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  • First, we’ll try to understand church as a working model. What do we mean?
  • When the designers of the SkyDome (now Rogers Centre) in Toronto called a press conference to announce their plans to build the new stadium, they knew there would be a thousand questions. What will it look like? How big will it be? How will the sliding roof work? So they had a miniature working model of the proposed stadium on display at the press conference.
  • If one picture is worth a thousand words, a miniature working model is certainly worth many hours of questions and explanations, repeated over and over again. This miniature working model showed clearly the intentions of the designers and builders. It was a glimpse of the future. Here, in microcosm, the future reality could be clearly seen.
  • In much the same way the church is intended by God to be a working model of the world as God wants it to be. This community is to live as a preview of God’s reign. The word church means those who have been called out. The church is a community of people who have been called out from the popular values and preoccupations of the society in which they are located, in order to learn and model a new way of living for a world that is alienated from God.
  • People are meant to look at the church and say WOW!!!—just as they did when they saw the model of the future Skydome.
  • Aristides was a philosopher in Athens in the second century and he observed the first Christians, the early church, and this is what he recorded about them in 125 AD.
  • “They walk in humility and kindness, and falsehood is not found among them. They love one another. He that has distributes liberally to him that does not have. If they see a stranger they bring him under their own roof and rejoice over him as if he were their own brother.”  
  • Aristides looked at that first church, that earliest gathering of Christians and he said WOW.
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  • Let’s read Matthew 5:13 and then keep put in a bookmark, we’ll come back to this.
  • To those who were interested in learning to follow him, Jesus said “You are the salt of the earth.” He didn’t want them to be the spice of life, or nice hard-working farming folk, like the saying means today.
  • Salt was an integral part of the life of the people to whom Jesus was speaking. In the days before refrigeration, it was salt that kept their perishable food from going bad. It prevented rot from setting in. A community of people who are learning to live as followers of Jesus are called to act as a preservative in their society.
  • So many people in our society today are suffering: from depression, pornography, drug addiction, overwhelmed by debt, alcohol abuse, gambling, sexual addiction, and the incredibly sad list goes on. Many people live quiet lives of pain and desperation, apparently without hope or sense of meaning.
  • A community of people who are learning to be followers of Jesus can point to a better way. The values they live by, the standards they follow, the causes they champion, the love they share, and the hope they point to as they bear witness to God’s truth can have a positive influence on the world around them. Christians have been at the forefront of the fight to end slavery (William Wilberforce), at the forefront of the fight to gain equal rights in the US (Martin Luther King Jr.) the fight to end apartheid (Desmond Tutu), the global fight against HIV/AIDS (Bono), —to only name the most prominent Christians in those causes, not to name the countless number of Jesus’ followers who have committed their lives to being salt of the earth in so many ways.
  • Unfortunately the call to live in a way that has a preservative effect on society has sometimes been misinterpreted by Christians as a call to live in judgment of others, functioning as moral watch dogs. This is an affront to the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Christian community is to gain its influence by modeling a lifestyle of loving, caring, gentleness that proves almost irresistible. Living as followers of Jesus involves much more than simply going to church. We must remove the phrase “going to church” from our faith vocabulary and replace it with “being the church”—we are called to BE the salt of the earth—we don’t just GO to church on Sundays at 11—we are called to BE the church as we learn to follow Jesus.
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  • Jesus went on to say: “You are the light of the world.” This community through its life and teaching is to be a witness for God, to give the world a glimpse of who God is and what it means to be in relationship with God.
  • This of course means that the church will always be imperfect because its membership consists entirely of learners.
  • Christians are not perfect, they are just forgiven. Showing that it is imperfect people that God is madly in love with, and that it is imperfect people who can enter into a relationship with God, this is the church being light, shining in the darkness of our culture, in the darkness of people’s perceptions about Christian faith and the church.
  • That the church is a community of learners is one of the community’s strongest and most appealing qualities. People are learning to love and to accept one another even though they are at various stages of growth, understanding and maturity. The fundamental defining characteristic of the community is its love and concern for absolutely every one of its members, not matter how difficult that might be at times. This is a community that places a very high value on acceptance, caring and forgiveness.
  • To the surrounding society, the sign of God’s presence in such a community is precisely their care and concern for one another, which spills over into genuine care and concern for those outside the community as well. That is what Aristides saw, and he eventually became a Christian.   Proclaiming the gospel in word and deed, living in such a way as to point to the presence of God, and modelling God’s vision for the world, the community is a light shining in the darkness of a despairing and broken world.
  • Jesus put it this way…lets read Matthew 5:14-16.
  • A few things to note: First, Jesus is the true light – we can’t turn it on or off, we can only try to hide it or reflect it. This is a good thing. Like the moon reflects the sun, we are meant to reflect the true light of the world to those around us. When people look at us, they are meant to see something about Jesus and the light he brings. You can see this in the last line, as well. Jesus wants everything we do, all our good works, to make people say “thank God”. They aren’t even meant to notice us, they are meant to notice God.
  • So let me be clear. In the normal course of events it is impossible to be a Christian, a follower of Jesus, on your own. You personally won’t be able to keep it up… we can’t fulfill the call of God to be light and salt on our own, and give people a preview of God’s kingdom.
  • God knows us so well, so intimately and loves us beyond our wildest dreams. God has created a community, the church, for us to be a part of, not only for our sake, but also for the sake of the whole world.
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  • The church, a community of those learning to follow Jesus, is one of God’s many gifts to the world. . Listen to what Napoleon Bonaparte once said. “Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and myself founded empires; but what foundation did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded an empire upon love; and at the hour millions of men would die for him.” That empire is of course Napoleon’s language, and the language that the Bible uses, is ecclesia……a worldwide community of people learning to follow Jesus…..a community based on love—a working model for the world, a community of salt and light, that has already outlasted the empires of Alexander Caesar, Charlemagne and Napoleon.
  • Question: In what ways can you see churches in Canada fulfilling the above roles, or not?