The Way Christian Fellowship is designed to be a “simple” church.  This parish started, in part, in response to the personality-obsessed, program-oriented, and politically driven institutional churches so often found in the United States. The parishes with the above orientation will naturally and consistently focus on the secular symbols of leadership.  Using god-talk to rationalize, they are busy in acquiring power or retaining power as a measurement of their success.  Size becomes the definable measurement of success. With size comes status, power, and influence.

There is nothing innately wrong with size, just like there is nothing innately wrong with money.  It is just that defining one’s identity, making subtle comparisons, and sanctifying competitiveness leaves one wondering if the Church has sold out eternal values for contemporary trophies. The turnover rates within large churches are genuinely alarming, and most pastors, along with their associate pastors, have told me they are exhausted trying to keep up with the busyness of success.

Holiness becomes defined in these congregations by one’s investment of time, talent, and treasures toward the local congregation or diocese or denomination.  Of course, there are exceptions.  But those exceptional churches only point out the flaw in our current system.  “Busy” becomes a four-letter substitute for “holy” in our driven society.

The Way Christian Fellowship seeks to be “simple” in response to the above kind of churches.  This fellowship desires to be simple because the early church was simple.  According to Acts 2:42, “they committed themselves to the teaching of the apostles, the life together, the common meal, and the prayers.”  Kingdom teaching, fellowship of life together, Eucharistic celebratory meals, and congregational prayers were designed to produce followers of Jesus in thought, word, and deed.  But simple does not mean shallow.  For the early church, there was a high level of commitment to God and to one another.  They truly sought to live their lives “on earth as it is in heaven.” (Acts 2:43-47; Col. 3; Rev. 1:4-7.)

On April 25^th, we will be having a worship service at my home.  Afterwards, you are invited to stay and have a family conversation concerning our faith community.  We are calling it “Pool and Pizza Fellowship.”  Our kids can enjoy the pool while we meet, eat pizza, discuss and pray about how God is calling us to be “priests within His Kingdom.”  Afterwards, we can all stay after the meeting and enjoy the pool.  You don’t have to bring anything but yourselves.  What is the focus of our conversation?

            Our Present Perceived Needs Within The Way Christian Fellowship

Three examples will prime the pump for your thinking as you pray before our gathering:

A.   We need to be visible in our communities. People will want to have current information if they are seeking a fellowship like ours.  So, current website information, weekly email announcements, and development of brochures and/or types of advertising may be needed in our community.

B.   We need to be faithful in our stewardship.  To that end, we need some folks within the community to handle the financial aspects so that we honor the LORD in the gifts that are provided.

C.   We need to be responsive to the needs of those who attend.  To that end, we need our community to consider children’s church, child-care, worship, congregational care, Alpha, and welcoming those who are new.

Of course, we also need to provide quality biblical teaching, appropriate Eucharistic preparations, appropriate setting for worship, and outreach opportunities.

Now, we are grateful for those who have provided some of these important items. But a simple church means that we all need to participate in order to keep it simple.

Bobbi and I are looking forward to your staying at our house after the service and enjoying the fellowship, pizza, pool, and conversation.  Deacon Kirsten and I are praying that this will be a powerful time of God-given perception as we move forward in walking in obedience to the way.

For His Kingdom, a church for the sake of others,

Fr. Tony Baron  and Dc. Kirsten Gardner

Read the gospels and you will witness the tenderness of Jesus toward a woman caught in adultery, the healing of a man covered with leprosy, the willingness to engage in a deep spiritual conversation with a woman who had been divorced five times, and the genuine joy when He was around children. The chief complaint, by those considered religious, was that Jesus liked to hang around with tax collectors and sinners. Read Matthew 9:9-11 and you see Jesus willing to be a first-century “party-animal” in order to help the estranged in society.

Jesus had more problems with religious people! He had problems when they used God-talk to justify their own selfish motives. He had problems when the religious people judged other people without knowing all the facts, often neglecting to look within their own hypocritical lives. He had problems with the smug, the know-it-alls, the God-talkers, the blamers, the verbal snipers, the haters, and the power hungry. Simply stated, Jesus struggled with the self-righteous!

But here was the problem: the self-righteous never saw themselves as self-righteous! They denied that they hated and judged. They rationalized their smugness, justified their God-talk, and ignored their grudges. They proclaimed themselves seekers of the truth, yet lived as if their opinion was the truth. They smiled on the outside, but hated on the inside.

It wasn’t reserved to the first century. In the course of my life, I have seen more cruelty inflicted by religious people to others within the church and outside the walls of the church than I care to share. Their lips say one thing but their lives say another. Here are some clues for those that have been hurt by the daggers of the self-righteousness:

Firstly: Self-Righteous people sound Righteous (but they are not!)

At times, they will tell you their thoughts come after much prayer. They did not. Some will claim to have a gift of prophecy when they tell you what your problem is – they do not! Some may speak in a quiet voice as they slip a knife in your back. Soft voices do not mean gentle hearts! Some may even say they are simply following Jesus. Unfortunately, their words betray them as they fail to imitate Jesus.

Secondly: Self-Righteous people speak with Selfish Motives!

They project their own inadequacies, biases, and hatreds upon you. They spin the story for their own ends and then reverse the truth so they act as the victims. Jesus encountered that several times in his public ministry. In Matthew 11, he was called a “glutton and a drunkard” by religious people. In Luke 11, his ministry of healing was called demonic by the self-righteous. The self-righteous destroy lives for their gain and are master manipulators of spinning the truth.

Thirdly: Self-Righteous people do enough to look good before others!

They spend an enormous amount of time trying to look good before others. And of course, the people that see these acts are fooled, over and over again. But their family knows about their hatreds, their lusts, their inconsistencies, their hypocrisies, and their gossips. Sometimes their family members cooperate with the masquerade or sometimes they simply are embarrassingly silent.

Self-righteous people love the institutional church. They love the symbols of leadership and the sounds of their own voices. But don’t be fooled, because this is the truth: there are no righteous people, no not one!

Any righteousness (transformed living in alignment with the way of God) comes from God alone and through God alone. It is his gift and his continuing sustenance of that gift. The one that has experienced and continues to live in the righteousness of God will have these four characteristics always:

1. They will be people of gratitude! They will give thanks for all that they have in Christ Jesus. They know their true condition and are unwilling to put up a false front. They are grateful to God for his love, mercy, grace, and truth. Everyday they know what their lives would be like and how they would act without God’s provision.

2. They will be people of humility! The only humble people I know in life are those who have seen God as He is, not as they want God to be. See Isaiah’s response when He truly saw God for the first time (Isaiah 6) and notice how clearly he saw his own standing before God. View the call of the Apostle Paul in the book of Acts when he sees God for the first time. A self-righteous Pharisee that now sees himself as the “chief of all sinners.” Take Moses in the Old Testament, documented as the most humble of men, living out that humility because he saw God. I could go on and on. Humility only comes to those that see God correctly. It helps them to see themselves accurately.

3. They will be people of loving grace and mercy toward others! They quit labeling, and they start loving. They quit condemning, and they start encouraging. They quit looking at people as insiders and outsiders, and begin to see them as God sees them. They desire to inspire, equip, and encourage all people toward God’s vision for a world that God loves.

4. They will be people of peace, seeking reconciliation instead of retaliation! “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God” speaks of a new way of living that reflects a heaven like existence on earth. In other words, they will reflect the Son of God, Jesus. These peaceful people will be marked with earthly patience and heavenly perspective.

Yes, with all the self-righteous people that attend church, I am not surprised that the 21st century equivalent of “tax-collectors and sinners” wants nothing to do with the church. But there is a better way to live.

It is the way of Jesus! A man of loving grace, mercy, humility, and gratitude that died on our behalf and has now been raised from the dead to accept his rightful place as King of kings, and Lord of lords. Following Jesus means to “imitate Jesus.”

Seeking His Way, a life designed for the sake of others,

Tony Baron+