Priesthood of 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).

Sweatshops in Southeast Asia crank out many of the name brand clothes that you and I wear every day. Sadly, many of these clothes are made by poorly paid and sometimes abused workers. How should Christians in America respond? Should we boycott these companies? Global missions expert Paul Borthwick posed those questions to a friend of his from Sri Lanka. His friend discouraged boycotting the big clothing companies, but gave this advice instead:

Tell people, especially your businesspeople, to become executives for Nike and other multinational corporations that run these factories. In positions of leadership, they can bring a Christian influence of compassion and justice and mercy into that environment. They can make rules of how the factory workers are treated. That could turn a whole village toward the gospel.

Borthwick shares what happened months later:

I shared his response with a church in New York City. One fellow approached me and said, "That's a great idea. I'm the representative buyer with a factory we have in Madagascar. I buy jeans from that factory. I sell them on Fifth Avenue; we buy jeans for a dollar and sell them for four hundred dollars. Maybe we can do something." He contacted the factory liaison in Madagascar and asked how much it would cost if the factory started paying for the school fees for the workers' children, better housing, health care, improved sanitation, and more reasonable hours. The buyer was pursuing compassion for these workers.

The buyer got a message back from the liaison representing the factory management. He said that they were sorry, but such added benefits would quadruple the price for the jeans to four dollars a pair. The buyer decided to authorize it anyway, thus making a smaller but still very good profit margin on the jeans. A Christian used his position of power to bring about compassion and justice for the poor. He was leveraging his position for the poor.

The clothing manufacturer Patagonia employs forty-five full-time technicians who complete about 30,000 repairs per year. In the spring of 2015, the company set off on a coast-to-coast road trip across the U.S. in a biodiesel truck to repair their customers' "tired and well-loved" clothing. Patagonia cares about fixing a jacket that has travelled the world with a customer because that act aligns with their company values, and just as important, it helps to deepen the bond between customer and company.

Often the people who send garments in for repair also send their stories about how that piece of clothing has been with them through thick and thin. The customers' stories fuel Patagonia's story and have done so for over four successful decades. The team at Patagonia believe that "one of the most responsible things we can do as a company is to make high-quality stuff that lasts for years and can be repaired, so you don't have to buy more of it." They innovate for and market to those customers who believe what they believe. The customer is their compass."

Editor’s Note: As of 2025, the company continues to offer clothing repairs on its website Wornwear.patagonia.com where they state “If it’s broke, fix it. Doing our part means making the most durable gear. Keeping it in use for as long as possible is where you come in.”

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Outreach; Missions—Even more so, the church should be committed to excellence in the way we love, welcome, and serve visitors and those who don't know Christ. (2) Work; Employee—Even more so should a Christian employee be committed to excellence. (3) Restoration – God continues to be in the business of restoring lives that are broken by sin and mistakes.

Which superpower would you choose—flight or invisibility? You can't have both, and you'll be the only person in the world to have that particular superpower, so which would you choose? An episode of the radio show This American Life explored that question and found some surprising responses. Here's how the commentator summarized the answers he found:

But what surprised me more was how quickly everyone would choose, as though they had been thinking about it for a long time. Everyone knew exactly which superpower they wanted and what they would do with it. Their plans weren't always flashy or heroic. In fact, they almost never were—[like the woman who wanted invisibility so she could act as a petty thief and steal cashmere sweaters].

Typically, this is how it goes. People who turn invisible will sneak into the movies or onto airplanes. People who fly stop taking the bus. Here's one thing that pretty much no one ever says, "I will use my power to fight crime." No one seems to care about crime—like the guy who said, "I don't think I would want to spend a lot of time using my power for good. I mean … If you had to rescue somebody from a burning building or something like that, you might catch on fire."

Possible Preaching Angles: Courage; Mission; Vision; Calling—But isn't that the whole point of having a superpower—to do good, to fight evil, to clean up crime? Why would you have a superpower and just be selfish or self-protective? (2) Spiritual gifts—In a way, every believer does have a superpower—a spiritual gift given to us by the Holy Spirit. How are you using your gift?

Like most women of her generation who visited New York in 1902, thirty-six-year-old Mary Anderson got to where she was going in a streetcar. On one particular wintery day, she couldn't help but notice how all hell broke loose on the city roads as soon as the weather turned nasty. When it began to rain or snow, every driver was in a mad panic to clear his window in order to see where he was going.

Today we take windscreen wipers for granted, and perhaps you imagined that they were invented along with the car. Not so. When bad weather struck, the driver had to roll down the window and stick his head out the side of the car in an attempt to see the road and oncoming traffic. He sometimes used his hand to clear the windscreen, but that wasn't very effective. The lucky ones might have had a split windshield, half of which could be opened to let the driver see out, but that wasn't very useful or practical and it didn't improve visibility and safety all that much. This situation inspired Mary to think about creating a solution to the problem, which would only get worse as more cars came on the roads. When she returned home to Alabama, Mary worked with a designer to create the first manually operated windscreen wiper, which she obtained the patent for in 1903 (it expired in 1920). It would take almost two more decades for wipers to become standard on new automobiles.

What Mary hit on a century ago was the solution to what Tony Fadell—the creator of the iPod—calls an 'invisible problem'. That's a problem that we don't think of as being a problem because we're so used to it, we just don't see it anymore and don't think about ways that things could be different or better.

Leo Tolstoy's story Two Old Men tells the tale of two men, Efim and Elisha, who decide that before they die they must make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. After months of planning, they collect what they will need and begin to walk. After a long day on the road, they come to a village that seems deserted. No one is about, and seeing a small hut, they look in to see what has happened. They enter its darkness and smell death. As their eyes adjust to the lack of light, they see bodies on beds. With trepidation they come close, and see that the people are still alive, but barely.

Elisha wants to stay and help. He encourages his companion to go on beyond the village, "And I will catch up with you." But as Elisha opens doors and windows, and offers them food and drink, he begins to see that their needs are more complex than he first imagined—and that it is not only them, but the whole village that is suffering. He finds his friend and tells Efim that he wants to stay longer, encouraging him to make his way on to Jerusalem. "I will find you," he says.

So one man stays in the village, helping the villagers find their way again to happiness and health, never going on to Jerusalem, eventually returning home; the other man makes his way to Jerusalem. He keeps waiting for his friend who never comes, so before long he returns home to Russia—again, walking across a continent. At one point along the way, he comes to a village that seems strangely familiar to him. And then he realizes that it is where he left his friend—but everything seems very different now. Men and women, older and younger, are busy at work and play; animals are healthy, and the crops are growing, and so he asks, "What has happened?" In simple innocence, the villagers explain that a man stopped along the way and gave them back their life.

Possible Preaching Angle: The story concludes with both men finally at home, telling the stories of their pilgrimages. Tolstoy has no desire to tell a black-and-white story, with a good man and a bad man; it is more nuanced than that, as life is. The last lines tell of their joy in meeting together again. But, clearly, one man paid attention to the needs around him. His pilgrimage became saving the village. What is your pilgrimage?

Christian leader Mark Labberton relates a personal story about when he had a seemingly unsolvable problem with the IRS. Labberton writes:

After several months of correspondence and legal advice, the day finally came to begin the talks in person. Those who knew the IRS suggested this would take many months, probably longer, to get settled. I went to the IRS office in Oakland. I waited. And I waited. Eventually I was escorted through a warren of cubicles to meet the agent who would assist me. The agent there listened to my case, took all the relevant paperwork, and excused herself to consult with someone else. I waited ten minutes, 15 minutes … 45 minutes but no one checked in. As far as I could tell, the agent had disappeared …

Suddenly, the agent was back. She handed me a sheet and said simply, "There, it's all done. It's settled." I assumed she was saying that she had taken the first step. What she meant was that the whole process was settled. She turned the paper over and revealed the nine signatures she had acquired all the way up the IRS ladder so the case was now closed, and closed in my favor.

There, in the midst of a warren of bureaucratic anonymity and powerlessness, I encountered a person who became my advocate, who heard my appeal and who took the initiative to do on my behalf what I could never have done for myself. She met me at a moment of isolation and fear and sent me out with resolution when I had anticipated nothing but delay.

Possible Preaching Angles: Mark Labberton comments: "For me, this has been a parable of what the body of Christ can be in the world. We are to be those who, in the vastness of the universe and in a context of human powerlessness, show up as advocates who represent and incarnate the presence of God, who is the hope of the world. We can, of course, choose instead to be bureaucrats. Show up and shuffle paper, engage very little, put in our time, and watch out for our own interests. At the Oakland IRS office, there was a system, but there was a person in the system who was ready to be an advocate. I don't know why, but she did it. And it changed everything for me."

Remember when there were 144 time zones in the United States? Probably not, because Sandford Fleming, an engineer and railroad planner, proposed a global grid of time zones that was adopted as a standard by the railroads beginning in the 1880s. Or how about when there was only enough penicillin in the world to treat a few people at a time? That was solved by Margaret Hutchinson, a resourceful chemical engineer who in the 1940s developed a fermentation method to mass-produce the drug. In the mid-1700s an unknown captain in the French military noticed that his army's cannons, while useful for fortress defenses, were too heavy to transport easily. An army on the offensive, he reasoned, needed agility above all else. So during the Seven Years War he developed a model for a smaller, more agile cannon. Eventually France could boast that it had "the most effective artillery in Europe."

A book titled Applied Minds: How Engineers Think, argues that now much our lives depend on the often hidden, unappreciated work of engineers. There are engineers for microprocessors, computer code, pharmaceuticals, rockets, electrical systems—even engineers who focus on big systems made out of smaller systems, such as air-traffic control. Yet most engineers share a few common roles—they create structures so that we can understand a problem and its solution, and then they formulate the most effective application for a given situation.

Unfortunately, in today's world, innovators and "creatives" get most of the praise for their efforts. For instance, Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, "received a statesman's funeral at St. Paul's Cathedral in London." He was hailed as a national hero. Margaret Hutchinson, who made the drug available to millions of people, died fairly anonymously on a winter's day in Massachusetts. But both of their roles were essential.

On a wintry December day in 1944, German forces made a massive surprise attack on the Allied lines, which became known as the Battle of the Bulge. About 19,000 Americans were killed in the month-long battle. On Dec. 16, 1944, the Germans attacked with more than 200,000 troops and hundreds of tanks along a 75-mile front through the rugged Ardennes forest in Belgium and Luxembourg.

The area was patrolled by relatively weak U.S. forces—green troops who had just arrived and battle-weary soldiers who needed a rest. But as the German army started to overrun U.S. defenses, they also met pockets of fierce and courageous resistance. One of the unsung heroes of the battle was a 19-year-old color-blind draftee from Baltimore named Albert Darago. Darago had never fired a bazooka in his life, but on Dec. 19, 1944, his superiors were looking for volunteers to go after some German tanks, and Darago and another 19-year-old soldier named Roland Seamon said yes.

Years later Darago admitted, "I didn't know the first thing about bazookas." But other soldiers loaded the bazooka for him and told him to fire at the German tanks' rear engines. Darago headed down a hill under heavy German fire without any cover. Darago said, "I knew God was with me." Once he spotted four German tanks, he aimed, pulled the trigger and, surprisingly, had a direct hit. When he got back to the camp the officer asked him to go again. So with a reloaded weapon, he crept down the hill again, looked over the hedge, fired, and got another hit. Again, he escaped.

In December 2014, at the 70th anniversary of The Battle of the Bulge, Darago said, "Believe it or not, I didn't even think about [volunteering for the task]. It was something that had to be done and we did it … I never considered myself brave … Somebody had to do it, and I was there."

When it comes to winning games, most pro sports teams go after talented players. Everyone wants a team of stars. But a new research study published in Psychological Science argues that too many talented players can actually hurt the team's overall performance. The research study is titled "The Too-Much Talent Effect."

When the researchers analyzed professional sports, especially basketball and soccer, they discovered that talented players helped teams win—but only up to a point. Teams loaded with star players found that the too-much talent effect actually hurt the team's chances of winning. Teams with the greatest proportion of elite athletes performed worse than those with more moderate proportions of top level players. Star-studded basketball teams had less assists and rebounds than teams with more average players. The researchers concluded, "When teams need to come together, more talent can tear them apart."

An article summarizing the study observed:

Why is too much talent a bad thing? Think teamwork. In many endeavors, success requires [team effort] towards a goal that is beyond the capability of any one individual … When a team roster is flooded with individual talent, pursuit of personal star-status may prevent the attainment of team goals. The basketball player chasing a point record, for example, may cost the team by taking risky shots instead of passing to a teammate.

Pastor Ray Ortlund writes, "The kind of God we really believe in is revealed in how we treat one another. The lovely gospel of Jesus positions us to treat one another like royalty, and every non-gospel positions us to treat one another like dirt. But we will follow through horizontally on whatever we believe vertically."

Ray then goes on to identify the "One Another's" he could not find in the N.T.:

Sanctify one another, humble one another, scrutinize one another, pressure one another, embarrass one another, corner one another, interrupt one another, defeat one another, sacrifice one another, shame one another, judge one another, run one another's lives, confess one another's sins, intensify one another's sufferings, point out one another's failings …

Once, while speaking on the topic of grace in Toronto, I asked the audience about their own experiences conveying grace to others. One woman shocked us all: "I feel called to minister to telephone marketers. You know, the kind who call at inconvenient hours and deliver their spiel before you can say a word." Immediately I flashed back to the times I have responded rudely or simply hung up. She continued:

All day long these sales callers hear people curse at them and slam the phone down. I listen attentively to their pitch, then I try to respond kindly, though I almost never buy what they're selling. Instead, I ask about their personal life and whether they have any concerns I can pray for. Often they ask me to pray with them over the phone, and sometimes they are in tears. They're people, after all, probably underpaid, and they're surprised when someone treats them with common courtesy.

Hearing such stories, I am aware how often I miss possible hinge moments in my own interactions with people. I marvel at the Toronto woman's gracious response and think of the times I get irritated with marketers and with employees on computer help lines who don't speak good English. I catch myself treating store cashiers and Starbucks baristas as if they were machines, not persons … Subtly or not so subtly, I let the other person know that I've been interrupted and need to get back to work. In the process, I miss golden opportunities to dispense grace.

In 1950, Indy car pit crews consisted of four men—including the driver! No one was allowed to get near the car except this small crew of specialists. A routine pit stop to replace two tires and fill the tank back then took more than 60 seconds. Today, a crew consists of 11 members—excluding the driver. Six are permitted direct contact with the car. Five serve as behind-the-wall assistants. A full service pit stop that replaces all four tires, adjusts the wings, and tops off the tank now takes less than eight seconds! Formula 1 pit crews are even bigger—sometimes involving over 20 people who all have their role to play. When everyone understands his role, and when everyone on the pit crew does his job with purpose and passion, the team can complete the same job in under three seconds.

When the work of the church is carried out by a small handful of people, including the pastor, progress is slow and sometimes awkward. But when every member knows and fills his or her role, the difference can be amazing to behold.

On June 8, 2014 at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg Florida, the Seattle Mariners Major League Baseball team shut-out the Tampa Bay Rays 5-0. Seattle's ace pitcher Felix Hernandez recorded 15 strikeouts (a personal best) but was taken out after seven scoreless innings because his pitch count had reached 100. Seattle's reliever Yoervis Medina pitched the eighth inning and was credited with the win because the Mariners scored all five of their runs in the top of the ninth inning. Two more Seattle pitchers (Dominic Leone, and Charlie Furbush) faced the Rays in the bottom of the ninth to preserve the shut-out.

In the next morning's official box score, Felix Hernandez was not credited as the winning pitcher. Instead, all of his efforts—his seven solid innings of pitching and his 15 strikeouts—were merely labeled a "no decision." One of his teammates, a player who pitched only one inning, got the official win. But Hernandez laid the foundation for the team's win. Then his fellow teammates combined their efforts for the win. It reminds me of that great quote by President Harry Truman (also attributed to Ronald Reagan), "There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit!"

Boys in the Boat is the thrilling true story of the 1936 University of Washington crew team, which went from backwater obscurity to a gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Few sports carry the aristocratic pedigree of crews from Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. But no one imagined that a crew from Washington, of all places, could be competitive. And yet the University of Washington built a team from kids raised on farms, in logging towns, and near shipyards. They blew away their Californian rivals and bested the cream of New England to become the American Olympic Team and won the gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

How did they manage to win the Gold Medal? Author Daniel James Brown explains it one word—teamwork. Brown explains how a crew team works best:

The greatest paradox of the sport has to do with the psychological makeup of the people who pull the oars. Great oarsmen and oarswomen are necessarily made of conflicting stuff—of oil and water, fire and earth. On the one hand, they must possess enormous self-confidence, strong egos, and titanic willpower … Nobody who does not believe deeply in himself or herself—in his or her ability to endure hardship and to prevail over adversity—is likely even to attempt something as audacious as competitive rowing at the highest levels. The sport offers so many opportunities for suffering and so few opportunities for glory that only the most tenaciously self-reliant and self-motivated are likely to succeed at it. And yet, at the same time—and this is key—no other sport demands and rewards the complete abandonment of the self the way that rowing does. Great crews may have men or women of exceptional talent or strength; they may have outstanding coxswains or stroke oars or bowmen; but they have no stars. The team effort—the perfectly synchronized flow of muscle, oars, boat, and water; the single, whole, unified, and beautiful symphony that a crew in motion becomes—is all that matters. Not the individual, not the self.

In a classic episode from the classic TV series from the 1960's, The Andy Griffith Show, Andy Taylor, the sheriff of Mayberry, is out of town. His deputy, Barney Fife, is in charge, and he has deputized the local mechanic who is named Gomer. The two deputies are walking down the street one evening when they notice that someone is robbing the town's bank. They hide behind a car. They are afraid and don't know what to do. Finally, Gomer looks at Barney and says excitedly, "Shazam! We need to call the police."

In utter exasperation, Barney shoots back: "We are the police!"

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Men; Fatherhood—Stephen Mansfield adds, "This is very much like the predicament of many men today. They know something is wrong. They aren't whole … and are confused about what it means to be men. They have no idea what to do … They're waiting for rescue … Then they look around and realize … they are the 'police." (2) Body of Christ; Church, mission of; Priesthood of Believers—We could say the same thing about the church, both men and women—"We look around and realize … we are the police."

At a men's retreat, a group of 30-40 men of all ages sat in a room sharing joys and deep aches of the soul. A young man named Jason sat in his chair, his face buried in his hand, his head occasionally rising to gasp a breath as he sobbed, Why didn't he want me? I don't understand why my dad didn't want me. Why didn't he want me, man? What's wrong with me?" None of the other men in the room had the answer to his question. But most of us knew the problem: young Jason was crying out for the acceptance and affirmation of his father. He was saying, "Am I such a defect that I am unlovable as a son and as a man?"

What happened next was absolutely beautiful and unscripted. Phil, an older man in the group, got out of his seat and walked straight over to Jason. He embraced him and in a loud voice said to him, "Jason, I'll be your dad and you're my son!"

From that day forward, Phil was involved in Jason's life as a surrogate father. Their relationship with one another deepened as the years passed. Although Phil didn't pay for Jason's college tuition or his room and board, he was present to pray with Jason, take him to lunch, listen to his struggles, and share his life wisdom with him. During one of my last conversations with Phil before he died, we talked about his relationship with Jason. At one point, he lifted his head and with a passionate conviction and said, "You know Jason is my son!" I nodded in the affirmative and said, "I know."

Phil became a tangible expression of our Heavenly Father's love for a young man who felt unwanted and unworthy of his natural father's love.

Possible Preaching Angle: Although this story is about two men, the principle of becoming a "father" to a lost "son" applies to a woman becoming a "mother" to a lost "daughter." This is what we should do for each other in the body of Christ.

In his work with International Justice (a Christian ministry that works to free the victims of human trafficking), Gary Haugen says he has noticed what he calls "the 15-70-15 Rule." Haugen applies this rule to criminal justice systems around the world—police forces, court systems, etc. But the same rule applies to many other areas of the Christian life—leadership, service, evangelism. Haugen writes:

The rule has no real scientific precision, but it expresses the observation that, within criminal justice systems in the developing world, it seems that about 15 percent of the personnel wake up every day intent on using their coercive power and authority for [selfish or corrupt] purposes. Another 15 percent wake up every day with an earnest intent to do good and to serve the public. The vast majority—the remaining 70 percent—are simply waiting to see which of these two factions is going to prevail … As long as the brutal and corrupt 15 percent is prevailing, the rest of the 70 percent are going to go along and join in the dysfunction and abuse—because it … would be risky to oppose the dominant ethos.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Justice; Injustice; Servanthood—This rule not only applies to issues of injustice, poverty, and social justice, it can also apply to Christian service or church membership. In other words, are we part of the 70 percent who just wait to see which way the wind is blowing? Or will we take the initiative to pursue what is right and good? (2) Leaders; Leadership—Leaders don't wait to analyze the percentages. They take action for the good no matter what others are doing.