Sermon of the Month - June 2008
Change Agents
Today’s theme is “Change Agents”. I’ve been reading Steve Chalke’s latest book, called Change Agents, which is very insightful, as I will mention later. And I see that the recent (2007) faithworks conference was also called Change Agents – so this seems to be the theme of the moment.
Now we live in an age of change, and as churches we need to flourish in such a time of change. We have faced and will continue to face many challenges of change, adapatation and renewal. As a church, we are going through a specially obvious time of change. Of course different people will have different responses to all that. I remember hearing of the young minister visiting an elderly member of the church. Wondering what to say, he commented, “I suppose over the years, you’ve seen many changes in the church?” “Aye,” the crusty old fellow says, “And I’ve voted against every one of them!”
I have found in my experience that when a church is going through a period of change, even if it’s going reasonably well, you can divide the members into three groups. About a quarter don’t like the changes, and think things would be so much better if we could slow down, and perhaps go back to how things were a few years ago. Another quarter are fed up with how slow the changes are. They see ahead, and are impatient to get there. What’s wrong with this church is that we are not where some go ahead church that could be named is. And then there’s about half the members who are with Goldilocks: they think it’s just about right. And that’s when things are working out reasonably well. We’d better not comment on what happens when things are not going so well.
We’re looking at the middle part of Acts to see how God helps us through the process of change. Last week Sue and Laura looked at the story of Philip, and the people he met and whose lives were changed. First of all, the Samaritans. There was a big jump. Samaritans and Jews, famously divided and hostile. Think the Balkans, and you’ve got something of the feel of it. But here was Philip a Jewish Christian reaching out to the Samaritans. And the impact was fantastic. There were great miracles, people being healed and people set free from evil powers; people being converted. But also Philip took care to make sure that the apostles, the leaders of the church in Jerusalem, were properly informed and more: Peter and John came in person and prayed for these Samaritan believers in Jesus to receive the Holy Spirit. The church was already facing persecution, and now it was experiencing change through rapid and unexpected growth. But it was going to work together.
But now as we move into Acts 9, we turn to the biggest changes of all. For nearly 2,000 years the faith had been for the descendants of Abraham, and the Christians at first continued with that, but adding that the historic prophecy of the coming of God’s Messiah was now fulfilled in Jesus. The move to the Samaritans, for all their historic rivalry with the Jews, did not really change that. But now the gospel was about to break out into the pagan world. People with no background in the Bible at all, or belief in God, were going to become Christian in great numbers. And the story starts with the conversion of the man at the heart of all this, and on the face of it, the most unlikely man in the world. This was Saul of Tarsus, a young Pharisee and scholar, motivated – driven indeed – by utter hatred of Christians, and of Jesus, whom they honoured as Messiah. A member of the radical purists, the Pharisees, think of the militant religious suicide bombers of today and you’re probably not too far away from Saul, that most unlikely agent of change.
Yes, today we are looking at change agents.
1. Ananias
The first of the change agents I want us to look at is Ananias. He was a reluctant agent of change. Called by God to pray for Saul of Tarsus, he protests, Lord, I have heard many reports about this man and all the harm he has done... There’s not a little alarm as well as incredulity in the response Ananias makes to God. But God says Go! And tells Ananias why: This man [Saul] is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles...
Not every change agent is a pioneering visionary enthusiast. Not every one is an obvious leader. Don’t assume you could never be a vital change agent. At a moment he never expected, God said, Go! And he went. Without Saul becoming Paul the world would not be the same. Ananias was not famous. But God used him.
You may feel reluctant to be part of God’s plan. But he will use you. When God says, Go! Will you go?
2. Saul/Paul
Then there is Saul of Tarsus. One of the most important change agents in all history. As Saul of Tarsus he was a passionate Hebrew believer in God. He belonged to the party of the Pharisees, that strict set of zealous laymen, determined to shine in their devotion to God in every possible detail.
He was a bigot. And bigots are not in the habit of changing their minds! But Saul was changed. It took a direct and dramatic encounter with the living God to do that. He was the unlikeliest change agent. And his ministry saw the setting up church after church after church all over the Mediterranean. But Saul is not alone in being an unlikely change agent.
Anthony Bloom was the nephew of Russian composer Scriabin, born of Russian parents but in Switzerland. And he was an atheist. He was a soldier and not particularly interested in religion. He was not looking for Christ. But like many soldiers he received Scriptures. It was the Gospel of Mark he had been given. And with nothing else to do, he started idly reading it. Suddenly he became aware of someone else in the room opposite him. He became aware of Jesus directly opposite him. As he read about Jesus, he met him. He was changed.
In later years, his faith deepened and he became a priest in the Russian Orthodox tradition, moving soon after ordination from France to England, where he eventually became the head of Russian Orthodox Christians in this country and beyond, as Metropolitan Anthony Bloom.
When I was a student in Cambridge, Metropolitan Anthony came to preach on several occasions. He was profound in many different ways. But there was something special that I did not really understand at the time. When he spoke, you could really feel the Holy Spirit. He was a man of deep prayer, and his time with God made a great difference.
He made a difference by helping Russian Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians learn together to love and serve and follow Jesus Christ. And I well remember the occasion he was the keynote speaker at the Baptist Assembly back in the 1980s.
God can have some surprising change agents. Don’t write anyone off. Pray for them instead. And don’t write yourself off. Dare to believe that God believes in you. – So much that he gave his Son Jesus for you. And he wants the best for you. Dare to want that best. Dare to pray to be shown the best that God wants for you and through you. If God can change unlikely people like Saul, he can change you. Dare to let him, and seek his life-changing work in your life.
3. Barnabas
Third, we have Barnabas. Barnabas was a different sort of change agent: he is the great facilitator of the New Testament: he facilitated change, by encouraging people.
Sometimes people say what we need is vision and visionaries. They remind us of the King James Version translation of Proverbs 29:18: where there is no vision, the people perish. But it’s not just visionaries we need. The visionary may have a fantastic vision, but if nobody catches the vision, it goes nowhere. Saul was converted and went on, having changed his name to Paul to become a great transforming leader in the church. But if Barnabas had not dared to believe that God had really changed him, Saul would have just been a footnote. But God used Barnabas the great facilitator and encourager just as much as Paul, the great leader.
Barnabas was a great enabler of the change God was bringing to the Christian church. Instead of being a Jewish Christian sect, or a mainly Jewish Christian group with a slightly larger Gentile fringe than had been common in Jewish groups at the time, Barnabas by enabling Saul and working with him, brought a new possibility into the church: the great apostle to the Gentiles, and through their work together, the emergence of largely Gentile communities turning to God, through faith in Jesus Christ.
God wants visionaries. But he also wants encouragers and enablers and facilitators. And if we are to see helpful life-building changes in our churches, we need many people like Barnabas. In his book On the Anvil, Robert Warren made an observation which I have found helpful in this – though he credits this insight to John Wimber. Within any organisation of group of people engaged in a common work, you can find roughly four different types. He calls them the radicals, the progressives, the conservatives and the traditionalists.
The radicals love change. They see it and they are eager to make it happen now! The progressives are OK about change – but change for changes sake. So they will weigh it up. But they are ready to listen to the radicals. But then they often moderate some of these radical ideas. Then there are the conservatives. Actually they are quite like the progressives as we will see. But they take longer to convince. They are more cautious. They need more evidence. They are more risk averse. But they can be won round if the case is made and the evidence presented. And here’s the interesting thing. It’s not the radicals who help the conservative. They usually scare them! It’s the progressives. The radicals are passionate people. But the progressives and the conservatives are people who are more persuaded by thinking something through, than by passion and emotion. The final group, the traditionalists, are actually also passionate and emotional like the radicals. But their strong feelings are against change. They are like the man I started with who said he’d voted against every change.
When helpful change happens, it needs a radical or two to have a new idea, to see a new possibility. But it needs a progressive or two to reshape it and improve it, and to show how it can work so the larger, conservative group can take to this and make it work.
I remember a radical coming up with a great idea, but in this unrefined form: a blitzkrieg drop of videos of the film Jesus (a slightly abridged version of Luke’s gospel) to every house for people of all faiths and none within our multi-cultural city. To work, this idea would need people to make it happen. Some progressives caught hold of the idea, but improved it. We would pilot this in a few small selected areas, first alerting the householders that we would visit shortly, on a named day, offering them a video with only one condition, that they would agree to watch it and tell us what they felt about it. I took part in one of these pilot drops, and found a very positive response. And the most positive and welcoming response was in the Muslim, Hindu and Sikh houses. These were the people who came up to me in the street asking for the videos so they could watch the story of Jesus, and who invited me into their houses, commenting enthusiastically on what they saw. Without the radical, the idea would never have happened. Without the progressive, it would never have worked.
In this picture, Paul was the great radical, and Barnabas the great progressive. Together they were a winning team. When the church faced crisis over circumcision, they managed to help the conservatives like James to accept the great change of recognising Gentiles who followed Jesus without being circumcised as true Christians.
Where do you see yourself? I suspect I am nearest to the progressives in this picture. Each of us is different, and I expect we will find all four here today: radicals, progressives, conservatives and traditionalists. And we are all children of God. But what we need is great partnerships – and that great partnership of Paul and Barnabas the radical convert and the great enabler and encourager – we need that partnership in every church today.
4. The Holy Spirit
But now we move on to the greatest change agent of all: the Holy Spirit. The book we are reading is called The Acts of the Apostles, but it could just as easily be called The Acts of the Holy Spirit. For we are seeing the fulfilment of those last words of Jesus in Acts 1:8: when the Holy Spirit comes on you...you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. And what we see in Acts 9 is the beginning of this move beyond the Holy Land to the ends of the earth.
We are change agents for God, when we let God change us. Let us pray for God’s Spirit. God’s Spirit is God himself in person available and at work among us and in our lives. We cannot be agents for God without God, and the way God makes himself available for us is in person – through his Spirit. The Spirit changed Ananias, Saul and Barnabas. And God through his Spirit, wants to change us all so we are transformed by his love and grace, and in that way and only in that way can we be agents of God’s agenda for transformative change.
5. You and me?
So we are left with a question which we have seen from many different angles. What about you and me? Are we ready to be agents of God’s change?
You might be reluctant like Ananias. You might think of yourself as a surprising or even impossible agent for the changes God wants to bring. But God can use you if you will let him. You might be someone who enables change by a ministry of encouragement. Where do you fit in? I began mentioning Steve Chalke’s latest book, Change Agents. He is certainly a radical! But as he spelt out his own vision, I felt myself strongly challenged. What is my vision? How clearly am I following it? What changes will I be an agent of? Let us all ask again, who we are, and how and in what way God is calling us to be agents for his wonderful and life-transforming changes in our world.