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A radio station in Missouri had an interesting experience. They had a popular program that played the music that most of us like -- music middle-America could understand. The program had a very loyal following. People would stay up into the night to listen. It became their friend, especially to those people who have difficulty sleeping. One day the disc jockey got an interesting letter. It said, "Dear Sir, I am a farmer living alone on my farm. My wife is dead and my children and grandchildren have moved away. I see them infrequently. There are three things in my life that give me comfort. One is the farm. Another is this radio program. The third is my fiddle. Sometimes in the night when you are playing music that I have known in past years, I get out my fiddle and play along with you. It brings me great comfort. But recently, a problem has developed. My fiddle is out of tune. The A string doesn't work like it should, and I don't have a tuning fork so there is no way I can get my fiddle back in tune. Would you be so kind as to play the note A? If you will do this, I will tune my fiddle." So the station did, and he did, and they all lived happily ever after.

Christians and their churches have a tendency to get terribly out of tune. This is reflected in the way that churches conduct their lives. It is tragic when this happens. Sometimes the church becomes a political base rather than an evangelistic force. Sometimes it seeks to substitute coercion for conversion. Sometimes the church debates doctrine night and day, and as great doctrinal debates are going on, we forget that we all see "through a glass darkly." Churches forget that the essential matters of scripture we understand. We know enough to tell the world that they are lost without Jesus Christ. The constant debating of doctrine and redefining orthodoxy will get a church out of tune.

Another evidence of being out of tune is when a church will set limits on the province of God. They will set limits on how far the gospel goes and for whom the gospel is intended. As a pastor, I see this happening all the time. Christians will say, "This is not a part of what God wants us to do." Too many modern Christians forget that God has the whole world in his own heart. It is difficult for us to stay focused all the time because there are so many things that distract us. We have things like weekend sports and business meetings that we elevate to a place of prominence. As we come to the Advent season, we must understand that it is more than a "huggy-touchy-feel good-chestnuts roasting on an open fire" kind of season.

Candidly, I like Christmas. I grew up in a home that didn't make much of Christmas. I married into a family that made everything of Christmas, and I like Christmas. I even like the shopping centers, if I don't have to go very often. I like decorating the house. I get the Christmas lights from the attic, bring them down, and usually spend three days untangling them and at least two more days trying to find a replacement bulb so they will work. Last year when we got the lights down from the attic, they unfolded perfectly. I plugged them in and every light worked. That was a great surprise for us. I have never had that experience in my entire life. I knew right then it would be a good Christmas. Another thing that I like about Christmas is that it forces us to define again who Jesus is in our lives and what his birth means for us and our world. As we do this, we cannot escape the fact that we must focus on getting in tune with his mission for our lives.

I never will forget the time my brother heard me preach for the first time. We had grown up in different cities. He was much older than I and we didn't really know each other. After graduation from seminary, I was pastor of a church in North Carolina, and my brother came to worship with us. He spent the weekend in our home, and on the way to church he said, "Bill, I have never heard you preach. What are you preaching today?" I replied, "I'm preaching a sermon on missions." He looked at me and said, "You mean I have driven all the way across the state of North Carolina to hear you preach for the first time, and I'm going to hear a sermon on missions?" It was a downer for him. I don't know if the sermon was good or bad, but I do know one thing -- that is the way many Christians see the mission of the church -- as extra baggage. Mission sermons somehow rate right in there with stewardship sermons. Perhaps that is why we are out of tune. We forget that the Bible has a global view. Isaiah 40:1-5 talks about the people who have been in darkness having seen a great light. Isaiah, the great prophet of the exile, focuses in and says, "And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all mankind together will see it." God never has intended for his boundaries to be set any less than the whole world. The Bible wants the providence of God to be for the whole world. Don't forget the book of Jonah. Jonah, the man who was running from God, thought that if he could get out of Israel, he would be free of God. So he was going to go as far west as he could in order to get away from him. He got to the shore of the Mediterranean, bought passage on a ship thinking, "I'll leave God in Israel," but God followed him even into the belly of a specially-created sea monster. So he repented, was delivered, and started to go east, not really believing God could go across the Jordan River, and God followed him even to the pagan city of Nineveh and did a mighty work in the hearts of the Ninevites. God is not as narrow as we make him. The New Testament is the same way. This God is for the whole world.

The New Testament says repeatedly that God pushes boundaries back. Israel was there to bear witness to God's purpose, but so was the New Testament church. Paul makes it very clear in all his letters that the gospel is for the entire world. Any church that lives and thrives and survives must have a global view. Any church that is getting ready to die shrinks its boundaries and says, "It's just for us; it is for our little group." Those who define the ministry of the people of God as only being a "feel-good ministry" and who "dumb it down" only take care of the needs of those few who are assembled there. A church focused on itself only is conducting an "ensmallment" campaign.

We see this clearly in two churches in the New Testament. One is the church in Jerusalem. At Pentecost 3,000 people were added. That is a good start for a new church. But they got out of tune with a debate over how they would fit with Judaism. The church in Jerusalem was masterful at procedure. They had, for the most part, come out of Judaism and were trying to make this new religion as much like Judaism as possible. Compare this to the church in Antioch, the northern city. That church may not have had all of its procedure down but it had its vision right, and vision gives life. Procedure gives death. The Antioch church decided that it was for the world, and it was going to do something no one had ever done. They were going to send out some people who were to be missionaries and establish new churches: Paul and Barnabas, and then later Paul and Silas. Everywhere Paul went, they were poorly received. They were stoned, beaten, and thrown into prison. However, when it was over, the church had been established. Later they went into Europe. When you go to Israel, you cannot find the site of the church in Jerusalem. In Antioch, on the side of a hill, the site of that great church with its altar still stands as a tribute to their vision. They were in tune.

It is a matter of life or death. Contract and pull in, build a high wall, and you will get out of tune. The church is nothing more or less than a fellowship of witnesses. "It is wholly possible to have a religion without the missionary thrust. When this occurs, the religion goes on as a cultus chiefly directed to the welfare of its constituents or communicants. Without much difficulty, people can be satisfied with their own peace of mind or cultivation of their own spirits. There can be emphasis upon worship and ceremony, with a priesthood and a valued ritual. In a real sense people who participate in such a religion tend to their own business and do not bother others. They can continue in this vein, devoid of mission, and maintain good relations even with an atheistic or dictatorial governmental régime."1

The church of Jesus Christ does not have a mission; its very life is mission. As a fire does not have heat, its life is heat, and it burns. We need to understand that it is wholly possible to have a religious organization and not have a missionary thrust, but it is out of tune.

How do we get ourselves in tune? We must remember who we are. Any church who does not understand that it has a big horizon is asking for death, and there never has been a narrower work for the church than the whole world. It was the world God so loved. Whatever sails on a lesser sea is not the ark of salvation, nor does it belong in the Christian fleet. Why does our violin get out of tune? Maybe we have received a confused message.

How do we tune our fiddles? The gospel is the A note. Get your fiddles and let's tune them now.

I want to tell you a series of stories that have helped keep me in tune. There was a deacon in a church I served who did not believe in doing mission work. He lived in the "objective mood" and the "kickative case." He disagreed with everything that happened. He was a standard-issue church type -- he stood around and smoked before church; he wore a big wide tie purchased in 1946 when he got out of the army; he never agreed with anybody on anything. I think he was the belt-over-the-stomach, not the belt-under-the-stomach, type. He never came into the service until the second hymn. The women and children had to be in first, then he would come in. He was the male equivalent to the Church Lady on Saturday Night Live. He never said anything that didn't sound like it was written in old English script. One day he accosted me after a mission sermon and said, "Look at all the money we wasted in China." I asked him what he meant. He said, "The Communists have taken over and we spent all that money on mission work and now the churches are out of business. We wasted all that money in China." He always said that before and after the mission sermon. This gave me a lot of encouragement as I went in to preach. Every year it was a ritual. "Look at all that money we wasted in China." We would get ready to approve the budget and he would stand and oppose the whole mission section. "Look at all that money we wasted in China." The whole church could do it as a litany. They knew what this man was going to say. When I did his funeral, I wanted to say, "Look at all that money we wasted in China."

I recently read again the history of missions in China. Those old pioneer missionaries were a crusty bunch of people. That work started about 1805, and was the centerpiece of the mission appeal in England and the United States for about 150 years. Those tough pioneer missionaries didn't know the language, but they would rent a room, start preaching and teaching, and before long, they had a church. They learned the language and started planting more churches. When their mission societies called them home, they would reply, "No, I don't want to come home." They survived the Boxer Rebellion, a time when the Chinese were killing all foreigners in their country. They endured the Japanese war with China. They endured the Communist persecution. They went underground during the Communist takeover, and the only thing we know about what happened is that when the Communists relented and allowed the Christians to declare themselves, the church had grown. One in every 23 Chinese is a Christian. It is hard to believe. When I read that, I wanted to run down to the cemetery and stand over a grave and say, "Look at all the money we wasted in China." Can you imagine that one in 23 of the world's biggest country is a Christian? Thirty-three million Protestants and eighteen million Catholic Christians are in China!2

We have taken too small a view of God's work. We think like businesspeople -- if we don't have a profit every quarter, it's wrong. God thinks in decades and centuries and millennia. God takes the long view; we take a little view. God works somewhere else, above time. We need to understand that the mission of the church is the mission of the church.

Those of you who are young to the faith and for the first time beginning to see the work of the church understand that the faith is more than your neighborhood. It is more than your child being satisfied on a ball team; it is more than you being stroked. For those of you who have been in the faith a long time, it is more than somebody visiting you. If you want to get your violin in tune, see the world.

The old categories of "home" and "foreign" missions are gone now with the reality of jet airplanes, e-mail, computers, and fax machines. Flexible borders exist. You can do foreign mission work in Miami as well as you can do it in South America. In fact, Miami is a South American city, some have said. You can do Asian missions in Chamblee, Georgia, as well as you can do it in Hong Kong or Seoul. We must go where the people are. The gospel teaches that everyone needs the chance to hear the gospel.

What does this mean for you? It means that your life can be in tune only if you get in tune with what God is doing in this world. The dumbest thing I ever did was take a youth choir to Colombia, South America, the drug capital of the world; but it was the smartest thing I ever did too. We went with medical doctors from village to village as they were giving medical help to indigent, native Indian people in Colombia, South America. I have walked back in the jungle in Liberia, West Africa, with two doctors and three native men from the school where I was preaching. We went from village to village. They preached and we were there to observe, but the people observed us also. We had gone through about five villages, gathering the people together, and the young men were preaching from pictures and diagrams. When we got ready to go back, one of the young men said, "Let's pray before we go back." He prayed for all the right things, then said, "Lord, keep the snakes off us." A young man walked in front and one in back with machetes in case snakes got in the way or fell off the trees on us. The point is: the Church, by the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, has never taken the comfortable route. It has always been pushing back the barriers. It has never been in the easy places, and it has never been easy for the Church. Our church is only a home base for making sure the gospel is being preached around the world. The gospel is for all people; it is for all flesh. Let's tune our violins.

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1. Elton Trueblood, The Validity of the Christian Mission (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 17.

2. Christian History. Vol. XV, No. 4, p. 41.