In the New Testament, we have four gospels – the stories of Jesus told from the perspective of early apostles. We have a bunch of letters that Paul, John, James, Peter, and others wrote to their respective churches. We have the vision of John recorded in the book of Revelation, and we have the book of Acts. Acts is unique among the other New Testament writings in that it is the only book that is really all about the life and work of the early church.

It is the companion volume to the gospel of Luke and picks up right where Luke leaves off with the Ascension of Jesus and the replacement of Judas in the roster of disciples. From there it goes on to catalog the journeys of Peter and Paul and to tell about how the church grew in those early years. Though it may not be a successful model for church growth in today’s environment, many have turned back to its pages to try to recall the excitement and the passion in which the early church began.

I confess that I’m one of those who want to go back – way back – to those early, early church years and discover what it must have been like to tell the story, not like it was 2,000 years old but as if it happened only yesterday. Being “the church” doesn’t always ring of such excitement anymore. When we try to play up that excitement, it can come across as false, phony. Every time I read through the local Oak Ridge Visions magazine, I chuckle when I get to the big ad for the church that meets at Tinseltown Theatre. Bless their hearts! I actually admire a lot of what they’re doing. They are trying their best to be contemporary, exciting, relevant, community oriented, and my guess is that they’re doing a hundred times more to draw in new people than we are. However, I laugh because they call their kids program “Meltdown” and their graphic for it is, well, you can probably guess, it’s a mushroom cloud. It may be metaphorically accurate, but probably not the best way to describe ministry to children.

But I understand the logic, really I do. Sometimes I feel tempted by the programs and experts who suggest that the way to bring people to church is to do a media blitz of attractive advertising, or to offer whatever music people say they want, or to entertain them with emotional displays and eye-popping visuals. At the very least, I wish we would do more to acknowledge why exactly we exist on the corner of Oak Ridge Turnpike and Lafayette Avenue. I get tired of being the ho-hum, established, comfortable church that is sits around and waits for folks to walk through our doors, and then wrings our hands when they don’t show up.

We do a whole host of good things, but I often wonder if we’re trying to keep a secret fellowship going here. In the same breath, I’ve heard it said that we are in dire need of resources, things like people and money and new energy, but we really don’t want to grow as a church. We like who we are, who our friends are, and how things have worked for the past 20 or 30 years. Why should we change anything all that much? Knowing that, we still claim all the excuses in the world for why we aren’t growing. Even here I’ve heard it said that we don’t have a critical mass for whatever it is (now there’s an Oak Ridge analogy for you) and I’ve heard that term used about everything from kids, to funding, to volunteer hours. What exactly are we waiting for?

Paul wasn’t waiting on the Stewardship drive to happen. He found a wealthy woman and took her up on the offer to stay at her house. He didn’t take out a full-page ad in the Macedonian Observer. He prayed for the Spirit to tell him where his travels would be most fruitful. He did nothing to promote youth and children’s programs. In fact there’s a rather obscure story in scripture about how Paul bored a teenager to death with his preaching. And if that wasn’t enough to send parents running, Paul also recruited his young assistant pastor by taking him to be circumcised so he’d have better luck telling their story in Jewish communities. These aren’t your typical church growth strategies.

What they had in the early, early church that sometimes I believe we are completely missing is that raw passion for the story, for the good news. They not only preached from scripture, they lived in the way of Jesus. They took the time to write down their experience or to write to others about their experience – pre-email. And the love of God was at the center of everything, everything that they did.

Coming back to this particular chapter in Acts, we read multiple stories of how Paul left this strange wake behind him wherever he went. On the one hand, he locked in these die-hard converts who would do just about anything to spread the good news. But on the other hand, he made people so mad at him that they flogged him in public and sent him to prison without so much as a case against him. That’s what real passion will do. Again, as far as church growth strategies go, measuring the Christian success rate of these 40 verses of scripture would be a rather ridiculous task. Do you count the numbers of converts and then subtract numbers of angry magistrates? Or are the angry magistrates counted “for the Christian cause” since Paul and his buddies seemed to anger the “right” crowd?

Anytime we try to go back and extract the wisdom for today from ancient texts, we inevitably encounter things that are strange to us. The idea that Timothy wouldn’t be accepted because he was, in one particular way too much like his Greek father, surprises us. It’s hard to know why Paul was so frustrated about the slave girl who had a spirit of divination – especially since she was confirming his absolute connection to God. We may be a bit more inclined to understand the anger of the slave-owners who lost their income stream when the spirit was cast out. But then again, to react to that by ordering a public flogging and a bogus arrest seems an implausible punishment for the act committed.

More recently we can recount modern examples that are similar to the latter part of the story. We have read about people who have accepted jail time to make a particular point for the public good. Paul and Silas remaining in jail after the miraculous earthquake so they could minister to the jailer and prove a point to their accusers sounds like a story of justice we might be inclined to repeat.

But what I’d like for us to hear and understand in this chapter of Acts today is just how strange it is to be on a mission from God. Following Paul in his ministry was anything but simple. He was totally, radically, unapologetically committed to following Jesus Christ and to extending the story of redemption and salvation as deep and as wide as it could possibly go in his lifetime. To that end, he would travel much farther than the majority of his contemporaries ever went. He would find himself in situations where he was thought to be the cause of or reason behind natural disasters. He would be beaten or put in prison by those who found him offensive. And at the same time he would encounter and convert the people who would then inspire others to keep this story being told for generation after generation after generation.

It’s not easy to build a church growth strategy, and I suspect that Paul never thought about what he was doing in quite that way. What I can tell you is that there are at least 1,001 programs out there that will tell you how to grow your church, but from what I’ve experienced, growth comes from a combination of the things we can do and the things that we have no control over whatsoever – the Spirit’s work. Paul’s strategy was most definitely “hit and miss” but it was his peculiar commitment to Jesus Christ that spread the message farther and wider than anyone else could have done, maybe even with Jesus included. The record doesn’t lie, Paul easily turned off as many people as he persuaded – but I do suspect one thing was true – very few people who met or heard about him could remain Paul-neutral. He was passionate and excited about following Jesus – that point could not be argued. He was in the business of converting people to Christianity – and could do nothing else.

But there’s a real difference between making converts to a religion and adding new members to an existing church. I love having new people join us on our journey, but I dare say that the former sounds far more exciting to me. It’s dangerous, and radical, and life-altering. I’d like to know what it means to be truly converted – willing to alter my body converted; willing to let prisoners who’ve just humiliated the town magistrates crash my house converted; changed from wanting to kill myself to willing to die for a cause converted. I’d like to know what it’s like to have that kind of courage, and passion, and excitement about my faith and be willing to share that with others.

I fear that we’ve become so “middle of the road,” so much the institution, that being a Christian now just doesn’t compare with the early church very much at all. If we do want to take this early church model seriously, what does it suggest to us? Perhaps it suggests that if our faith doesn’t make our lives different – we’re not doing something quite right. If we’re no longer making waves and starting trouble, then we’ve become too much a part of the establishment. If people aren’t either excited or afraid to be around us, then the message of Jesus isn’t the message of hope, and redemption, and salvation that it used to be.

I don’t know for sure. You’ll ultimately have to decide for yourself, we all do. What does it mean for you to be a follower of Jesus Christ? Have you been converted to Christianity – wholly and completely? Will you let this story shine in your life so that others can bear witness to the truth of the gospel through you? Will we as a congregation let this story go viral, become so contagious again in this place that the Spirit adds to, no multiplies, our number?

There are things we can do to make ourselves more ready to grow in our faith and to grow as a church. We can pay attention to improving our ministries. We can more fully develop our sense of mission. We can relate to each other in better and better ways. But to get to the heart of the matter, we have to be able to live out the story. Without that – nothing else will matter. Will you let the living Christ live in you?

Amen.