Religious Freedom

The Fourth of July brings celebration of our American freedoms. It is a good time for us to think about the meaning of religious freedom. Many Sundays in church I have thanked God or heard other people thank God for “the freedom we have to be here today and worship without interference.” Religious freedom is a precious gift.

Religious freedom means freedom for all religions and for people of no religion. In America people are free to worship as Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Muslims, Mormons, or Unitarian Universalists. They are also free not to worship God. There is no religious test for holding public office in America. There are countries in the world in which it is against the law to belong to any religion other than the official religion of the country. Thank God there is no such state control of religion in America.

Maybe the hardest part of religious freedom for us is the freedom it allows for those who are atheists. Once, I visited a woman in the hospital who said, “I don’t like it when people tell me they don’t believe in God. It just makes me angry.” Why would she respond to someone who says they don’t believe in God with anger? Why not with compassion and sadness that they are missing out on a source of strength and comfort?

Anger is a protecting behavior. We tend to use it when we are afraid. This normally sweet and reasonable lady had grown up surrounded by people who believed in God and talked about God in Baptist ways. Fear gripped her heart when someone talked about there being no God.

We live in a nation that long ago decided to leave it up to individuals to decide about religious faith. The result of religious freedom in America is that we have to live with people all around us who are of a different faith than ours or of no faith. What a gift! We can listen to them and learn from their perspectives. We can lead them to freely choose faith in God, as we know God in Jesus Christ.

"Work Hard and Serve the Lord"

Wednesday night we discussed Romans 12:9-13, Paul’s words to the church on loving one another sincerely. He tells us to love each other generously, without hyprocisy, and “don’t’ fake it” (The Message). We discussed the eight ways Paul says we can make our love real at New Hope. One of those ways is to “work hard and serve the Lord enthusiastically.”

This is where my job comes in . As the pastor, I want to help as many members of New Hope as possible to find a job in our church that enables them to work hard and serve enthusiastically. So I am using a class that I am calling “Discovering Your Ministry.” Any member who takes this class will learn his or her S.H.A.P.E. (Spiritual gifts, Heart, Abilities, Personality, and Experience) for ministry. Out of that knowledge of their SHAPE they will find an area of our church’s ministry that fits them. I along with other church leaders will help them to get involved in a job that seems right.

This has to be one of the most important ways to love with real love. We want to help each member to find a way or ways to serve the Lord at New Hope that brings them fulfillment and makes us a stronger church.

The next Discovering Your Ministry Class will be two Sundays afternoons in August from 5:00 to 7:30 pm. Mark your calendar for August 22 and 29. Our goal is to have all of our members working hard and serving the Lord enthusiastically.

Our Papa God and Our Fathers

All across the country, children are celebrating fathers on Fathers Day. Fathers are receiving gifts, phone calls, text messages, emails, and being honored with meals out at restaurants. My children have remembered me with car washing liquids and materials. They have called and will call to strengthen the ties that bind us.

One of the best gifts I have received was from my ten-year-old granddaughter Madison a couple of weeks before Fathers Day. I sat down with her on the floor of Fleda’s mother’s house in Easley, SC to play a card game. She looked at me and said, “I love you, Papa.”

In his book of daily meditations, Bread for the Journey, Henri Nouwen wrote, “The Spirit reveals to us not only that God is "Abba, Father" but also that we belong to God as his beloved children. The Spirit thus restores in us the relationship from which all other relationships derive their meaning.

“Abba is a very intimate word. The best translation for it is: ‘Daddy.’ (I want to add ‘Papa’ as a good translation of Abba.) The word Abba expresses trust, safety, confidence, belonging, and most of all intimacy. It does not have the connotation of authority, power, and control that the word Father often evokes. On the contrary, Abba implies an embracing and nurturing love. This love includes and infinitely transcends all the love that comes to us from our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, spouses, and lovers. It is the gift of the Spirit.”

We thank God today for fathers. We thank God for sending Jesus to give us our best look at God. Thanks to Jesus, we know who God is, and we know who we are: Father and children. (Read The Message translation of Romans 8:15-17.)

Religious Freedom, Personal Freedom

It happens that July 4 falls on a Sunday this year. I am going to preach on the great gift and blessing religious freedom is to our nation. This will lead me to talk about the size of our church. I don’t mean the physical size. I mean the size of the Jesus we worship and serve, the size of the heart of New Hope Baptist Church.

The text for July 4 is Luke 4:16-30, which tells about the time Jesus went to his hometown and read from the scroll of Isaiah in the Synagogue. He applied the scripture by telling those gathered for Bible study the story of how God sent the Jewish prophet Elijah to provide food to a Gentile widow during a famine and how God used the Jewish prophet Elisha to heal a Gentile with leprosy. His people tried to kill him after that Bible lesson, because they did not want to hear that God actually brought healing to people who were not of their race or religion.

The title of the sermon is Big Church, Big Nation. My prayer for this sermon is that it will help us to see how America got its deep desire to give religious freedom to all people from the spirit that is behind Jesus’ teachings in this story. I also pray that it will lead us to see ourselves as Jesus’ church with a calling to live out God’s desire to bring healing and hope to people who are not of our race or our religion.

The following Sunday, July 11, the sermon will be based on an obscure Old Testament story of how the prophet Elisha threw salt into the water of the spring that supplied the city of Jericho. Elisha’s actions removed the curse that Joshua had placed on the city. This gives us an image of God’s readiness to quickly remove anything in our lives that has cursed us with doubts about our salvation and anxieties about our future.

The text for July 11 is 2 Kings 2:19-21. The title of this sermon is Salt in the Water. My prayer for this sermon and worship service is that it will bring healing for many. Come ready for God to remove any curse from your heart and mind that is holding you back from a free flowing supply of God’s love and from growing in Christ. You will have an opportunity to throw salt in water to symbolize your freedom, your healing.

Women as Church Leaders

Baptists Today reports that the Georgia Baptist Convention plans to disfellowship Druid Hills Baptist Church in Atlanta “for the crime of calling a female co-pastor,” Rev. Mimi Walker. You may remember that the Halifax Baptist Association disfellowshipped Central Baptist Church of Daytona Beach after it called Rev. Sonia Phillips as co-pastor.

John Pierce, editor of Baptists Today, writes that the argument of some fundamentalist Southern Baptists that 1 Timothy 2:11-12 is the clear statement of the Bible on the issue of women serving as pastors, ignores parts of scripture that affirm women in leadership roles. It also ignores the instructions in verse 9 calling for women to dress modestly without “braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes.” I agree with his point.

Defenders of slavery took the approach of choosing verses of the Bible that supported their way of looking at the world, such as Ephesians 6:5 (“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling”) while ignoring the broad biblical message of human worth and equality.

I am glad that New Hope Baptist Church decided long ago not to restrict the roles that women can play in our church. We have women serving in almost every area of the life of our church including teaching.

“Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence,” says 1 Timothy 2:11-12. We recognize that just as slavery was accepted in Bible times, so was the subjection of women. At that time in history, to own slaves and to keep women from being educated and becoming leaders were accepted as a normal way of life. Have we not recognized the gospel truth on both of these issues?

We live in a society that respects women in leadership in any realm of life you can name: education, business, politics, science and the list runs on. If a woman came to me as the pastor of New Hope and said, “I believe I have teaching and shepherding gifts from the Holy Spirit, and I believe God is calling me to be a pastor,” I would listen and try help to her find her calling. There are some Baptist churches today that will call women to serve them as pastors and co-pastors. Georgia Baptists and the Halifax Baptist Association won’t have fellowship with them, but thank God for churches that respect women and know that the Holy Spirit gives gifts without regard to gender.