March 3-4
Scripture: 
Text: Psalm 78: 1-8

This is our focus today, not on our own needs but the needs of the next generation, on your children. This is a special time for our church not just because it is Lent. This is a special time because the leaders of our church believe that we are at a kairos moment which will redefine the future of our congregation. If we respond faithfully and sacrificially, it will dramatically change our lives and the lives of our children. 

 

I shared last weekend that the word kairos in the ancient Greek language means “opportune time.” The early Christians believed that these kairos moments were occasions when the Holy Spirit steps in to shape the future. Everything changes after a kairos moment.

 

We’ve named this kairos moment Connecting Promises. The theme verse comes from a kairos moment in scripture when the church was born. I’d like you to read it with me. It is found on the front of your bulletin. “For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” (Acts 2:39)

 

The promise is for our children. What is the promise? The promise is the Holy Spirit who Jesus says “will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” (John 14:26) The challenge of course is this: someone has to teach them what Jesus said before the Holy Spirit can remind them. Someone has to share their faith for the Holy Spirit to be able to work in our children’s lives.  Whose responsibility is it to share the promise with our children? The answer is us. We are responsible for sharing the faith with future generations. 

 

A few years ago, Hillary Clinton wrote a book titled, It Takes a Village. The phrase was overused to the point of cliché. She was inspired to write the book because of serving on the Board of Directors of the Children’s Defense Fund, an organization set up by the child educator, Marian Wright Edelman.[1] It take a village is a common African proverb but also shows up in Native American writing. No one can pin down its origin and there are many written versions.[2] One version is told by an African Peace Corps worker.  She tells the story of a young girl named Yemi whose mother asks her to watch her baby brother, Kokou, on their trip to the market. Yemi is proud to be watching her brother all by herself. But soon after they get to the market, Yemi turns her head for a moment, and Kokou slips away. Yemi frantically searches the market for her lost brother, worried that he's hungry, or thirsty, or tired. But as it turns out, Kokou never has a chance to be hungry or thirsty or tired, because every adult he bumped into took care of him for a few minutes, giving him something to eat and something to drink and a quiet place to rest.

 

When Yemi finally found her brother, he was happy, well fed, and rested. They hurried back to their mother and told her how she had lost Kokou for a while, but all of the people of the village took care of him. Yemi's mother wasn't surprised at all. She looked at her daughter and said: "What my mama told me, I will tell you. We don't raise our children by ourselves. It takes a village to raise a child." [3]

If you're a member of this church, you have children in your life. This weekend, there will be over 300 children and teenagers in this building.  Chances are you won't make it from the sanctuary back to the parking lot without passing some of them. We all have children in our lives, and according to God's Word, we are responsible not only for their physical and emotional welfare, but for their spiritual development as well. It is the promise for your children and it is the prayer of Psalm 78.

 

The 78^th Psalm is often called a prayer for children. In the first eight verses, the Psalmist prays about the need to share stories of faith. Then, throughout the rest of the Psalm, the longest in scripture, there are stories of God’s redemptive acts. The Psalmist reminds us of the stories which should be passed along. But the Psalmist recognizes that faith doesn’t get passed on to the next generation without first being inherited by the present generation.  “Give ear, O my people, to my teaching; incline your ears to the words of my mouth….things that we have heard and known, that our ancestors have told us.” (Psalm 78:1,3)

 

The faith we possess is a faith passed on to us. I want you to consider this. There is no such thing as a self-made Christian. Someone shared his or her faith with you. Someone witnessed to you. Someone invited you to worship or took you to church. Someone made sure you knew the stories of Jesus. 

 

I am always interested in stories about how you come to have faith. At membership class, we go around the table sharing these stories. Some describe experiences similar to mine. Going to church is one of my first memories. My parents took me as an infant and never stopped taking me. I went to Sunday school every week. I went to Vacation Bible School and church camp and youth groups. I can name countless men and women who shared their faith with me, taught me the stories of the Bible, opened the teachings of Jesus so that I could experience this promise in my own life.

 

Others aren’t as fortunate. Some of you grew up in homes that didn’t believe or didn’t value the importance of a Christian education. Someone else introduced you to Christ. You came to faith as a teen or as an adult. It may have come when a friend or a coach or a teacher invited you to worship or to Bible study or to youth group. It may have come when you married a faithful person and began to worship with him or her. Whether we started early or came late to faith, we all have someone or several people who influenced us spiritually—Sunday school teachers and youth workers and coaches and pastors and musicians and babysitters and neighbors.

 

Here is the first question for today. Do you have a sense of gratitude about what has been given to you? You have inherited a great legacy, a family heirloom. The family is the Body of Christ and the heirloom is our faith, passed down from generation to generation. Are you grateful for the faith that was passed on to you?

 

If you are grateful, the next step should be easy. The Psalmist says that because we have this gift of faith, we now have an obligation to pass our faith on to the next generation. The obligation belongs not just to families, but to the community of believers. It's as if all the children belong to all the people. To paraphrase the African proverb: We don't lead our children to faith by ourselves. It takes a church to raise a child.

 

In just a few weeks, it will be spring. Throughout this neighborhood, there will be two experiences. Kids of all ages will be playing baseball or soccer. I grew up in a community where no one played soccer. In fact, in my high school class, there was a kid named Joe who was a soccer player. He was really good; a goalie who was named All State.  None of us knew a thing about soccer so he’d teach us about the game.

 

What I knew, what all of the other kids knew was baseball. We knew it because our dads taught us. We had hours and hours invested in our education. I’ll never forget the dads who’d come straight from work, take off their coats and ties, roll up their sleeves and hit balls, throw batting practice and make sure that we understood the nuisances of the game. They did it because their dads did it. It was important.

 

Four decades later, in this community, as spring arrives, the same thing is going on, now on the baseball diamond and the soccer field. Men and women who care enough about the sport that they played want their kids to know it. They give hours every week organizing, coaching, and carpooling kids to practice and games. As a parent, I’ve done this drill for a dozen years. What amazes me over the years is the collective commitment that we have as adults to see that our children understand and play these sports. What is even more amazing are the adults who are helping out who don’t have kids. Men and women who are passionate about a sport that, even though they don’t have kids in the league,  still give boatloads of time to pass their knowledge on to the next generation. Often, they are the most passionate, the most intense, and the most committed.

 

It's that kind of collective commitment, a sense of shared responsibility that the Psalmist is saying every generation of believers must have. The question is, “Are you passionate enough about your faith that you want to share it with the next generation?” Is it important to pass your faith on to those who are coming after us? This is what Connecting Promises is about.

 

I want to share with you some statistics. Demographers tell us that the present population of school age children is the largest ever (73 million of them in 2003), and that the population is just now moving into adolescence. This generation of children and young people is growing up in the most secular culture in our nation's history. They do not hear the stories of the Bible or the message of Christ anywhere but in their homes and churches.

 

We also know that adolescence is the most formative time of a person's life, spiritually speaking. Researchers like George Barna tell us that somewhere between 76 to 85 percent of all Christians make their decision to follow Jesus before the age of 18 with the vast majority of those decisions taking place before the age of 14. They also tell us that what a person believes at the age of 13, they are likely to believe for the rest of their lives. [4]

Unfortunately, according to Barna and others, this generation is being overlooked and underreached by the vast majority of churches. Even though children and young people have been shown to be far more receptive to the gospel message than adults, most churches focus their evangelistic efforts on reaching adults. And even though the childhood and adolescent years have been shown to be the most formative years of a person's life spiritually, churches continue to focus the ministries on the education and development of adults.

 

In light of the tremendous opportunity represented by this current generation of young people, and in light of the feeble efforts by many current churches to reach this generation, Barna is calling for a radical recommitment to ministry for children and young people; challenging churches to make children their number one priority. He puts it this way: "If you want to have a lasting influence upon the world, you must invest in people's lives; and if you want to maximize that investment, then you must invest in those people while they are young." There is a third question: “Do you want to have a lasting influence on this world by making a difference in the lives of children?” This is what Connecting Promises is about.

 

Last week, I surprised most of you by not talking about what the Connecting Promises campaign was going to build and I haven’t mentioned it so far today. There is a reason. This campaign isn’t about facilities, it is about ministry. It is about what God wants us to do, how we are being called to be faithful.

 

Three years ago, as we began to study and pray about expanding our ministry to a second site, we first clarified what we believed God wanted us to accomplish in the next five years. Our leaders believed we needed to significantly strengthen our children’s and youth ministry. We started a service for youth and borrowed against our equity to build a worship center, the ALTARed space. We felt we couldn’t wait for a campaign. This ministry was too urgent. We launched a new program for children called Faith Quest. We added staff in youth and children ministry. All of these initiatives have created significant growth in the number of students we serve and confirmed our five year plan.  But we have long known that our youth ministry will not reach its full potential without a family life center. We also know that our current site is insufficient in size for such a facility. To better serve our youth and pass faith on to the next generation, a second site is needed and what better place than across the street from a new high school on Promise Road. “The Promise” is indeed for your children.

 

I believe that God wants us to be the kind of church that is a magnate for youth. I believe that ministry to our children and teenagers is one of our top priorities. The new family life center on Promise Road is going to be a great place for kids to connect to the promise, a regional youth center that will serve hundreds and hundreds of youth. I can’t wait to see the place crawling with kids and teenagers.

 

It's wonderful to imagine that little African boy, Kokou, wandering the marketplace, being loved and cared for by every adult he bumped into along the way. How much more wonderful to imagine a young boy or girl, wandering the halls of Geist Christian Church, being loved, served, and prayed for by an entire community of faith.

 

Last weekend, I asked you to be patient about your decision. Kairos moments are too important to make hasty decisions. I gave you some questions to ask yourself. I did this because spending time asking and answering these questions has been what the leaders of our congregation have done over the past three years. As you noticed, there were questions in this sermon too.

 

This week, ask yourself these questions:

·        Are you grateful for the faith that was passed on to you?

·        Are you passionate enough about your faith that you want to share it with the next generation?

·        Do you want to have a lasting influence on this world by making a difference in the lives of children?              

 

Ask these questions. Pray about them. Let the Spirit work on you. Figure out how God is using you in this kairos moment at Geist Christian Church because the promise is for your children.

 

---