At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered round him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?’ They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’ Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no-one condemned you?’ ‘No-one, sir,’ she said. ‘Then neither do I condemn you,’ Jesus declared. ‘Go now and leave your life of sin.’
John 8:2-11 NIVUK
Not long after I returned from the Philippines with my wife, I made a prediction. I predicted that our churches would all need to prepare for an influx of people from different cultures.
I was not listened to at the time.
Now our church doesn’t just have a Filipina attending. We also have a part-Kenyan family, a Nigerian family, a Zimbabwean family, a part-South African family, a part-American family, occasionally a part-Nepali/part Indian family. The other day I ran into a family that is part-Albanian.
The irony is that we don’t live in a massive metropolis. Yes, our town is in the top ten by population in our country, but this is Scotland. Our biggest city has a population of barely a million.
Now, our church leadership is still way too white to be fully representative of our community. But in time, that will change too. It wouldn’t surprise me if one day our pastor was African or Indian or Eastern European in origin. Not in the slightest.
I predicted something. I wasn’t believed. It seemed too far fetched.
Let me make a further prediction.
In the years to come, I believe that, if we are doing our job properly, we will have people coming to church to hear the Bible preached whose lifestyles turn our stomach and cause us to be revolted. Not Christians, though (although these days little would surprise me).
No, I mean seekers after the truth who want to know more, follow Jesus, be baptised and join our church.
And they will come with the tons of excess baggage and personal issues that such lifestyles bring.
So, fellow Christian, brother or sister, are you ready for it?
How will you react?
This will determine whether or not our church will truly grow, or if it will gradually become a museum piece, before the doors are locked and it’s bought over to become a retirement home or a nightclub or a swanky restaurant, or a carpet store...
Or a mosque.
You heard me correctly. The crux of whether or not we grow as a church will not depend on our music or our preaching or our theological orthodoxy.
No. First and foremost, more than anything else, it will depend on how we treat those whose lifestyles cause us massive issues.
Why am I predicting this?
Look at the morality of the people around us. In most cases, it’s drifting towards the gutter at frightening pace. Behaviours and attitudes that even as little as decades ago would be considered as utterly unacceptable are not only accepted nowadays, but are commended. People have actually been voted into power over our nations who ordinarily we wouldn't leave in charge of our houseplants.
Our culture had blurred just about every line on which civilisation is built: marriage, family, gender, even vocabulary itself.
Nowadays, it seems like anything goes. Except if you have a critical thing to say about our modern culture. Then you’re labelled as an ‘intolerant bigot’, a ‘phobe’ of some variety or other, you’re ‘cancelled’ and then it’s you who goes.
Sometimes we think of the Gospel as like spear fishing. We see the type of people we want to join our religious club we call a church. We spear them with our precision evangelism and the laser-guided logic of our apologetics. They join our church. We get the warm glow inside and the congratulations of our peers. Their average income is high, so their tithes are enormous. Everyone is happy.
In reality, it’s nothing like that at all. Jesus describes the Kingdom of God like this:
‘Once again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was let down into the lake and caught all kinds of fish. When it was full, the fishermen pulled it up on the shore. Then they sat down and collected the good fish in baskets, but threw the bad away.
Matthew 13:47-48 NIVUK
This type of net is not like a butterfly net. This is more akin to a dragnet or (and I know environmentalists will hate this comparison) a trawler’s net. The fisherman knows where the great shoals of fish are. He lets down a huge weighted net into the deep. It catches the fish he intends, but also catches many other fish: maybe predators like sharks or dolphins, maybe octopi, maybe detritus and rubbish thrown into the sea. To get the fish he wants, he must remove the items he does not want and throw them back.
Do you understand the picture?
If we set our sights on only recruiting the people we like, we are not truly evangelising. We are not winning souls for Jesus. We are winning donors for our church.
But when we cast our ‘evangelism net’ into the deep and let God do the job of determining who us good and bad, when we give Him the authority to determine who joins us, then we are truly out o save souls.
And it’s when we do this that we lose control of who comes through our doors. This is what creates room for people who are wounded and broken to come and seek salvation. This is when people whose morality makes us ill come through our door. This is when we have the duty not to condemn them, but to welcome them and help them. As Jesus Himself said:
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
John 3:17 NIVUK
The approach in these verses is challenging. This could well be one of the reasons why many theologians would rather these verses were not in the Bible. But it is very simple.
Firstly, we recognise that what such people are doing is sin. Let’s not cheapen it by excusing it or trying to explain it. It is sin. No question of it bring anything else.
Secondly, we recognise that we too are sinful. But unlike the Pharisees, we don’t try to conceal that guilt behind a thin veneer of religiosity and spiritualised hypocrisy. Instead, we repent.
Thirdly, we hold out to those who are painfully aware of their own sin the hand of grace that leads them to the Cross.
We are Evangelical Christians. Our distinctive feature is that we evangelise. We don’t turn our churches into middle-class social clubs or matchmaking groups for our children. We reach out to sinners and we invite them to repent. That is what we do.
If we don’t, then what’s the point of calling ourselves Evangelical?
But not every church understands this.
When I was a kid, my local church had a huge Sunday School compared to the size of the church. Maybe around fifty kids attended. And they had a burgeoning youth ministry too. It was fantastic.
But then it faded. The youth of our town were more interested in drinking alcohol, taking drugs, fighting, engaging in pre-marital promiscuity. They weren’t interested in the Gospel.
And, quite frankly, the church had no interest in them.
I tried to bridge the gap. But leaders in my church made it abundantly clear that they did not want too many young people in their church, and certainly not young people like that.
What happened? That church now has a membership of around a fifth of the size their Sunday School used to be. They’re struggling. The community has no interest in them. They have no interest in their community. They are in the process of slowly wasting away: an aging outpost with no desire or ambition to be anything more.
It’s sad to see.
When a church refuses to reach out to its community in grace and compassion, this is what happens.
This is why I say that the fate of the church depends on how we deal with the sin in our community.
My old church will likely close sooner or later.
Don’t let it be yours.
Questions
1. How do these verses challenge our approach to those around us who commit sins that revolt us?
2. How do you react to such people?
3. ‘The fate of the church depends on how we deal with the sin in our community.’ Do you believe this? How can you make sure that your church gets this right?
I would love to see our churches more inline with the The current needs of our society and welcome those from other nations whose first language is not English, for translators and interpreters to be the norm in church.