As we progress through exploring our mission we’ll be looking at evangelism this Sunday. We started by exploring our responsibilities of fellowship in the church and this Sunday we’ll be looking at the church’s responsibility of evangelism to the world. There is a purpose to our order because if the church acts like the church, then the world takes notice. John Winthrop was a great thinker in the puritanical movement and while the puritans can hardly be held up as a model of practice their thought at its inception was beautiful. Wintrhop’s essay below is thought to have been preached at least in part aboard the Arbella the ship which brought the puritans to America. Before they stepped foot in the new world they understood their grand experiment in being the church and a witness in the world. While the whole essay is worth reading I’ve included an excerpt below (a sneak peek from Sunday).
Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “may the Lord make it like that of New England.”
- From “A Model Of Christian Charity,” by John Winthrop (1630) (Full text available here)
