Believers

Here's the most famous place you've never heard of. It's St. Peter's Church Hall in Liverpool, England. It looks like a typical church gym except for the heavily-timbered cathedral ceiling and missing basketball hoops.

St. Peter's was having a church social with a local music group performing. During a break in the music, Paul, a 15-year-old guest, played songs on the guitar and piano impressing the teen band leader, John. A few weeks later, John Lennon invited Paul McCartney to join the Quarrymen, later known as The Beatles. That first meeting was July 6, 1957 - a historic place and moment in music but nobody knew it.

The Liverpool Museum reflected, "That meeting didn't just change the lives of John and Paul, it was the spark that lit the creative (fuse) on a cultural revolution that would reverberate around the world."

St. Peter's Church Hall is a temple where two music greats met. The stage from the hall is almost an "altar" since it was moved to a museum in Liverpool.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Altar; Worship - Christians also worship at an altar, but it is exclusive to New Testament believers (Heb. 13:10); 2) Temple - The New Testament names three places as the Temple of the living God on earth: 1) The physical body of Christ (Jn. 2:19; Matt. 26:61; Mark 14:58); 2) The church, the body of Christ (1 Cor. 3:16-17); 3) The body of the individual believer (1 Cor. 6:19).

The vast majority of US adults believe in God, but the 81% who do so is down six percentage points from 2017 and is the lowest in Gallup's trend. Between 1944 and 2011, more than 90% of Americans believed in God. Gallup's May 2022 Values and Beliefs poll finds 17% of Americans saying they do not believe in God.

Gallup first asked this question in 1944, repeating it again in 1947 and twice each in the 1950s and 1960s. In those latter four surveys, a consistent 98% said they believed in God. When Gallup asked the question nearly five decades later, in 2011, 92% of Americans said they believed in God.

A subsequent survey in 2013 found belief in God dipping below 90% to 87%, roughly where it stood in three subsequent updates between 2014 and 2017 before this year's drop to 81%.

The groups with the largest declines are liberals (62%), young adults (68%), and Democrats (72%). Belief in God is highest among political conservatives (94%) and Republicans (92%), reflecting that religiosity is a major determinant of political divisions in the US.

The bottom line is that fewer Americans today, than five years ago, believe in God, and the percentage is down even more from the 1950s and 1960s when almost all Americans did. Still, the vast majority of Americans believe in God. And while belief in God has declined in recent years, Gallup has documented steeper drops in church attendance, church membership, and confidence in organized religion, suggesting that the practice of religious faith may be changing more than basic faith in God.

Has your working day become one long battle to wade through a to-do list? An article on BBC.com noted the multiple distractions of the modern world—digital overload, open offices and constant interruptions, to name a few—that can make it near impossible to achieve your goals, or even get anything done at all.

The article argued that we should start thinking more about what we shouldn't be doing. That's one of the strategies employed by Canadian businessman Andrew Wilkinson, who has come up with a list of "anti-goals." Wilkinson noticed his day was filled with things he didn't want to do. He was feeling stretched, doing business with people he didn't like, with a schedule dictated by others, he wrote in his blog.

So he adopted a strategy from an investment expert called "inversion," which means looking at problems in reverse, focusing on minimizing the negatives instead of maximizing the positives. To put it in practice, Wilkinson came up with his worst possible workday: one filled with long meetings at the office, a packed schedule dealing with people he didn't like or trust. Then he came up with his list of "anti-goals," which includes no morning meetings, no more than two hours of scheduled time per day, and no dealings with people he doesn't like.

These "anti-goals" have made his life "immeasurably better" he said. Focusing on the negative helps us reflect on and cut out activities that don't align with our broader goals. It's about prioritizing that which is important.

Possible Preaching Angles: 1) Leaders; Pastors - We should avoid spending the prime time of the day checking email, handling administrative details, and updating social media. Put these items on your 'not-to-do' right now list. 2) Believers; Christians - The Internet, television, and video gaming do provide needed relaxation but they should be on our 'not-to-do' list until we give priority to God's Word and prayer each day.

An El Dorado Hills, California family overcame their own emotional turmoil to turn a canceled wedding into a special event for approximately 100 less fortunate people. David Duane said his 27-year-old daughter, Quinn, announced that the groom had called off the wedding, five days before the event.

The reception venue, the Citizen Hotel in downtown Sacramento, had been booked months in advance. Duane said he and his wife knew they could not expect a refund at such a late date. "We said, 'Hey, do we just not do anything, or do we go down and do something?'"

His wife, Kari, came up with the idea of hosting people who were homeless or in need at what was intended to have been the wedding dinner. She contacted Next Move and program director LaTisha Daniels. The organization's mission is to provide shelter and other services to help people transition out of homelessness. Daniels took charge, inviting individuals and families, and providing bus passes so they could get to the dinner, David Duane said.

Duane and his wife were on hand at 5 P.M. to welcome people to the buffet dinner that would otherwise have been served to wedding guests. "It was a fabulous night, a great evening," Duane said. He talked to a number of the guests and listened to stories of the difficulties they have faced. Wedding costs, including the honeymoon, he said, totaled more than $30,000. "As a family," Duane said, "we took away something good from this."

Possible Preaching Angles: Many that God invited to the wedding banquet of his Son have declined. It is now our mission to joyfully extend the invitation to the poor and needy so that heaven will be full and its riches will be fully enjoyed.

There was a front-page article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a metro-transit operator named Linda Wilson-Allen. She loves the people who ride her bus, learns their names, and waits for them if they're late and then make up the time later on her route. A woman in her eighties named Ivy had some heavy grocery bags and was struggling with them. So Linda got out of her bus driver's seat to carry Ivy's grocery bags onto the bus. Now Ivy lets other buses pass her stop so she can ride on Linda's bus.

Linda saw a woman named Tanya in a bus shelter. She could tell Tanya was new to the area and she was lost. It was almost Thanksgiving, so Linda said to Tanya, "You're out here all by yourself. You don't know anybody. Come on over for Thanksgiving and kick it with me and the kids." Now they're friends. Linda has built such a little community of blessing on that bus that passengers offer Linda the use of their vacation homes. They bring her potted plants and floral bouquets. When people found out she likes to wear scarves to accessorize her uniforms, they started giving them as presents to Linda.

Think about what a thankless task driving a bus can look like in our world: cranky passengers, engine breakdowns, traffic jams, gum on the seats. You ask yourself, How does she have this attitude? "Her mood is set at 2:30 A.M. when she gets down on her knees to pray for 30 minutes," the Chronicle states. "'There is a lot to talk about with the Lord,' says Wilson-Allen, a member of Glad Tidings Church in Hayward."

When she gets to the end of her line, she always says, "That's all. I love you. Take care." Have you ever had a bus driver tell you, "I love you"? People wonder, Where can I find the Kingdom of God? I will tell you where. You can find it on the #45 bus riding through San Francisco. People wonder, Where can I find the church? I will tell you. Behind the wheel of a metro transit vehicle.

Writer and NPR commentator Heather King, a recovering alcoholic who has come to faith in Christ, reflected on her initial experience with the church:

My first impulse was to think, My God, I don't want to get sober (or in the case of the church, worship) with THESE nutcases! (or boring people, or people with different politics, taste in music, food, books, or whatever). Nothing shatters our egos like worshipping with people we did not hand-pick …. The humiliation of discovering that we are thrown in with extremely unpromising people!—people who are broken, misguided, wishy-washy, out for themselves. People who are … us.

But we don't come to church to be with people who are like us in the way we want them to be. We come because we have staked our souls on the fact that Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and the church is the best place, the only place, to be while we all struggle to figure out what that means. We come because we'd be hard pressed to say which is the bigger of the two scandals of God: that he loves us—or that he loves everyone else.

While Paul Knight, a pastor from Grand Forks, North Dakota, was visiting Fiche, Ethiopia, he had the chance to meet the little girl his family had been sponsoring through Compassion International. He wanted to bring gifts to the girl and her mother, a single mom who lived and worked in a one-room home that also basically functioned as the local bar. During Paul's visit, the place slowly started filling with rowdy men from the community. Suddenly, Paul's guide and translator took him by the arm and said, "We have to go now."

Paul looked back at his sponsor child, a ten-year-old girl, and asked for more time. The crowd was getting louder, and his guide firmly said, "It's not safe for you. You must leave now." Paul started to move, but then he pointed to his sponsor child and said, "But what about my little girl?"

"Well, this is her home," the guide said.

Reluctantly moving to the street, Paul asked, "But will she be safe?"

"It's not really safe, but this is her home," the guide said.

Paul was indignant. "What does that mean," he asked, "that 'it's not really safe'?"

"Most likely everything you think it means," the guide said.

Paul fought back tears. "What can she do?"

Gently grabbing his arm, the guide said, "We teach the girls to do this: scream and run to the church. When you get to the church, you will find love and safety. The church will shelter you. So when they feel threatened or vulnerable, they scream and run to the church."

We ought not be like players on the NFL all-star team. Every year the NFL has the all-star selection. They choose the best players from the league, and they are appointed to their respective division's teams. It's interesting that each division team wears the same colored jersey. So the NFC has on, say, blue, and the AFC has on white. But it's striking that though they all wear the same jersey, they don't really play for that team. They all have different helmets. They wear the helmets of the team they really play for, the folks who pay them the big contract. So when they come to the all-star game, they don't really hit hard or run hard. They play gingerly because they don't want to "mess up my contract." They really play for the team they came from.

It strikes me that so often we're like NFL players on the all-star team. We wear jerseys that say "Christ," but we wear a helmet that says "Ethnic culture." That's the team we play for. That's the side we're on. "After we finish this little thing, I'm gonna go back and play with my squad. I'm not gonna run hard with those not on my squad." We need to flip that, and it is the gospel that enables us to do that.

Every three years InterVarsity Christian Fellowship sponsors the Urbana Conference, a gathering that challenges university students to get involved in world evangelization. About 16,000 students from around the world attended the 2009 conference.

After the main session each evening, students would leave the larger conference auditorium to meet in smaller groups for prayer and reflection. In one of the banquet halls, there was a small group comprised of Chinese students, another group of Taiwanese students, and another group of students from Hong Kong. Large dividers stood between the three. These walls were important, because historically these three peoples have "harbored bitterness and animosity toward one another." They felt it was best to pray and worship each with their own people.

But as the Chinese students were praying one night, they told their leader they wanted to invite the other countries to join them. When the Taiwanese students received the invitation, they prayed and sang a little while, and then they opened up the wall divider. It wasn't too much longer before the students from Hong Kong pulled back their divider, and some 80 students mingled together.

"In Christ, we are all one family," said one leader. "And [Christ] breaks down political boundaries. In Christ, we have the desire to make the first steps to connect."

The Taiwanese students asked the students from China and Hong Kong to lead them in worship. The next night, they invited the Korean and Japanese groups to join them, nations which also had experienced fierce animosity. The leader told them, "We are living out what we have learned this week in John: This is 'God with us.'" One girl from China said, "It was a really moving time. This kind of thing would not happen in another situation."

In his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller describes a New Year's Day parade held in San Diego. But this was no ordinary parade. This was a very special parade organized by Bob Goff and his family—a parade where nobody was allowed to watch, because everybody was a part of it. Miller tells the story:

Bob and the kids were sitting around on New Year's Day when one of the kids mentioned she was bored. Bob agreed and said he thought New Year's Day was probably one of the more boring days of the year. He asked the kids what they could do to make New Year's Day less boring.

The kids started tossing out ideas, things like buying a pony or building a rocket ship, and then one of the children mentioned they could have a parade. Getting himself out of buying a pony, perhaps, Bob lit up and said a parade sounded great.

So Bob, [his wife], Maria, and the kids sat around the dining room table and dreamed up what their parade might look like. They could wear costumes and hold balloons, and maybe they could invite their friends to watch. The kids started talking about what kind of costumes they could make—the more elaborate, the better. And Maria began planning a cookout at the end of the parade, in their backyard, and wondered how many people she should prepare for. And the kids started running through the friends and neighbors they could call to invite and watch the parade.

Bob thought about it, though, and realized it's more fun to be in a parade than to watch one. So he made a rule: nobody would be allowed to watch the parade, but anybody could participate. So he and the kids walked down their small street and knocked on doors, explaining to neighbors that they were having a parade, and anybody who wanted could be in the parade, but nobody would be allowed to watch. [When Bob shared this story with me,] I laughed as I imagined [him] standing on their neighbor's porch, explaining that if a parade marched by, please look away. Or join. And surprisingly, plenty of his neighbors agreed to take part. [They would] march down the street with Bob's kids and join the cookout in the Goffs' backyard ….

Bob and the family dressed up in their handmade costumes and walked to the end of the street, where they were joined by a few neighbors, and began marching down the street, converting all parade watchers into parade participants. And by the time they got to their backyard, they had a dozen or more people sitting around, enjoying each other's company and eating hamburgers.

Anglican priest and author Michael Green shares the following story to remind us of the impact of our actions long before our words:

I read about a missionary candidate in language school. The very first day of class the teacher entered the room and, without saying a word, walked down every row of students. Finally, still without saying a word, she walked out of the room again. Then she came back and addressed the class. "Did you notice anything special about me?" she asked.

Nobody could think of anything in particular. One student finally raised her hand. "I noticed that you had on a very lovely perfume," she said. The class chuckled.

But the teacher said, "That was exactly the point. [It] will be a long time before any of you will be able to speak Chinese well enough to share the gospel with anyone in China. But even before you are able to do that, you can minister the sweet fragrance of Christ to these people by the quality of your lives."

Steve Sjogren writes in “Changing the World Through Kindness”:

Not long after we moved [into our first house in California], my wife, Janie, and I picked up on the tension between a couple of neighbors. One was a very outspoken churchgoer, while the other was an unbeliever. I knew I was in the hot seat when the unchurched man struck up a conversation with me as we were both working in our yards.

"Say, Steve, aren't you a pastor?" It seems implicit in the public's understanding that pastors exist to serve as referees in times of conflict, so I reluctantly listened as this troubled man opened up about the neighbor he'd never understood. He unfolded a long history of numerous conflicts over small issues. …

Then he looked up and sighed, "But the most recent problem takes the cake. We received a letter from his attorney threatening to sue us if we don't trim a tree that borders his yard. It seems strange he didn't just come over and ask me to take care of the tree before he went to his attorney." …

With a little wink this streetwise unchurched man continued, "You know, I was getting ready to trim that tree, but now there's no way I'm going to do anything until he forces me. I will gladly go to court just so I can have a story to tell about being sued by Christians over an orange tree." He summarized his thoughts with a haunting observation: "I guess sometimes Christians love us—they just don't like us."

During one of the most volatile periods of the current economic crisis...Philip Yancey received a call from an editor at Time magazine. The editor's question was simple: "How should a person pray during a crisis like this?" Here is a summary of what Yancey shared in response:

The first stage is simple, an instinctive cry: "Help!" For someone who faces a job cut or health crisis or watches retirement savings wither away, prayer offers a way to voice fear and anxiety. I have learned to resist the tendency to edit my prayers so that they sound sophisticated and mature. I believe God wants us to come exactly as we are, no matter how childlike we may feel. A God aware of every sparrow that falls surely knows the impact of scary financial times on frail human beings. …

If I pray with the intent to listen as well as talk, I can enter into a second stage, that of meditation and reflection. Okay, my life savings has virtually disappeared. What can I learn from this seeming catastrophe? …

A time of crisis presents a good opportunity to identify the foundation on which I construct my life. If I place my ultimate trust in financial security or in the government's ability to solve my problems, I will surely watch the basement flood and the walls crumble.

A friend from Chicago, Bill Leslie, used to say that the Bible asks three main questions about money: (1) How did you get it? (Legally and justly or exploitatively?); (2) What are you doing with it? (Indulging in luxuries or helping the needy?); and (3) What is it doing to you? Some of Jesus' most trenchant parables and sayings go straight to the heart of that last question.

Chris Heuertz is the international director of Word Made Flesh, an organization that helps the world's poor. In his book Simple Christianity, Heuertz writes that one night in particular stands out in all his world travels. While walking the streets of Kolkata, a destitute region in South Asia, Heuertz and his companions—Josh, Sarah, and Phileena, Heuertz's wife—stumbled across a person lying under a filthy, fly-infested blanket. A three-foot trail of diarrhea was making its way toward the gutter. It was obvious to anyone passing by that the person under the sheet was either dead or dying. Heuertz writes:

My pal Josh tapped the body on the shoulder to see if the person was dead. The body moved. Josh pulled the blanket down from the face that it covered to see a helpless young man, maybe twenty-two years old and visibly stunned by our approach. As soon as he realized we were there to help him, he began weeping uncontrollably. A crowd gathered. He continued to cry.

We didn't have much to work with, but our friend Sarah grabbed a bottle of water and some newspaper. She began cleaning the young man, wiping the diarrhea off with the newspaper and rinsing him with the water. We asked him his name. Tutella Dhas. He was lost, afraid, alone. His body was a leathery-skinned skeleton, and his bulging eyes accentuated the shape of his skull. He kept crying.

We tried to get a taxi, but none would stop. The crowd grew. No one wanted to help. Two more friends happened to be walking down the street just then, and they were able to find a taxi. They took Tutella Dhas with them and headed off to Mother Teresa's House for the Dying. Phileena, Sarah, Josh, and I stood there in disbelief.

I lifted my head and caught sight of a church and its sign less than five feet where we found the dying Tutella Dhas. The sign read, "All are welcome here." It may have been what inspired someone to drop Tutella in front of the church. But was he welcome? People from the church watched as we helped Tutella, yet the gate remained closed.

Lillian Daniel writes in "A Cast of Thousands”:

At my daughter's elementary school musical, the printed program noted: "This musical was originally written for 15 actors, but it has been adapted to accommodate our cast of 206." You know what kind of show this was. No-cut auditions, no performer left without something special to do. They danced, they sang, they delivered lines, and somehow 206 children graced the stage that night.

It was not a short program.

The church's calling is like the volunteer geniuses that took an elementary school musical with 15 parts and creatively made room for 206. We take a task that we could professionalize and simply pay someone to do, and we divide it into parts so that everyone has a job. Is it efficient? No. Not if all you care about is getting the job done. But the church cares less about getting the job done and more about the people doing it. We are not in the efficiency business. Our business is to make disciples. We want to offer as many people as possible the chance to know Christ in service and in community.

I have sat in church meetings where the most unlikely person volunteered for the job. The woman I had envisioned on the finance committee chooses instead to join a team of church supper cooks. We want her excellent mind and keen eye keeping track of our numbers. But that is what she does all day.

"At church, I want to do what I love," she says, and until then, I never knew it was cooking. That church supper could have been catered, with more efficiency, but instead the script was adapted to accommodate a person with a calling.

Sure, there are people we might not want on the program. Sometimes the accountant reminds us how grateful we are that cooking is not her day job. We have to adjust, to help her find the place where her gifts meet the world's needs. But in the midst of a bite of half-cooked quiche or rubbery sausage, we recall that Jesus came for all of us, not just the star performers, or even the competent.

The church remains the home of the no-cut audition. We don't get to choose the other members of our body. You have to want to get in, but once you are here, we will find a part for you to play.

Improvisation is the willingness to live within the bounds of the past and yet search for the future at the same time. Improvisation is the desire to make something new out of something old.… It is experienced in being open to letting the people around you…have impact on what you are creating.

Wynton Marsalis is the artistic director of jazz at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. He's earned a Pulitzer Prize, written several books, and plays a mean trumpet. On a Tuesday evening late in August 2001 at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village, he was playing "I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You" on his trumpet without accompaniment. As he neared the end of the song, the sound of a cell phone intruded into the drama of the moment. A jazz critic in the audience scrawled on a sheet of notepaper, "MAGIC, RUINED," and people began to chatter. Marsalis improvised. He played the notes of the cell phone ring tone—slow, fast, and in different keys—and when all ears were back on him, he seamlessly transitioned the silly cell phone tune back to the ballad and finished the song. In the words of the jazz critic, "The ovation was tremendous."

Philip Yancey writes:

As I read accounts of the New Testament church, no characteristic stands out more sharply than [diversity]. Beginning with Pentecost, the Christian church dismantled the barriers of gender, race, and social class that had marked Jewish congregations. Paul, who as a rabbi had given thanks daily that he was not born a woman, slave, or Gentile, marveled over the radical change: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

One modern Indian pastor told me, "Most of what happens in Christian churches, including even miracles, can be duplicated in Hindu and Muslim congregations. But in my area only Christians strive, however ineptly, to mix men and women of different castes, races, and social groups. That's the real miracle."

Diversity complicates rather than simplifies life. Perhaps for this reason we tend to surround ourselves with people of similar age, economic class, and opinion. Church offers a place where infants and grandparents, unemployed and executives, immigrants and blue bloods can come together. Just yesterday I sat sandwiched between an elderly man hooked up to a puffing oxygen tank and a breastfeeding baby who grunted loudly and contentedly throughout the sermon. Where else can we find that mixture?

When I walk into a new church, the more its members resemble each other—and resemble me—the more uncomfortable I feel.

Racing driver Darrell Waltrip writes:

Racing drivers must use all their senses. When you're in tune with the car, it speaks to you with a small voice. When something's happening, you smell it; you hear it in the changing tone of the engine. If my car was starting to go, my senses would come alive. As I hit the pit, the crew chief would ask, "What's wrong?"

"It's getting ready to blow up," I'd say.

"Are you sure?" he'd ask.

I've driven for people who wouldn't believe me. I'd have to let the car blow up before they did. That usually meant a wreck; it sometimes meant getting hurt; it always costs lots of money.

Several times I've had the crew pull an engine out of a car when it was running fine. "I don't know what's wrong," I'd say, "but something is." They'd pull the engine. "You were right," they'd admit later. "We were scuffing a piston," or, "It was losing a lobe on a camshaft," or, "The rod bearings were about ready to fly out of the thing."

Discernment involves listening with love and attention to our experiences, to each other, to the inner promptings of the Holy Spirit deep within ourselves and others, to Scripture and Christian tradition, to pertinent facts and information, to those who will be affected most deeply by our decisions, to that place in us where God's Spirit witnesses with our spirit about those things that are true.

—Ruth Haley Barton, spiritual director, teacher, and retreat leader

In his book Ministry in the Image of God, Stephen Seamands writes about the relational side of our personhood, which reflects the Trinitarian nature of God. In fact, Seamands calls this our trinitarian personhood. It means "we will never be able to complete the journey on our own. Since to be a person is to be in relationship with others, involvement in a small group of fellows Christians…is indispensable to our spiritual and emotional growth." Seamands illustrates this well through the life and ministry of John Wesley. He writes:

When John Wesley was a young Christian, a "serious man" advised him, "Sir, you wish to serve God and go to heaven? Remember you cannot serve him alone. You must therefore find companions or make them. The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion." In the light of the relational nature of personhood, that is good advice for every Christian, especially those involved in full-time ministry.

Wesley took that advice to heart both for himself and in shepherding the fledgling Methodist movement. Convinced that the pursuit of personal holiness was impossible apart from Christian community, he carefully organized the Methodists into societies (similar to congregations), classes (small groups of eight to twelve), and bands (cell groups of three to five).

Seamands concludes: "Because of the relational nature of human personhood, I believe every person in ministry needs to be in a small Wesleyan-type band group or its equivalent. Solitary religion is unbiblical; so is solitary service for God. We must either find companions or make them."