JR. Forasteros - May 19, 2013
Pentecost
The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity. She empowers the Church to be the body of Christ, the visible image of God's life, to the world. Everything we do as followers of Jesus flows from the Holy Spirit, and we can do nothing in God's Kingdom without her. What keeps us from living the full life God offers is our refusal (or ignorance) of the Spirit's power. By choosing to connect to the Spirit, we live powerful, victorious lives that present a clear image of God to the world.
From Series: "Already/Not Yet"
Jesus' resurrection wasn't the end of the story; it was the beginning of God's new creation. The Resurrection is God's first step toward reclaiming creation, and we get to be a part of it. By choosing to follow Jesus, we leave the old reality dominated by sin and death and step into God's kingdom, where we find life. This new life has already begun. And yet we're also still waiting, because God's kingdom has not yet come in full. How do we live in the tension between the Already and the Not Yet? This series explores who God calls the Church to be, and how the Holy Spirit enables us to join in God's mission in the space between the Resurrection and the Second Coming. We're not just waiting around for God to show up. God is already here and working, so we're joining in!
Sermon Manuscript Discussion Guide Spiritual Practices Guide
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Let’s talk about how you manipulate people with religion! (I know… it just got weird. Bear with me!)
My first vocational ministry job was as a youth pastor. There was a local summer camp the church attended every year, so my first year on staff at that Church, I took my teens to the summer camp. As a youth minister at summer camp, you spend a lot of time hanging out behind the scenes, so it wasn’t terribly surprising that I overheard a conversation that made me a little sick to my stomach.
It was probably halfway through the week, and one of the adult volunteers was talking with the worship leader for the week. Apparently, he didn’t think the week was going very well because he said,
“This week hasn’t been very spiritual so far. I think tonight we should do an altar call, to really punch it up.”
If you never attended an Evangelical summer camp and aren’t familiar with the ‘altar call’ phenomenon there, let me explain it to you:
You play some music, usually at the end of a long worship service. Often the message has been particularly emotional. The pastor will invite people to come forward to make decisions – for salvation, calls to ministry, life changes, etc.
I want to be careful not to denigrate all altar call experiences. Having a particular moment to mark an important faith decision is invaluable – I received my own call to ministry in an altar call experience, and I know many wonderful people who can point to an altar experience as when they said Yes to Jesus’ invitation to faith.
But altar calls can also be incredibly manipulative, as that summer camp experience demonstrates.
I’ve also met plenty of pastors and leaders who use the high emotion of the altar call moment to manipulate people into making decisions they’re not ready for or haven’t considered fully.
In fact, the altar call experience is a pretty good microcosm of the problems with religion in general: there’s something good, beautiful and true about religion that welcomes the outsider, lifts up the downtrodden, gives voice to the silenced.
There’s a reason Karl Marx described religion as the ‘opiate of the masses’ – too often religion becomes a tool of oppression, supporting those in power and silencing those who dare oppose them.
Let’s talk about religious leaders and how we can learn to spot the rotten ones. About what seeking that beautiful religion looks like. Because we’ll see that Jesus is actually much closer to us than we ever imagined, inviting us to follow him into new life right where we are.
