2006 National Gathering - Opening Sermon

"We Can Do It If We Will"
(Romans 10:1-15)

Robert M. Thompson, Pastor
Corinth Reformed Church -- Hickory, NC

National Gathering
Faithful and Welcoming Churches
August 04, 2006

(Copyright 2006 by Robert M. Thompson, President. Unless otherwise indicated, Scriptures quoted are from The Holy Bible, New International Version, Copyright 1978 by New York International Bible Society.)

From the haystack to the world

This month marks the two hundredth anniversary of one the most significant tipping points in American church history. This commemoration brings together two vital strands of my own faith journey.

The first two decades of my life I was shaped primarily by American evangelicalism. I used the word "evangelical" here in its mid- to late-twentieth century sense of a response to fundamentalism. Evangelicalism is less separatist and more outward-focused than fundamentalism. Billy Graham is its most recognizable public figure. Evangelicalism sees the primary role of the church as spreading the good news, the evangel, including a strong emphasis on foreign missions. My parents were evangelical missionaries to Pakistan.

During the last three decades of my life (and I will turn fifty next month) I have been in the United Church of Christ, an identity I need not explain further to this audience. At times, my evangelical roots and my UCC identity display a sharp contrast of values, but the event that happened two hundred years ago in a Massachusetts hayfield converges those two parts of who I am.

Three decades after the signing of the Declaration of Independence the American spirit still surged with optimism and ingenuity. Samuel Mills, who had been converted at age 15 when the Great Awakening revival movement touched his father's congregation, enrolled in Williams College in Massachusetts. Revival fervor had spread throughout the college, and Mills regularly joined with a group of students for prayer on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons on the banks of the Hoosack River.

One Saturday afternoon in August 1806, Mills and four other students were caught in a thunderstorm during their outdoor prayer meeting, and forced to take refuge under a haystack. Samuel Mills "proposed to send the Gospel to that dark and heathen land" of Asia and declared to the group, "We can do it if we will." The young men spent time in prayer toward this objective. Mills' closing prayer was described by one of the others as "enthusiastic," as he "prayed that God would strike down the arm with the red artillery of heaven that should be raised against a herald of the cross."

By 1808, these students had influenced a number of others to join them in a commitment to overseas service. They formed a secret "Society of the Brethren" toward this end. Samuel Mills enrolled in Yale to prepare himself further for missionary service, and later attended Andover Theological School. In June, 1810, Mills and several fellow students, including Adoniram Judson (who was not at the haystack prayer meeting) petitioned the General Association of Congregational Churches to form a mission society. On June 29 of that year, the association recommended the formation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which from the beginning brought together various denominations in the missionary enterprise. On February 19, 1812, Adoniram Judson, Samuel Newell, and their wives sailed for India.

Within fifty years, the ABCFM had sent out 1250 missionaries. By the end of the nineteenth century, the board had established missionary work among the Cherokee and Sioux, in India and Ceylon, in Hawaii and Micronesia, in Syria and Turkey, in China and Japan, in Thailand and Indonesia, in Liberia and South Africa, in Mexico and the Balkans, and many more nations. The work was evangelistic, educational, and medical. Other denominations cooperated and/or established boards of their own, but ours was the first American foreign mission board.

You can find more information about the Haystack Prayer Meeting and celebrations of the anniversary both on evangelical web sites (from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and on the UCC's Global Ministries site). The UCC logo for this anniversary shows a haystack casting a shadow, on which appears the continents. "The field is the world" was the motto of those early pioneers.

As I have read again the accounts of the Haystack Prayer Meeting, I realize that this seminal event captures much of my own identity and the identity of Faithful and Welcoming Churches of the UCC. We who came together in Faithful and Welcoming Churches are from churches that Congregational, Christian, Evangelical, Reformed , and post-merger. We are old and young. In our politics, we are liberal and conservative. We are charismatic and non-charismatic. We are UCC-born and spiritual immigrants. We are Bible belt and Yankee and whatever you are that doesn't fit either of those categories. We have different ideas about a broad range of theological issues.

When we get together, however, those differences tend to evaporate around a common set of theological assumptions that we have in common with the haystack prayer meeting students and, we believe, with the Apostle Paul, as expressed in Romans 10. We use an acronym, "ECOT," to describe who we are. ECOT stands for evangelical, conservative, orthodox, and traditional. Those words are illustrated in this text.

An orthodox view of Christ

Paul writes concerning the Jews, our closest spiritual kin, that his "heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved" (1). He adds later in the passage the condition for that salvation, "That if you confess with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved" (10:9). This is the theological foundation that motivated the young men in the haystack.

Orthodoxy, according to Thomas Oden, is "ancient consensual scriptural teaching." [1] It is to think and live within the boundaries of the faith passed down to us through prophets and apostles. It is to embrace what Rupertus Meldinius said: "In essentials, unity." Meldinius defined essentials the same way Oden does -- you look at where Scripture is most clear and the Church has been most united. [2]

Of particular importance is the orthodox view of Christ. Who is he? What did he do and why? We join the framers of the Preamble to the UCC's constitution in proclaiming as our "sole head, Jesus Christ, Son of God and Savior" and owning as our own "the faith of the historic Church expressed in the ancient creeds and reclaimed in the basic insights of the Protestant Reformers."

What is critical for Christian orthodoxy is the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the incarnation of God, as the revelation of God, as the only way human beings can overcome their sinfulness and rebellion and be restored to God's original intent of a relationship with him.

By claiming that we affirm orthodoxy, we do not intend to insinuate that all who do not join us are unorthodox. I was asked when addressing a North Carolina UCC church about FWC, "In saying that you are 'faithful and welcoming,' are you not implying that others are not faithful?" My answer is no. An organization chooses a name to define its distinctives and core values, not to characterize those outside it. If we say we are the United Church of Christ, we do not mean to imply that others are divided or do not belong to Christ. I do not think that UCC people who are Open and Affirming would say that all who are not in their organization are closed and condemning.

However, it probably is true that ONA folks would want others to ponder the words "open and affirming" and examine the extent to which they are truly open and affirming. So it is with Faithful and Welcoming, and so it is with saying we embrace orthodoxy. We are not calling everyone else heretics. We are affirming a core value and simultaneously asking others to re-examine their own faith in light of the consensus affirmed by the church of Jesus Christ across the years and around the world.

A conservative/traditional view of the Bible

Our view of the Bible as ECOT members of the UCC is variously described as "conservative" or "traditional." We have FWC members who do not like one or both of these terms. "Conservative" is often used in a political sense or with a political agenda. That is not our meaning. The word simply means "to conserve", and in that sense is tied to tradition -- what has been handed down to us.

The Apostle Paul does not believe that he has invented the message of salvation. He believes that it arises from, is fully consistent with, and is fulfilled in the revelation that has preceded him. Throughout this passage, Paul grounds his message in Scripture. He acknowledges an old covenant of righteousness by law revealed through Moses in verse 5, but he then moves to texts from Deuteronomy (30:13-14) and Isaiah (28:16) to undergird his argument. He always and everywhere treats, as Jesus did, the Holy Scriptures as the very Word of God. The Bible does not contain the Word of God -- it is the Word of God.

This commitment to the inspiration and authority of holy Scripture does not mean that we understand all its pieces. It does not mean that we ignore or discount scholarship. It does not mean that we discount the human element God used to record his Word. And we who are ECOT might find various ways of expressing our understanding of Scripture.

Those haystack prayer warriors similarly placed their faith in God's Word. The hymn they sang the day of the famous prayer meeting compared the Bible to all other religious writings --

'Let all the heathen writers join
To form one perfect book;
Great God, if once compared with thine,
How mean their writings look.'

We in FWC find ourselves uncomfortable with the UCC's "Still Speaking" campaign -- not because we believe God is not still speaking, any more than we believe others in the UCC do not believe God has spoken. We do, however, unashamedly prioritize "has spoken" over "still speaking" because it is far too easy for individuals, institutions, and generations to equate their contemporary innovations with God's voice. Our opinions -- most particularly the newest ones -- must pass the test of consistency with the canon of holy Scripture.

We are evangelical in vision

"Evangelical" is another of those words that some of us in FWC embrace and others dislike. It has negative associations for some among us, and it also carries potential for confusion based on its changing use in church and society. Evangelical means everything from non-Catholic to the German Evangelical stream of the UCC to a practical synonym for fundamentalist, depending on who's talking. I defined "evangelical" at the beginning of this sermon for me, and I think for many others in FWC. But not everyone in FWC claims that label used in that sense. Still, one of our common values is that our view of the world is "evangelical."

The Apostle Paul is not content just to believe that salvation comes through Jesus Christ and that the Bible is God's Word. In a series of rhetorical questions, which once again crescendo to a biblical foundation for the mission, Paul restates the Great Commission in verses 14-15:

"How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, 'How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!'"

This is what moved those men under the haystack. They absolutely believed that Asia was a "dark and heathen land" of "moral darkness" without the Light of Jesus Christ. The UCC's Global Ministries web page of resources on the Haystack Prayer Meeting includes an accounting of that event as retold in 1906 by the then-president of the ABCFM. As it does so, each page of that story is prefaced by a bold print heading that sounds sort of like our version of PG-13: "PLEASE NOTE: This piece was written in 1906 and therefore reflects the language of that time." In other words, phrases like a "dark and heathen land" of "moral darkness" are no longer how the UCC sees the non-Christian world.

In a separate article commenting on Haystack, Ken and Betty Frank, serving in Turkey with our American Board and also sharing the role of General Secretary of that board, see the nineteenth century mission effort that grew out of the Haystack passion as emerging from an attitude of American superiority about matters religious and otherwise. By contrast, most of us who are ECOT, even though we also place high value on social ministries, education, and health, have not altered our basic premise that what the world still needs the most is the transforming message of Jesus Christ, Savior and Lord. It does not belong to Americans. It is the Christian message, and we must share it with the world.

The Tipping Point

My summer reading list this year has included a book recommended to me by my banker-brother, The Tipping Point. It is not a book about the church or faith -- not directly, at least. It is rather about social epidemics -- how Hush Puppies regained their popularity as footwear, how Sesame Street became must-watch TV for kids, how crime dropped dramatically in New York City in the 1990s. Malcolm Gladwell asks the question, what triggers tipping points that turn ideas or dreams or causes into real change?

As I ponder Gladwell's rules of epidemics, I find it hard not to connect them to the Haystack prayer meeting and to our work in the Faithful and Welcoming Churches.

Gladwell's first rule is "The Law of the Few." Just like the Haystack Prayer Meeting changed the face of American Christianity by the passionate initiative of five college students, social epidemics often powerfully affect the world with only a handful of very committed people. To be sure, you need the right mix of people -- Gladwell calls them connectors, mavens (those with a knowledge base) and salesmen. But Gladwell is only pointing out in the culture at large what Moses practiced, what Jesus modeled, and what Samuel Mills intuitively understood. We in FWC know we are still small numerically, but what movement has not started small?

Gladwell's second rule is "The Stickiness Factor." Mills declared under a haystack with torrents of rain falling, lightning flashing across the sky as if God himself were taking photographs, and peals of thunder making conversation difficult at times to hear, "We can do it if we will." A clearly articulated motto, vision, and strategy that connects with felt needs and stays with people has the best chance of turning an idea into an epidemic. In FWC, we think our name, "Faithful and Welcoming," has stickiness, and have tried to promote the name and our purposes in ways that will capture interest in the UCC.

Gladwell's final rule is "The Power of Context." In my view, this is the epidemic-inducing factor which is least able to be influenced or manipulated by design. The power of context is more about the ability to recognize when the time is right and to seize the moment. "Strike while the iron is hot" is a comparable maxim. Just like Martin Luther's reformation may not have changed Christianity had it not been for the invention of the printing press a generation earlier, so Samuel Mills and his cohorts were both beneficiaries and capturers of their moment a generation after American independence when the nation and the world were ready for their bold ideals and initiative. Likewise, we unashamedly seized the moment during the UCC's "15 minutes of fame" with the bouncer ads and the EMR resolution to move forward. That's the power of context.

From our perspective there is yet another "rule of epidemics" that we must consider, related to the third. I'll call it "The God Factor." It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway -- not only the flow of history but the will of God are clearly beyond our control and even our understanding. John Thomas and many of our colleagues and friends in the UCC believe we are on the wrong side of history and we are not listening to the God who is still speaking.

One of the admissions we must be willing to make is that maybe they're right. I don't think so, and will say more why I don't think so in tomorrow morning's workshop on "Why Same Sex Marriage Matters." But I have to admit that those who considered themselves evangelical, conservative, orthodox, and traditional have often been wrong in the past about issues on which they are as sure as we are today. Passionately defending what Christians have held in the past doesn't automatically put you on the side of truth.

What I'm saying is that there is a God factor to be considered. Two hundred years after the Haystack Prayer Meeting, I am convinced that God was with those young men, that he guided their prayers, that he blessed their efforts to spread the good news of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth. Two hundred years from now, will history vindicate our meeting this weekend? Will history even remember we were here? I do not know. That is up to God.

What I know is that we must do our part. We must see to it that the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Word of God is preserved for and spread to our generation, both within and beyond the UCC and America. That task, articulated by St. Paul and reclaimed at the haystack prayer meeting, is still our calling.

"We can do it if we will." Amen.

Footnotes

[1] The Rebirth of Orthodoxy, 29.

[2] Meldinius: "“Necessary dogmas are, (1) articles of faith necessary to salvation; (2) articles derived from clear testimonies of the Bible; (3) articles decided by the whole church in a synod or symbol; (4) articles held by all orthodox divines as necessary." (Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, VII:108).