Why We Exist as a Church

It’s not easy to swim in the fog. Florence Chadwick found that out on July 4, 1952. Florence Chadwick was a world famous long-distance swimmer. She had become the first woman ever to swim the English Channel in both directions. Now her goal was to become the first woman to swim across the 30 mile San Pedro Channel that separates Catalina Island from the coast of California.

On that Fourth of July day in 1952, the Pacific Ocean was like an ice bath, and the fog was so dense that she could hardly see her support boats. Occasionally, a shark would cruise toward her, and had to be driven away by rifle shots. Florence’s body was numb and she was exhausted. She had been swimming for nearly sixteen hours.

From the boat next to her, her mother and her trainer offered encouragement. They told her that it wasn’t much farther. But all she could see was the fog. They urged her not to quit, and she never had… until that day. With only half a mile to go, Florence begged them to pull her out. She was utterly exhausted and chilled to the bone.

Several hours later, still wrapped in blankets, she told a reporter: “I don’t want to make excuses, but if I could have just seen the shore, I might have made it.” It wasn’t fatigue or even the icy water that defeated Florence Chadwick—it was the fog. She was unable to see her goal.

There are many churches that are swimming in the fog. They’re not really sure why they exist or what their purpose is. They are just going through the motions. They may have lots of activities and programs, but there’s no real sense of direction. They’re swimming, but they don’t seem to be able to see their destination.

I don’t want our church to swim in the fog. So I’ve made it my intention to devote at least one sermon a year to talking about our mission as a church. What are we here for? What are we supposed to be doing? Why do we exist as a church?

In order to find the answer to those questions, we need to turn to Acts 2, which is on page 1079 of the pew Bible. This is a familiar passage of Scripture, and you have heard me talk about this passage before. I go over it in our New Members Classes.

But students of communication have found that for people to really absorb and understand a message, they need to hear it several times. So that’s why we’re going to look at this passage again.

You know when you take your car into one of those big auto repair places, you can get a diagnostic print-out that tells you what kind of shape your car is in. Well, this paragraph we’re going to look at, from verse 42–47, is like a diagnostic print-out of what a healthy church is supposed to look like. Let’s look at it…

Acts 2:42-47 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

Now when you look at the life of the early church, you can see that they were involved in many different activities. And you can group those activities into four major categories.

1. Worship - they celebrated the Lord’s Table together (the breaking of bread - v.42). They prayed together. They were filled with awe—there was a sense of the supernatural in their midst. Miracles were happening. And they praised God together. That’s worship.

2. Teaching - it says “they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching”. What did the apostles teach them? They taught them about Jesus—what he said, what he did, how he died on the cross, how he rose from the dead. That teaching of the apostles came to form the basis of the New Testament Scriptures. And the apostles also taught them how Jesus was Israel’s Messiah; how he fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies. So they were integrating their understanding of the OT with the NT truth about Jesus.

3. Fellowship - they devoted themselves to fellowship. And that fellowship—that community spirit—took many forms. They met together every day in the Temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts. They were together and had everything in common. If anyone had a need, the others would share their resources and meet that person’s need. So there was a spirit of fellowship in that early church.

4. Outreach - the number of believers didn’t stay static. The church grew. It says in verse 47 that “the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” And that was happening because the church was attractive—it was making a favorable impression upon the community. People knew about these Christians and thought well of them. It says in verse 47 that they enjoyed the favor of all the people. They were building a positive image in the community at large.

So the Lord is telling us here that a healthy church is going to have four components: worship, teaching, fellowship, and outreach. Now we have taken that as our blueprint and we have built a mission statement around those four components. A mission statement is simply a statement of what we believe we’re supposed to be doing as a church.

And our church’s mission statement is found on the back of your bulletin. I’d like you to take it out and look at it. Let’s read it together and see if you can identify those four elements in our mission statement. Let’s read it aloud together.

The mission of First Baptist Church is to exalt Jesus Christ and to equip believers to express their faith so that His Kingdom extends throughout the Lehigh Valley and around the world.

Now if you look at that statement, you’ll notice that there are four words that begin with the letter “e”—Exalt, Equip, Express, Extend. Why don’t you circle them. Those key words are just another way of expressing those four key components we saw in Acts 2— Worship, Teaching, Fellowship, and Outreach.

So our mission statement is a declaration that we, as a church, are going to intentionally build our program of ministry around those four essential elements. Because those are the biblical elements that will make our church a healthy church—a church that is pleasing and honoring to God, and a church that is exciting to be a part of, and a church that is effective in its ministry.

Now if you flip your bulletin over, you’ll see our church logo on the front cover. Someone has said that one picture is worth a thousand words. And in designing this logo, we’ve tried to create a picture of our mission statement.

As you look at the logo, what do you see? You see four concentric circles. The center circle contains the cross, which stands for Jesus Christ. That says that Jesus Christ is the center of our church’s life. Everything we are and everything we do has to flow from our devotion to him.

When we come together for any purpose—whether it be for a prayer meeting or a picnic—we need to remember that we are coming together in the name of Jesus.

And when we come together on the Lord’s Day to worship God, we are coming to Him through Jesus. We are coming to Him on the basis of what Jesus did in dying on the cross for us. Jesus said “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

So our relationship with God is built upon Jesus Christ. He is the head of our church, he is the center of its life, and we want to exalt him in everything we do.

And if that is true of the church, it is also true of the individual Christian. Is Jesus Christ at the center of your life this morning? Is He on the throne of your life? Is he the one you are serving? I trust he is. Because you’ll never be happy unless He is.

Now the second circle out on our logo contains the Bible. And it is through the Word of God that God has revealed to us the truth about Jesus, and about ourselves and our need for him.

So we, as a church, want to devote ourselves to the Bible—the Word of God. It is our textbook; our answer book for all of life’s questions and problems. We’re going to make it a priority as a church to study it; to learn from it. We’re going to devote ourselves to its teaching.

That’s why, on Sunday mornings, and other times we get together, the Bible is our curriculum. We don’t study current events, we don’t discuss the latest theories of psychology and sociology, we don’t do book reports on the writings of famous authors. We don’t study comparative religion. We study the Bible.

Because we believe 2 Timothy 3:16, which says “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

The word “equip” is key. The Bible is what God uses to equip us for living. That’s why it is the second part of our mission statement. But we don’t want to teach the Bible as just dry theological facts. God didn’t give us the Bible for our information; he gave it to us for our application. And that takes us to the third circle on our church logo—the circle that has to do with expressing, or living out, our faith.

In that circle, you will notice three smaller circles. They are not golf balls or ice cream cones. Those circles represent people—people who are living in fellowship together.

The church is a community and we need each other. And as we live together in fellowship, we will learn how to express our faith in Jesus Christ in tangible ways. We will love each other. We will encourage each other. We will care for each other. We will share our resources with each other. We will learn to depend upon each other as fellow members of the Body, for that is what we are.

This is the third part of our mission statement—expressing our faith—living out our faith in community together.

In the earliest days of the church in the book of Acts, the people outside of the church looked at the way the believers got along together, and they exclaimed “My, how they love one another!” The richness and the reality of the church’s fellowship was an eye-opener and a door-opener for witness to outsiders.

Jesus said “By this will all men know that you are my disciples; if you love one another.” And that love is made visible through fellowship, as we express to one another in practical ways our care and concern and encouragement.

And as that takes place, we will impact the world around us. And that takes us to the fourth and outermost circle on our church logo. That circle has three arrows in it, which actually form the bodies of the people in the third circle. The arrows are pointing outward, away from the circle. That’s significant.

What this part of the logo means is that each one of us is a witness to the world by our life. We embody the truth about Jesus Christ. To put it another way, people are going to draw some conclusions about Jesus by what they see in you and me. Jesus not only gave us a message to take out into the world—he said “You are the message.”

In Acts 1:8, he said “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

As a church, we want to see Christ’s kingdom—his rule, his authority—extend to people here at home as well as people all over the world. And we want to make that outreach a priority.

You see, the tragedy with many evangelical churches today isn’t that people out there in the world are ignoring the church; it’s that the people in the church are ignoring the people out there in the world. They’ve become so engrossed in their own programs and relationships, that they’ve forgotten the lost.

And unless we are willing to go out there and reach them, those people are going to stay lost. But going out and reaching them means that we’ll have to be willing to step outside our comfort zone. Remember, the arrows go out from the circle. You can’t do outreach—you can’t extend to unbelievers—unless you are willing to take some risks.

It means being willing to strike up a conversation and start to build a friendship with someone you don’t even know. It means being willing to put up with situations that might make you feel uncomfortable or awkward. It means learning to love people who aren’t always that loveable, but doing it anyway for Jesus’ sake.

You know, your love for an unbeliever is the greatest outreach tool ever invented. It’s better than any canned evangelistic presentation; any gimmick; any tract. Christians are forever trying to cook up impersonal methods by which we can just “zap” unbelievers with the message of the Gospel, and hope they’ll get it.

Hand him a tract. Give him a copy of the Jesus video. Tell him to turn on the radio. And sort of hope that he’ll get the message.

But look at what Jesus did. He simply made friends with people. Struck up conversations. Built relationships with them. Remember what they called Jesus—they called him the “friend of sinners.” Because he loved those people.

Author Bill Hull has said that the greatest outreach program of the church is a discipled membership. People who are so in love with Jesus that they start to live like him. People who care enough about a friend who is not a Christian to pray for that guy or gal and seek to be the means by which they can be brought to Christ.

If FBC is going to be a healthy church, it is going to have to grow by conversion growth, not transfer growth. We need to be out there in the ocean catching fish; not just having fish jumping from another aquarium into ours.

Somebody looked at the logo and said “Why do the arrows point down?” Because that’s where the people are who need the Gospel. They’re down. They’re hurting. And they are headed for an eternity separated from God unless we reach them.

So that’s why we’re here as a church. That’s why we exist.

- to exalt Jesus Christ - worshiping the Son of God who bought us with his own blood

- to equip believers - devoting ourselves to the teaching of the Bible

- to express our faith - learning how to really care for one another through biblical fellowship and love—ministering to each other as a community of faith.

- to extend Christ’s kingdom throughout the Lehigh Valley and around the world - as we build relationships with unbelievers and love them into that kingdom for Jesus’ sake.

That’s our mission. That’s our purpose. So let’s not swim in the fog!

Oh, by the way, two months later, Florence Chadwick tried again. This time, she made it. And she not only made it, but she beat the men’s record by two hours! Because she could see her goal clearly all the way.