The Outreach of the Church 3/30/41
Scripture: Matthew 28: 16-20.
There is one season when, perhaps more than at any other time of the year, we try to cultivate a deeper devotion to the Father of our Spirits. And that is this Lenten season in which we now are. The dignity and the possibilities of a human life were never so vividly shown as in the life of Him, whom the Father gave us, in the closing days of his earthly life.
The Church of Jesus Christ is established upon the spirit of Christ, as, with great singleness of purpose, he went about doing and saying the things that ought to be done and said. The appeal of the church for many of us, today lies, not in any system or systems of philosophy with which the church may be associated but in the fact that it rests upon the life of a person. And when we remember that it is founded on a person it becomes at once, not a task, but an interesting privilege to be associated with it. It is this personal character of the church that appeals to other persons - to you and to me and to our neighbors.
I gladly testify to the personal character of my experience in the church. Like many another who has been nurtured in, and has grown up in, the Christian faith, I joined the church where my family worshipped at the age of ten or eleven years. That church was a religious and social home for me. Much of my earliest acquaintance with the religious experiences of others as recorded in the Bible was made in the Sunday School. I was present at the worship service each Sunday morning at eleven o’clock from the time I was little more than a babe in arms. My father was for many years Superintendent of the Sunday School, and always an officer of the church in some capacity. The tremendous pressure of hard work and long hours on a busy farm was entirely relaxed each Sunday, and the Christian Sabbath always became a day of rest and attendance at church.
Later on, we growing young folks found our channel of expression in the young people’s society of the church. Some of us got our first lessons in speaking out voluntarily in a group of people in those meetings. We learned to organize and give expression to some of our thoughts about our religion as it affects human living.
My first and most important experiences with music were in my home and in my church. A helpful choir leader invited me into the church choir while I was a high school student and encouraged me to sing my first solo in public about the time I entered college. And the whole world of beauty in music was opened before me. Through attendance at the services of worship, in the discussion of the Sunday School class and young people’s society, I learned of the freedom of conscience; how precious it is as a hard-earned right.
In the church I have found the best channel I know of for volunteer and cooperative service. And I think it has meant that to me because of the fellowship there with other Christians, and with the Lord of us all.
When we sing together the hymn - “I Love thy kingdom, Lord;” my heart warms especially at the second stanza, beginning “I love thy Church, O God.” I love the church for what it means to me personally. I love it for what it means to other friends whom I have known and friends you have known and to all of us.
But I love it for something else, too. And I am not sure that this may not be even more significant. I love the church for the fact that it reaches out to others near and far.
It is a curious and genuine fact that we can not keep the most precious experiences for ourselves. It is so with the experience of love. One who regards love as an emotional experience of receiving, finds love vanished. When selfishness gets mixed with love, there appears jealousy and suspicion. And love can not long abide with those devils. Love is only preserved in giving. The true lover is one who, through tranquillity and storm, is a giver; who is not concerned with what he or she will get, but with what may be given in remembrance, affection, attention, honor, devotion to the beloved.
Dr. Frank C. Lanbach makes the startling observation that one can not keep God. To really have God, one must gladly share God with others. If God has become precious to my life and yours, we can preserve that experience only in giving God to others! That for one thing is exactly what we are able to do through the church in the field of missionary work. Some of those who have joined the Church of Christ have felt the urge or call to carry the good news of Christ’s gospel to others who are without it. And the rest of us have a part in that giving by supporting these missionaries with our prayers and our money, with our study and our interest. No single aspect of the life of the church is so important, spiritually, as this sharing of our experience of God, of the gospel of Christ, with others.
Look for a moment at the lives of some of these representatives of the Church of Christ. A couple of years ago, I heard Dr. A. I. Ludlow, a retiring medical missionary from Korea. A man who is exceedingly modest about his own accomplishments, he is nevertheless sufficiently distinguished in the practice of medicine and surgery to be known by many of the most prominent doctors of the world. He has given his life in service to Korea, backed by the church to which he belongs in Cleveland.
I knew another one, a woman who has given a whole life of Christian hope and service to the people of the same country. So faithful and so distinguished was her service as a Christian nurse that she had been called by others the “Florence Nightingale of the Orient.”
In the Phillipine Islands is a man who sheds the light of God’s patient and persistent love among humble people with whom he works, and afar through his writings. He is Frank C. Lanbach.
This is what one of the secretaries of our American Board of Missions says about him: [read from preface of “Letters by a Modern Mystic.”]
In India, there is a field of missionary work that is backed in particular by the Churches of Hawaii - Dindigal. A missionary family is located there, teaching, patiently, and simply spreading the Gospel.
The church reaches out in other directions. A young minister who was my former roommate at Yale, Rev. Ross Ensminger, is struggling to see that fine young white people in a southern district who are exceedingly poor, have a chance for a college education. And he is backed as President of Southern Union College by the great church fellowship of which we are a part.
The church reaches out in preaching, teaching, healing, understanding, friendliness and encouragement to people all over the world; in social action in matters that must be improved in our own land. And we have a part in that outreach, in our corporate giving to benevolences at church and as Christian individuals.
Aren’t you proud to belong in a fellowship that keeps its greatest good only by sharing it, by giving it? The outreach of the church is its glory and strength - for that glory belongs to its God and from Him is given the strength.
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Dates and places delivered:
Pilgrim Church, Honolulu, March 12, 1939 AM
Wisconsin Rapids, March 30, 1941