A Sermon on Matthew 4:12-23
Preached January 27, 2002
By Donald M. Tuttle
First Christian Church, Corpus Christi, Texas
Many of you are familiar with this magazine. It is The Disciple, our denominational publication and it traces its roots back one hundred and forty years to a journal called The Gospel Echo. Unfortunately, this is the final issue of The Disciple. Despite award-winning content and design, The Christian Board of Publications has decided to cease publication. The reason was simple: It was no longer financially viable. CBP could no longer afford to publish the magazine given the fact that only 20,000 copies were sold each month.
I share this with you because many people in our tradition are pointing to the demise of The Disciple as part of a serious crisis affecting our denomination. That crisis, they say, is numerical decline. In 1977, about three years after The Disciple came into being through a merger of two other journals, more than 329,000 people attended Sunday School in Disciples of Christ congregations. Two years ago, that number had fallen to less than 112,000, that is a 66 percent decline. In the same 23 years, the number of participating members in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) fell 35 percent. We went from more than 820,000 participating members to less than 528,000. And that is a mere quarter of the more than 2 million members we once claimed.
Of course, this crisis is not just happening "out there." It is not just what is taking place in other congregations. It has happened here. In 1977, this church reported nearly 1200 participating members and 500 people in Sunday School. But for 2001, we reported about 500 members and little more than a hundred in Sunday School each week. That is a 58 percent decline in membership and an 80 percent drop in Sunday School attendance. And our worship attendance is actually better now than it was five years ago.
And what is true of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) is true in greater or lesser form for the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Episcopalians, the United Church of Christ and many others.
Certainly, I can understand why people call it a crisis.
Yet I don’t think the decline is the crisis. Don’t get me wrong. I am not in denial. I recognize the troubles that falling numbers create in finding good quality leadership, carrying out programs, affording staff, and maintaining facilities. I understand well the problem numerical decline creates. But numerical decline is merely a symptom of a deeper problem. It is the fever that points to an infection or the pain down the left arm that signals a heart attack. The real crisis is one of faith in Jesus Christ. The real crisis is that we are reluctant to "fish for people" because we are not sure that having them follow Jesus Christ really matters.
Last summer William Willimon was speaking to a group of Christians. At that gathering, he was asked if Christians ought to try and convert people to the Christian faith. He quoted our text for today and told them "absolutely." Christ calls us to "fish for people."
And the response of those attending the conference? Hostility. They said that trying to convert others was arrogant, imperialistic and exclusive.
A few weeks ago, one of our neighbors, the wife of a minister, wrote to comment on the carillon. She said she was reluctant to write but would recommend the volume be reduced. That was fine. We needed to hear the input of those around us. But she went on to suggest that the playing of hymns—like we do at noon, three and six—was inappropriate. She said publicly praising God in such a way was "proselytizing," and that we should keep such praise confined to the sanctuary. "Proselytizing" simply means "to try to convert a person from one religion to another," but like most folks she was using it negatively. Like the folks with whom Willimon was talking, she was saying that Christians ought not to try and convince anyone else to follow Jesus.
Why? Because like many people, even these followers of Jesus, have embraced the idea that all religions are equal, that what one believes doesn’t matter as long as one believes something, that Jesus is no different or better than any other religious teacher, that it really doesn’t matter who or what one follows. In effect, what too many of us have thought is that Jesus may be "a" savior, "our" savior, but is not, as the Scriptures declare, the world’s savior. And if we don’t believe knowing him as Lord and Savior matters, then why share him?
Yet can you tell me today that what one believes doesn’t really matter?
On the morning of September 11, 19 men boarded airplanes in New Jersey and Washington, D.C., and skyjacked them. Two crashed into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon. God only knows where the third was heading when it crashed in Pennsylvania. The men who did this were not crazy. They were not stupid. They were intelligent men, devoted to their faith, models of commitment. Yet because what they believed was wrong, they killed more than 3,000 people.
Can we really say after September 11 that all religions are the same?
Don’t you wish that someone in the Christianized West, in Florida or Las Vegas, would have shared with them the love of God in Jesus Christ before they board those airplanes?
Johnny was the son of a nurse and a lawyer. He was intelligent but introverted. At 15, he developed an interested in Islam, and soon began to wear Muslim dress and took an Islamic name. At 19, his parents paid his way to Yemen to study the Koran. Later he would make his way to Pakistan, becoming the oldest student in an Islamic school where students studied the Koran from 4:30 in the morning to 9 at night. He would only leave there to visit a small town nearby so that he could email his parents to assure them he was OK.
But last year, Johnny’s parents lost contact with him. He had left the school, telling the teacher he was going into the mountains to escape the summer heat. When next he emerged, John Walker was fighting with the Taliban.
Do we really believe that it doesn’t matter what people believe as long as they believe in something? Don’t you wish that somebody, anybody, would have helped that California youngster to see that the way to life was not in the Koran’s rules but in Christ’s grace?
In the course of any given day, any one of us here is likely to run into
In the course of any given day, any one of us here is likely to encounter people who are living lives of quiet desperation, looking for some reason to go on, some reason to hope.
Do we really believe that Jesus is "our savior" but not theirs? Do we really believe he died for us but not them? Do we really think we shouldn’t proselytize them, try to convert them from death to life?
When Simon and Andrew, James and John, left their nets, their boats, their families, they were not doing so for simply another religious teacher with good ideas to share. They were not following after some preacher trying to fill empty pews or some denominational executive trying to fill empty coffers. They followed Jesus because they knew he was the very presence of God in the world, the one person who could reconcile people to God, each other, and themselves. They did so knowing that he was the one who reveals God completely and fulfills God’s intentions completely. And it was that Jesus that they proclaimed. It was that Jesus they sought to share. It was that Jesus to which they sought to convert others.
If that is the Jesus you confessed in your baptism, if that is the Jesus you have grown to know and love, then won’t you do a little fishing this week. I challenge you to share your faith with that co-worker struggling with life, the friend frightened by death, the neighbor embittered by injustice. I challenge you to tell someone you are praying for them, to invite them to church, to—dare we say, proselytize--to offer them Jesus Christ.
The crisis that churches face today won’t go away until we do.