And while staying with them he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, “you heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” (Acts 1:4–5)
Have you ever found yourself in a graveyard trying to find a distant relative’s final resting place? Someone you never met but feel some strange connection with?
My aunt recently took me to Brookwood cemetery in England. You probably won’t have heard of Brookwood. Why would you? But it’s kinda famous (in graveyard circles) as being (at least at one point) the largest burial ground in Europe with over 235,000 graves. It even has its own Wikipedia page. The problem was, my auntie didn’t know where the grave was …
I’ve never searched for a needle in a haystack but I imagine it’s a similar experience to finding a specific headstone amongst 235,000 other, rather faded, headstones.
Now imagine this, you’re in a graveyard (don’t worry it’s not night time and there are no zombies around) searching for your auntie’s dead great, great grandfather, when suddenly you see a headstone that says ‘Liberty Church Amsterdam.
‘Born 2014 — Died 2016. Much loved but too weak to face this world. Missed by a few, forgotten by many.’
How would you react? That would freak you out, right?
When we first arrived in Amsterdam, that was exactly how the city was described by one pastor; ‘A graveyard for church plants’. I thought he was exaggerating, trying to give us the hebbie-jebbies. But, as I spoke to others in the city, I stumbled across a number of faded, overgrown burial plots. Headstones shrouded in shrubs and weeds. Some of them were unnamed — stillbirths — churches that never really got started. Others were toddlers, children, even teenage communities that had seen some measure of success before shrivelling, dying or being consumed into other churches.
Another pastor, from his own vantage point in the graveyard, looked across the numerous internments and told me, ‘Church planting doesn’t work in Amsterdam.’ Other missional activities might have some success but the church … The church has had its day. When even pastors start believing things like that we’ve got problems.
Two dangers, one response
At this point some sober reflection is called for. There are two dangers we must consider:
- Defeat. We become the soldier on the battlefront so scared by the stench of death around him that they turn and run from the conflict, the deserter who abandons their post.
- We go gung-ho. We adopt an ‘I’ll show you attitude’, an indestructible arrogance that jumps straights out of the trenches and runs headlong into enemy fire.
There is a third way to respond. We can look at the failures, determining the causes and reasons for their demise and we can study our city learning our terrain, discovering our environment and understanding what successful mission — church planting in Amsterdam will look like.
What will it look like for us, to not just gather an insular, therapeutic community of Christians but build something that communicates what we believe in an intelligible way, a compelling way for the millions of secular, liberal, post-modern, post-atheist urbanites around us?
However, most importantly, we must walk into the graveyard, smell the memorial flowers, listen to the silence of the dead and remember our God who specialises in bringing life from death.
From the stench of death comes life
We look to Jesus who stood in front of a tomb containing, at least so his disciples thought, a four day old, rotting, stinking, fly & worm infested body. Yet Jesus said ‘Lazarus, come out’ and a bandaged man stumbled out (read all about it John 11).
Or we could turn to Jesus own tomb, peek behind the rolled-away stone and find… nothing. No headstone, no grave, no spread ashes, no embalmed head. He’s alive. And he’s an expert in taking the deadness of me and you and making us alive. That’s why Jesus promises to build his church — not because he’s got better organisational skills, or because our pastoring abilities aren’t up to scratch but because for a new church to survive and thrive. For any church, anywhere, to live — it requires the resurrection power of Jesus.
Church plant Bootcamp
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be studying what it looks like to reach our city. We’ll spend some time learning our city; what makes it tick. What do the people believe and why? Where are they from and what do they want to do? What are the obstacles to the gospel and what are the opportunities? Where is the city hostile and where might it be hungry?
We’ll also be studying what the bible, in particular, what the book of Acts says about church planting, what can we learn from the Apostles strategies and faith.
Wait
Right at the start of Acts we find Jesus instructing them to wait. You can imagine them having similar ‘graveyard worries’ — is it just going to be us? How will we survive? How can the church — the first ever church — avoid a grisly and gruesome fate? How will I tell my friends? What will my work colleagues think of me?
But Jesus doesn’t ask them to wait for a good idea, a clever missional strategy, reinforcements but ‘the promise of the Father’ — ‘you will be baptised with the Holy Spirit’.
And, as we’ll see in Acts 2, it’s this outpouring of God that completely transforms the future of the church. It takes them out of the graveyard and turns them into the most powerful people movement the world has ever seen.
SC Lowry: The world will not be regenerated by men who simply work in the strength of good intentions, but by those who are impelled by power from on high.’