I became a deliberate and open follower of Jesus Christ when I was sixteen years old. The people who mentored me made it clear that I needed to let other people know that I had become a deliberate and open follower of Jesus Christ. The term I was taught for letting other people know was witnessing. I have never doubted that witnessing belongs to a full-orbed Christian life.

But those early and lasting lessons in witnessing set up conflicts in me that endure to this day. The nature of those conflicts belongs in another conversation, except to say that it has to do with methods. The outcome of those conflicts bears strongly on what I say today. The outcome has been the on-going effort to restate the meaning and methods of witnessing to the reality of Jesus Christ.

Central to that conflict has been a focus on the witness of the individual instead of the witness of the Church. Focus on the witness of the individual nearly always failed in one or more of the following ways.

First, it patronized or neglected the Church altogether. For example, the person bearing witness didn't need to be part of the Church. What the individual needed was good methods and materials. The worshipping church stood to one side, like a mother-in-law on the honeymoon, resented and useless.

Second, it made it seem like one size fits all, when it comes to witness. When you seperate witnessing from the communal experience of the Church, it rapidly becomes a technique, and techniques of necessity will be simple and less flexible and will therefore force people into a mold. The results are not all pretty.

Third, focus on the individual said nothing about the quality of life of the whole Christian community. The idea that the Church might live in such a way as to advance the gospel of Christ received lip-service at best in all the exhortations to witness I used to hear. The idea that its quality of life would be central to the advance of the Gospel barely received honorable mention.

Fourth, it left the impression that there was no relationship between the Church and salvation. Witnessing was an individual performance, and salvation was an individual experience. "I got saved" was the way I often heard it expressed, in the same spirit in which one might say, "I got a new shirt," or "I got well."

I know that many people come to faith through these efforts; and I rejoice in that. Nothing we do is all pure, and God doesn't wait for it to be pure before He blesses people.

My accusation is that to focus on the individual as witness and to diminish the Church as witness is a distortion that needs to be corrected. I offer this sermon as a corrective. Taking this step brings us back into the world of the Thessalonian congregation. Turn with me to 1 Thessalonians 1:8-10.

The Thessalonian Model
Paul opened this intensely personal letter with thanksgiving for the Thessalonian congregation. A third occasion for his thanksgiving came from the content of their faith, which showed itself in unmistakable public ways. Here is what Paul wrote. The Lord's message rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia - your faith in God has become known everywhere. Therefore we do not need to say anything about it, for they themselves report what kind of reception you gave us. They tell how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead - Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.

Their faith in Christ was public and communal. You can see these characteristics in chapter 2:14-15 where suffering is the public, communal witness. For you, brothers, became imitators of God's churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus: You suffered from your own countrymen the same things those churches suffered from their countrymen, the non-Christian Jews, some of whom killed the Lord Jesus.

Look over in chapter 4:11-12. He was addressing the whole church. Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody. Responsible work habits in the Church offered public, communal witness, which won the respect of outsiders, and that respect made outsideres interested in and vulnerable to what was going on in that church. And what was going on was Jesus Christ and the life of God in human relationships.

1 Thessalonians 5:5-6 gives one more example of what I am talking about. You are all sons of the light and sons of the day. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness. So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep, but let us be alert and self-controlled. The language and the emphasis are public (let us not be like others) and communal (you heare it in the plurals: You are all sons of the light ... We do not belong to the night ... let us not be like others ... let us be alert and self-controlled).

Paul said absolutely nothing about what individual believers in that church said to their non-Christian neighbors. Undoubtedly, they said a lot. They had a lot of explaining to do. But what they said and however well or poorly they said it, it was backed up by the public and communal experience of the Church.

With this as a background, I'd like to talk about the witness of BVBC to Jesus Christ. Even though the apostle said absolutely nothing about what individual Thessalonian believers said to their non-Christian neighbors, I need to say a few things about what we might be saying to our non-Christian friends. Second, following the example of the Thessalonian Church in chapter one, I'd like to talk about some powerful, public and communal ways that BVBC might bear witness to the reality of Jesus Christ.

On the Grapvine
George Barna is a California Christian, who runs a polling organization that tries to keep its finger on the pulse of issues that affect evangelical Christianity. Last January 31 (http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=181), he "explored nine specific approaches to sharing faith in Christ with non-believers. If you download this sermon you can click on the link and read the article. I though you might want to know the three most common approaches and the least common approach that Barna found.

The most frequently used approache among the people Barna surveyed was to "offer to pray with a non-Christian who was in need of encouragement or support." 78% of the people surveyed said they had done that during the past year. I have to say that no one, including complete strangers, has ever refused when I offered to pray for them.

The second most common approach was "lifestyle evangelism." The survey described that as living in ways that would impress non-Christians and cause them to "raise questions about that lifestyle." 74% of "born-again adults" said they did this. Unfortunately, the article didn't talk about what kind of living made that kind of impression. Neither did it tabulate how often this approach resulted in actual conversations about Jesus Christ.

The third most common approach was to "start a discussion with a non-Christian in which you intentionally asked what they believe concerning a particular moral or spiritual matter, and continued to ask questions about their views without tell them they are wrong, but continuing to nicely challenge them to explain their thinking and its implications." 69% of those surveyed took this approach.

The least used approach was "preaching on the street or in other public places (11%)." It is among the least, if not the least, personal of all the approaches that Barna asked about.

But did you notice? Barna's survey focused entirely on the witness of the individual. It reminds us how powerful the paradigm I decribed earlier continues to be in evangelical culture. It's not wrong, it's just distorted. So, I want to bring some balance to our perceptions by commenting briefly on the approaches to sharing faith in Jesus Christ that characterize BVBC. I'll mention two.

We take seriously the conventional wisdom that says evangelism is most effective among children and teenagers than among adults. We have put our money where our mouth is. We have hired staff that focus on those two age groups. We built the east wing to make room for more children. Then, two years later, we built the west wing to make room for more teenagers. We run Sunday classes and small groups and choirs. We have VBS and a pre-school. We take students to Maine and Alberta and Ukraine and impoverished sections of Washington, D.C. In all these environments, we seek along with their parents to form Jesus Christ in them. I think that is wise and effective.

Second, BVBC has proved itself to be a safe place for adults, who somehow lost their way spiritually and looking to rediscover or discover for the first time a vital faith. Thousands of people live within a five-mile radius of this sanctuary, who grew up in a church, went to a religious school, read the Bible and learned their catechisms as children, and then they fell away from it all.

BVBC is safe, because it is peaceful, it doesn't always have its hand out for money, it's not always telling people what not to do, and it allows people to proceed at their own pace in rediscovering the faith they lost in college or somewhere else. This community embodies these values. A lot more people would come here if they knew we were like this. Don't underestimate the power of communal witness.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
That brings me to the heart of this sermon. The heart of the sermon takes us back to 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10. Those verses tell us what drew the attention of people all along the Adriatic seaboard to the Thessalonian Christians. They themselves report what kind of reception you gave us. They tell how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead - Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.

The crucial action that drew attention was that they turned to God from idols. Idols were everywhere. Acts 17:16 says that while Paul was waiting ... in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. Every non-Jewish city in the Roman world was full of idols. That's just the way life worked in the ancient world. So, for a little sect of Christians to reject idols for a God you couldn't see was news. You just didn't do that sort of thing. It was un-American, or whatever they called it back then.

So, here is the question I'd like to pose for our consideration. Are there ways in our culture that the witness of the Church will stand out as the witness of the early Christian congregations stood out? What in our culture are the socail equivalents of rejecting idols?

I believe it is possible, and I'd like to offer you some possibilities. I will make seven short statements and then comment briefly on each. Here they are. 1) Keep sex within marriage. 2) Keep marriages together. 3) Protect the unborn and the infirm. 4) Do these things in the name of Christ and His Church. 5) Pay the price to do them. 6) Do them in overwhelming numbers. 7) Do them without a whiff of self-righteousness. Let's look briefly at each.

1) Keep sex within marriage. This goes diametrically contrary to the values of our culture. I cam across a statement by a professor and a coed that illustrate the challenge. Here is what the professor said.

"Sexual promiscuity is the elephant in the dorm room: Every student knows that it's there one way or another - pressure, expectation, reality - but is either afraid to face the fact or too ashamed to admit that he fits the profile, or doesn't." (All quotes below can be found at: http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006716.)

Here in her own words is one coed's resolution of the problem, and this may be hopeful. She said, "'I've realized that promiscuity is incongruent with the rest of my life because the rest of my life is grounded in my faith ... So, I decided to give up sex and dating because I don't know how to date without sex anymore.' She decided to call herself a 'thinking it through virgin.'"

2) Keep marriages together. I have a book called The Case for Marriage. It is not particularly religious. It makes the case for marriage on other grounds. One feature in recent studies of marriage in this country is shocking. "86% of unhappily married people who stick it out find that, five years later, their marriages are happier" (The Case for Marriage, 148). Too many marriages have given up too soon.

3) Protect the unborn and the infirm. This is easier today, because the pro-life voice has earned a place in the public discussion. The challenge will be more personal. How will we respond to the woman who says, "I'm pregnant, and I don't want to carry this child,"? Can we help her sense her deep self-worth and provide her with adequate support - medical, psychological, financial, and spiritual?

Can we also care for the infirm: the deeply handicapped, those with severe memory loss, those whose health will never improve and who need more and more attention? Are we willing to spend ourselves on their behalf?

4) Do these things in the name of Christ and His Church. So much motivation is negative. We pursue our vision to honor our Savior.

5) Pay the price to do them. There will be a price. People may mock us. The effort may cost us personally. Do we think it is worth it?

6) Do them in overwhelming numbers. This is not just for BVBC. Everything is on a large scale today. The Christian witness needs to be on a large scale.

7) Do them without a whiff of self-righteousness. We are not doing this to prove anything or to compare ourselves with other people. It is our way to be people of integrity in a world where we are free to do anything we can get away with. Here's to integrity.