The 15 Characteristics of the True Church — How Many Does Your Church Have? Take the Quiz that 9 out of 10 Pastors Don’t Want You to Take.
THE QUIZ
Little quizzes online and on social media are quite popular these days. Quizzes about important things like your knowledge of Harry Potter, characters on the TV Show, Friends, or pranks pulled on the TV Show, The Office. They have titles like, “Do YOU Know the Meaning of these 24 Southern Baptist Words? 90% Fail or Can You Actually Get 15/20 on this Law Test? 78% of Americans Fail. The framing of these quizzes are designed to provoke your curiosity enough to get you to click through to take the quiz. Well, I’ve designed one for us this morning based on our Scripture, Acts 2:42–47. These early chapters of the book of Acts recount the story of the birth of the church. And in our Scripture this morning, we have a very clear picture of an early and successful church that can be used as a benchmark for our church, or your church if Epworth isn’t your church home. So, on your sheet of paper, list from 1 to 15. I’m going to ask you a series of questions about your church. They are yes or no questions. I have entitled this quiz, “15 Characteristics of the True Church. How many does your church have? The quiz that 9 out of 10 pastors don’t want you to take.” Now, even though most of us watching go to the same church, you may have different answers and that’s okay. We’ll go quickly — so just go with your first impulse. So are you ready to take the quiz?
1. Is there devotion to your church leader’s teachings?
2. Is there devotion to fellowship?
3. Do you break bread?
4. Do you pray?
5. Has awe come upon everyone?
6. Are wonders and signs being performed by your church leaders?
7. Are all your believers together?
8. Do all your believers jointly own all property and possessions?
9. Do your believers sell their possessions and give the money back into a common pool or distribute among the needy?
10. Do you spend much time together in church everyday?
11. Do you break bread together in each other’s homes on a daily basis?
12. Do you eat your food with a glad and generous heart?
13. Do you praise God?
14. Do you have the goodwill of all the people?
15. Is the Lord adding to your number every day?
Okay, now add up the number of “Yes” answers you have and that’s your score out of a possible 15. Even if the result isn’t as good as you might like, I hope you’ll share the score you got in the comments section. Now to get an “A” — that is, over 90% correct, you’d have to get a score of 14 out of 15. To get a passing grade — a “D” or better — you need 65% correct — or at least 10 “Yeses.” This is why 9 out of 10 pastors don’t want you to take this quiz — even getting a passing score on this quiz is quite tough and an A is nearly impossible. Now, I don’t want us to beat ourselves up here — I think most churches around town would have a pretty hard time getting a decent score on this quiz. Hold on to your quiz, we’re going to come back to it.
COVID-19 CHARTS
When the quarantine began, there were lots of daily schedule charts floating around social media intended to helpfully structure one’s day. For the record, I never really wanted to do one of these, but my wife and my oldest son did. And so we had a family discussion and designed a schedule that we thought would suit our family best and we even wrote it down on a sheet of paper. But life happened and the next day, we didn’t really follow it. Nor the next day and it was never mentioned again around our house again. More recently, I’ve been seeing a different take on the Coronavirus Schedule being posted on social media. One in which it seems all semblance of structure and order have been abandoned. The act of putting it on a chart is what makes it funny. It seems we are not alone in abandoning the early ambitious family schedules.
If you were able to watch the conversation with Rev. Sheri Ferguson about mental and spiritual health during the pandemic on our Facebook Page or our website, you heard her say, “under stress, we regress.” And I think that’s what we see here reflected in these charts. It may not be reasonable to expect ourselves to comply perfectly with planned out activity charts during a time of increased stress. I heard another therapist advise, “Lower your expectations.”
ORDINATION QUESTIONS
When I transferred my ordination into the United Methodist Church several years back, a friend from seminary was visiting with us and came to my ordination. She was from another denominational tradition. After watching the service and hearing the questions that we were asked, there was one that she was quite surprised by. Are they serious about that? To be frank, she thought it was completely ridiculous and she brought it to my attention after the ordination service. The questions asked of us during our ordination service come from John Wesley himself — they begin simply enough:
1. Have you faith in Christ?
2. Are you going on to perfection?
3. Do you expect to be made perfect in love in this life?
The questions go on, but that third question right there is the question that got my friend. Do they, do you — really expect to be made perfect in this life?
I can see her point. I’m not anywhere close, nor is anyone I know. “Weeellll…you see….” The theological gymnastics began as I tried to justify answering “Yes” to that question.
Whether it is these 15 characteristics of the true church, an hour by hour daily schedule during quarantine, or the expectation to be made perfect in this life — ambitious standards often leave us feeling like we don’t, we won’t, we can’t measure up. The temptation is to say, well, to hell with this. I’m going to drink beer all day, while the kids play video games and eat ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If I cannot meet the standard, why bother aiming in that direction at all?
PERSONAL CONFESSION
Personally, I have to confess — there are at least two areas in my life where I regularly employ this kind of thinking. First, dieting. If I slip up on my diet somewhere along in my day, I’ll just tell myself — I’ll start again tomorrow. Because I made one little slip, I’ll just eat what I want the rest of the day. I often find myself thinking this way about my golf game too. I get a double bogey on the first hole and start thinking — well, I’m not going to have the kind of score I want now, I’m not even going to bother keeping score or trying my best. If I can’t reach the ideal, then why bother trying.
HAGIOGRAPHY VS HISTORY
Remember back in 2018 — we celebrated the 125th anniversary of our church. It was a wonderful celebration of our church’s hagiography. Hagiography, didn’t you mean to say, “It was a wonderful celebration of our church’s history?” No. I said what I meant. What is this funny word hagiography? Basically, a hagiography is like a biography that tells only the good side of the story. It paints its subject in positive light. The Greek word hagio — is the word for saint or holy. History, in contrast to hagiography, in theory is an unbiased report of someone, some group or some thing. For instance, at our 125th Anniversary Celebration, we had rooms set up celebrating weddings and baptisms, the great people who were part of this church that are now deceased, previous youth groups and choirs, the long history of our MDO program and much more. We did not have any rooms set up detailing the difficult church splits. Or a room setup showing how we were taken off the major thoroughfare when I-565 went in. Or a room with a creative illustration showing the steady decline in membership. We had a wall of letters people sent to us speaking of fond memories, milestones, and spiritual moments. We had no wall of disappointments and let downs that happened in the life of our church. We have a position in our church for “Church Historian,” but really it should be called “Church Hagiographer,” because I really want someone out there collecting and working on positive parts of our past or if we deal with the negative, it should be about how we overcame those challenges.
THIS SCRIPTURE IS HAGIOGRAPHY
While some interpreters may choose to believe otherwise, we can better describe the genre of this particular Scripture as hagiogrpahy rather than history. That is not to say it isn’t true. It is just telling the best possible version of the story. The way we did of our own church at our 125th anniversary celebration. The way the ambitious COVID-19 schedule charts imagine. Luke implicitly admits this 3 chapters later in Acts — not all believers held things in common — Annais and Sapphira tragically learn. Later in Acts, Luke emphasizes how one of the first major controversies in the church — should Christians follow the Mosaic Law — was overcome at the Council of Jerusalem. Whereas the remainder of the New Testament tells a messier story — from both sides of the debate — in Paul’s letters, passionately arguing against and James, in his letter, arguing in favor. At the risk of over simplifying things — in Acts, Luke tells us what the church should be, the sanitized, PR-ready version. The rest of the New Testament tells us what it is presently.
WE DON’T MEASURE UP >> WHAT NEXT
So let’s come back to our quiz scores for a bit. I scored an 8 on my quiz. Not proud of that, but it is what it is. Could be worse, I guess, but it is still a failing grade by most any standard.
The unvarnished truth is, we’re not even close to this early, ideal church. And when you’re not even close — like my friend from seminary — we might question the entire standard to begin with. Who could possibly measure up? Or the temptation might be like the second COVID-19 chart — or my abandoning any pretense of effort on my diet or golf game after a slip up. We can’t reach the standard anyways, let’s just do what we want.
Often, we look at these things through a binary lens. Either we meet the standard or we don’t. Our answer to the questions on the quiz was either yes or no. But if you were like me, you sort of felt a bit between on a few of them. And that is how the movement of God’s sanctifying grace works in our lives. We do not reach perfection instantaneously; the movement towards it happens day by day with starts and stops. Early in American Methodism, there were some — such as the Methodist evangelist and author, Phoebe Palmer who believed in instantaneous and entire sanctification. She went one giant step further than Wesley’s question implies. She preached not just that it was possible to reach perfection in this life, but that it can happen entirely and in an instant. But like those ambitious COVID-19 schedules, this is a theological idea that died out pretty quickly. Time has a way of revealing the distance between our ambitions and reality.
I believe that mainstream Wesleyan spirituality offers us a helpful spiritual middle way here. Neither hagiography nor resignation. We don’t want to have to pretend that we have instantaneous and entire perfection — that we measure up to this Acts 2 church. Nor do we want to give up entirely because we know we won’t make it. Belief that you will reach a goal — even a highly improbable one — is a powerful tool in moving towards that goal. It keeps you moving in the right direction with a sense of purpose.
Of course actually you can’t be perfect — no body is. Well, okay, nerd, I suppose that is true. Wesley was above all, a practical theologian rather than a systematic one. That is, his theology was not100% coherent and consistent the way a systematic theologian might like. Let me use a common paradox to explain why Wesley’s approach is so practical. Perhaps you’re familiar with some of the philosopher Zeno’s paradoxes. One of them goes like this. If I walk half way to the other end of the sanctuary, and then walk half way of the remaining distance, and then half way of that distance, and so on — in theory I won’t ever reach the other end of the sanctuary. No matter how many times I walk halfway to the other end of the sanctuary, there will always be some small infinitesimal distance between myself and the final line. But practically speaking, I’m basically there after 8, 10, 12 iterations of moving halfway there. My point is — the goal — or in our case, Luke’s portrayal of how the church is supposed to work isn’t hagiographic nonsense. Rather it is that far end of the sanctuary. It keeps us going in the right direction with purpose and movement.
I believe this is a word we need in this moment in our lives — still under quarantine. The possibility remains that we won’t unite with our church family in person for still some time longer, even as the state gets back to work. And without the our normal support systems — a big part of which, I hope, is your church family — we may feel an increased sense of stress, despair, loneliness, uncertainty and more. And under stress, we regress. That regression can feel like getting off the wagon on your diet. Don’t give up. Even if you have a few or many days that look like that second COVID-19 schedule, let’s not abandon our pursuit of what God wants for us. There’s a 3 word phrase that occurs twice in our short Scripture this morning that I want to call your attention to. “Day by Day” Sometimes we’re not going to measure up. As a church, we don’t measure up to this standard in Acts 2. But take heart — God’s grace will continue to grow us, if we will get up each day and put one foot in front of the other. Day by day, move a little closer. And on any given day, we may actually go a bit backwards. Yet still, day by day, get up keep your eyes on the prize and take a step forward.
There’s a final secret ingredient that isn’t in Zeno’s paradox. But it is in John Wesley’s ordination question. Do you expect to be made perfect in love in this life? God’s grace, God’s love is reaching out to us from the other side. God will help us become the kind of people, the kind of church God needs and wants us to be. We may be far from where we need to be. Yet, let us reach out and take God by the hand who is always at work, using grace from the far side of where we are to make us more than we ever imagined we could be.
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
