10/17/65

Scripture: Acts 16: 1-10.

Text: Acts 16: 9; “And a vision appeared to Paul in the night; a man of Macedonia was standing beseeching him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’”

A minister of a Christian denomination other that the United Church of Christ was ordained at the beginning of this century and is now retired. He was talking with his son, an active churchman, about the idealism of his time in the ministry, concerning the mission of the church -- or “missions.” Later, the son told a friend about some of the conversation. “Father,” he said, “came in on the flood tides of Christian hope, when the motto was ‘The evangelization of the world in this generation.’ And now he thinks the world is, if anything, worse than when he started.” There is little doubt that the climate for that kind of Christian expectation has dropped during this century, from about 90 degrees to near zero. We still sing, “Jesus shall reign where’er the sun does his successive journeys run,” just as our fathers did. The words are the same; the tune is the same. But, even when we sing it heartily the mood is not the same. Our hope is to be expressed in some different way.

A medical missionary was sent to China in 1910. He went with the soaring hopes and boundless confidence of those days. The Christian world was stirred with the great advance of the gospel. Christianizing the peoples of the entire planet seemed just over the horizon. There seems to have been an element of false optimism during that time --- an under-rating of the powers of evil and an over-rating of a historical tide that flows toward peace and progress. There was a false estimate of the durability of Anglo-Saxon hegemony in the world. But there was also a faith, a confidence, a readiness for sacrifice that has been characteristic of Christian folk in the church during many ages and that has to be recaptured by Christians of this time in history, now.

How ought we to go about it? How do we achieve that perspective? Can we attain to it? There are those who would say about this vision of a Christian world: “Forget it.” I suppose there are people with this viewpoint in most Christian communities. They reason that the world is in a mess, and that there is precious little that the church can do about it. “Look,” they say,” at the missions to China; and now the communists have the whole country. Look at the missions to Africa; and that whole continent is now on the boil. Let’s stop dreaming about a Christian world and wake up to the problems on our own doorstep.”

Well, any observant Christian churchman knows that there are enough individual needs, close at hand, needing some kind of a ministry. There are enough troubled hearts, enough perplexed or inquiring minds, to demand all the time and strength and energy one has to give. Why bother with the “world” dimension? Perhaps the short answer is that no one can minister a “local Christ” to anyone. If we have only a limited formula for peace of mind, we can limit our attention to a few square miles. If all we offer is some set of ideas to fascinate the mind, we may ignore the world situation. But we preach and teach and follow Jesus Christ. It is his grace that we try to bring to troubled hearts. It is his truth that we offer to the inquiring mind. And Jesus Christ can not be contained in any little area of man’s describing. For Jesus Christ is not just my Savior and the Savior of a few families in Wisconsin Rapids and Wood County. Whoever knows him knows that he is Savior of the World. “God sent His Son into the world, to redeem the world, and that the world through him might be saved.” [John 3: 16, 17].

Those first disciples of Jesus made this discovery. They wanted to keep Him to themselves. But they were shown, in no uncertain terms, that he was not their Christ to keep. “I have other sheep, that are not of this fold,” he said; “I must bring them also.” [John 10: 16]. Gradually it dawned upon them what kind of Master they had found. The gift of Christ was not just for them; it was not just for the church. “God so loved the world that he gave His Son that whosoever believes on Him should not perish, but have eternal life.” [John 3: 16]. There came Christ’s commission to his followers: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to the whole creation.” [Mark 16: 15]. So it has always been. The nearer people come to Christ, the wider their vision. Peter finds that whom he supposed was a Jewish messiah is calling the Gentiles, too. And he wakens to a mission that never ends. Paul, a few years later, stood at the tip of Asia and, looking across the water to a foreign continent, met his first European. “A vision appeared to Paul in the night,” we have read: “A man of Macedonia was standing beseeching him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’” [Acts 16: 9].

This is what the Lord does to those who come to him for help and strength. On the one hand, he supplies their need; on the other, he opens their understanding to the needs of an entire world. At any time, Peter and Paul could have said, “The world is in a mess; and there is little we can do about it. Let’s stop dreaming about a Christian world, and nourish the grace that has been given us.” But the same Lord who helped them, with sufficient grace for their needs, gave them the world as their parish. Without this vision, without their hopes for a Christian world, the gospel would not have crossed that strip of water into Europe; no Christian civilization would have emerged in the West; there would have been no church to cross the Atlantic; and there would have been no congregations of the United Church of Christ, or any other denomination, here in Wisconsin Rapids or anywhere else. There seems to be little question that, as a Christian church we are committed to a world responsibility, to an enterprise that goes out beyond the limits of each parish.

Of course this is not a time to repeat the slogans of the past. It may not be a time for slogans at all. But it is time for a reassessment of our mission in the world, and for recovery of the vital faith and sober hopes that energize the church in every age.

There is, in the young generation of today, as great a potential for Christian service, and as strong an impulse to do battle with the evils that plague the world, as ever before. But all of us need to see the point and purpose of a Christian mission in a world torn with deadly rivalries, where rich nations become richer and the poor poorer; where the future is spelled out with deadly alternative --- swift and appalling overpopulation and diminishing food resources, or suicidal underpopulation.

Some of the church’s older generation maintain a loyalty to the kind of mission that they knew (what used to be called “foreign mission.”) They are often bewildered by the immense changes in a revolutionary world and by some uncertainty as to what the church’s hopes can be. And, of course, there are thousands for whom the word “mission” means little in the context of present day international affairs.

The setting has changed. The missionaries of fifty years ago rode the crest of Western optimism and expansion. The gospel was carried to Africa and the Far East with the prestige of a dominant civilization. Sometimes it has been said that the missionary always followed the trader and the soldier into other lands. This is not true. Sometimes the missionary was there first, with no other thought than the service of Christ. But there was always the thought of the churches back home in the West --- a bastion of prestige and support from which they had sailed forth to backward lands. Now these same lands are independent nations in various stages of development. No kind of paternalism can ever again be acceptable. The idea of a Christian bastion in the West can hardly survive any realistic assessment in 1965.

China was long considered a fertile field for the help of Western missions. Now it is fiercely independent. Some Christian churches survive there, but they have no leadership from, and almost no contact with, the Christians of any other land --- least of all ours. There are Christians in China, but the most optimistic estimates place their number at no more than one in every thousand Chinese.

The Christians of India and of African countries move more and more to the position of self-direction. Many of them still welcome, and even request, the help of missionaries from our churches --- but not as supervisors or directors of their activity --- rather as helpers, advisors, Christian servants of the cause.

Add, to this fundamental change, at least three other factors and we can understand the mighty challenge to our idea of a Christian world. There is (1) the emergence of communism as a dominating, avowedly anti-Christian force, with an aggressive missionary zeal of its own. There is (2) the unexpected revival of Islam and Buddhism in many parts of the world. There is (3) the brute force of population expansion according to which Christians, who were in a world majority at the beginning of the century, are estimated to number less than a third by its close.

With these changes of setting, there has come a change of mood. The note of triumph has died away. Hopes for a Christian world, in this generation or the next, have been indefinitely postponed (or in some cases transferred to an apocalyptic event in which some expect that God will write “finis” to the story of the nations and Himself usher in the reign of Christ.) In this revolutionary change of mood, how do we see the mission of the church? What are we doing when we support the nearly 500 missionaries and fraternal workers of the United Church of Christ Board for World Ministries in more than 30 countries other than our own? What is our hope as we face closer cooperation with other churches in the missionary movement? What are our motives as we back the world mission with our prayers and our money and our young volunteers? And what are our expectations?

A first thing to say is that, while the Christian mood today is sober, it is not defeatist. Mission techniques are changing but mission continues to be imperative. And, as we heard in last Sunday’s lay report from General Synod, our church denomination is on the cutting edge of new ways to make the gospel effective.

25 years ago, Winston Churchill looked catastrophe in the face and said, “We shall go on.” The British people did go on. The best in the Christian church expresses that kind of determined faith in its mission today. After all, is the situation in the world today more daunting than it was when Paul crossed over to a continent totally dominated by the might of Rome and the art of Greece? Is it any more hopeless than what Augustine faced in the chaos and barbarism that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire? Is it more dangerous than the world faced by Martin Luther? or John Huss? or John Knox? --- which sent many of the reformers to their death?

This is not time for resigning from the world mission, at home and abroad, to which our Lord has committed his church. Was there ever a time when the nations, thrown together in a common need and a common danger, so greatly needed the reconciling word of Jesus Christ?

Surely God speaks to us, if we will listen, through the revolutions in which we are living. Instead of bewailing a decline in Christian church power during the last 50 years, instead of lamenting the loss of some kinds of missionary zeal, let us consider three factors of hope, each one of which draws us closer to the authentic message of the New Testament, and to the Savior whom it proclaims.

I. First, we are learning what mission really means. The idea that a missionary is one who goes from a Christian nation to transplant its culture, its ideas, and its ways of life in foreign soil is not to be found in the New Testament. Nor is the thought that missions are a special department of the church to be developed in isolation from its total life. Nor is the thought one of a “Christian nation” taking its message to “foreigners.” In the New Testament no line is drawn at national frontiers. The apostles were not interested in importing Jewish customs to Corinth, Athens and Rome. The line is drawn everywhere and confronts the territory of those who are believers and those who are not. The only obligation of the missionary is to proclaim Jesus Christ in spirit and in truth. The mission is total and continuous. Wherever a Christian goes, he is a missionary.

We may see this more clearly now than we might have seen it fifty years ago. In our close-knit world the Christian Church is present, to some degree, in nearly every corner of the earth. It confronts the territory of opposing belief and unbelief in every nation. We need to seek a closer understanding with all our Christian brethren, by whatever name they are called. The church is mission, and speaks and acts in the name of Jesus Christ to the whole world. And it is surely evident today that we have some mission in our own neighborhoods, as we have in India, Turkey or the Congo.

It is still true that some nations, by the grace of God and the turn of circumstance, have churches that are stronger in tradition, training and material resources than their sister churches elsewhere. Therefore, as in New Testament times, the task of every church is to bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. We are more and more aware of being in a world of shrinking distances, where we are closely bound in the adventure of the human race toward great new opportunity or total catastrophe. Our eyes are being opened to the unity and mutual responsibility of Christ’s church, and the great urgency of her total mission. We are learning what it means.

II. Two, we are learning to be servants. Of course, every missionary who went out in the past was a servant. But often there was a church behind him with power and prestige, inspired by a theology of triumph. The hopes for a Christian world were often expressed in terms of success for our cause. And the churches leaned more heavily than they knew on the support and prestige of the dominant power. Today we are forced back to the spirit of the New Testament where we see the apostles moving about their world as servants of Jesus Christ; guided by no strategies save that of the Holy Spirit; seeking no success but the fulfillment of God’s will. Today it is again the voice of the Serving Lord that we hear, and the cry of the world in need, “Come over and help us.” So we learn that the Christian mission is no power structure. It is a companionship of those who see the need and who go and help in the name and spirit of Christ.

The man or woman who goes today to mission work in Harlem, or South Africa, to ‘Frisco or Hong Kong, to Chicago or India, should not be asked, “How many converts did you make?” for the answer will be, “I went to serve.” The motives for mission are not a lust for power or a desire for success -- even in the best of causes. The motives are a response in service to the call of any Macedonian saying, “Come over and help us.”

III. Third, we are being led to set our hopes in Christ alone. Here we touch the crucial center of our faith, and our expectation for this world. The New Testament tells us that Jesus Christ, who was born into the world of us humans, who lived here among mankind, who suffered and died, whose resurrected spirit lives among those who will know and serve him, is the true Lord of all mankind. He is in this world to be king of our spirits. How and when his kingdom comes about we must be content to leave with our Father God. We can sing, “Jesus shall Reign” with more confidence than ever.

In the past, there was a temptation to set Christian hope on something other than Christ himself. Some of us believed, for a time, that the law of evolution would move the nations to the Christian path. Some believed that progress toward peace and prosperity was inevitable. Some supposed that the advance of the sciences would guarantee a world without want and without war. Many hopes of this sort were smuggled into the Christian expectation.

Today, we are learning that Christ himself is Lord, and He only. We can listen to, and accept, the words at the beginning of the Book of Acts: “It is not for you to know the times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem [Wisconsin Rapids], and in Judea [the state of Wisconsin], and Samaria [all of this nation] and the ends of the earth [all of it, everywhere]. [Acts 1: 7-8].

This is our mission, and this is our hope. We cannot map the immediate future. We cannot forecast what will surely happen in the international struggle for power, justice, prosperity and peace. But we believe that, in this struggle, we are called to serve. And it matters whether or not we are on the side of Christ.

The world is still responsive to an act of faith. And that is where the Christian mission comes in , and persists, in spite of the toil and anguish of a dangerous world. Remember the words of a good hymn in its closing stanza:

And when the fight is fierce, the warfare long,

Steals on the ear the distant triumph song,

And hearts are brave again, and arms are strong.

Alleluia!

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, October 17, 1965.