Introduction
Hospital rooms are strange places. I know of few places where logic and emotions are further apart than an ICU, at least for those who have a loved one lying hooked up to all kinds of machines and monitors. It’s a bit like a foreign country, with its own lingo and customs. The locals do their best to make you welcome, but in many ways you’re just in the way. The other thing happening is that all of a sudden the family and friends of the loved one are faced with using language about how to express what they believe is happening, and what will happen, if this person doesn’t walk out of the room alive. Spiritual language and clinical terms slam up against each other. Atonement theology and biology awkwardly intersect. Blood oxygen levels and baptism experiences are intertwined. It can be really surreal.
Now if you’ve had any experience with evangelicalism, you were prepared for this moment. You were taught that death could come at any time and it was your job, first to “get saved” yourself and then to make sure others “got saved” so that if, and ultimately when, they died they would be okay. You were given a language to describe things in spiritual terms.
In the worst of these experiences, it was intimated that you were responsible for other people’s eternal destiny based on how effective your witnessing to them was. If you didn’t persuade them to “pray the prayer” then, well, their damnation was your fault.
Maybe there’s a better way to think about this? Maybe there is a language that better reconciles life, death, and what comes next?
Let’s dig in this week and see what we can find.
Grace and peace y’all,
John Ray and the teaching team
Reflection Questions:
- How have you experienced evangelism as part of the Church or Church activities in the past? How was this concept introduced to you, and what role has it played in your faith story and development?
- Considering your experiences with evangelism in relation to your faith and religious history, has it been healthy, harmful, mixed? In what ways?
- If you had been taught to think about evangelism and altar calls differently, do you think your faith and relationships with God and others would have looked different?
- Is there any part of you that needs healing because of how altar calls and evangelism have been used or presented to you?
Communal Confession for Vine and Branch
Rejoice, Grace Church this time culminates our Sabbath day, our gift of rest and renewal.
We rejoice in this time for worship and wonder.
God gives us Sabbath as freedom from and freedom for.
God is worthy of worship, our Creator, Healer, and Inspiration.
Hang on Grace Church, we were never promised an easy road.
Jesus bids each and all of us to take up our cross and follow Him.
We have the promises and person of Jesus with us every step of the way.
Because we have this we will endure, even though we struggle.
We have the testimony of those who have gone before us to encourage and enlighten us.
Because we have this we will follow their example and receive their encouragement.
We have been given each other to rejoice with, grieve with, grow with and work with.
Because we have this community and all these things we will not lose heart or be forever discouraged.
Grace be to you now and forever in the Name of our Lord Jesus
Lord’s Prayer
Christ, who taught us to pray saying:
Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come, your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread and forgive us our sins
as we forgive those who’ve sinned against us.
Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.
For yours is the kingdom, and the power,
and the glory forever. Amen.
