Many of you remember when Bruce McIver was your interim pastor. Bruce was truly a master craftsman storyteller. Kind of like Jesus, he could take virtually any life experience and weave it into a story that would communicate the gospel on a new level. Bruce had this problem, though. During all the time he served as a pastor, he pastored churches filled with real human beings. As a result, he had this incredible bag full of real-life stories. The problem was, he could not repeat most of them in any pulpit he was serving at the time. Therefore, upon his retirement, he wrote a book entitled, Stories I Couldn’t Tell While I Was a Pastor. If you need a little bit of hope for the work of God through very human people, I would really encourage you to read Bruce McIver’s book.

Someday, I may write my version of that book. But one story I must tell today, while I am still your pastor, is the story about the impact this church has had on my life. This story, about how God used you to help transform me over the past eight years from what I would call an institutional Christian into a missional Christian. We are in the season of Lent, the time of year set aside for personal reflection on the cost of following God’s call on our lives, just as Jesus did in the forty days he was in the wilderness, following his baptism.

The two texts of scripture that we read this morning, from Numbers 21 and from Ephesians 2, show us the beautiful interplay between the Old and New Testaments on the subject of the cost of following God’s call on our lives. In the Old Testament, the children of Israel were reflecting on the call of God on them as a people while they, too, were wandering in the desert. Life was hard. Many of them wanted to go back. Moses’ job was to keep calling them forward.

The challenge that Moses faced with those people was not all that dissimilar to the challenge that every follower of Jesus has ever faced and faces today. There were those in the crowd in that moment, perhaps it seemed the majority, who longed, believe it or not, for the institution of slavery in Egypt.

For all of its drawbacks, slavery offered two very important benefits that most human beings find very appealing. For one, it offered predictability, and, at least on some level, security. Here they were, in the wilderness. Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, they were free at last. And someone said, “‘Moses, why have you brought us out here, out of Egypt, to die in this wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.’”

So, which was it? Was there no food, or were their tastes just not being satisfied? “‘For there is no food,’” they said, “‘and no water, and we detest this miserable food.’”

Try to put yourself in Moses’ sandals for a moment. What would you say to the people who were complaining? I think I might be tempted to say, “I’m sorry you feel that way. I know the buffet isn’t that great. And, out here in the wilderness, with all this sand, things get a little gritty sometimes. I know the view isn’t that great. But, at least you’re free.” As the story goes, you know, the people who rebelled against the mission to which God had called them ended up dying in the very wilderness they so detested.

Now, jump to Ephesians, some centuries later. Listen to this thing repeat itself in the writings of the New Testament church. When the Apostle Paul said, “You were dead, but God.” But God. You were dead, slaves of death, if you will, “But God, who is rich in his mercy, made us alive together with Christ and raised us up so that in the ages to come, he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”

Do you see it? We have so much in common with these poor people wandering in the wilderness who had known only the institution of slavery all of their lives, for generations. Their fathers, their grandfathers, their great-grandfathers. That is all the history they had known. And, just like them, we are tempted toward institutionalized ways of living that, though they steal our freedom away from us, do offer two things we all crave, predictability and, on some level, at least the perception of security.

Yet, like them, you and I, not just the children of Israel, not just the church at Ephesus, all of us who claim to be followers of Jesus have been called from the life of predictability and security to a greater mission. The mission as Paul describes it, as being the ones who demonstrate through their transformed lives the power of God to raise anyone from death to life and a greater purpose than living just for themselves.

As I understand it, the mission of the church, therefore, the mission of this church, given to us by scripture is to influence the transformation of the world by introducing to it a new culture called the Kingdom of God. The question is, what does that mean for us, here and now, today in this church? Or, for that matter, in your family at home, or in your career, your hobbies, your life. What does that really mean? Just like the children of Israel, at some point, we must and will make, one way or another, a critical decision about being mission-minded or not. We will either go forward to fulfill God’s mission call on us, or, like the children of Israel in the wilderness, we will be doomed to die in the very wilderness we say, given the chance, we find so meaningless. Every single generation of Christians has had to face and answer that question. How will we answer it?

It’s the question you have caused me to ask for myself over the past eight years, without my even realizing it until rather recently. Whether I would be an institutional Christian or a missional Christian. The only thing riding on the outcome of how we will answer that question is whether we want our lives to matter or not, for eternity. Or, do we just want them to matter for these few short breaths we draw while we are here?

Now, here is where the confession comes in. I was raised by well-meaning people. People I love deeply. They raised me, for the most part, to be a good institutional Christian. I believe they gave me the best they had to give. But, by that, I mean that I was raised to believe, despite what we said otherwise, that the most important thing was the propagation of the institutional church, the brick and mortar and all the attendant programs and budgets, staffs, and even ways of measuring effectiveness. You have caused me, through some stories I can tell now and some that will have to wait, to see the world through a missional set of lenses. Starting with this community of faith and working out from here.

I find myself reflecting on Paul’s words in a different kind of way. “When I was a child,” he said in 1 Corinthians 13, “I thought like a child, I spoke like a child and reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I put away childish things.” I find myself this morning taking just a little different spin on Paul’s words to say this, by way of confession. When I was an institutional Christian, I thought like an institutional Christian and spoke like an institutional Christian. But when I became a missional Christian, though I have not arrived or have yet become perfect, I strive forward to the high calling of God in Christ Jesus to begin putting behind me institutional ways of thinking, in order that I might fulfill God’s mission call on me.

I wonder if some of you here this morning might hear your own confession in mine. May I give you four specific ways? There are several, but I have picked four that seem to be most crucial.

When I was an institutional Christian, I thought first of all of salvation as an event in time. I was led to believe all of my life that the most significant thing I ever had to do was make certain that I accepted Jesus as my personal Savior so that I did not go to hell when I died. In addition, the primary proof that I was saved for eternity was that I had ceased certain behaviors that were largely more culturally than biblically defined, even to the point that there were some West Texas moral behaviors that were unacceptable, that in Baptist life in Dallas would have been perfectly acceptable.

I always thought I had done my part by going to church whenever the doors were open and giving my 10% and trying to live my best, either to be a pretty decent person or, at least to not get caught doing otherwise. As I have become more missional, I have come to appreciate salvation not so much as a one-moment-in-time event, perhaps the moment we would describe as the moment we first accepted Jesus as our personal Savior, but I have come to describe salvation as a journey.

Jesus said, recorded for us in John 8, these words, to those, by the way, who had already believed in him. To the Jews who had already believed in him. By our definition, those who had already joined the church and gotten their picture taken for the church newsletter. To those people, he said, “‘If you continue in my words, then you are truly disciples of mine, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free’” (John 8:31-32, NASV) Only if the people of Israel followed the call of God through the wilderness would they know ultimate freedom. Freedom not measured just in terms of getting free from Pharaoh in Egypt, but in terms of following the call of God all the way to its ultimate destination in the Promised Land. How would you describe your experience with Jesus? As event, or journey?

When I was an institutional Christian, I thought of church as building. I never would have admitted that. In fact, when I first came here, I wouldn’t have. But, if you examined the way I lived, worked, and preached, and specifically what I was working for, that is how I really must have believed. The church is this (pointing toward the sanctuary). I knew better; I didn’t do better. Most of us were trained to think like that, to think that the building is the church and as of a place we go to worship on Sunday.

When I was an institutional Christian, I thought that the primary mission of the church was the protection of the building and the extension of this church family into the world meant making the building bigger for more people to come on Sunday mornings and making certain this building was always preserved. In my missional way of seeing things now, I have come to understand that when Jesus said “church” (and, by the way, he only used the word “church” twice), I am absolutely convinced he didn’t have anything in mind like what we worship in on Sunday morning. I believe when Jesus said “church,” he was thinking of his body, which consisted of the lives of those who had been transformed by his saving grace, extending itself further and further out into the world he died to redeem.

When I was an institutional Christian, I thought of missions as sending. Over the years, most of us, though we would not admit it, believed that. In the beginning, God created man and woman, male and female, in his image. Yet, when the church was born, he created a third sex called “missionaries.” We were taught that missionaries were mostly people who went and served in distant places. “Distant,” as in, “away from here.” Our language in worship called on people to believe that, in every congregation, there were specific people God had called on to “surrender to missions,” while the rest of us stayed here and made our lives in what we called secular careers, so that we could take special offerings once in a while to keep the missionaries “over there” doing missions for us, where we had sent them to do missions.

Missional thinking now demands of me that, for the first time, we really accept the fact the Bible teaches, that we are all, in fact, missionaries. While God may call on some to transplant their lives into different cultures and different continents, we are all missionaries to a broken world where we stand.

Last, when I was an institutional Christian, I thought of the motivation for missions as being the fear of hell. All of us growing up were encouraged to give to missions, or consider the call to missions as a career out of the fear of hell, one way or the other. If we didn’t give so that missionaries could be sent, or we were not willing to go, someone over there would go to hell, and it would be our personal fault, for which God would hold us personally responsible in judgment.

Yet, throughout the years, I have known very few people who call themselves Christians who, though they paid the preacher to say those things, actually adjusted their lifestyles to embrace them. Which means, though we said we believed the motivation for missions was saving people from hell, we must not have really believed it, since we didn’t live it. Apparently, we just needed the preacher to make us feel guilty, because feeling guilty was so deeply woven into the fabric of our understanding of a loving, gracious, redeeming God. You can’t have grace without a lot of guilt. Right?

As a missional Christian, I am coming to appreciate that my God is bigger than that. That God does the saving in this world and God does the saving God does through Christ, with or without me. We can actually be motivated to be missional people out of a higher calling than fear and guilt. Guilt-ridden people don’t make very effective followers of Jesus on any level. Our reason for being missional is to give glory to God with all of our lives and all of our resources, wherever we live and whatever we do for a living. As Paul said to the ancient church at Ephesus, “We were created for good works, that we might reflect the glory of the risen Christ.”

Jurgen Moltmann has said that the church’s final word is not “church.” That’s news to most church people. “The church’s final word is not ‘church,’ but the glory of the Father and the Son in the Spirit of Liberty” (As quoted in The Changing Face of World Missions by Michael Pocock, Gailyn Van Rheenen and Douglas McConnell, Baker, 2005). I like that.

This is the clearest way I know of saying what I am trying to say as confessionally as I possibly can. Our mission, folks, as a church, as I understand it, based on my understanding of scripture, is not to ensure that after we are dead and gone, there is still a Cliff Temple Baptist Church located at the corner of 10^th and Zang, but to expend everything God has given us on this corner to fulfill his mission, whether there is a physical building named Cliff Temple to show for it after we’re gone or not. That is what I really believe. That is how I live. And, that is the belief out of which I now work.

We will all be gone someday. What will be our legacy? On this corner, in this community? Missional churches do not define success or effectiveness by how well they protect or expand the existence of their physical institution located in the community, but instead by how effectively they use that physical institution to fulfill their God-given eternal mission of influencing the transformation of the world by the introduction of a new culture called the Eternal Kingdom of God. May I show you visually how that is beginning to look at Cliff Temple? Would you watch with me on the screens? (At this point I began a PowerPoint presentation with verbal explanations of each slide).

First slide: A church. A beautiful church in the wildwood, perhaps. I would say brick and mortar, but it looks more like plank and nail. Steeple. I’m sure. Beautiful stained glass. A wonderful building. Nothing wrong with that, unless its mission is just for itself.

Second slide: A picture of the world. More like the astronauts would have seen it perhaps, from outer space. “Go, therefore, into all of this,” Jesus said (my paraphrase of Matthew 28:19). The primary word being “go.” If you don’t always know where to go, just join the club. We are all searching for that.

Third slide: This is what it looks like when the church is fulfilling its mission. When the church is using its resources to go out into the world. I want to show you some very specific ways in which we are, as a church, trying to do that now.

Fourth slide: 24/7. Some 90 youth come on Wednesday night, most of whom now think of Kenny Cheshier as their pastor, not Glen Schmucker. You will never see most of them on Sunday morning. But, our youth minister, Kenny Cheshier, who baptized a young woman this morning who grew out of his program, preaches the gospel to them on Wednesday night, and they are being saved, baptized, and discipled. By the way, if you really want to see the new life at Cliff Temple, you will need to come here virtually any day but Sunday.

Slide 5: Wednesday night dinners. Who would have ever thought it could be a missional activity? Your tithes and offerings provide money for these kids who come from schools around our neighborhood, whose empty stomachs get filled with food they would, in many cases, not have otherwise, so that later, when Kenny preaches, their hearts may be filled with the gospel. In some cases, it is demonstrably true that is the only decent meal some of those kids get all day.

Slide 6: ASC3ND, our after-school ministry. My wife, Nancy, teaches children’s missions on Wednesday nights. She tells me that fully half of the children in that program now come through our after-school ministry. Half of them! Do you know what that means? The first contact many of these children are having with the gospel of Jesus is not on Sunday morning in worship, but on Wednesday night at missions training, a time which many traditional, institutional Baptists have forsaken.

Seventh slide: Our Child Development Center, transformed through the leadership of Judy Lewis and others. Families are now actually being reached for our church through this. Every single day, those children who come to the CDC don’t just get their diapers changed; they hear, they feel, they experience the love of Jesus.

Eighth slide: Charter schools. We are now leasing space to one charter school. It is nothing less than the good stewardship of turning our unused or underused space into an income stream. This is space built at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and used, for the most part, only one hour a week, now being used five or six days a week. The most beautiful part of it is, forty of the children who participate in the charter school that meets in Mead Hall now find their way every Wednesday night into the children’s and youth ministries of our church. They are hearing the gospel, they are being saved, and they are being baptized.

Slide 9: Mission: Oak Cliff. An institution that has been here for a long time, committed to its mission of caring for some 20,000 - 30,000 a year who receive food, clothing and other services, helping us fulfill the call of Christ to minister to “the least of these.”

Slide 10: Our Buckner partnership. Most beautifully, very soon, a community center will go up across the street that will enable us to develop even more programs to minister to the community. Our Buckner partnership also gives us a new avenue for missions.

Slide 11: Union Cathedral. A church just down the hall, in the chapel. They are not just leasing our space, they have become new partners in ministry, and we will celebrate Good Friday with them.

Slide 12: Misión Central is no longer a mission. It is its own freestanding congregation that contributes $200 a month back to the church that birthed it!

Slide 13: The Well Community. I didn’t even know, I am embarrassed to tell you, until recently, that The Well is the only church in the United States of America fully dedicated to the mentally disabled. It meets in our church on Saturday nights and throughout the week in a day center in underused space in our facility.

Slide 14: YoungLife. Students from around the community being taught about Jesus.

Slide 15: B. H. Carroll Institute. Training young ministers to become professional ministers.

Slide 16: Home teams, reaching out into the communities around us. Equipping and discipling, especially young married couples.

Slide 17: Precept Bible Study, inviting people who do not even go here to come and study the Bible here.

Slide 18: The Baptist General Convention of Texas, through which we do so much of our partnership missions.

Slide 19: The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, through which we also do other mission work.

Slide 20: Our Latvian mission partnership, through which we will comply with this teaching. “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress . . .” (James 1:27, NIV).

Slide 21: Shows that our budget for all these ministries is $1.4 million. That’s money incredibly well spent. The most beautiful part of it all is this, only 38% of that total budget, less than at any time in recent history, actually goes to sustain the brick and mortar of this building. And, now, more than ever, the brick and mortar being used to reach the community.

What are all these slides about? We are in the process of becoming a missional congregation. That’s the story I do tell and need to tell.

The two people I am most responsible for discipling in this world are my sons. I was thinking this week, how will I know if I have done a good job discipling them? I decided I will be able to know whether or not I have done a good job by the questions they ask and the pronouns they use. If they are asking questions when they are my age, “What about me and mine, and my space, and my place?” then I have taught them to be institutional Christians. If, however, they are asking, “What about the world, and how can I be a part of what God is doing in it?” then I will know I have succeeded in training up missional Christians.

We all get to choose, just as did the children of Israel. We all live or perish with the choice we make. Our mission in this world is the transformation of society by the introduction of the new culture, the Kingdom of God. Institutional Christianity finds its rest in the assurance of life after death. Missional Christianity is committed to bringing the Kingdom of God to be on earth, even as it is in heaven. And, the difference between those two is everything!

About fifteen months ago, I asked you to pray with me that God would send us more missionaries here, people like you and me, to do the work we are called to do in this community. Every one of these programs we’ve seen this morning needs more volunteers, missionaries in action. However, maybe we should first pray that God would awaken the missionaries who are already among us. Right here, in this room. To be involved with us in the transformation of the world through the introduction of a different culture called the Kingdom of God.

We were dead. We were slaves. But God had a different idea in mind.