There is More! Carolyn Moore’s message to the GMC General Conference –

By Carolyn Moore – 

Days before being elected as a bishop of the Global Methodist Church at its General Conference meeting in Costa Rica, the Rev. Carolyn Moore preached the opening sermon during the first evening worship on the campus of the Methodist School in San José.

There is a scene in the book of Acts that has grabbed my attention. It seems like a word for this moment in our history, so turn with me if you will to Acts 19.

“While Apollos was at Corinth, Paul took the road through the interior and arrived at Ephesus. There he found some disciples. He asked them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” They answered, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”

So Paul asked, “Then what baptism did you receive?” “John’s baptism,” they replied.

Paul said, “John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance.

He told the people to believe in the one coming after him, that is, in Jesus.”

On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.

When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied.

There were about twelve men in all.

Paul entered the synagogue and spoke boldly there for three months, arguing persuasively about the kingdom of God.

But some of them became obstinate; they refused to believe and publicly maligned the Way. So Paul left them. He took the disciples with him and had discussions daily in the lecture hall of Tyrannus.

This went on for two years, so that all the Jews and Greeks who lived in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord” (Acts 19:1-10). 

This is the story of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God!

To get at everything this moment in history has to teach us – the ones standing in another significant moment of history – we need the backstory. This conversation between Paul and these disciples actually begins some stretch of time before we get to this scene, with a Jewish guy named Apollos, who was preaching in Ephesus before Paul ever showed up.

We learn in Acts 18 that Apollos knew about Jesus, was enthusiastic about the gospel, but was preaching only the baptism of John. Somehow he’d missed the message that there is more. And if we learn nothing else from Paul in this scene, I hope we can absorb and begin to live out of that word: there is more.

For Apollos, it wasn’t until two more seasoned disciples – a couple named Priscilla and Aquila – heard him preach that he got the whole gospel. They took him to their house, fed him a good meal, and explained to him, “Friend, there is more to the story!”

Can you imagine finding out after you’d been preaching a while that you didn’t know there was more? Or maybe I need to say that this way. Some of us who have been preaching a while may not have realized (or may have forgotten) there is more. In fact, some of us probably need to take a moment to identify not with the good folks who knew but with the well-meaning preacher who missed it, because some of us may need to grieve the fact that there are dimensions of God we still don’t know … and then … after we’ve acknowledged the lack, we need to get excited about the fact that there are dimensions of God still to explore!

So Apollos gets schooled. We need to appreciate his humility in this moment – his teachability – when he finds out John’s baptism was a prequel to the main event, which was the coming of Jesus, the Messiah, and the subsequent outpouring of the Holy Spirit. John said so himself: “I baptize you with water, but the one who comes will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” Which is not to minimize John’s baptism. His was a deeply personal work of initiating grace – a getting ready for what was to come: a freedom from invitation, freedom from the tyranny of sin, freedom from a sacrificial system that tied them to a temple and to a Law that was meant to give life but that had become so cumbersome as to be deadening.

John had an important message for those waiting for God’s Messiah, that where we start from … matters. If we want the “more” that this gospel promises, we must begin by confessing all that has kept us stuck in the shallow end of grace. We must be willing to name aloud the demons that have pestered and paralyzed us, and we must do so believing in the supreme power of grace to cover all that lacks in us and all that lacks in those around us.

Grace is the beginning of “more.” Justifying grace is our invitation into deeper waters. So the baptism of John was an initiation into grace, as if he were saying, “Don’t step into this river until you’re ready to leave the pond behind. Don’t make the mistake of dragging out of stagnant waters your bitterness and your anger and your judgments. Don’t bring those into the river of sanctifying grace now flowing from the throne of God.”

Do you hear that grace, Church? Can you receive it? Where we start from … matters.

Some years ago, I was speaking at an event in Atlanta. A colleague and I both happened to arrive at the hotel at the same time, so we both found out at the same time that the hotel was overbooked. There was no room for either of us at the inn. The hotel rebooked us at a place near the airport about half an hour away from where we were. Since I had a car, I offered to give my colleague a ride to the new hotel. I used my phone to find a route and with total trust in the direction my GPS was taking us, we started out.

As it turns out, that app on my phone will give me one option if I’m driving and another option if I’m walking. I don’t know what demon controls that choice on my phone but sometimes when I get directions to a place, it’ll show up as if I’m walking. As life would have it, the first time it ever did that was the night I was driving myself and my colleague across Atlanta, so I didn’t notice we were being directed as if we were walking from downtown to the airport.

I don’t know how I missed it – I was tired, it was late … pick your excuse. The upshot was that for the whole drive we never touched one of Atlanta’s fine freeways, a fact that baffled me but somehow didn’t cause me to stop and recalculate. I just kept driving. For ninety minutes of that thirty-minute drive, we drove the most awkward back way through the darkest streets in the most sketchy part of town at night on a weekend.

If I’d been the passenger in that car, I’d have assumed I was being kidnapped.

Imagine for a moment (I often do when I remember this event) how much more intelligent I might have looked if when we first got in the car I’d taken a moment (ten seconds!) to scan the screen and make sure all the facts were in place. If I had started us off right, I would not still to this day feel immediate shame when I see that colleague.

Pro tip: How you get started … matters. Your starting place theologically will determine your trajectory and impact where you land. Likewise, your starting place spiritually will determine your trajectory and impact where you land.

So yes! In your pursuit of the Holy Spirit start where John and Jesus started. As you believe, repent. As you go seeking a baptism in the Spirit, be immersed in sorrow for all you’ve done to oppose the Kingdom of God, whether you knew what you were doing or not. Find your heart for humility and soak in it until there is nothing left but Jesus, because on the other side of repentance, there is more. We who believe in justifying grace also know that repentance is just the beginning of all the grace. There is a sanctifying more. This is the essence of Methodism. Ours is a “freedom to” faith led by an audacious optimism (as my friend, Kevin Watson puts it) in the sanctifying more of the gospel.

So Paul’s question to those folks in Ephesus was an invitation to believe in the “more.” Something in that conversation makes Paul suspect these people are missing the rest of it so he asks them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?”

Brilliant diagnostic question!

If your answer, as with those precious souls Paul found in Ephesus, is, “For way too much of my life, I didn’t even know there was a Holy Spirit,” there is good news for you straight out of the first-century church. It is never too late to go after the more!

Notice what happened. Look at Acts chapter 19:6, When Paul placed his hands on those Ephesian disciples of John and baptized them in the name of Jesus, the Holy Spirit came on them and they spoke in tongues and prophesied!

Talk about course correction! I’m just guessing no one was expecting that! But there they were, with an immediate supernatural response to the presence of the Holy Spirit. It had to feel like leaving the back roads and hopping on an expressway! John Stott says of these people Paul finds in Ephesus still living in a justification world, having never moved on to the sanctifying joys of the Spirit, that “Pentecost finally caught up with them!”

Don’t you love that?

My brothers and sisters in Christ on the verge of this great move of God, are you ready for Pentecost to catch up with us? Because we can do this the hard way. We can do the spiritual equivalent of traveling down every back road and dark alley, taking the longest possible route, waiting until after we’ve organized and systematized and elected and ordained and commissioned and created all our policies and procedures (I mean, we are Methodists after all! We do love “method”). We can wait until after we’ve expended all our own effort before we attempt to retrofit our movement with whatever of the Holy Spirit we can squeeze into the margins. Or we can start now, while we’re still flexible, moldable, still maybe a little messy (the term I prefer is wild). We can start now while our movement is still young and our hearts are still soft, while we still have some sense of adventure and joy and creativity about us, and we can cry out for the Holy Spirit to infuse our DNA with love and power in equal measure.

What will it be, my people called Methodist? Are you ready to let Pentecost catch up with you? Because where you start from determines what we receive, and what we receive makes all the difference.

There is more. What a powerful question Paul asks of us in this room: “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?”

Can we as Global Methodists receive the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit as a non-negotiable as we begin? Can we cultivate a compelling vision for a Spirit-filled Methodism and let that be our witness to the world and our contribution to the Body of Christ? You know, right here in this message would be my obvious opportunity to lay out a three-point plan for developing such a thing in our movement, but I’m not that good. It seems a bit arrogant to say I know how the Spirit wants to move among us. But I do have some suspicions about where a healthy, Spirit-filled, global Methodism might begin. For starters, I think we might all benefit from a holy curiosity characterized by a willingness to experiment. This seems like a very good place to begin if we really want to get beyond the status quo.

What if we could develop a posture of holy curiosity toward historic Methodism that allows us to mine the best of the ancient ways while remaining curious about and open to all the Spirit-filled life can be?

What if we try some things together — experiment a little, become more open to the moves of the Spirit, less interested in excellence-and-order for the sake of nothing more than excellence-and-order, and more interested in things Jesus actually commended to those first followers, like casting out demons and curing diseases, proclaiming the Kingdom as we heal the sick? Are you willing to come into this movement with a spirit of holy curiosity toward the supernatural dimensions of God still waiting to be explored?

My friends, are we willing to let Pentecost catch up with

us?

And if we’re going to experiment, I suspect we might also benefit from a fresh understanding of spiritual leadership, one marked by its commitment not to a more excellent organizational chart but to a more vibrant life in the Spirit? I notice in the Church that we often talk about spiritual gifts when we are looking for volunteers but we use a business model for structuring ourselves. Why is that? Why do we structure ourselves for maximum control and efficiency when Paul – the one who first envisioned what church can be – challenges us to structure ourselves spiritually? His leadership chart began with apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers – all activated through the infilling of the Holy Spirit. How committed would you be to advocating for that kind of spiritual leadership for our movement, from the volunteer lay speaker to the ordained elder to the bishop?

Do we have the imagination for that? Can we unleash a new generation of leaders who move in the supernatural power of God?

Leaders, are we willing to let Pentecost catch up with us?

And how might that influence the culture of our local churches? What kind of spiritual atmosphere might be cultivated under that kind of leadership? I’m not talking liturgy or worship style or the org chart. I’m talking about the intangibles, the pervading presence of the Holy Spirit … the sound we make when we pray. Can we learn the vocabulary of real, deep-end, contending, Spirit-driven prayer as a primary language … so the world will know there is more?

Church, are we ready to let Pentecost catch up with us?

When Paul finds this group in Ephesus, there are just a handful of people (twelve, the story says) doing their best to understand what God was doing in the world. Ten verses later, the story tells us that under the influence of the Spirit of God, they’ve gone from twelve guys to all the Jews and Greeks who lived in that part of the world having heard the word of the Lord! From a handful of people to the evangelism of a whole city … in ten verses! Jesus said the Kingdom of God is like that. Its like yeast that a woman takes and mixes into about sixty pounds of flour until it has worked it way all through the dough. That’s how its done in the Kingdom of God under the influence of the Holy Spirit. It starts with a handful (or a roomful?) of people and before you know it, the whole world knows there is more.

Let’s pray together. There is a beautiful woman who lives in my neighborhood and goes to my church. Her name is Laura. She didn’t grow up in church so her perception of God was based on a “freedom from” kind of religion — a lot of guilt, not much grace. As she put it, she believed that if she did bad, she was bad. For Laura, that became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It really is true, theologically, that where you start from … matters.

Laura came at life from a place of guilt and shame and that led her to spiral into habits to numb the pain. She became a serious addict. Eventually after losing the ability to care for her three kids, she ended up on the street. Homeless, Laura resorted to making money in ways she never thought possible.

She ended up in prison and that’s where she first opened a Bible and got hungry for more. She had a cell mate who loved Jesus and that intrigued her. She didn’t get delivered of her demons. So when she got out of prison, she ended up back on the street and back to her old ways … but the hunger she found while she was in?… that never left.

I want to share with you in her words something that happened to her while she was on the streets. Laura writes, “You may know that the Gideons supply Bibles for every hotel room. In one of those rooms, I found myself picking up that Bible … even in the midst of my chaos. A man … this was a client, folks … came into my hotel room and noticed the Bible and my reading glasses on the night stand. He proceeded to ask me why I was reading the Bible while I was doing these things I was doing. An immediate feeling of conviction and shame fell on me and out of nowhere, I heard my voice yell, ‘Let’s pray together!’ I said it over and over. I must have scared him to death. He bolted out of the door.”

Laura said that for her, that was the beginning of the end. The Lord had set her up. She was so hungry for more that when she was eventually arrested again, she felt nothing but relief. She ended up in a recovery house and saw how real faith could be lived out not just as “freedom from” but as a “freedom to” adventure. That was so compelling to her. She wanted more and God delivered.

Laura is now two years sober. She’s home again and raising her children. The whole family is in church – our church, a Global Methodist church! – and Laura is sharing her testimony everywhere, talking about the freedom she has found in the more of a Christ-centered, Spirit-filled life. She leads a 12-step group at our church and another one at a local recovery house and she has even been invited to speak at local and regional gatherings of the Gideons.

Isn’t that the best? This is how the Kingdom grows! Its like what happened in Acts 19: “This went on for two years so that all the Jews and Greeks who lived in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord.”

Friends, this is the whole reason we go after the Holy Spirit. It is not just so we can have a more enjoyable quiet time. We go after the igniting power of the Holy Spirit because someone is still out there hungry for more. And we go after it because we have a charge to spread scriptural holiness throughout the land and across the globe. We go after the whole gospel so we can cast out the demons that have our friend bound up in fear and pain, and we go after it so we can lay hands on people and watch Jesus heal the sick, and we keep going after it until the whole world knows there is more!

Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?

If you missed it, if we missed it – and friends, I suspect somewhere along the way, Methodism missed it – if we missed it, the good news according to this scene in Acts 19 is that its not too late. This is our moment! We’re just getting started! We can let Pentecost catch up with us! We can get on our knees tonight and cry out for more … tonight … for ourselves … for our movement … for a world that is hungry to know the whole optimistic, curious, joyful, Spirit-drenched gospel. Are you willing right now to cry out for more? If you are, I invite you to begin where the scriptures invite us to begin – with repentance and infilling – because where we start from … matters.

I invite you to hear Paul’s encouragement: there is more. Are you ready to pray for that fresh move of the Spirit, both in your life and in this new movement? If so, I invite you to cry out and ask boldly for God to fill us freshly.

Carolyn Moore is a newly-elected bishop of the Global Methodist Church. She is a church planter and former senior pastor of Mosaic Church in Evans, Georgia.