordinary action. This happened only a few weeks after Jesus resurrection, the most powerful event in history a person could ever experience. And Peter simply wanted to go fishing afterward. I have always wondered "Why?"
What happened is they were living between Easter and Pentecost. They saw their Rabbi resurrected from the dead, that He’s the Almighty God. But they are not so sure that does it have to do with them yet. They don’t have a direction of what to do next, they were simply lost. They don’t know what to do, so they do what they know: go back to fishing.
Isn’t that the same way in many of our lives and our churches today? Living in limbo between Easter and Pentecost? We might have met the risen Christ but haven’t yet experience the full power of the Holy Spirit. Look at our churches! Is this the community described in the pages of Acts [2:41-47]? Do we see a devotion to Scripture; do we see fervent prayers? Do we see the unity and sincerity among the people? Do we see the awesome miraculous wonders and of God’s presence there? And do we see God changes lives, and adding more and more people into our churches?
Instead what we see is very disheartening. Most of our churches are struggling for survival, many were so buried in fire fighting of various emergent issues that they had no time to look ahead and see what direction they are heading for.
The questions Jesus brought up in the midst of this situation is this: “Do you love me?” Three times He was asking Peter, meeting every single denouncements Peter had with a chance for confirmation of his love; a public reinstatement of His leadership and ministry. And for every time Peter said “yes”; Jesus gave him a similar command; a command to love and care for others. So here we see the same principle we learn last night: If we say we love God, we will need to love His people. If we say we love God, we will need to love His church, even your local Vietnamese Alliance Church.
{Transition}
But the three commands Jesus gave was not exactly identical. The first time He said, “Feed my lambs”; the second was “Take care of my sheep”; and the last time “Feed my sheep”. The slight variations each time actually was significant enough, because in them, I believe we can learn the basic strategy to address our current situation, even for our churches.
3) The basic Strategy…
a) We need to invest in the youth: “Feed my lambs”
This is the first priority. Why? Let’s say if I and my son Timmy is about to get hit by a truck and my wife can only have time to push one of us out of harm way. Guess who she’s going to save? Timmy, of course! Later on, if you were interview her, “Why didn’t you save your husband?” Her answer would be, “Hey, he’s big enough, he should be able to take care of himself!”
This is exactly why invest in the youth must be our first priority. Because they cannot fend for themselves. They cannot must rely on somebody else for their survival. It’s the same way for new believers, and the youth too. Especially people in Jr. High and High School age. Do you know that 83% of people who possessing faith in Christ do so before 19 years old?
So, if we don’t invest in the younger generation, we will not survive in the long run. I remember one retreat we had in 1997. That year, pastor Pham Thanh Vu were pulled from our church back to the district headquarter. He was very supportive of our English Speaking Ministry and he’s the main speaker for our English Service every Sunday. With him gone from our church, we were facing serious issues because from time to time there would be this resentment wave toward English Speaking Ministry. “What’s going to happen to our Sunday English Speaking Service now?” We were discussing a survival plan. “If the church disbands the English Speaking Service (for a lack of leader) and wants us to come in and meet with the Vietnamese congregation, what would we do?” Some of us contemplated going to American churches if that were to happen. But then some people start to put their feet down: “Yes, it’s easy for us to leave and go to American churches. (We are in college now, we can drive, we have our own car.) But what about our younger brothers and sisters? Who is going to make sure that they won’t have to go through what we are going through?” From that moment, we realized that our job was to be pioneers, to pave the wave for the next generation. And so we formulated a plan. If the church disbanded English Speaking Service on Sunday, we will redirect the college fellowship ministry to cover for it, and if that is gone, we will morph into home groups Bible Study. But the next generation needs to survive! Fortunately, the leadership of our church were very wise to see the signs of the time. Within five years, they formally made the English Speaking Service into its own Worship Service.
But the keyword here is “invest”. Casually picking stock would not be qualified as investment. That’s only intention. If you love the next generation and volunteer to teach in Children Ministry, that’s only “intention”. How do you turn intention into investment? When you put the best you have into that intention.
In 2000, our High School youth pastor left to go on with his schooling. We scan our district and begin to realize that it’s going to be impossible to get a youth pastor. At the time our whole district has 83 churches, and they have only three youth pastors (one of them is here, pastor Hoai-An). So our college leadership team met together and discussed the situation. We decided to send our best people forward. Chelsea was the College group’s “president” at the time and we sent her to take over the High School group. A year later she came back and take the next best leader we had (An Nguyen) into the High School ministry. We know that the college group will be unstable because of these “brain-drains”, but we know that it’s the best investment we could have.
But before you are jumping on this, let me remind you a few applicable basic rules of investment. 1) You don’t invest out of deficiency! Make sure that you and your group is at the point of sufficiency first. If you are still struggle with loving God and loving your neighbor, you won’t be able to spread that love around. 2) Investment takes time to grow. Before Chelsea went on to lead the High School group, I was investing in her on our College leadership team for 6 years, she went on all the SonLife training, she was with Campus Crusade, she went to Urbana, OGN and countless other stuff. And when she was leading the High Schoolers, it would take times before her investment to the kids started showing too. 3) Investment is risky and requires constant prayer. Even without the best effort went in to pick a stock, the market could go belly up and you loss your investment. Similar here, we can put our best foot forward in invest our lives into the next generation, but it may not get us any where. That’s why we pray, friends! Ultimately, God has to multiply our investment, God is the only factor between a successful investment which yield returns, or just a royal waste!
Let’s quickly move to the 2nd strategy…
b) We need to care for the young adults: “Take care of my sheep”
Here the verb changed from “feed” to “care” because the noun had grown from a “lamb” to a “sheep”. To the kids in the children ministry, their needs are basic scripture knowledge. If you had a chance to teach elementary kids like my son Timmy’s age, you will be amazed of how tenderly they are toward the things of God. They would just absorb everything. Not so when they were older. The older people are the more diverse their needs would be.
And so, if we settled for just providing the baby food for college and career people, we are short changed them. When kids are taught to have faith in God, that’s the feeding of the lambs; when people are practicing that faith, that’s the care the sheep need. When kids are loved, that’s the feeding of the lambs; when people are cultivating a community of love, that’s the care the sheep need. When kids are memorized the Word, that’s the feeding of the lambs; when people are anchoring in the Word to face the real issues of the World, that’s the care the sheep need.
The postmodern world we live in today is very skeptical with promises. We are not easily impressed with people who spill the Bible out every time they say something. We want to be real faith, even in the struggles of real life. So, our lives must be authentic and transparent so that our faith can be observable, include our struggles to let Christ reigns in our lives. But how can we be willing to be vulnerable unless “acceptance is assured and fear is driven out by unconditional love and the proclamation of forgiveness. Not only is the church to believe that there is no condemnation in Christ but the church is to become a ‘no condemnation zone’”.[i]
I still remember my first encounter of authenticity when I was a small group leader with Intervarsity Christians Fellowship. It was my first semester. All the leaders gathered after Spring Break to share about their experience. Many just came back from a Spring Break conference and was excited. But one guy shared that he didn’t go, and had a miserable time at his home town, a popular student-tourist destination for Spring Break. The whole week, he saw the many college students paraded around, and he had a hard time fighting with the urge to go out there to woo girls and party. I was amazed as I listened, “What? These guys are leaders! And they have no shame to be vulnerable like this?”
But then I understood: In order to care for each holistically, we need to get deep beyond the superficial religiosity. That requires authenticity in sharing all of lives with each others as we following God together. And authenticity can only happened when we minister to each other not only just in truth but in grace as well. From then, I want to be as transparent and authentic as I can on my journey of following God.
My most liberating experience of ministry happened one night toward the end of a routine ministry meetings. We were instructed to write some encouragement note to the person next to us. The girl next to me handed me this note: “Bumble, I know your struggle with lust. But don’t be weary! This bible verse is for you, and I am praying for you, too!” Was it a shame for me to not be perfect in my walk? No! I have my battles just like you have your battles and Paul had his. We are slowly gaining ground and making progress, being transformed toward the likeness of Jesus. Even as people see me as a leader, the last thing I want to be, is to set myself apart on a pedestal, because there in that place is where I will have no mutual support from my fellow companion! What’s liberating for me in that moment, is I know that this person - even a girl - accepted me, loved me, and minister to me, not as her leader, but as a fellow recipient of God’s grace!
Perhaps this lack of authentic care in ministry was the reason why we don’t have a lot of people who would be willing to pastor the next generation church. Which would bring us to the next strategy…
c) We need to raise up the shepherd: “Feed my sheep”
I believe that this is the 3rd strategy: we must raise up the shepherd among for our generation, because “feeding the sheep” is not as simple as “feeding the lamb”. A friend show me a picture of him feeding a lamb with a bottle. He was just a tourist, but with a bit of “how to” training, he could do the job well enough. Not so when you have the responsibility to feed the flock, you cannot feed the sheep by cutting the grass and filling them into the trough all the time. A shepherd must lead his flock to find grass and water in a dry and stony land. He must protect his charges from weather and from fiercer creatures, and retrieve any strayed animal.[ii] So when Jesus charged Peter to “Feed my sheep”, He was calling Peter to the most awesome responsibility of overseeing the community of God’s people.
If you were to ask me that same question a few years ago, I would say “No way! You must be kidding me.” I am willing to help in anything I can do. But feeding the flock? Aren’t you supposed to have a special calling for that? I just don’t feel that it was something for me and my family. So I just sat there in the pew, and griped “our church didn’t pay attention enough to the next generation”. I was frustrated, “we are not relevant enough for the young people, and they are leaving the church in drove!” I was just there, doing what I could, but never think far enough down the road. Mean while, God began to drop some hints. Some old saints in the church started telling me that they are praying for me; some pastor I know started challenging me to consider the next step. Then the whole thing came together as I visit one of the camp a few years ago. We had a Korean pastor as the main speaker. And I seek him out, telling him about my story with my church for the last 15 years, about our English Speaking Service. My question to him was, “Since the Korean church was about 10-20 years development ahead of the Vietnamese church, what’s the next thing that will happen to our church?” And through that conversation, I began to realize that while I sat there and griped, our Vietnamese pastors had tried their best, but they simply will not be able to meet the needs of the next generation. We could sit there and wait for the District to try to find someone and to send them to serve your church. Have you ever scouted around at the Annual District Conference to look for some prospect? We could sit there and gripe about the lack of people, or we could step up to the plate and learn how to shepherd our generation.
Is God calling you to shepherd our generation?
What kind of shepherd are we talking about here? I am not talking about just youth pastor. I am talking about the need for full-pledged pastors for the 2nd generation church. They will need to be able to discern God’s voice as they lead the next generation through the landscapes of changes. They will need to be able to preach the Word relevantly into our world. They will need to be able to care for broken people in our church. They will need to be able to train church leaders. And they will need to be able to interface well with the older generation.
There are 3 things that are needed for the development of 2nd generation church: 1) The youth: if you don’t invest in their foundation, they won’t survive; any movement now would be dead in a few years. 2) The college and young adults: if you cannot care for them holistically, they won’t mature and the church won’t get movement forward. 3) The pastors: if you cannot raise them up, no one will be able to coordinate the direction for the movement.
{Transition} But what is the common motivation for all of this three-tiers strategy? Love. Specifically the love for God. Without this love, you will burnt-out and you will even give-up. But with the love for God, you would embrace His challenge to love the way God loves. Here is what God challenge us to love: to surrender and sacrifice everything to love Him, the same way He have sacrifice everything to love us.
How did Christ love us?
and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. Eph.5:2
25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her Eph.5:25
4) The challenge to Surrender
a) First, God challenge us to surrender our Materials possession and/or Careers to love Him.
When Jesus first asked Peter, “Do you love me more than these?” What was the word “these” He talking about? Some people think that “these” meant “Do you love me more than these people love me?” They could be right. But look at a few verses earlier; I think with the 153 shiny fishes just being counted laying there flopping under the sun, “these” could be what Jesus pointing toward as He talked to Peter. Jesus could challenge Peter to surrender his love for fish, or for fishing in order to love Him.
I believe this is an area where Jesus is challenge us today. We could talk much about our love for God, but how many of us is willing to put money where our mouth is? How many of you is tithing your ten percents of your income to God? You might say, “But I don’t make any money! I work part time! And I am still on Financial Aid!” But if you won’t be able to part with your money when they are still little, will you be able to part with them when they are great? Or perhaps by then your materialism had already formed a lifestyle and it control you?
Let me challenge you a bit. At a Vietnamese church in my region, the budget for youth and college groups is about 20 – 25 thousands dollars a year, this is just operational budget, not for staff or personnel. They have less than 100 people in both groups combine. And what’s noteworthy is that this amount was totally self-support! This is not the budget the mother church allocated for them, but it’s their own contribution. And it’s not from every members either. They have less than 20% of their members who faithfully finance their own ministry!
We talked invest into our youth. But where’s the money get the Bible materials for them? We talked about caring for people holistically. But where’s the money to send people to trainings? We talked about raising up pastors. But if they are available, would we be able to hire them? We talked about loving God; but do we love Him enough to financing His operation?
b) Secondly, God challenge us to give up our Control to love Him.
In verse 18, right after saying to Peter “Feed my sheep”, Jesus followed with a cryptic remark of, “When you are young... when you are old... someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not go”. When we were young, we want a revolution, we want changes, and we want to be in charge! But eventually, we will realize, as the old generation before us will have to realize, that ultimately we are not the one who is in control. Things will not turn out to be the way we want it to be. But that’s OK because God is still in control.
If there is any of you here who are movers and shakers in the church, may I respectably submit to you that perhaps God is challenge you to let go of your control and invest, train and empower next generation of leaders. In the Korean American churches, the control issues were so great that 95% of younger Korean American had left their churches. They even had a name for this phenomenon. It called the Silent Exodus.
And to the younger brothers and sisters among you, I plead that we too need to let go of our fight for control. God is the one who is in control. As David submitted himself under God’s authority, he also submitted to the power God had put over Him. By relinquish his control and observe God’s timing, David was forged by God into the best potential God had for him. Later on in his life, David even relinquish his control even to Absalom, and God intervened and backed him up, restored him back to the throne.
c) Even life itself: “Jesus... indicated the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God”
Ultimately, every Christian will die glorifying God. No, I am not talking about you have to die a martyred death in the jungle of Africa somewhere. Every Christian will die glorifying God when they die in the middle of what God had entrusted them to do.
5) Conclusion
END NOTES:
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[i] Thanks to the idea first expressed by Brad Hightower at http://haloscan.com/tb/bradhightower/111594121098499228
[ii]D. R. W. Wood and I. Howard Marshall, New Bible Dictionary, 3rd ed. (Leicester, England; Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 1093.
posted by mar13 at
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