Those early days of the Christian Church must have been something else! I mean preaching and conversions and tongues of flame resting on all your friends! What would it feel like ______ to have a tongue of flame just above your head?

That first group of less than a hundred, including some women and children - the first followers of Jesus - had been inspired by the Holy Spirit to share their experience of the Risen Christ. Soon, as a result of this sharing, their numbers began to grow remarkably. In their first preaching experience thousands were added to their numbers. In a few weeks we will celebrate this gift of the Holy Spirit that came upon the first Jewish Christians.

This week, however, we read that God did not limit the gift of the Spirit to just Jews. Cornelius, from today’s verses, was one of several very important Gentiles in the early church. He and others, like Lydia from Philippi, were of Greek heritage rather than Jewish heritage. Peter claims in these verse that for the first time God is moving beyond the human imposed confines of ethnicity.

Peter claims that he was prepared for this startling new experience by a dream sent to him by God. It may have taken three times, but Peter finally got the message! Those who were with him however had not received the same preparation. Perhaps they didn’t argue with Peter, because they saw for themselves that something had taken hold of these Gentiles.

Peter claims that that something is the Holy Spirit. He claims that God does not respect human imposed lines that separate people into groups. God does not respect the division of Greek and Jew, male and female, young and old. In spite of our human tendency to claim that God is on our side, God loves all people equally. The Holy Spirit is no respecter of human imposed divisions.

Today in this 21^st century, the Holy Spirit is moving again, falling on those we least expect and calling us to follow into the lives of the un-churched. Church after church has begun to explore what they are calling contemporary worship. Emmanuel down the street offers it and Grace Church is another. Our National Evangelism Conferences teach it. Something is happening in our churches and that something is, I believe, the work of the Holy Spirit.

Aldersgate is also exploring this new style of worship. During the summer months, we will have three worship services that will have a different style. With support from the church council, our worship planning team is preparing three services that will communicate the good news in a new format.

Yet we are unsure what to call this new thing that God’s spirit is leading us to explore. Our worship committee recognizes that all worship is contemporary, pertinent to the people that experience it in their times. Traditional liturgical worship that meets the needs of those who grew up in the church is also contemporary and cannot be left behind.

When we worship we come together to praise God, to hear God’s word and to respond to God’s word with our lives. Worship is the one activity that defines and separates the church from the Rotary, the YMCA, and other community groups. Worship is also the first opportunity that we have to communicate the good news of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Some come to our sanctuary and feel renewed and energized for the week to come. Some visit with us and have difficulty hearing the message of God because the form does not engage their thought or emotion.

We have signs out front on the lawn saying "Everyone Welcome." These signs are well intentioned, but are they true? Our welcome sign is both an invitation to passes-by and a challenge to us. If we really want to welcome others into our congregation, then we need to be intentional about inviting them. We need to listen when others speak and recognize that a young person’s experience of God is just as real as an older person’s. And that a single mom’s perspective is just as credible as a married mom. A working class male’s viewpoint is just as important as a college professor’s. All are holy in God’s eyes.

This morning as a way of helping us understand this new style of worship, I’d like to walk us briefly through a history of communication. By reviewing in very broad strokes the developments in human communication from the ancient people to the twenty-first century, I hope we can see how the means but not the message of the good news has changed.

In the beginning… God did not write the words of Genesis in English. In the beginning, the stories of Genesis and Exodus were told and passed from generation to generation through an oral process. During the fifth century preceding the birth of Jesus, the scribes of the Hebrew people began to write these stories into scrolls. These scrolls became for us the Hebrew Scripture or Old Testament. But Jesus’ knowledge of scripture came to him through this oral tradition. Judaism did not completely adopt the new communication tool of writing.

On the other hand, the apostle Paul, one of the key influences in the early Christian church, took advantage of the new technology of writing on papyrus. After founding faith communities during his various journeys, Paul preceded to write letters of encouragement to those same groups. He also used the letters to correct what he saw as misunderstandings and to address conflict. Yes, Paul’s early letters were actually written before the gospels so that he could communicate with his fellow Christians. The gospels were written 20 to 30 years after these first letters.

During the first millennium of the Christian church, these letters and gospels were copied into manuscripts. Thousands of monks and nuns spent meticulous hours inking the letters and illustrating the images formed by the words. They understood this work as holy and had a very different relationship to the word. They were artists inspired by God.

In 1450, the invention of the printing press changed forever the way in which people would communicate the good news. The King James Version of the Holy Bible was one of the first books to be printed. More copies of the Bible were printed in a week than was possible through a lifetime of a nun copying by hand. The Gutenberg Press, however, printed only the words and not the colorful images of the ancient manuscripts.

The fledging Protestant Church embraced the new technology, mass producing the Bible and encouraging people to read it for themselves. The Roman Catholic Church, however, did not adopt the new technology. It wasn’t until Vatican II in the 1970’s that Catholic families were encouraged to own Bibles and read them at home.

Jumping forward in time, the 1950’s saw the invention of another new method of communication; it will have as significant an impact on the way we communicate the good news, as did the printing press. Many of us gathered here this morning remember when we got our first television and many more remember the first computers. Over the last fifty years, this new media has grown up; video has changed the way we communicate with each other.

As a result of these new technologies, some researchers are suggesting that the way in which children think today is dramatically different from how our grandparents thought. Children who use computers on a daily basis think faster and their minds work in different patterns. Computers help us to process thoughts in a spider web fashion, rather than with straight-line logical thought. Video also utilizes different parts of the brain in the learning process, activating learning through images as well as words.

Thus, many churches are experimenting with forms of worship that include, images, video, and computers. Just as the invention of the printing press changed how churches communicate the good news, so also the invention of video is having an impact on our methods of communication in this century. Practices during worship are changing as a result of these inventions yet the good news message remains the same as it did in the first century.

As Christian believers we are called to communicate this good news to our children and to those who are un-churched. We are called to effectively invite them into relationship with God even if our communication requires use of a new technology. Our goal is to share the good news in ways that will help the message to be heard. It is the message that is critical, not the means by which we communicate that message.

During the 1700’s when the Wesleys, John and Charles were trying to renew the Church of England, they wanted to speak to the people who were singing songs and drinking stout in the bars that populated the working class neighborhoods of Britain. These people were un-churched and uneducated; Anglican worship did not work for them. So Charles took their familiar tunes and gave them new words that would communicate the good news! Yes, most of our familiar hymns written by Charles Wesley are actually sung to what were bar tunes. How do you think the proper people of the Anglican Church of England responded to Charles Wesley’s hymns? The Wesley’s founded a singing church! Scandalous, maybe, effective, certainly!

We cannot know God’s purposes, yet I believe God is calling us to speak to the Gentiles, the un-churched who live in our neighborhoods and work with us in our offices. God is calling the church to use a new language and communicate with the thousands who have been unable to hear the good news message in the traditional language of the church.

A few years ago, I was working with a group of junior high students trying to introduce them to some Christian rock musicians. I thought they would respond positively to the idea of listening to rock music in church. They did not. It wasn’t that they didn’t like the music. It wasn’t that they didn’t like rock music. Instead they struggled with the idea that a band could communicate Christian ideas in a form they only knew in the secular world.

"Great!" you might be thinking to yourself. "We need to keep rock music out of the church." Yet, I am deeply concerned about teens and others who compartmentalize their lives, thinking certain behavior is for church on Sunday morning and other behavior is for Monday through Friday. What we preach and teach needs to impact our daily lives and not just our Sunday behavior. Rather than keeping rock music out of the church, I would like to transform the rock music we listen to so that we hear a more positive life-giving message.

In a few moments, we are going to baptize Brooke, one of the youngest members of our congregation. In accepting this baptism, we are accepting our responsibility to pass the faith to this young child and to the other children who are part of our congregation. We always need to be looking for new ways to communicate with our newest Christians so that our efforts of communicating the faith of Jesus Christ are successful.

May God help us to find methods and forms for inviting our children and the un-churched people of our neighborhoods into relationship with God. Amen.

Prayer

"No one has greater love than this," Jesus said, "than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends." On this day, O God, we remember all those who have died while helping their friends, their community, and their nation. We remember those who have died in war. We remember those who have died committing acts of justice and courage. We remember those who have died risking everything to protect others. We remember those who have died rescuing others. May we honor their memory in our daily living as we work fro a world of justice and peace – a place where, following the example of Jesus, we can live as true friends of one another.

Eric’s grandmother.