Jesmond Parish Church - the Future of God's Work

Heavenly Father, Lord of history and Lord of this church, please speak to each one of us this evening, and help us by your Spirit to hear your voice. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

So what does the future hold? That’s the question at the end of that brief film history of this church. I want us to think about the future of God’s work through this church, and we’ll focus on 1 Corinthians 3.5-16 on p1146 in the church Bibles. Please have that open in front of you. And there’s a brief outline at the back of the service sheet.

God has done great things. And the best way we can celebrate and honour the bold faith and vision of those who founded this church is for us to be part of something in our generation that will be celebrated 150 years from now.

So how do we see JPC’s future? Our answer is also summed up at the end of the film, in these words:

JPC's vision is that in one generation the church will grow to ten thousand people living Godly lives, growing the church and changing their nation – half in Newcastle and half in new churches in this region and around the world.

What do you think when you hear that? Do you think, “We can’t do that – that’s completely unrealistic.” If you do, then I agree with the first part – “We can’t do that” – and I disagree with the second part – “that’s completely unrealistic”. It is unrealistic for us. But it’s not unrealistic for God who, as the Bible says, …

… gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were. [Romans 4.17]

Only God can make that vision reality. But God can make it happen. Our privilege is that he uses us.

I want us to take a look at how that works, from what the apostle Paul says in our passage – 1 Corinthians 3. 5-16. What we’ve got here is Paul’s double vision. I’ve had trouble over the years with double vision – and minor operations to correct it. My problem has been one vision separating to become two. What Paul does here is that he has two visions that he joins together to become one. He has a vision of the church as a field – growing a crop. And he has a vision of the church as a building – under construction.

My favourite early picture of JPC is that one from 1860 of the brand new church building standing in an open field. The building was planted in a field. That, says Paul, is what the church is like – both a field and a building. We are the church. We are the field, and we are the building. But we are also, says Paul, God’s fellow-workers, both in the field and on the construction site. God works in us and God works through us.

So I have two simple headings as we look at these verses. First, We’re God’s gardeners as well as God’s field. And secondly, we’re God’s builders as well as God’s building.


First, WE ARE GOD’S GARDENERS AS WELL AS GOD’S FIELD

Paul spells out what disciples do and what God does. This is verses 5-9:

5What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants through whom you came to believe – as the Lord has assigned to each his task. 6I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. 7So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. 8The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labour. 9For we are God’s fellow-workers; you are God’s field…

Only God makes things grow. It’s God alone who causes the seed of the gospel to take root in the hearer’s heart. It’s God alone who raises someone who is spiritually dead to new life in Christ. It’s God alone who makes a church grow in spiritual depth as well as in numbers.

We’re God’s under-gardeners who sow the seed and spread the manure. But we’re also the field. We’re the soil in which the seed of God’s word is sown. Jesus has a parable about that, called the Parable of the Sower. It’s in Luke 8. And he challenges us about what kind of field we’re going to be.

Jesus gives us four possibilities for the kind of faith in God that we can display in our lives. Some have failed faith, some fairweather faith, some faltering faith. But Jesus is looking for a different kind of person – the fourth kind. He is looking for those with fruitful faith – the good soil, the fertile field. Luke 8.15:

But the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop.

A crop, that is, of salvation.

“[The seed] came up [says Jesus in Luke 8.8] and yielded a crop a hundred times more than was sown.”

Jesus is looking for a hundred-fold increase on what he sows. That makes our vision for a ten-fold increase over a generation look rather modest. I tell you, my worry isn’t that our vision is too big. I have no fear that Jesus will say to us that we should’ve been content with praying for 50% growth over a generation or something. My worry is that we’re going to have to stand before Jesus and explain why we were content with a vision for only a ten-fold increase. How big is our vision of God?

The nature of fruitful discipleship is what we spell out in our summary of JPC’s mission which is based on Jesus’ Great Commandment and Great Commission: Godly Living, Church Growth and Changing Britain. If we’re living Godly lives, we’ll be doing two things: trusting in Christ and obeying the word. If we’re going to play our part in the growth of the church, then we’ll be telling the world and serving the church. And to change Britain we’ll need to be caring for needs and contending for truth.

What kind of disciples will be prove to be?

Let me give you an example of how God makes the gospel grow. One of the key missionary societies that the JPC congregation supported right from the start – in fact even back in Clayton’s time – was the Church Missionary Society – CMS. CMS was started in 1799 by a small group of visionary Christians with a deep concern to spread the Gospel of Christ across the world.

It took five years before the first two missionary candidates could be found to send overseas. After 14 years a total of 15 missionaries had been sent. Four of them, and four of their wives, who’d gone to West Africa, were dead.

From a human point of view, those were unpromising years! But 100 years after its founding, CMS was supporting 1000 missionaries who were working with 9,000 native Christian workers. 37 training colleges had been started; 2500 schools; and 40 hospitals. And that was just the beginning of amazing church growth, not least in Africa, over the last hundred years.

If our vision is to become reality, we have to be ready to give our lives for it. There may be years when nothing much seems to happen. But when the time is right, God moves fast, and the harvest comes.

We’re God’s gardeners. We’re God’s field. That’s the first vision that Paul has here.


Secondly, WE ARE GOD’S BUILDERS AS WELL AS GOD’S BUILDING

We’ve thought about the agricultural analogy. What of the architectural analogy? That’s what Paul uses in verses 9-16. Here he speaks of the church as a building, as the temple, the dwelling place of God. But the church is a temple under construction. Verses 9-10:

9For we are God’s fellow-workers; you are God’s field, God’s building. 10By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should be careful how he builds. For no-one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.

Paul knew that the only lasting foundation is Jesus Christ and him crucified. Those who founded this church knew that too. They gave us a wonderful legacy in that statement that this church’s purpose was to form …

a central point for the maintenance and promulgation of sound scriptural and evangelical truth in a large and populous town

In other words, the foundation of the church had to be Christ and his word. It’s all too easy for a church to be built on something other than the gospel of Jesus Christ. It may look superficially OK – even thriving. But under the surface there may be severe problems. And one day they’ll come to light.

I remember, in my engineering days, going to see an elderly couple in their home. They’d had a terrible fright. One night they’d been woken by an almighty bang. They looked, and found that right through the walls of the house great gaping cracks had appeared. They were afraid the house was about to fall down.

We discovered that the house had been built on an old landfill site. The ground beneath the house had fallen away. For a while the house was rigid enough to survive. But in the end it broke in two.

This church must be built on the gospel of Christ. It’s possible to remove Jesus from the life a church and for it to carry on little affected for some time. We could build this church as a social network, or a place of entertainment. We could cut and paste the Bible to leave out all the uncomfortable stuff. But that’s like building a church on rubbish. Even if it thrives for a while, the time will come when it’ll fall apart.

To build a church on the gospel and the word of God is to build a solid, immoveable, permanent structure. It is, in Paul’s terms, to build with gold, silver and costly stones. To build with anything else is to build with wood, hay or straw. The Day will come when the quality of our church-building will be revealed. What will survive will be all that’s built on the foundation of Jesus.

What God has already done through this church is extraordinary. Here’s an example. One of the key members of that spontaneous crisis committee that got together when Richard Clayton died was a man called John Bennett Alexander. There’s a memorial to him on the wall at the back. The other day we had a letter from his great-great-grandson, Nick Alexander – now an old man. Here’s some of what he wrote:

There will of course be thousands of others – perhaps tens of thousands – who would claim JPC as being where the Lord has done great things in their lives, but you may be interested in seeing and, if you wish, sharing, the … history of my family’s Christian commitment over several generations

He then explains how five generations of the family since John Bennett Alexander have all been engaged in life-long Christian ministry. And he ends:

We rejoice that JPC has continued in the strongly evangelical tradition that my great-great-grandfather was so keen to preserve and we send our best wishes to all those celebrating its 150th Anniversary …

“There will of course be thousands of others – perhaps tens of thousands – who would claim JPC as being where the Lord has done great things in their lives”, says the great-great-grandson of one of those who built this church on the foundation of Christ. That’s what God has already done. After 150 years, we are now the field and the building. We are now the gardeners and the builder’s labourers – fellow-workers with a gracious and faithful God who is preparing a great harvest and a beautiful temple as his dwelling place for eternity.

My daughter said the other day that she was already looking forward to the 200th Anniversary. She also kindly pointed out that I wouldn’t be there. None of us will be here in 150 years. And we don’t know when Christ will return. But our calling is to live and work for the glory of God in such a way that what God does in and through us will be a cause for celebration and praise to God 150 years from now.

Let’s pray. I’m going to use a prayer for this church written over 100 years ago by the vicar then, Thomas Brocas Waters. Let’s make it our own.

“Gracious and Holy God, who has revealed it as thy good pleasure to give us the kingdom, grant, we beseech thee, that the work in the parish of Jesmond may be so directed, controlled and inspired by thy Holy Spirit, that it may be in all things according to thy mind, and that thy blessing may manifestly rest upon it. Fill every post with earnest whole-hearted workers. Increase, we beseech thee, with vital growth every part of the work. So breathe through the words uttered in your name, that many may definitely turn and give themselves to thee. Call out from this parish, both men and women as workers in thy ministry both at home and abroad. Make all who know and love thee to show forth thy character and power; and cause thy ministers to be filled with faith and with the Holy Ghost. Hear us and answer us, O heavenly Father, for the sake of Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord! Amen.”