Easter 4
26 April 2026
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
W. Gregory Pope
THE FIRST STEP TOWARD THE RESURRECTION OF THE CHURCH
Isaiah 25.6-9. Matthew 16.13-18. 1 John 1.5-9
We’ve been told the church is dying. There is a decline in church attendance and influence almost everywhere. Asia, Central America, and South America are the only continents experiencing a growing number of new Christians. Reasons have been given for the decline in places like Europe and North America. Almost all of them are aimed at the culture outside the church.
Author and pastor Tara Beth Leach suggests that its time to look inward to understand the church’s decline.1 She does so honestly and with great hope in the future possibilities for the church. She reminds us of the words of Jesus who assured us that the gates of hell would not ultimately prevail against the church. The apostle Paul tells us that all creation is groaning toward redemption. The biblical prophets remind us that God is always doing a new thing, giving birth to new life in the world. As Rev. Leach reports from her own experience as a mother of physically giving birth, she says: It is hard! There is nothing easy about it. It is literally blood, sweat, and tears!
Since the 1980s when I began my ministry, church growth books have been saying: We need to toss tradition. We need new lighting. We need to make worship seeker-sensitive. We need to create a positive atmosphere and make everyone feel comfortable. We need to make sure the kids have fun. But I’m in agreement with Tara Beth that we need to go deeper in order to get at the heart of the church’s decline.
Listen to these hard words from an outsider to Christianity: “Most people I meet assume that Christian means very conservative, entrenched in their thinking, anti-gay, angry, violent, illogical, empire builders, they want to convert everyone, and they generally cannot live peacefully with anyone who does not believe what they believe.” Many within the church allow patriotism to trump the values of God’s kingdom. Instead of peacemaking, we engage in speech that divides.
Chuck Poole gets to the heart of the matter by pointing out the widening gap between the church of today and the Jesus of the four gospels.2 It’s a gap that’s been around since at least the fourth century when the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and turned the persecuted Church of the poverty-stricken Jesus into a political powerhouse and government sanctioned religion, receiving favors from the state, forcing baptism upon unwilling citizens, leading soldiers into battle with the cross of Christ before them. The Jesus who said he was sent to bring good news to the poor and to proclaim release to the oppressed and to bind up the brokenhearted has not always found followers who will continue that mission.
Part of the difficulty comes because the pull of our culture is so strong and we long for the church to be respected. But for the church to be faithful to the way of Jesus we have to go against the popular tide and stop measuring ourselves by the prevailing standards of North American culture. Led by our cultures standards the church becomes consumed with such things as size, power, and prominence – or what Tara Beth Leach calls the ABCs of empire: Attendance, Buildings, and Cash – none of which reflects the standards by which Jesus measured life. We have to fight against the image of “the successful church.”
The great preacher Ernest Campbell said of the church: “It doesn’t really matter whether an action is profitable or popular, whether it is practical or realistic, whether it wins a salute from a city or nation. What matters only and always is whether it can be understood as following Jesus.”
With all the challenges the church faces, I do not believe it is too late for the church to change its ways. We know how this story ends. We know the bride of Christ will never fully crumble. Our Lord said “the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church.”
But exposure to our shortcomings should lead us to our knees, crying out for the Spirit to birth something new, alive, and beautiful. What God, through the prophet Isaiah, called “a new creation” brought into being within history here on earth in a partnership with God’s people. It’s not too late to be renewed and revived and allow the work of the Spirit to birth something new and beautiful.
How do we do it? According to Jesus, we are most true to following him when we bring good news to the poor, bind up the broken, liberate the oppressed, feed the hungry, visit the lonely, cloth the naked, welcome the stranger, defend the powerless, embrace the hurting, and shelter the weak.
So it seems confession is in order.
Donald Miller tells a remarkable story of confession in a book that later became a movie. Miller was a college student and a member of a Christian organization on the campus of a secular university. Each year the university shut down the campus for a festival where the students could party to the extreme. The school would actually bring in a medical unit that specialized in treating bad drug trips. To my knowledge, Mercer University has not held such a festival. Is that right, Todd?
Miller says that some of the Christian students in his little group decided this was a pretty good place to let everybody know there were a few Christians on campus. As a joke
he suggested that since a lot of people would be sinning they could build a confession booth in the middle of campus and paint a sign on it that said “Confess your sins.” His friend Tony thought it was a great idea. Another friend thought it was crazy: “They may very well burn it down.” “We’ll build a trap door then,” said Tony.
After a while Tony gathered everyone’s attention in the little group and said, “Okay, you guys, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to build a confession booth, but we’re not actually going to accept confessions. We are going to confess to them. We are going to confess that, as followers of Jesus, we have not been very loving; we have been bitter and for that we are sorry. We will apologize for the Crusades, for Christians killing in the name of Jesus. We will apologize for our racism. We will apologize for Columbus and the genocide he committed in the name of God. We will apologize for the missionaries who landed in Mexico and came up through the West slaughtering Indians in the name of Christ. We will apologize for televangelists. We will apologize for neglecting the poor and lonely. We will ask them to forgive us, and we will tell them that in our selfishness, we have misrepresented Jesus on this campus. We will tell people who come into the booth that Jesus loves them.”
Donald said: “We all sat there in silence because it was obvious that this was something beautiful and true. It would feel so good to apologize. I wanted so desperately to say that none of this hatred and violence was Jesus, and I wanted so desperately to apologize for the many ways I had misrepresented Jesus. I could feel that I had betrayed Jesus by judging, by not being willing to love the people he had loved and only giving lip service to issues of justice. I prayed about getting in the confession booth. I wondered whether I could apologize and really mean it.”
On Friday night, the first night of the festival, Don and Tony dressed up like monks and walked among the anarchy smoking their pipes, soaked in the spray of beer spewing from the crowds. People would come up to them and ask them what they were doing. They told them that the next day they would be on campus taking confessions, and to come by and see them, that they were going to build a confession booth.
The next morning, while everyone else was sleeping off their hangovers, they built the booth and painted in large letters on the outside, “Confession Booth.” Some who walked by said it was the boldest thing they had ever seen. All of them were kind, which was a surprise.
That night, as the party hit full steam, Don said, “I was doubting whether or not I wanted to do this, when our first customer walked in.”
“What’s up?” the customer said. “Your pipe smells good.”
“Thanks. What’s your name?”
“Jake.”
I shook his hand, not knowing what else to do.
“So, what is this?” he asked. “I’m supposed to tell you all the juicy gossip of what I did this weekend? You want me to confess my sins, right?”
“No,” Don said, “that’s not what we’re doing, really. We’re a group of Christians on campus, and, well, some of us who were thinking about the way Christians have sort of wronged people over time. You know, the Crusades, all that stuff.”
“Well, I doubt you personally were involved in any of that, man.”
“No, I wasn’t,” Don said. “But the thing is, we are followers of Jesus. We believe he represented certain ideas that we have sort of not done a good job at representing. He’s asked us to represent him, but it can be hard.”
“I see,” Jake said, being very patient and gracious.
“So there is this group of us on campus who want to confess to you.”
“You’re confessing to me!” Jake said with a laugh. “You’re serious.”
Don told him he was.
Jake looked at him and told him he didn’t have to.
Don told him he felt very strongly at that moment that he was supposed to tell him that he was sorry about everything.
So he began: “Jesus said to feed the poor. I have never done very much about that. Jesus said to love those who persecute me. I tend to lash out, especially if I feel threatened. And I know that a lot of people will not listen to the words of Jesus because of people like me. There’s so much we Christians have done wrong.”
“It’s all right, man,” Jake said very tenderly, his eyes starting to water.
“Well, I’m sorry for all that,” Don said.
“I forgive you,” Jake said. And he meant it.
“Thanks,” Don said.
“You really believe in Jesus, don’t you?” Jake asked.
“Yeah, most often I do. I have doubts at times, but mostly I believe in him. It’s like there’s
something in me that causes me to believe, and I can’t explain it. I believe God loves us and forgives us. All of us. Jake, I guess I’m just saying if you want to know God, you can. If you ever want to call on Jesus, He’ll be there.”
“Thanks, man. I believe you mean that.” His eyes watering again. “This is cool what you guys are doing. I’m going to tell my friends about this.”
“I don’t know whether to thank you for that or not,” Don laughed. “I have to sit here and confess all my crap.”
Jake looked at him very seriously and said, “It’s worth it.”
Don writes: “It went on like that for a couple of hours. I talked to about thirty people. Tony talked to several others. That night was the beginning of change for a lot of us. We started taking a group to a local homeless shelter to feed the poor, and we often had to turn students away because the van wouldn’t hold more than twenty or so. We held an event called Poverty Day where we asked students to live on less than three dollars a day to practice solidarity with the poor. More than one hundred students participated. We held a talk on poverty in India, and more than seventy-five students came. Before any of this, our biggest event had about ten people. We hosted an evening where we asked students to come and voice their hostility against Christians. We answered questions about what we believed, and we apologized again, and asked for forgiveness. We enjoyed new friendships, and at one time had four different Bible studies on campus specifically for those who did not consider themselves Christians. We watched a lot of students take a second look at Christ. But mostly, we as Christians felt right with the people around us. Mostly we felt forgiven and grateful.”3
Sometimes the church needs conversion, beginning with the confession of our sins. John says: “If we confess our sins, God is faithful to forgive us and cleanse us and shine the light of God’s love upon us.”
Are we ready and willing?
In the words of Tara Beth Leach: “Creation is groaning. The labor pains can no longer be ignored. In the power of the Holy Spirit, it’s time to push and birth something new, something beautiful, something wrapped in love, truth, and grace.”
Pushing new life into the world begins with a grip on truth and reality which then leads to honest confession. It may just be the first hard step toward the Church’s resurrection. I think the world is ready to listen.
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1. Tara Beth Leach, The Radiant Church, InterVarsity Press, 2021
2. Charles E. Poole, Beyond the Broken Lights, Smyth and Helwys, 2000, 103-110
3. Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz, Nelson, 2003, 116-126