I preached my final sermon to the church that my wife, Angela, and I planted and co-pastored together almost 14 years ago: Greenleaf Vineyard Church.
It wasn’t a year ago by date, but by the church calendar. It was Pentecost Sunday, 2020, the day that Christians celebrate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The sermon was titled, “What is the Holy Spirit Up To?”
I phrased it as a question because questions were pretty much all I had at the time.
So over a computer screen (as if what I was doing wasn’t hard enough), I read from Acts 2, and then made the following points as I said goodbye to our church, our dream, our baby, and our friends:
THE HOLY SPIRIT IS OPPORTUNISTIC. It seems that the Holy Spirit will often work within circumstances that he did not orchestrate in order to achieve his purposes for human flourishing and for the expansion of the kingdom of God. Pentecost was a big-deal Jewish festival that brought people from all over the world together into one place, so the Holy Spirit took advantage of that situation.
THE WORK OF THE HOLY SPIRIT IS OFTEN UNEXPECTED AND UNCOMFORTABLE. Sometimes when the “violent wind” of the Holy Spirit blows, it can be rather unnerving. Unsettling. Even frightening. Yes, Jesus calls him the Comfortor, but that doesn’t mean that he only makes us comfortable. The question is, can we discern that it’s him, even when it’s unexpected? Can we trust him even when it’s uncomfortable?
THE WORK OF THE HOLY SPIRIT IS TO HELP MORE AND MORE PEOPLE HEAR OF THE WONDERS OF GOD. When the Holy Spirit arrived, the disciples didn’t stay huddled together, enjoying the comforts of being together with their Spirit-induced warm fuzzies. They left the building. They headed out into the streets so others could “hear them declaring the wonders of God in [their] own tongues.” And once they left the building, they never gathered together in quite the same way ever again.
THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT CAN BE INCORRECTLY ATTRIBUTED TO OTHER THINGS. The people outside thought the disciples were drunk. It’s easy to miss the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit. Not least because we like being comfortable. Some people attributed our church closing to reasons other than the work of the Spirit. I get it. But this was the result of what we had tried to teach out church for years, and what we tried to teach them even through the process of closing our church: How to discern the movement of the Spirit.
THE HOLY SPIRIT ALWAYS MAKES A BIG DEAL ABOUT JESUS. This what we did for 13 years. We made a big deal about Jesus. Believe it or not, everyone wasn’t always happy about that. Sometimes people wanted us to make bigger deals about different things. But even as we sent our people out to search for new churches we urged them to find churches that always make a really big deal about Jesus. No apologies.
SOMETIMES THE HOLY SPIRIT HAS TO BREAK UP A LOCAL CHURCH AS A CATLYST FOR MORE FRUIT. The church of Jesus has always been gathered and scattered. It’s clear that these 120 who waited in a room together for the Holy Spirit never gathered together in that same room again. Instead, there were now thousands of them gathering in different rooms all over the city.
I’m certain that they missed each other. I’m certain that they all looked back on the good old 120 days with nostalgia, joy, and thankfulness—and also with a bit of longing and grief mixed in.
But Pentecost wasn’t a one-shot deal. This work kept going. Each of those new churches eventually dispersed and multiplied until similar Jesus communities existed all around the world, including the one that I am (and quite possibly you are) connected to today.
For years Angela and I were asking, “Lord, where is the harvest? Where is the fruit?” When we pictured the harvest field for us, we imagined that as being in Chapel Hill. We never really imagined it being anywhere else. But it became clear that God’s answer to our prayer was that the harvest was elsewhere for us. We wanted to see the fruit in North Carolina. But God, in his wisdom, saw that there would be more fruit elsewhere.
We also all co-discerned that the harvest was elsewhere for each member of our church family as well. God was sending us all out into the harvest. Would we follow him?
I left my dear church with these words from Jesus:
You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other.
Johnn15:16-17
