Paul Nixon challenges our perception of reality and of the church in this thought-provoking video exploring a church plant that lead to the discovery of building on the basics of faith challenging us to find the life-changing radical, Jesus.

Transcript

I’m Paul Nixon. As I was growing up in Southern California, I was part of a vibrant church. That is not the experience of most teenagers growing up in America. It was really a special place and experience we had together of the Holy Spirit of God to see lives changed probably not in their lifetime. And honestly I thought I’d never see it again. I did so I have been doubly blessed. 

Most of my school friends in Southern Cal were pretty secular. California’s not the most religious place in the world and many of them had only feeble perceptions of what church was, of what God was. I knew a certain reality that was very special, extraordinary, and yet they live like in a parallel universe. For me that became my life’s work I suppose of helping to bridge the gap between God's reality and human perception. It’s been an interesting journey. Honestly I never thought I would see anything like what I saw growing up and yet 20 years later in Gulf Breeze Florida I was the pastor who was assigned to plant a new faith community church, called Community Life Church. And it happened again when two worlds collided. The world of faith and the world of everybody else coming together. The few times I would ask our crowd on Sunday I would say how many of you would have been found in a church anywhere ago about half the hands we go up, meaning that about half our people were new or coming back after decades away from Christian faith.

Thinking about how that bridge got built. I remember The first time that we had a new member gathering. People learning more about the community. There were two or three things everyone had had in common. One was that they all have bad memories. Of nuns racking their knuckles with a ruler back in school. They all said they disliked church, but liked the community life Center -they had bad perceptions and in some cases bad realities that they brought with them as part of the baggage of their lives. But they all liked the Community Life Center and said I didn’t know that church could be like this. In other words they found a beautiful reality at odds with the previous perception that they carried with them. 

There were a lot of people in the crowd in those days who were new and had never been baptized. Or they assumed everyone on the planet had been baptized. They assumed their parents had baptized them. But they were not, so we realized that some of them were embarrassed about it. They didn’t need to be but they were. So we said let’s have Baptism amnesty Sunday. So we had this day where no one had ever been baptized before. No do overs but if you’d never been baptized we’d take care of that that day. With the understanding that everyone in good faith would follow up, and take seriously the covenant that God was making with them in the waters of baptism. So I thought maybe 20 people might take us up on that offer that day. A hundred or more, it went on and on and on. People back in the children's ministry said what are they doing in there? When is that gonna be over? It was an amazing day!

I noticed the very next week something changed. It was like the air pressure changed in the room. People were singing, there was a sense of ownership in the community. There was a sense that they had stepped across a threshold of openness that they were experiencing more of the presence of God. As I think about the bridges we built in those days, there are several things that come to mind.

One, is we didn’t take ourselves too seriously. We didn’t pretend that we had some special, magic formula. We had the Good News of Jesus. It was nothing that was not a common source throughout the whole planet. Second, We didn’t judge people. We understood that all of us have our issues, and that just wasn’t a productive place, so there’s just no point in judging one another. We’re all on a journey and we’re all gonna disagree on this and that. And we’re just not going to get into judging who’s wearing a wedding ring and all that business. No way. The third thing is that we’d listen to people’s stories. Listening to people’s stories, this is where reality and perception begin to do a dance. We have a perception of all the people outside the church are one way and the people outside have a perception that all the people inside the church are another way. We’re all ignorant of each other.

We begin to talk across these lines. And to listen to one another. And we discovered that there was one woman in our church who had an interesting spiritual journey. She had been a stripper for a while. Then she ended up becoming a therapist & counselor. Then she wrote a children’s book and found that in our church she could pull together a lot of what had happened and piece milled together. She had a beautiful story. On the other hand there were people that really had an understanding of church. And faith was something very confining. They discovered that actually it was a discovery of freedom, a discovery of healing and discovery of power in their lives. We were all learning from one another. We also tried to be down to earth. We were in a beach community so we had a rule: nothing fancy. No fancy rituals, no fancy clothes. We’re gonna do normal, we’re gonna do local. We continually invited people to take the next big step in their lives. Whatever that was. We knew that the Good News of Jesus always demanded, invited a constructive response and we asked people. Would you go there? Would you do it? Would you take the risk? Would you dare to live into this challenge? And by the hundreds they did. I think that was where people’s perceptions were met with God’s reality. When they took the risk to try, the spiritual challenge or whatever it was that Jesus put in front of them, they began to discover. Wow, this is for real! This stuff really works! It was an amazing season.

That was two decades ago and the world has changed a lot and this pandemic season is speeding up all that change. We really can’t go to church anymore, can we? In fact, we never could. Church has never been a place to go. It is a common experience of the power of God. It is a group of people but it has no location. It has no address, it certainly doesn’t have a time on Sunday morning. So the whole idea of going to church has always been a facade, and for people who thought that was what it meant to follow Jesus was to show up at a certain place on Sunday, you could waste decades of your life and think that somehow you were on a spiritual journey but you’re not. You’re just showing up to a spiritual club. A very nice group of people, throw in some inspirational music, a nice message, your children are happy, then you go home. Church is so much more than that. Church is a group of people who follow Jesus. And in this amazing season in which we live, the church has been thrown out of the building. Its awesome! And people are still following Jesus. People are still discovering power, for renewal, and for healing. It’s an interesting time! 

I know people today that say I’m a part of three churches. It’s almost like they channel surf on Sunday morning on the internet. And they do it all while eating waffles in their pajamas. Most of the stuff is recorded and you can access it at 3:00AM. The gathering is really important but it’s not about going to a place. It’s about following Jesus. 

Now for all the people who really never liked church anyway, including all those people in my first new members class. And for most of the people in the world quite frankly, this new world may work out for you quite nicely because the church is being forced to remember it’s about people and not a place. Certainly not an institution. I think that a lot of churches in the days ahead are going to be talking about things that are more relevant and getting back to what it’s all about. It’s about following Jesus. It’s about living into the reality that Jesus taught, which we call the kingdom of God. An amazing reality!

To follow Jesus, you’re gonna need two things. You will need a Bible and you’ll need some friends to come along with you on the journey. That’s what you need. 

In terms of a Bible I would encourage you to get something that’s readable. Get a translation that’s in English that you can understand. Or whatever language it is that is your mother tongue, get that Bible. Start with the Gospels. Those are the books that talk about the life of Jesus. They are the first four books of the second section of the Bible called the New Testament. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Start with Matthew, start with John, it doesn’t matter, but read them all. Read them slowly, take it in, a chapter a day. If you get into it then read five chapters. Don’t think that this is a speed reading thing, it is not. We want you to read and to meet this wild man whose life is told from four different perspectives. The wild man being Jesus. Because everything you’re going to read in the Bible later...everything, I want you to read in the light of what you’ve discovered about Jesus.

And certainly anything you hear from any preacher, in the days ahead, I want you to be able to filter that through your fundamental experience with Jesus. You need a Bible. I prefer one that does not have a bunch of footnotes or study notes. There is a place for study notes but they’re all over the place and you never know what you’re getting. Especially if you’re new to this. I really don’t want you to meet the study notes, I want you to meet Jesus! Just get a Bible without the notes that’s in a decent translation that you can read. I want you to get a good drink of Jesus. It’s like a neat shot of Basil Hayden with no mixer. That’s what I want you to experience. I want you to be shocked. I want you to feel the radical edge or edges of what he talks about. And let happen whatever needs to happen in that encounter.

Second thing is, you’re going to need some friends. Nobody can do a spiritual journey alone well. It’s just not possible. It’s sorta like you can’t do recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous, it’s not a solo journey, you need one another to do this. It’s very much the same with following Christ. The church exists because we can’t do it alone. So find some friends who are willing to go with you on this Gospel reading journey. Compare notes with them. As the questions arise, you’ll want to find a pastor, or someone who has logged some miles on this journey. Who can reflect with you about what they’ve learned across the years. I predict that if you meet Jesus this year, he will rock your world. The same way he did mine when I first met him reading the Gospel of Matthew, sitting under a pine tree on a mountain about 5-10 miles from my house. He’s a wild guy with good news that will change everything. And that Good News will change your life in ways that are wonderful and in ways that maybe you weren’t expecting or even thought that you needed.  

Many people are saying that this COVID year with its lack of time to get away, sort of homebound and this year feels like a waste. We’ve cancelled so much of what we planned to do this year. No year needs to be a waste. Certainly not this year! Use this year as an opportunity to take a Jesus Challenge. Use this space that has been created in your life to explore and ask some hard questions. Don’t waste this year! It could very easily become the very best year of your life!

Resources

We’ve created a free downloadable PDF to explore the article deeper. It contains discussion questions about the topic in general terms that will give you a jumping-off point for beginning a conversation.

The second page contains a way to see the topic from a biblical perspective.

And finally, to go deeper into the subject, we have chosen a few curated resources to explore from other authors’ and thinkers’ research or perspectives.

Read. Engage. Enjoy!

What do you think?

Depending on how a gem is held, light refracts differently. At B+PC we engage in Pop Culture topics to see ideas from a new angle, to bring us to a deeper understanding. And like Pastor Shane Willard notes, we want “…Jesus to get bigger, the cross to get clearer, the Resurrection to be central…” Instead of approaching a topic from “I don’t want to be wrong,“ we strive for the alternative “I want to expand my perspective.” 

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