We exist to meet other people’s needs with love!
As you know, the cultural impact of the North American church has declined in the past century. This decline has resulted in a society which no longer implicitly trusts it institutions. This new cultural environment necessitates that churches begin to utilize methodologies which many would have believed appropriate only on the foreign mission field a generation ago. In today’s America the foreign mission field is just across the threshold of our homes. Our goal is to renew and re-tool our church’s ministry by going back to our roots.
An excellent means for evaluating the ministries of our church is to determine how each of them fit into Christ’s mandate to the church in Acts chapter 1:
2 . . . after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen. 3 After his suffering, he showed himself to these men and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God. 4 On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. 5 For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” 6 So when they met together, they asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” 9 After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.
We are beginning to evaluate what our church is doing in its Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth.
A strict one-to-one application of Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria is difficult for us in America.
Israel is a very small country, roughly the size of our smallest state of Rhode Island. For the apostles Jerusalem was their home, their city. Judea was their state and region.
During Jesus’ time Judea was a Roman province. It encompassed all of the territory of the former kingdoms of Israel and Judea as well as Samaria. Samaria was the name used to describe the city and region occupied by the Samaritans. This group of people were hated by the Jews of Jesus’ day because of their false worship of Yahweh. The Samaritans are the decedents of the ten tribes who made up the Northern Kingdom of Israel who were not exiled but forcibly intermarried with settlers from other parts of the Assyrian Empire when the upper classes of the Kingdom of Israel were carried away into exile around 720 BC. Mount Gerizim is where they worshiped God according to only the Torah. When Nehemiah returned with the remnant of the Southern Kingdom of Judah after it had been exiled to Babylon, the Samaritans and the returning exiles could not unite due to disagreements over their interpretation of the Torah. As a result, lingering bad blood culminated in outright hatred, defining the Jewish/Samaritan relationship during New Testament Times. Thus to be a witness in Samaria would require us to go to those in our own nation whom we like least and who may in fact hate us most.
The ends of the earth would represent what you and I know as foreign missions.
Each of us need to ask ourselves how are we serving the needs of the persons who live nearest to our church, whether or not they are members. Next, we need to examine what our church’s ministries do to impact people’s lives. Are there people who can testify to how their lives have been radically changed for the good by our church’s ministries?
While America has been a Christian nation from its inception, its behavior has not always been explicitly Christian. For example, when in 1812 the first missionary study was conducted to ascertain the church’s condition on the frontier, it concluded that, “This is a good field for missionary labor, [because] drunkenness and profane swearing are very prevalent in this district, and the Sabbath is greatly polluted, by visiting, hunting, fishing, and neglecting public worship even where they can enjoy it.” The churches of America in this era took Schermerhorn and Mills’ report as a call to action and launched a great missionary enterprise which made America a Christian nation.
It is our hope that FBCE will take the information before us in our own community each day and discover that we are also in a “good field for missionary labor.”
