Church on the Move, Where are We Supposed to Be?

Bringing Life and Healing

April 29, 2007

Joe Kutter, preaching

Imagine this: It’s a Baptist baptism before baptisteries in the sanctuary. You’ve gathered by the lake or the river and the new Christian has been taken into the water, immersed and then led back out to stand in the middle of the church members. The members circle around him as he kneels and they all reach out to lay hands on him and pray for his life in Christ. The Baptist historian, Bill Leonard, writes that the early Baptists understood that to be baptized into Christ was to be baptized into the ministry of Christ.  If you are a Christian, then you are a Christian minister. You cannot follow Christ and be anything other, so believed our Baptist forbearers.

Obviously, this did not mean that every baptized believer was an ordained pastor. There has always been a distinctive role for clergy. The difference was in large measure this. Clergy work begins within the church. For everybody else, most of the work was outside of the church! It happened in the course of daily life.

How did our forbearers work?  Imagine this. It happened thousands of times. As the American frontier moves west, imagine that a Baptist family moves further west, into the wilderness. The family moves with the frontier. That is a large part of the story of our nation’s development, the great western migration. Kansas is a part of that story.

Our farmer family moves west and before long discovers that another Baptist family lives nearby, only four or five miles away. What do they do?  They meet together for prayer and Bible study on Sunday. And when the third family is discovered, they start a church. Do they wait for a pastor? No. They don’t need a pastor. Already, they are all ministers. They start the church and, in time, they look for a pastor.

Now they have ten families and no ordained minister is to be found. What do they do?  They pray and they talk and they identify their natural leader and they ordain him. The church has just called a pastor. And friends, that’s the way that the Baptist movement spread across America. Every baptized believer was a minister and every one had the privilege of serving Christ according to his or her gifts. I could say it more sternly; every baptized believer knew of his and her responsibility to share in the ministry of Christ. 

Does that say that education and training are not important? Of course not!  Rather than belittling the need for an educated clergy, it emphasizes the need for an educated laity!  You do not have the right to be an ignorant Christian!  You may choose ignorance, but God has not given you the right! We call it “The Priesthood of Believers.”  Every baptized believer has a share of Christ’s ministry.

Let’s  look at our scripture for today. We read the story of Tabitha, whose Greek name was Dorcas. She was identified as a disciple. Greek nouns have both male and female forms. Here, the Greek word uses the female form. Tabitha or Dorcas is clearly identified as a female disciple.

She lives in Joppa, which is located on the coast in Samaria. Today the city is called Jaffa and it is the principle port of Israel. But then, that ancient port was in Samaria.

Just by reading the story, we can tell that she was a part of a Christian community, a church. So the question is, how did the church get to the Samaritan town of Joppa? As the Christians ran from early persecution, as they spread out, some of them landed in Joppa. When they arrived, they formed a Christian community, probably a house church. And within that church, Dorcas assumed her ministry. “She was committed to good works and to charity.” (verse 36)

Now, please do not miss the nature of the church’s growth. Joppa was in Samaria. Joppa was in a place where good Judeans did not go. In going to Joppa, Samaria, the church took the gospel to a group that had formerly been unacceptable. It was an inevitable reality that as Christians took refuge in an unacceptable place, they reached out to an unacceptable people.  Their community became their mission field. 

Her ministry was to make tunics and other clothing for people in need. Perhaps she was the first white cross lady in Joppa!  She had a gift, a talent for making clothing and she used that talent in the ministry of Christ. Jesus, in Matthew 25, says something like this, “I was naked and you clothed me.” In clothing the widows, she was clothing Christ himself. She was a fully-engaged minister of the Gospel.

It could well be that the early Baptists learned from the early Christians in Joppa. Your place of ministry is wherever you are. For Dorcas and the church in Joppa, it was Joppa. For the early Baptists in America, it was wherever they were on the frontier. For us, it is Topeka, Kansas.

And then tragedy struck. Dorcas died. The Apostle Peter was visiting another church in Samaria in the town of Lydda, perhaps ten miles away. The people in Joppa knew that he was there and just as soon as Dorcas died, they sent for Peter.

Why?  Were they expecting Peter to restore her to life? Or were they just hoping that he would celebrate her funeral and walk with them for a while during their season of grief?

How long would it take for the messenger from Joppa to walk or run the ten miles to Lydda? At best three hours, I would guess. How long to tell the story and for Peter to gather his goods together and begin the walk to Joppa? Perhaps another hour?  And then it would take at least three hours to walk back to Joppa.  So from the time that they made the decision to go and find Peter until Peter entered Dorcas’ room would be at least seven hours.

During that time, the women of the church prepared her for burial. Did they pray? I would think so. Did they mourn? You can bet on it.

Now comes Peter to the house and they take him to a second story room where Dorcas is laid out in preparation for burial. She is surrounded by the widows who are crying as would be customary for that part of the world at that time. The widows show Peter the garments that Dorcas has made. I think that the widows were wearing them. “See what I am wearing, she made it. She dressed all of us.” 

Can you imagine? And then Peter asks them to leave and when he and she were alone, he knelt and prayed. And then he said, “Tabitha, get up.”  And he reached out and she took his hand and she woke up!

And then the Bible says that Peter called the widows and the saints and he showed her to be alive!  Do not miss the word “saints.”  It is the gospel word for all disciples of Jesus. It points in the same direction as the word disciple or the doctrine that says that all of Jesus’ disciples are ministers. We are all in this together.

Back to Tabitha or Dorcas: The power of God was present in such a way that her life was restored. It happened then and it happens now that the Spirit of God works to heal those who are lost.

This week, with Deanne Burgess, we had an experience in which one who seemed to be lost was restored to us. I have no words for it other than, “thank you.” I find myself speechless in the presence and power of God. I cannot explain it and will not try. God is enough of an explanation for me. Good friends and good medicine and good prayer were all involved, thank God, but in the end, I just look towards the Holy One and say “thank you.”

I have to be honest with you. There are times when we see that power, the power of God, working in a completely different way. Here I look at the ancient stories of the Bible and the early church. I see Jesus dying with power before his resurrection. I see Peter and Paul dying with enormous power. I see the early Christians being so empowered by God’s Holy Spirit that it was better to die than forfeit their relationship with God.

It was by that power that the church of Christ made its move into the world. By that power the church moved from being a tiny little Jerusalem sect into witnessing to the whole world. And by that power, we too are bearing witness to the saving grace of God in Jesus Christ.

By that power, we are a part of Christ’s church on the move.