Everyone Needs a Church
SUMMARY
In this sermon, Jeremy Smith uses Jesus' parable of the great banquet in Luke 14 to challenge the congregation to recapture the heart of evangelism. Friends Day isn't about filling seats or boosting numbers — it's about recovering the conviction that inviting others into the life of the church is an essential part of faithful discipleship. Just as someone once cared enough to introduce each of us to Jesus, we are now called to extend that same welcome to others.
TRANSCRIPTION:
I appreciate the opportunity to be here with y'all today and thank you for coming and joining us this morning. Real special welcome to our visitors again. Gail, that was an awesome welcome and call to worship. And so I just appreciate what you did. It actually ties in exactly with what we're going to be talking about if you are visiting with us.
My name is Jeremy Smith. I am not the regular preacher. I'm the executive minister and college minister here. And I'm excited to have a bit of an opportunity to to kind of do a very short two part series with you about an upcoming event that we have called Friends Day. And so I'm going to kind of do a little bit today and then next week I hope you'll join us because we'll have a father daughter duo that's going to be joining us.
And so Tim Talley and Elizabeth, his daughter, will be here with us and they're going to be kind of wrapping up a little bit about what I talk about today. And so really what I see is that what I'm going to be doing today is really the appetizer for what's coming next week. So. So if you know Tim and Elizabeth, you know that they are fantastic people, really dynamic speakers. And so I am really excited about them being able to join us next week.
And I hope that you'll come back and join us also for that. Because I think that the idea of Friends Day has been kind of an interesting thing. We've been doing it a couple of years and the basic idea is it is a day which we encourage our church to invite people to come join them on that Sunday. And I was talking to a friend of mine a few weeks ago and they said something interesting to me and I've heard this a couple of different places. They said they weren't trying to be mean or anything, but they knew I was preparing for the sermon.
And they said, you know what, I just don't buy it. I don't buy into the idea of Friends Day. And I said, okay, well tell me a little bit about that because I'm the one preaching on it, so I kind of need to know. They said, well, no offense, but it kind of sounds a little gimmicky and it sounds like something that we should be doing every day. And I said, okay, tell me a little bit about that.
And they said, well, is it all just about like we're just trying to get people to come and fill up our seats? Is it just a Numbers game? We're trying to boost our Numbers. I was like, no, that's not the purpose of Friends Day at all. But I can understand how on the surface, it might seem like that.
It might seem like Friends Day is just about boosting our Numbers, but that's actually not at all what it's about. It's really about us recapturing the heart of evangelism. Again, that's really the purpose of Friends Day. And he goes, well, shouldn't that be every day? Then?
Shouldn't every Sunday be a Sunday where we invite people to church? And let me tell you, that is a really good point. And if you are. If you talk to any of the ministers or elders here, one of the things that they're going to tell you is, yes, absolutely, every Sunday should be this. But just because we celebrate the incarnation of Christ every week doesn't make Christmas any less special.
And just because we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus every week doesn't make the Easter any less special. In fact, I actually believe that it heightens our awareness on those days. And so why are we doing something like Friends Day if every day should be this. Well, the reality is, we discovered is that while every Sunday should be a day where we feel like we can invite people to church, the truth is we don't. We don't do this.
And we know we don't do this because last year, at the beginning of our mission and vision process, we did a church health assessment. And there was a lot of different information that came out of that. And one of the most important information, there's some really good things that we scored high on. Like, we heard from you say that you feel really loved by this church, that one of the reasons you're here is because you have found community. You.
You have found acceptance. You have found a place to really fit in, in love. But one of our lowest scoring areas of the entire church health assessment was that while I feel loved here, I don't tell my friends about Broadway. I don't actually invite people to church. And that was really interesting for us to see those two dynamics of finding community here, but yet at the same time, not feeling like we needed to go out and invite people in.
And I'm not trying to get onto us as a church, but I think that we have to talk about some of this stuff, because I think churches of Christ in general have lost the spirit of evangelism sometimes. And if you grew up in the church of Christ like I did, I grew up in a church of Christ that had really, really bad theology supporting evangelism. And when that Theology got ripped out from under us. The whole idea and the whole concept of going out and talking to people about God kind of fell with it. And so I grew up in a church that believed that we were the only ones going to heaven.
And I don't know if this has been your experience growing up, and if you're not Church of Christ, you may be like, this is kind of weird, but it was weird. I grew up believing, being taught that if you didn't go to Church of Christ, you weren't going to go to heaven. Like, Church of Christ was the way to get into heaven, and that's the way it was. And so I was actually taught that as a young age. And when you believe that, it makes evangelism pretty compelling.
A few years ago, I was talking with some. We had some students come and visit Atlas, and they had a Baptist background, and they were coming and they were visiting us. And one day their old minister from back home was in town visiting them, and they wanted me to meet them and talk to them. And so I got to sit down and talk with this old Baptist preacher. And he kept using this phrase over and over again when he was talking about kind of the mission of his church.
And he kept saying, we're just snatching people from the fires of hell. We're snatching people from the fires of hell. He said this over and over again. And I started thinking, man, if that really is. If you fundamentally believe that you are snatching people out of the fires of hell, it's gonna make evangelism seem pretty powerful.
It's gonna make you be pretty motivated to go and talk to people about God and bring them to church. But we realized over the years that that theology is pretty weak. For one, it says nothing about the Holy Spirit and the work it does on people's lives. And two, it puts all of the pressure and onus on us and says nothing about Jesus. And so over the years, I think that we've realized that the old hellfire and brimstone sermons are not going to happen.
They're not going to get people coming. They're not filled with grace. They don't actually represent truly what God and what Jesus have done in order to bring people to them. And when we moved away from that type of theology, I think that what has happened is that with it went the desire, the push, the sense of urgency to talk to people about Jesus, because we just assumed, well, God's grace is going to take care of it. And so there's really no work for us.
To do. And so the purpose of Friends Day is not just to fill seats. The purpose of Friends Day is actually an internal thing. It is for us to develop a deep conviction that inviting people into the life of the church is an essential part of faithful discipleship and to give us an opportunity to practice it. That is what Friends Day is about.
It is about us recapturing a desire and. And a realization that we have a job. Faithful discipleship is two things, just like it was with the disciples, the original ones, it is come and follow me and then the sending out of the 72. It is this dynamic of drawing near to Jesus, following Jesus and then going out from him to find others and bringing them back. These are two different sides of the same coin.
That is what it is. But we do really, really good at the follow me side. We like to talk about that because we like to be kind of more focused just on what we need. And we're the ones drawing here. And so there's a tendency to forget that we are called by Christ to be sent out from this place.
Yes, coming and following Jesus is important, but also being sent out is just as equally important. You cannot be a disciple and only have one side of it. These two things go hand in hand. And so Friends Day primarily is about us recovering that. And so what I would like to do today, and what I'm hoping that Tim and Elizabeth will do next week, is help us maybe recapture a good theology of evangelism, a good theology of reaching out, because we know that the hellfire and brimstone and that we're the only ones going to church mentality is not real.
And it has nothing to do. It is not what God sets up as his premise for why he sends the 72 out. And so I want to do this by centering us in one story, one parable that Jesus tells in Luke chapter 14, whenever he is sitting at a table eating with someone, and somebody says, man, can't you just wait until we're all gathered together in heaven and eating together? And Jesus decides to describe what that moment will be like. And as a church that constantly prays the Lord's Prayer and says, may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
May your kingdom come on earth as in heaven, I start to wonder what that is like. What is it like for the church to bring about the kingdom of heaven on earth just like it is up there? What is that like? And I'm really excited about what we're about to do in our adult Bible classes that's actually going to start on Friends Day. I don't know if I'm allowed to share this, but I'm looking at the.
So I'm going to do it anyway. Sorry, but we're going to be looking at N.T. wright's book surprised by Hope, which asks the question, what actually is the Biblical principle of heaven and what does it mean to be a church that lives into the Lord's Prayer, to be the church that brings about the kingdom of heaven here and now on earth as the first fruits of that? Because I believe that that is one of the central theologies of what it means to be the church, is that what we are doing is we are thinking about and imagining what life will be like at the end of days when Jesus returns. And our job is to go ahead and start that process now, not just escape and wait till we get to heaven.
And so I imagine, what will that be like? And Jesus gives us little hints about this. NT Wright will say that actually what we have is like signposts that point into a fog. We don't have a clear picture, but we have an idea. And he does this, I think, through parables and stories, which I think is awesome, because what parables and stories do is they don't just tell you directly, well, you're going to have this and this and that and you're going to do this and that.
No, what it does is it helps us capture the feeling of what it's going to be like. And so when this man sitting at this table says, man, can't you just wait until we're all together in heaven, dining and eating together, what that's going to be like? Jesus tells a story of what that's going to be like. And he says, Jesus replied, a certain man was preparing a great banquet and invited many guests at the time of the banquet. He sent his servants to tell those who had been invited come for everything is now ready.
Do you want to know what it's going to be like in heaven? It's going to be like a great banquet that has been set out for us, a great banquet that has been set and that we are going to be invited in. Now, I think that there's a really important thing to think about the opening of this story. The first thing is that it is the hosts themselves who are offering us hospitality. The banquet begins with the hospitality of God.
It doesn't begin with emotional manipulation to get people to come. Every Sunday, as we sit and we take this table communion, we're not just remembering what Jesus did. But we're living in hopeful expectation about what's to happen, what's to come, and we get a taste of it here because the reality is, is that we don't prepare the table. The table is prepared for us. The table is set, the meal is provided, the wine is poured, and the doors are open.
By the grace of God, every single person who is here today is not here because they have earned it. They are here. We are here because God's grace and love has allowed us to be here. But we're also here because God sent out somebody to go and invite us to come. I'm convinced that there is not one single person sitting in this room who accidentally became a Christian because one day they were sitting in a hotel and the WI fi didn't work and the TV didn't work, and they opened up a drawer and pulled out a green Bible and flipped through the Gideon's Bible and said, what in the world's all this about?
Oh, I guess I'm just going to become a Christian because now I've read what this guy was dead, now he's alive. What's going on here? That doesn't happen. Right? The reason you and I are Christians today is because somebody cared enough about you to invite you to meet Jesus.
That's the reality. And in fact, I would wager, I would guess, that most of the people who are sitting in this room today are here at Broadway because somebody invited you to come and join. In fact, if you have been invited to come to Broadway your very first time, whether it was your parents bringing you or your sibling or maybe your spouse, or would you raise your hand if you're here in this building today because somebody asked you to come? Most people are here today because somebody asked them to come. I'm here today because Carl called me and said, hey, we have this open position and I'd like for you to come check it out.
If Carl hadn't called me and asked me to come and see, I wouldn't be here today. We are Christians because somebody cared enough about us to introduce us to Jesus. We didn't find that ourselves. And this is how the Kingdom of God, the story opens. It's like a great banquet that God has set out for us, and he has sent people out into the world to invite you to come.
And you are now sitting in the banquet hall every Sunday to celebrate in anticipation of what is to come at the end of days.
And we are now charged as servants to go out and invite other people to come in. But God knows that this doesn't always work. He knows that some people will make excuses. And in fact, that's what happens. They all alike began to make excuses, and their excuses are not very good, right?
Like, one guy says, I just bought this field and I gotta go see it. I think that's a wild, like, excuse. Like, who buys a field without actually seeing it first? That's like saying, oh, I'm gonna buy a car, but I've never driven it. I've never even seen it.
I'm just hoping it's gonna get here. And so Sunday's church, I can't do that. I'm gonna actually. I just gotta go sit and look at my car because it's a new car. So I'm just gonna go sit and look at it.
Like, what is that? Who goes and sits and looks at a field? Another guy says, oh, I just bought 5 yoke of oxen and I'm on my way to try them out. Who buys oxen, first of all? But who buys oxen and doesn't actually try them out, doesn't actually know if they can plow.
It's like, oh, I bought all these oxen, but I don't know if they're actually gonna work. It's like saying, I bought a bunch of tractors off of Temu and here they come, and I don't actually know if they're going to work or not, so I got to go try them out. People give excuses for why they won't come to church. People do it all the time. When I was in high school, I invited a friend of mine to come join me at a youth rally, and he said, "I can't go do that. Both my girlfriends go there.”
You can see why I was trying to invite him to come to a youth rally, right? This happens. Like, people make terrible excuses. It's going to happen. Jesus realizes that people's excuses for whether or not they're going to be here don't matter.
Because the purpose, the witness of sharing the gospel is not based on external ends and external external goods, like whether or not somebody accepts it, professing the kingdom of God is at hand is worthy of our attention because of what it professes. Regardless of how people respond to that, when you invite people to come to church, people are going to make excuses. Some people will say no to our invitation, some people are going to say no. And a lot of times we often will think, well, just because somebody's going to say no, we already expect that to happen. And so we don't even make the invitation, we assume people are going to say no.
And we start saying things like, well, all my friends already go to church somewhere, so, you know, there's no point for me to even ask them, even though going to church and being a part of the life of a church are very different things. And while one may be true, the other may not be true. Or we'll say things like, well, everybody I know is already Christian, so there's really no point for me to do this. We start making excuses that prevent us from even asking people to be begin with because we're afraid that some people will say no to us. And I wonder, though, if maybe them making excuses might actually be a movement of the Holy Spirit.
We don't often think that this whole story begins because Jesus is at a banquet and he's talking about honor and humility. And he tells his disciples, don't sit at the place of honor, because if you're really not that high up, they're going to move you and you're going to be humbled. Instead, sit at the place of humility, and then you will be honored, for everybody who honors themselves will be humbled, and everybody who humbles themselves will be honored. And then he goes into this passage. Then Jesus said to his host, when you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or your sisters or your relatives or your rich neighbors.
If you do, they may invite you back so that you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous. And it's from this way of thinking that Jesus now jumps into this next part of the parable in Luke 14, where he says, the servant came back and reported that all of these people made excuses. And then the owner of the house became angry and ordered his servants to cancel the party, ordered the servants to throw away the balloons, get rid of the bouncy castle, and I'm going to go eat the cake in my bedroom by myself and pack.
That's not what happened. He doesn't cancel the party. The banquet of God is happening, and there is no force on earth or in hell that can stop it from coming. It is coming. And there will be people at this table.
And the people that will come go out quickly into the streets and the alleys and the towns and bring in the poor and the crippled and the blind and the lame. Bring them in.
Some people will tell you no. And it may be the obvious choice. You're going to talk to your friends and you're going to talk to your family and you're going to talk to your parents and your grandparents and your kids and you're going to invite them to come. And they may say no because they may go to church somewhere else. That doesn't mean stop asking.
Actually, what I think that means is who are the people that you wouldn't normally think about asking? If all the usual people are connected to the church somewhere, then it's time for us to think outside of the box about those who aren't connected to invite them in. We've been doing a process where we've been looking at our website and figuring out how we want to communicate to our community. And part of the process of doing that is we have to actually figure out what it is that our community believes so that we can target our conversation to them. And so we've been doing one of the things that we did in order to get ready for this is we looked at a demographic study of our neighborhood and we pulled 75 pages worth of demographic research of the Lubbock area within a 20 minute driving radius of Lubbock.
And here's what we discovered. We discovered that the mission field is not somewhere else. That approximately 335,000 people live within a 20 minute driving radius around Broadway. That that's projected to grow to 347,000 by 2030. Now, most people, if you were like me, assumed that all of these people are Christians because we live in the Bible belts and we have two Christian universities in this town.
But the reality is, is that most people do not attend church, 63% do not regularly participate in religious services. And out of that 63%, 44% disagree completely that they attend regularly. Two thirds of the people you walk by every day do not have a church. So when you say to me, everybody I know already goes to church, that's not true. Lubbock is not a Christian town.
Two thirds of the people, almost 50%, completely disagree that they participate in religious services. We also discovered that this is an unusually young community. The median age of Lubbock is 33.9. Gen Z represents 28.5% of the population and millennials represent 24.8%. And so together they make up half of our community.
Most Gen Z people in our community do not attend church. This is why we are launching a young adult ministry on Friends Day because we realize that not only is there a gap in our Church. There is a gap in our community for places for young adults to fit in. We also realize that we have a changing community. 37% of our community is Hispanic and it's projected to rise to 40%.
And we have a community that lives outside of the traditional families. 40% of adults never married, 10% are divorced. So over 37,000 people live in a one person household. 50% of people in our town do not have a spouse. They live in a single family household.
So when you tell me that everyone I know goes to church, the reality is that may not be the case. There are people out there that we probably don't normally think about inviting to church. But you want to know what the kingdom of heaven is like? You want to know what we are supposed to do as a church? We are supposed to be a church that invites people in.
Not just the usual suspects that we think about, but to think about those who don't have a place to find them, to go out into the streets and find them and to bring back, bring them in. But we're so afraid of being rejected that we don't do this. When I was in elementary school, I liked this girl. She was really pretty and I was not that good of a looking kid. I was really scrawny.
I used to wear dragon hoodies and I had a bowl cut. Not kidding, right? So I wasn't that good looking and I liked her. And my friends found out that I liked her and so they started talking to me and said, you know, you should go and you should ask her out. Go ask her out.
I didn't know what asking a girl out was, but I decided I was going to do that. And so I walked up to this girl, her name was Jessica. And I said, “Jessica, will you marry me?” Because I thought that's what you're supposed to do. And she looked at me and she said, ew.
Now, I don't know if you know what that does to the confidence of a prepubescent boy, but it destroyed me. I didn't ask anybody out until I met Leah at 28 and asked her to marry me. Like, right? We are so afraid that we're going to walk up to somebody and say, hey, will you go to church with me? And they're going to look at us and go, ew.
That we don't even do it. Most of you will not receive a rejection like that. Some of you may, but most of you probably won't, right? But we make up this imagery that if I go and I talk to this person, they're going to be like, how dare you? I am an atheist.
I don't believe in God, and how dare you come and even invite me? That's not going to happen. And I know this because in preparing for this lesson, I did this. I went out and I asked somebody to come. And I was surprised how afraid I was initially.
It crept up, but I did it anyway. And you know what they said? They said, oh, well, tell me when it is. And I said, okay. It was a young adult.
And I said, we're launching a young adult ministry. And she said, okay, well, tell me when it is. And I said, okay, when we launch it, I'm going to come and I'm going to tell you. People may be open more. Discipleship means becoming so secure in God's welcome that.
That we carry that welcome to people who cannot yet imagine there is a place for them. That's what discipleship is. It is realizing that there are people out there who don't know that they are welcomed here. Jesus goes on to say that the servants come back, and they say, what you ordered has been done, but there is still room. The Master told the servants, go out to the roads, the country lanes, and compel them to come in so that my house will be full.
I tell you, not one of those who were invited will get a taste of my banquet. This is the heart of the God that we serve. He wants us to go out into the streets so that his house can be filled. And he wants us to compel people to come. Compelling them to come means convincing people that they are truly wanted here.
It means finding people that are broken and hurting and lonely and saying, there is a place for you, just like there was a place for me. As a church, it is our job to remove barriers, to remove barriers between people and God, to remove barriers between each other, to remove barriers between our church and our community. That's what it's like in the kingdom of God. To be people who tear down these walls that divide us, to bring us unified to the banquet, to become people of invites. Because the purpose of Friends Day is developing in us a deep conviction that that is the truth.
To be people of invite. We have a slogan that we've kind of just. Kind of just happened. It's been in our bulletin and it's been in our Broadway today where we'll say, everyone needs a church and we would love to be yours, but for you, I want to change the slogan. Everyone needs a church, and it's time to share yours.
You have been invited to the banquet. You sit here in the presence of God, in the community of believers, and you participate in the blood and the bread of Christ every Sunday. Two thirds of the people you meet out there do not do that. They are not invited in. And I don't know about you, but I want to be a church that is a church of invite.
I want to be a church where people find home and find community here. That is what Friends Day is about. It is a remembrance for us of our calling to think about the people. Not the usual suspects, but the people who are outside, who don't have a place, and to invite them in. Let's pray.
Father. God. Lord, we love you. And we thank you, God, for the mercy that you've given us. God, we thank you for being a God who welcomes us in, a God who hears our stories.
God. And doesn't leave us, but draws us in. God, we thank you for the people you've sent into our lives that have brought us here. God, help us to extend the same grace to those elsewhere, to become a church, a people of invite that celebrates the banquet not just by ourselves, God, but with as many people as we can find. We love you, God.
And it's in your son's name we pray. Amen.