Rev. David Holwick N
First Baptist Church
Ledgewood, New Jersey
April 22, 2018
Hebrews 10:23-25; 13:8
DIVORCING YOUR CHURCH
I. Sometimes it is hard to get along.
A. Can this relationship be saved?
Peggy Wehmeyer is considering filing for divorce.
Her grounds will be infidelity and betrayal.
She is heartsick about it.
She doesn't have any issues with her husband, who is fine,
but her intimate partner of more than 30 years,
the evangelical church, is another matter.
They met at the University of Texas, whose tower is inscribed
with the words, "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall
make you free".
Peggy was looking for truth, for a philosophy that would make
sense of a messed-up world.
She found it in the teachings of Jesus.
And even though her relationship with evangelicals would be
rocky at times, she stayed faithful.
If you find your partner is unfaithful, you face the reality
of packing your bags and leaving.
But how do you leave a church whose members brought you meals
for five months when you were bedridden with a difficult
pregnancy?
How do you separate from a partner whose encouragement and
spiritual wisdom helped you raise your children?
And why would you reject a lover who reminds you that your value
is measured by the quality of the love you give and not by
your popularity or prestige?
You don't. You hang on through the heartbreak, until you can't
hang on anymore.
The first crack in Peggy Wehmeyer's relationship with the
evangelical church came when her children drifted to more
socially conscious churches.
One daughter became a public defender lawyer and sometimes
fights for guilty criminals to get fair sentences.
Peggy asked her how she could defend bad guys, and wouldn't
Jesus want her to be a prosecutor instead?
Her daughter responded, "Are you kidding, Mom?
He hung out with prostitutes and sinners.
He's for the disenfranchised and powerless.
If I'm going to follow Jesus, I follow him into the prisons."
Her other daughter teaches special ed in the inner city.
Peggy begged her to teach in a safer neighborhood.
She responded, "If we're the hands and feet of Jesus - like you
taught us - this is where I need to be."
It struck Peggy that all those Bible stories her husband and her
had read to them at the dinner table each night had stuck,
just in ways she was unprepared for.
Peggy is not a typical evangelical - she was the religious
reporter for ABC News, the only one on a national network.
She did reports on Promise Keepers and the True Love Waits
chastity program and defended them to her liberal co-workers.
The liberals liked to call us evangelicals "swamp people."
Peggy knew that evangelicals valued personal morality and
serving the wider good.
Now she is not so sure.
Evangelicals on the national stage seem to be more interested
in power and influence and winning by any means.
Instead of making it our mission to serve and protect the most
vulnerable, the church now seems desperate to BE served
and protected.
Peggy Wehmeyer is not sure how much longer she can belong.
#66052
B. Most of us have more prosaic reasons for giving up on a church.
1) Usually it is personal preference, or personal irritation.
a) Someone treats you poorly.
b) You don't like the music style.
c) The pastor's sermons don't do anything for you.
d) On rare occasions it can be due to a change in doctrine
or other major issue.
2) Leaving should always be hard.
a) Church is more than a decent sermon.
b) It should be like family - even like marriage.
c) You shouldn't quit at the first sign of trouble.
3) When divorce a person, it affects your taxes and checkbook.
a) When you divorce your church, it can affect your
spirituality, maybe even your eternity.
b) Many who leave a fellowship never tie in with another
one.
c) What would it take for you to leave this church?
II. Spiritual divorce can have many causes.
A. Your church changes.
1) It becomes more liberal or fundamentalist.
2) It gets more political, especially if you don't like those
politics.
3) It gets new leadership or membership.
4) It changes its style of worship.
B. You change.
1) You question beliefs you used to hold.
a) If you are not a fossil, you will change over time.
b) Think about some beliefs you had when you were 18,
that you don't believe now.
2) Especially as we get older, we become more set in our ways.
C. It is possible to adapt to change.
1) In marriages, you learn to change together to stay together.
a) For the sake of unity, you become interested in their
hobbies and passions.
b) Hopefully, they do the same with yours.
2) Churches are no different.
a) Some of you have adapted to praise music, or traditional
hymns.
b) Maybe you have always resented poor people and see them
as lazy and immoral, but you get exposed to Family
Promise and you get a new perspective on the
struggles of poverty.
3) Even as we change, we have to keep a consistent focus.
a) Jesus doesn't change, and we have to keep aiming at him.
b) When you focus on humans you will always end up
disappointed. Always.
c) Keep your eyes on Jesus.
III. What your relationship with a church should be based on. [1]
A. Authentic worship.
1) It is more than talking about God or singing to him.
When Mahatma Gandhi was a young lawyer in South Africa, he
read the Bible and was impressed by the teachings of Jesus.
He was a Hindu himself, but thought that he might consider
Christianity seriously.
So he went to a church for several weeks and looked around him
for the promises of God.
But all he found was boredom and complaining and a lack of joy.
And he decided right then that Christianity couldn't be the
true religion.
What a tragedy! The promises of God made boring in Church!
People secure in God's love, but dull and distant and drab!
We need to find in the Church those promises made visible!
#2891
2) Experiencing God's power.
a) The early church saw many miracles and healings.
b) Believe it or not, we have seen remarkable things in
this church as well.
1> It doesn't happen every week, and we don't have the
thrill level of Pentecostalism, but God has
worked among us.
2> If you have never seen God's power in your own life,
perhaps the problem is with you, not the church.
B. Sound instruction.
1) Church should help us understand the world's condition.
a) Ideas still matter.
b) "Prison Fellowship" was sued by the ACLU because of a
prison ministry that used the Bible to change inmates.
2) It should help us grasp God's answers.
a) Studying the Bible together in Sunday School and our
home studies.
3) It should give us fuller knowledge of our riches in Christ.
C. Opportunities for service.
1) As Hebrews 10 says, spur each other to love and good works.
a) Meet human needs in a practical way.
b) It can be tiring, but very fulfilling.
2) Remember that human needs go beyond food and shelter.
a) They also need the good news Jesus offers us.
b) Pray for others in this church.
c) Ask them if they truly know the Lord.
D. Intimate fellowship.
1) Multi-site churches are the new trend - our area has 2.
a) One preacher transmits his sermon to several other
locations.
b) Those locations have worship bands, and prayer time,
and then the distant pastor pops up on the screen.
c) It may be a better sermon, but it must have a distant,
disconnected quality to it.
2) Some churches dispense with human contact altogether.
I heard of a "cyber-church" a few years ago.
They bragged that they had no doors, no walls, and no
limits.
(Actually, they did have a building in San Antonio.)
You called their chatline with your phone and a counselor
would pray for you or with you.
And they provided live video shots of their facility.
Of course, they had a website, too.
The weblink no longer works.
#17625
3) People need more than knowledge, they need relationships.
a) Electronic relationships don't work very well.
b) We give you the opportunity to truly get to know people.
1> You can be as open, or closed, as you want.
2> There is no substitute for intimacy gained over time.
IV. Instead of divorce, work at reconciliation.
A. Churches are open to being challenged.
1) Like people, we can grow.
2) If you think this church is too stodgy, or is off-track,
change it.
3) The upcoming transition period will be a great opportunity
for this.
B. You must decide what is really important to you.
1) What doctrine can you not compromise on?
2) How much political/social involvement is necessary?
V. Our church is not cutting edge, but it is community, it is family.
A. The importance of loving one another.
1) I called Karen McCollum after Al died. We were both stunned
to realize they had left 15 years ago!
a) But she still felt a closeness to this church.
b) It was partly due to family ties - Al's sister Lee -
but also due to Karen's spiritual ties here.
2) We want each of you to have this kind of bond here.
B. Jesus never changes.
1) He still calls us to repent, believe and follow.
2) He wants you to be part of something larger, a family
of the redeemed.
3) Don't let the differences and irritations of life get in
the way of that.
=========================================================================
SOURCES FOR ILLUSTRATIONS USED IN THIS SERMON:
[1] This section is adapted from my sermon "Who Needs Church?", Section
III, March 2, 2003.
# 2891 “Gandhi's Disappointment,” by Rev. Wayne Brouwer, Dynamic
Preaching (www.sermons.com), Winter 1992 "A".
#17625 “Cyber-Church,” email dated July 21, 2001, collected by Don
Johnson, March 3, 2003.
#66052 “She May Divorce Her Church,” adapted by Rev. David Holwick from
the article "Is it time to divorce? A former TV religion
reporter reconsiders her life as an evangelical," by Peggy
Wehmeyer, Dallas News, April 12, 2018; <link>.
These and 35,000 others are part of the Kerux database that can be
downloaded, absolutely free, at http://www.holwick.com/database.html
=========================================================================
Copyright © 2024 by Rev. David Holwick
Created with the Freeware Edition of HelpNDoc: Free HTML Help documentation generator