Welcome, welcome, welcome. A big hello, in fact, to Hemel
and Hatfield this morning that are joining in.
And if I was Chuck, I would say, come on everybody, give them a
big cheer. And now we're going to have a
big cheer from them. We can hear you through the
airwaves. No, it's wonderful to be
together and to be joining together across our sights this
morning. As you've heard, my name is
Claire and one of the pastors here, and this morning we have
the absolute joy of launching our Love Your Street 2026
Missions Month. I think you can do better than
that. We're launching Love Your Street
2026 Mission Month. Come on, we are super excited.
If you have been around the last few weeks, you might have seen
the The Vision video that went out.
And if you were here last year, you will have been part of Love
Your Street. But essentially, we're stepping
into a month of greater missional intentionality.
So we're always called to be missional.
And you might think, well, why are we doing a special month for
it? Well, just like we have rhythms
of prayer and rhythms of Bible reading and rhythms of worship
and solitude, we're having a rhythm of intentional mission in
our church just to help us to recalibrate our hearts with
God's heart for our streets and our neighborhoods and the people
that we see in our everyday lives.
And I don't know about you, but sometimes I just need a bit of a
kick to get myself back in gear. Eyes wide open, ears open to the
Holy Spirit to see the people around me.
And, and so we are stepping in this year and we're going again,
and we're asking God to ignite an even bigger wildfire.
As Taron talked about last week, We're wanting him to spur us on
with greater love for the people that we see everyday.
And we're going to do that this year by we've set ourselves a
bit of a faith igniting goal because we are human and we
forget and sometimes it's good just to kind of have something
that we're that's pushing us along a little bit.
We've, so we've set this goal of 3 / / / 3000 Acts to be
outworked across the places that we live and we work as a church
family in this next month. And I want to say this because I
know when we talk about numbers like that, some people are like,
Oh, I don't like a number, Claire.
That makes me feel a bit like we're just pushing to a goal to
pat ourselves on the back and that feels a bit off track with
God's heart. And so don't get hooked up on
the number. The number is not about the
number and patting ourselves on the back.
It's actually about us remembering to celebrate what
God is doing. And so we're each week you get
the opportunity to fill in a form out in the atrium if you
are a paper kind of person and you can just tell us what you
did and any stories of God that came up.
Or you can fill out, there's AQR code online.
So you can do it in the week as you do things and literally
anything counts, right? It could be that intentional
moment in your driveway to actually stop and talk to your
neighbor that you've maybe not talked to in two years.
It could be when you get off the tube in London, taking a moment
to say hello to the person, experience homelessness that you
just walked past on a normal day.
It could be that you're gathering your neighbors for a
BBQ, you're going to invite your whole street to your house this
month. It could be prayer walking your
streets. It could be a whole host of
things. But this is what it is not.
It is not us as a church in this building putting on an event.
It is you, the church, the people that we call the church,
getting out on your streets and your neighborhoods and asking
the Holy Spirit, how does he want to bless the people that
you see every single day with more of who he is?
And he's going to do it through you and me.
Amen. And last year you will have, if
you were here on our celebration standard, you will have heard
the sounds of the Kingdom breaking in, the sounds of
stories of people coming to Jesus, of fresh revelation, even
in in US. God's going to work in US in
this month and people being kind of formed and and their horizons
expanded on what God's heart looks like.
And so we are believing for more getting it on.
I'm just going to take a little wardrobe.
And so I want us to this morning, just open our hearts in
this room for God to move in here first, right?
Because this isn't a program. This isn't a nice thing to do.
This is God changing his people from the inside out and
impacting the world around us. So let's pray.
Holy Spirit, we just invite you to come this morning in this
room. God, we want to be marked by
your heart for your world. For what you're doing in the
places that you put us in. And so we choose this morning to
open our hearts in this room right now to allow you to speak
to us. Come Holy Spirit, I pray give us
fresh revelation of your Word this morning in Jesus name,
Amen. So as I began to think and pray
over this month, the Lord led me to this scripture that we're
going to unpack this morning together.
And I want you to turn to your Bible.
If you have a physical Bible, get it out right now.
If you don't have a Bible, we'd love to give you a Bible for
free or you can open up your device.
And we're going to be turning to Matthew, which as you can see in
my Bible is a good kind of halfway almost to the back.
If you don't know where Matthew is, go halfway through the
Bible. Go a bit further and you'll find
the book of Matthew you and we're going to be turning to the
chapter 5 and then looking down to verse 13.
So I'll just let you find your spot.
Brilliant. And we're going to read the Word
of God together. It says you are the salt of the
earth, but if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made
salty again? It is no longer good for
anything except to be thrown out and trampled under foot.
You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be
hidden. Neither do people light a lamp
and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on it's
stand and it gives light to everyone in the house.
And in the same way, let your light shine before others, that
they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.
Amen. We're going to look at what a
missional church is this morning.
And the first thing that struck me in this passage is that a
missional church is a church that understands that everybody
gets to play. You know, at the start of this
Scripture, there are two tiny words.
Jesus ultimately is unpacking what it means to be missional in
these these few verses, but he starts with two tiny words.
You are, you are the salt of the earth.
You are the light of the world. Notice what he does there.
He makes a definitive present tense declaration over the
people that he's talking to. And he's doing that in this room
this morning to us, which I find really striking, actually, when
you look at how most of us here be missional and the narrative
that plays in our head, because it often sounds a lot more like,
gosh, I'll, I'll, I'll be better at mission when I understand the
Bible a bit more or when I'm a bit more grown up in Jesus, then
I'll get really good at being able to share my faith.
Or when I've overcome. I've still got stupid thing that
I just that niggly sin. It just, it just seems to taunt
me. And I, when I've sorted that
out, then I'll be, you know, then I'll be a good light that
I, I want to make sure that everybody sees my life well.
And, and if I've got sins still, then I can't possibly show my
faith because it will just look hypocritical.
Jesus looked at us in this room this morning and he looked at
the group in front of him and he said you are the salt of the
earth and you are the light of the world.
And the, and the group in front of him were his disciples.
In fact, they were the newly called disciples.
They just said yes to following him.
And if you look at those those disciples, they're quite the
motley crew, to be honest, a bit of a chaotic mix of passionate
people, slightly confused people, impulsive disciples and
honestly a bit broken. And surrounding them was this
crowd of men and women and children who simply were
captivated by Jesus as he had gone around the villages.
And they were trying to understand this man who was
blowing their minds apart about their understanding of faith,
which up to this point had all been embedded in religious
performance, external behaviour and an identity and a position
that was based on their own merit or what society said about
them. And Jesus walks into them this
on this mountainside and he says you are the salt of the earth.
You are the light of the world. You are my image bearers because
Jesus was called the light of the world.
Right now he's looking at them and calling them the light of
the world. And you know, in 2 Corinthians
520, it says that he, we, it's phrases we are as ambassadors
and ambassadors don't represent themselves, do they?
They represent the person who sent them who and they go in the
authority of the one that they were sent out by.
And so we have these two little words this morning.
You are in fact, these two little verses that we're going
to unpack here this morning. They come right after.
If you look in the Scripture, the the verses before are the
beatitudes. The blessed are the poor in the
spirit, for they will see the Kingdom of God.
Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek.
Blessed are the persecuted for my name's sake who experience
rejection. And there's a guy that I love
reading called Dallas Willard and he puts it like this.
He says that the beatitudes are not a list of requirements.
They are the list of the kind of people God has chosen to work in
and called bless. He just says that they describe
what it looks like to have the Kingdom of God working in
someone's life. And so Jesus has told this group
the kind of people that the Kingdom of God works in, and
then he delivers these two verses and tells them how they
will go and impact the world around them.
Bringing home the reality that I have said many times when I talk
about mission, that we are called to the Father and He
commissions us to go out and tell the world about this
beautiful relationship that we have with Him.
The inward transformation of the Kingdom always spills out.
You are blessed to be a blessing.
And so I want to remind us as we start into this month of mission
that we are a Church of ordinary, extraordinary,
slightly broken, hungry for his presence, longing for
breakthroughs in our life. Some of us will feel on top of
the world this morning, and some of us will feel like we're in
the valley floor. But it's not about our ability.
It's about our God-given identity that is yours because
you belong to Jesus. It's not about your competence
this month. It's about our response to give
Jesus our yes as we go to Him as our Father.
It's not about for failing or succeeding admission.
It's simply about giving Him our faithful presence, the one who
has given us His. Amen.
And so church being missional is not for a few.
It's not for the missions pastor or those crazy people that love
to go out and tell their friends about Jesus.
In fact, it's John Wimber, the guy who started this wonderful
family that we are part of in the Vineyard, says everybody
gets to play. It's not the spiritual elite,
it's the whole body of Christ, brand new to the most mature,
moving together in the power of the Spirit.
Everyone gets to play your missional identity as a present
tense gift from Jesus, not a future goal that you have to
earn. And actually, last year someone
shared a testimony on our celebration Sunday and they said
it like this. Over this last month, I've
realised I'm not too broken for God.
In fact, as I learnt to just say yes, it blew my mind that people
said yes to being prayed for. And what absolutely blew my mind
was when someone's pain in their knee disappeared when I opened
my mouth. Amen.
It's for everyone. Sorry about my cough here this
morning. Secondly, A missional church
lives as the people of both and Jesus.
Gosh, my word, Jesus goes on, doesn't he?
In this passage, to use two quite famous metaphors if you've
been in the church for a while. And I want us to explore them
this morning. But you know, when we often look
at this passage, people often explore them as two separate
things. But I found something
fascinating as I was preparing and intriguing that these two
items, salt and light in the physical, were both highly
essential items for society at that time.
They were incredibly valuable and they were absolutely life
giving commodities for flourishing, for life in back in
the Near East, Ancient Near East.
But something that I'd never read before was how that they
work together. Fascinatingly, back in those
days, they would sprinkle salt onto the oil Wicks of the lamps
because what the salt contained, the sodium crystals, cause an
effect that made the flame burn brighter and hotter and longer.
The salt literally enhances the light.
And I thought, gosh, Jesus isn't stupid, is he?
He wasn't just giving us a menu choice here.
Like some of us feel a bit more like salt.
We love to be working behind the scenes, to be faithful presence
in people's lives. But I'm not going to show my
light too brightly, right? Or, or maybe some of us feel
like we're, yeah, we love it. We're out there.
We love to let the love of Jesus be on display.
What Jesus was doing here is that he's saying that we're
both, we're both salt and light, not one or the other, because we
carry the Holy Spirit and we walk as people who bring the
Kingdom. And there's a double portion for
you this morning to allow the Holy Spirit to work in your life
like salt and like light, like presence and proclamation.
Because you know what? Kindness without clarity could
just be seen as another act of Community Action.
And proclamation without love is just noise.
The way of the Kingdom is beautifully, radically both and
showing and sharing who Jesus is.
Amen. Wasn't that I loved finding that
discovery in my reading this week and I thought good.
The the the premise of love your street is biblical.
This is a good thing. Wonderful.
Thank you Jesus. So let's dig in to these two
items a little bit more closely. Salt.
A missional church, lives as people of faithful presence in
our world. Think about salt with me for a
moment. Salt is tiny, tiny, tiny grains.
In fact, it almost brought my salt shaker this morning because
I know that I'm becoming known as the props.
Lady Sue told me this week. You should bring your salt
shaker, Claire. Imagine the Schultz Saker is on
my hand. The salt is these tiny grains
that are powerful and in the natural.
Salt enhances flavour. It preserves goodness.
It tenderizes what's tough. Don't get too lost thinking
about your tender steak for lunch on the BBQ.
But you put a good amount of salt on a steak, right?
Like that's what makes it just melt in your mouth.
But in order for the salt to do all of that, to do what it's
intended to do, it has to leave the shaker or the pot that it's
in. It has to interact with the
surface of the thing that it will bring its goodness and its
impact too. And I was thinking about this
growing up, my step mum, who I love deeply, she had this funny
habit. We'd always have guests come, we
had a lot of people from different places.
My parents were pastors, so there was always people coming
through the doors. And she had this funny habit of
receiving gifts, some random ingredient from some place in
the world. And she was a meat and potatoes
cooked. So the extravagant ingredients
just didn't add up to our cooking theme in our house.
And so she would receive them, and they'd come in these
beautiful packages and she'd sit it on the shelf and it would sit
there for years, you know, wonderful coffee that came from
some lovely nation, and we never drank it or, you know, whatever
the ingredient was. And I think salt can be a bit
like that too, right? It could stay on your shelf and
it could be safe and contained, but completely missing its
purpose. And I think we get to come to
church, don't we? We get to pray.
We get to be in this wonderful place experiencing the presence
of God and worshiping and filling up the salt shaker of
our lives, so to speak, because we love the Lord and we're so
grateful for what he's done and we should do those things right?
And we hear the warning of not losing our saltiness in this
Scripture and and keeping our distinctness in the world that
we live in. We we know to do that we need to
be in the presence of God. But my question for us this
morning is what do we do with that freshly salted presence
that's been filled up in this place on a Sunday?
Where do we take it? Because we're reminded in this
Scripture that we are designed to carry it out into our
Mondays, into Tesco's, into the school gates, into the gym, into
the corporate boardrooms, into the lifts at hospitals, the
sports sidelines and the WhatsApp chats.
And sometimes I think we we miss it because we get so caught up
in the big miracle that happens in here or the the the latest
amazing thing that happened at this church or that church and
we forget that the work of Salt is really spectacular.
It's by nature granular. You pour it on, you trust the
process. You can't always see the work
going on. You might not even know if the
salt you poured on that steak is actually done it's job for hours
later or maybe months or years, but you poured it out anyway.
And just like salt, the work of the Kingdom is about a faithful
people. Through whom we're pouring our
lives out in granular ways. Giving our yes, doing the thing
that the Holy Spirit is nudging us to do.
Blessing the people in front of us.
Not in spectacular ways, in very ordinary, granular ways.
Giving up the right to know if it's made any difference or if
it will ever be fruitful in the person's life that you're
standing in front, but trusting that this might just be the one
action that softens the heart. That softens your street.
That softens a community, that brings out someone's God-given
identity and value and holds fast to the goodness in our
world that feels like it's darkening by the hour.
That action might be the thing that's counter cultural shaping
values in a school governors meeting.
Or like the teacher last year who told us that she asked for
permission to ask her whole year ten group to go home and read a
gospel over the summer holidays and she got a yes.
Timothy Keller says it like this.
To love your neighbor is to seek their flourishing in every
single dimension, physical, emotional, social and spiritual.
The gospel makes us a people who pour out our lives for the
common good of the streets that we live on.
And I was thinking about Andrea and John.
I don't know if they're in the room this morning, but they are.
They're there. Last year they told us a story
about how they knocked on their neighbors doors to invite them
for a barbecue. And they knocked on the, I think
it was literally their next door neighbor.
And it was a, an elderly man. And they discovered in a, in a
conversation with him on their doorstep that his wife had had
died. In fact, I think she'd passed
away almost a year and they were so humbled that they'd been
living next to this man and they did not know that this life
changing event had happened in his life.
And so they began a conversation and they invited their St. for
his barbecue. And what did it do?
It softened the community. It softened their St.
It started changing the atmosphere to be seen and known
and valued by others. Freya was telling me about a
story where she had gone into a supermarket and she had just,
she had seen someone in the line in front of her and she just
felt a prompting of the Holy Spirit to pay for the ladies
groceries. And so she leaned over, she said
I'd love to pay for your groceries.
And of course the lady's like no, no, no, no.
And she said no, no, I really love to pay for your groceries.
And she paid for the groceries. She has no idea what that did in
that life, the life of that Lady, but there was definitely
emotion on her face. But then she said to me, but
what was fascinating is it softened the heart of my kid who
said, mum, why would you do that?
And so our small actions are changing the atmospheres of a
world outside of us. It's changing the atmospheres of
our own families and our own children.
Just by saying yes to the prompting of the Holy Spirit,
the world grumbles and we encourage, the world is anxious
and your words and your actions bring peace.
The world is in economic crisis and your radical generosity
speaks a different word. It's like throwing granular acts
of everyday kindness, like salt onto the light of the gospel,
where there is so much spiritual hunger right now that these will
act like catalysts that make the gospel make sense to people.
Amen. And lastly, A missional church
lives as people of both and faithful presence and a bold
voice. The way of the Kingdom is this
beautiful, surrendered, granular presence like salt.
But Jesus doesn't stop there. And we've said he's not giving
us a menu option because a missional church isn't called to
be undercover. He looks at the ordinary chaotic
crowd and he drops the second declaration over them.
And he says you are the light of the world.
A town built on a hill cannot be hidden.
We are being built up in the presence of God in this room and
we cannot be hidden. Church.
Another theologian, John Stop, once captured the the weight of
these two metaphors perfectly. He said we should not ask what
is wrong with the world, for that diagnosis has already been
given. Rather, we should ask what has
happened to the salt and light. Because if the house is dark
when the night falls, we do not blame the house.
We ask where the light is. And if the meat goes bad, we
don't blame the meat, we ask where the salt is.
Church. We're living in a culture where
it is incredibly easy to spend our time pointing out all the
darkness. We hear the news, we join in the
complaints of the news, we fret about the breakdown of community
and culture. And we look at the brokenness
around us and we can feel completely overwhelmed.
And hear my heart in this. I get it.
I've been there. I can sit there and be like, oh,
Lord have mercy. But if we walked into a room
that was black, pitch black. You know, imagine you walk into
your house at night. It's pitch black.
You don't get angry at the dark for being dark, right?
Because that's just what darkness does.
It's dark. You look for the light switch to
turn on and church. Our lives in our world are like
switches, light switches that bring a bold light to the
darkness. It's unapologetic.
The light switch sits there, right?
And we just press it. It's like I'm here, turn me on
and you flip the switch into that dark room and the entire
atmosphere changes. And this is the shift that I
believe the Word is calling His bride to be in this hour.
Most people in our world live like thermometers.
They reflect the temperature of whatever is going on around
them. We church are like a thermostat.
When we carry the Holy Spirit, you don't just register the
temperature around you, you change it.
But how do we actually turn up the heat?
Because I know I can't turn all of the darkness in our world to
light, right? But I can do it wherever I'm
walking. I can bring the light of Jesus.
And it happens when we become bold speakers of the good news
of the gospel, the good news. That is good news at all times
for all people. It is the solution for every
single person alive on this planet right now.
And you hold the good news, and it's out of your mouth that the
world will hear the good news. Amen.
And Tara reminded us of that so powerfully last week when she
talked about the Holy Spirit works through us when we speak.
The presence is powerful, and the power of words that come out
of our mouth are also powerful because they're not in our
power, but they're because of the Holy Spirit's power in US.
You know, Acts 18, the mission verse on the on the wall by the
Cafe, the Holy Spirit calls upon you and you become witnesses.
Witnesses speak about what they have encountered, and so we are
living in this moment of genuine spiritual awakening.
At the moment the ground honestly is softer than we
think. The world is anxious and it is
shaking and it is looking for answers.
And there is therefore a fresh hunger rising in your street and
your neighborhood and your workplace and your school.
But how were they here? The good news of the gospel, the
light, if we don't tell them the Kingdom of God was never meant
to be a private lifestyle choice hidden away.
But I know when I talk about this, I've lost half the room a
minute. I said bold and vocal.
You're like, well, that's not my personality.
I'm not an extrovert and I'm not, I'm very quiet.
I've not got the charisma to be bold, Claire.
I'm not confident. But Jesus offers something very
different about what boldness is in this Scripture, and I want us
to see it this morning, He says neither do people light a lamp
and put it under a bowl. Instead, they put it on a stand
and it gives light to everyone in the house.
Maybe real boldness has nothing to do with the volume of your
voice or the personality that you carry.
It's simply refusing to live under anything that dims or
suffocates the light of God inside of you.
Because think about it, lights don't accidentally slide under
bowls. I mean, it's a, it's a slightly
crazy metaphor he's using, right?
The only way a light gets under and is covered up is if somebody
places a light or a bowl, a bowl over the light.
And when the bowl covers the flame, it doesn't just hide the
light, it slowly starts to suffocate it.
And so Jesus isn't asking us to be a light that's trying to be a
different version than the one he's made us to be, But he is
saying carrying the light of God and you don't hide it.
Don't put something over it that's going to dimmer it.
The gospel is bright and bold all on its own.
And so every time we choose silence over obedience, or fear
over faithfulness or comfort over our Commission, it's like
we're placing a bowl over the flame of the light of God in US.
And so maybe let's get real. Like what?
What would the bowl look like? Maybe it's the bowl of fear.
Like if I actually mention Jesus right now, people are going to
think I'm really strange, irrelevant, or perhaps extreme.
Or like that Christian that I really don't want to be
associated with. Or that movement, that latest
headline about the church that fell apart.
Gosh, I don't want them to think I'm that.
So we protect ourselves by by being silent.
Or perhaps it's the bowl of low expectation.
I've known Jesus for 40 years and for most of my life I've
never seen the world so hungry for him like I have now.
And so growing up, every time I went to share Jesus, it was like
ridicule, ridicule, ridicule. And it's silenced and silenced
and silenced. And it made my expectation that
Jesus could actually break in and somebody would actually want
to say yes, go really, really low.
Or maybe it's the bowl of business.
We're not ashamed of Jesus. We just are moving so fast that
we've never slowed down long enough to make notice the person
in front of us. I think one of the most striking
testimonies that stuck with me from last year was somebody who
sat in this room and humbly wrote.
I'm listening to all of these stories today and I've realised
that a whole month has gone past and I've done absolutely
nothing. I've not stopped to talk to
anybody out of the ordinary. My life has been so busy that
I've run the rat race and I've forgotten that I'm on this earth
to share and show who Jesus is. And so fresh boldness in arises
in us when we simply surrender the things that hold us back.
And then the Holy Spirit has room to breathe in US.
And we get to speak what He's putting in US without fear,
without low expectation. And the bowl is lifting church
and breakthrough moments that are happening across our church.
Even a story last year was a lady who went to her facial for
that. She would go to her facial every
couple of months and she'd told her facial practitioner about
Jesus. And she said two months previous
she walked in and she said, I walked in.
And the lady said to me, you know, last month when you told
me about that Jesus, would you pray with me this today while
you're here for your appointment for me to accept Jesus into my
life, right. There was a someone else who had
to have the same mechanic his whole life.
And he said during Love Your street last year, I just felt
this prompting to tell him about my faith.
And what I discovered was this guy turned around.
He said, I've always felt this longing towards some kind of
religion or or some there's a pull inside of me.
He said, I'm so glad you've told me because I just never knew
what to do with it. He said, well, come with me to
church and he came to church inviting people to church.
In this moment, one out of every three people that you invite
will say yes, who is the Lord inviting you this month to
invite to church? In fact, a mum last year said
that her kids started inviting their friends to church during
Love Your Street. And she was like, they actually
said yes. And I was bringing a whole car
load of kids to church. And she said, I thought, gosh,
why am I not inviting my friends to church?
And she said, I had a go and I invited my friend and they said
yes. And she was like, so our kids
are leading the way. We're inviting people to Alpha
and we are so excited. We've got 3 alphas starting
between now and September. We've got one starting this
week, 1 starting at the end of June, and one starting in
September because we know that there is a hunger, spiritual
hunger for people to explore faith.
And so the alpha leaflets are out in the atrium so that you
can take them home with you today.
Who are you going to invite to Alpha this month?
One person, do you know that we've set a goal of over 3000
acts and we have about 1500 people in our church.
So to break that down for you, if we all just did two things in
one month, we would have blown that goal out the water.
But Can you imagine if we did two things each and two people
said yes? To come into church or come into
Alpha or come into your house for a conversation about faith
or just got to know you. What radical change would happen
in our midst where we let the Holy Spirit move church.
The light winds, the light always wins, and the spiritual
awakening in our streets will not happen through our silence.
It will happen through our bold surrendered yes.
Your new definition of boldness is a surrendered yes to speak
the the Kingdom comes through you and me when we step into
being both and kind of people, faithful, present, attentive,
healing, presence on our streets and in our workplaces, and a
bold, unapologetic voice of the gospel as you just take down the
things that prevent your light being fully seen.
The light in you will do the talking because it is the power
of the gospel that comes to save and heal and transform people.
So let's lift up our bowls this month.
Let's speak the good news boldly.
Not so that people look at us. Not so that Verso gets us an
incredible name for being in this great church.
They did a great missioned month.
Why? As the Scripture says here at
the end that they may see your good deeds, you're trying your
small yes, your big yes, and glorify your Father in heaven.
This is what it's about. We want to see a whole world
glorifying our Father in heaven so that one day, one day we
would see every tongue and every tribe and every nation gathered
around the throne of God in worship.
Amen, Amen, Amen. Stand with me, Church.