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Good morning. It's wonderful to see you — everyone here, everyone online, and those in our overflow spaces too.
I'd like to begin by reading a little from the New Testament. In this passage from Corinthians, the Apostle Paul is talking about what the church is like — or what it should be. And he gives us a really neat metaphor: the church is a bit like a human body. It's one thing, representing Christ, and yet it's made up of a whole load of different parts.
Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body — whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free — and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.
And so the body is not made up of one part but of many. If the foot should say, "Because I'm not a hand, I don't belong to the body," it would not for that reason stop being part of the body... But in fact, God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.
The eye cannot say to the hand, "I don't need you." And the head cannot say to the feet, "I don't need you." On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable... so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.
Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.
I want to speak for a few minutes today under the title Kingdom Community.
One of the things I think is so special about our church here at HTB is all the different nationalities represented in our family. I love this particular Sunday — big summer Sunday — with all the different cultures, congregations, and food stalls coming together. It's a reminder that each of us — our age, our gender, our colour, our culture, our nationality — coming together is what makes us represent Christ in London, and Christ in the world.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theologian, put it this way:
The church is not a religious community of worshipers of Christ. Rather, it is Christ himself who has taken form among people.
In other words, when we become a Christian, to an extent we cease being just an individual entity. We are co-joined with each other, and we find our identity in being joined to one another.
Paul uses this brilliant metaphor of a human body — many parts, but somehow inseparable. The eye can't say to the hand, "I don't need you." The head can't say to the feet, "I don't need you." And each one of us has a visual aid for this: our own body. We are parts that represent Christ.
If this is true — that each of us plays a part making up the whole — then I want to suggest three things.
The body is not made up of one part, but of many. Everybody is required. Everybody is needed.
Imagine if an ambulance tore down the drive and parked outside while we're meeting this morning. Two paramedics rush in, right in the middle of the service. "What's happened?" we ask. "We've heard a report of renal failure," they say. "The two people who are the kidneys — they didn't turn up today. They thought they'd stay home because they figured nobody notices them. And now the whole organism has seized up."
That's what Paul is saying, isn't it?
My dad and my family came here for the first time when I was a teenager in 1984 — 40 years ago. HTB was a lot smaller then, just a couple of hundred people rather than the thousands it is today. One of the things about my dad that I always thought was a bit curious: if he was going to miss the coming Sunday — travelling or away on leave — he would always make a point of phoning the vicar, a guy called John Collins, just to let him know he wouldn't be in church.
This was pre-text and pre-email, so he'd phone on a Friday. I used to say, "Dad, do you really think the vicar wants a call on Friday afternoon to hear that you won't be in church on Sunday?" (And please — do not send me lots of emails every Sunday!) But my father would say, "Absolutely. He needs to know that I'm still a part of the body."
Maybe our connect group — whether we show up or we don't — matters more than we think it does.
Someone on our staff team told me this week about something they do every day called the three P's. Every morning they set three priorities for the day, three projects — often work-related — and then three people. For the three people, they make a point of texting, WhatsApp messaging, or sending a voice note to someone who comes to mind: a family member, a friend, someone in the community. Just saying, "Thinking of you today. Praying for you."
Can you imagine if we all did the three P's every day? If we all brought our passions, our personality, our practical acts of service, our prayers — every single day — to being a part of the body here? Can you imagine the impact, the co-joining that would do for us as a community?
Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.
When the world is shaking and uncertain — like it is right now — the human tendency is always to draw back in on itself. To retreat, to draw a circle around our lives, to insulate and buttress and fortress ourselves so we feel secure against the world.
But that tends to lead toward individualism. And the trouble is, individualism leads to a loss of identity, to loneliness, isolation, and anxiety — all the social studies data will tell you this. What Paul is saying is: keep connected to one another. Keep attaching yourself to something bigger than you.
For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body... and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.
Last Sunday I was at one of our other sites, and after the service a woman told me it was her first time ever at HTB. I asked how she came to be here. She replied, "Well, I've been following the teachings of Archie Gumbel" — Gumbel being the name of my predecessor as vicar here. I said, "Very pleased to meet you. I'm Nicky Coates." (I didn't actually say that — but I wish I'd thought of it!)
But she's got a point. The nature of being one body is this: we're all distinct parts, and yet we're strangely intermingled. It's hard to tell where one ends and the next begins. It's all co-joined.
So don't ever make your life just about your life — you'll shrink it. Never make your friendship group just about your friendship group, or your connect group just about your connect group, or your church just about your church. Always take whatever expression you're part of and connect it to something greater and larger. And you will expand and grow your life.
That's one of the reasons we go to Focus together — to take our little lives and expand the vision, the possibilities, the dreams that God has for us, not only as individuals but as a community. And it's bigger than our denomination, our preferences, or our network. We are part of something that is multicultural, global, and international.
That's why on a Sunday like this it's such good fun celebrating our different cultures. I challenge you to take food from a stall from a region of the world that is not yours!
Patriotism and national identity are important — we're all celebrating the Ghanaian football defence for getting them through to the last 32 in the World Cup! But patriotism is different from nationalism. Amy Orr-Ewing, one of our speakers at Focus this year, writes in her recent book on forgiveness:
Patriotism is the love of one's country and the commitment to its values, alongside a moral determination to improve it. Nationalism, on the other hand, promotes the inherent superiority of one's nation over others.
As Christians, we are patriotic, but we are never nationalistic. Because we share the same heavenly Father who has made us brothers and sisters across every culture, nationality, colour, gender, race, and language. God's gift to us here at HTB is that we have 108 nationalities represented in our church family. The World Cup organisers could only manage 48!
For many years my parents used to go to the Wimbledon Tennis Championships. They had a friend whose great-grandmother had won the women's singles at Wimbledon over 100 years ago, in the 1920s. Because she won, she was given two centre-court "debenture" seats in perpetuity, handed down through the family. The family didn't want to go 14 days in a row, so they shared the seats — and that's how my parents got to go one day a year.
What they liked most was when it rained. Because when it rained, their seats got them access into the players' tea room. So they'd be sitting with their scones, cream, and jam, and in would walk these tennis greats — Rod Laver, Billie Jean King, Andre Agassi, Roger Federer. My parents felt a bit sheepish, because anyone could tell they'd never played tennis; they shouldn't be in that room. But then they looked around and saw a whole lot of other people at the tables also looking embarrassed — because they were only there because their great-grandmother had won Wimbledon 100 years ago too.
It's an amazing picture. Because what qualifies any one of us to be in this room is the GOAT — the greatest of all time — Jesus Christ, who won a tremendous victory 2,000 years ago on the cross. And He qualifies every single one of us to be in the group.
That's what makes us one body, brothers and sisters. A black pastor who's a friend of mine here in London wrote this:
The wonder of the gospel is not that Christ saved a Nigerian engineer, a Jamaican nurse, or a Tamil student. The wonder is that Christ saves sinners, and then gathers those sinners from every background into one family. When Christ is our biggest agreement, all lesser identities find their rightful, smaller place — celebrated, yes, but surrendered to the one who has made us one new humanity in his blood.
This is the challenge for us.
They say a parent is only as happy as their most unhappy child. NATO's Article 5 says an attack on one is an attack on all. Or, more positively, a blessing on one is a blessing on all. Paul says we should think of the church in this way: when one part suffers, we all suffer with it; when one part is honored, we all rejoice with it.
Let's take an example. A woman in our church — I took a photo of her last Sunday — is called Kai Tang. She's HTB, but she comes originally from the far north of Burma, now known as Myanmar. She's part of a very small people group called the Kachin, who are 95% Christian in a nation that is very strongly Buddhist.
For the last 15 years the Kachin people have been caught up in conflict. Some 400 of their villages have been destroyed, and 80 of their churches. There are 100,000 Kachin people internally displaced. Kai Tang is here in London, leading a community of 100 Kachin refugees. Because they are Christians, you are as connected to each one of them as you are to your best Christian friend or family member. And Kai Tang is an indispensable part — that's Paul's word — of our church.
The Open Doors charity says there are 388 million Christians persecuted around the world. That's one in seven Christians. These are not statistics. They are brothers and sisters, because we are all one body. The writer to the Hebrews puts it like this:
Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are ill-treated as if you yourselves were suffering.
Twelve months ago, I had the enormous privilege of travelling to northern Nigeria with the charity Open Doors and one of our pastors here, Soji Olatunde. We visited many Christians who've been internally displaced because of the conflict there.
In Nigeria there are 16 million people internally displaced, the majority of whom are Christian. That's the equivalent of the populations of London, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester combined. I visited one of these internal displacement camps in Benue State and met Christians who'd had to flee their homes — including a pastor whose own brother, and his brother's wife, were killed by militants, and who now lives displaced among his own flock in the camp, saying, "I don't have anything to give them. We only pray together and share the Word of God together."
If one part suffers, we all suffer with it.
We can pray. I'm so grateful to Sabine, who leads our prayer, particularly praying for Christians around the world in conflict.
But we can also stand together in solidarity. Open Doors have a petition — Arise Africa — seeking one million signatures, as a way of sending a message to our brothers and sisters in sub-Saharan Africa: You are not unseen. You are not unheard.
You might wonder — we came for Big Summer Sunday, expecting something celebratory. Why bring such a sombre tone?
Partly because I want you to be aware that, just as we live and worship here in great celebration and relative security, there are others for whom that is not the case.
But also — more hopefully — because if you look at the history of the church, wherever there has been persecution, there has always been the advance of the gospel accompanying it. The two go hand in hand, because the cross and the resurrection — the ultimate victory of Christ — cannot be thwarted.
Whether it's persecution in the Roman Empire in New Testament times, or in Syria, China, North Korea, Eritrea, South Sudan, or northern Nigeria today, the cross stands above it all. Ultimately, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ is greater than any grief.
As we finish, let me suggest three things for each of us to be part of this community:
If we do that, we carry together the presence of Christ. We become like Jesus to the world, to London, to the nations. There's nothing more compelling than that. We become a kingdom community.
Let's pray. Take that image of a body — limbs, organs, tendons, muscles, sinews. What it needs is life to flow through it. That's the Spirit. Jesus promises that for those who believe in Him, rivers of living water will flow from within them. So let's all — here, online, and in our overflow — ask the Holy Spirit to come and flow through us again.
Come, Holy Spirit. Come by your Spirit now, we pray.
In the quiet, allow the Spirit to fill you — but also to prompt you. You may find a thought popping into your head. Work out: is that a distraction, or is it a prompting of the Spirit? If it's the second, just say, "Lord, are you trying to say something to me?" Because Jesus says we should be not only hearers of His word, but doers. "Lord, what are you wanting me to do?"
I believe one of the things the Holy Spirit wants to do in our community today is to increase our levels of love and compassion for the people around us. For understandable reasons — because the world can be so overwhelming — we can develop a hardness, a self-protection. I think God wants to burst through that. The only way we can have compassion for people beyond ourselves is if it's given by the Spirit. You can't make yourself more compassionate — but the Spirit can.
If that speaks to you — if you'd love to break through any cynicism, skepticism, or hardness and have a greater love and compassion for people — would you make your way to the front, and we'll pray for you? It may be compassion for a particular people group, or for part of the church around the world, or simply that you'd love a softer heart. It's not that you're not compassionate — it's that you need a supernatural compassion.
Notice that Jesus' miracles — like the feeding of the 5,000 — are nearly all born out of compassion. That's the engine. That's where it starts.
So if this is something you want, come to the front, and the prayer team will lay a hand on you and release God's love and compassion in your heart — and through you, to the people around you.
