The sign on the stage proclaimed, "The Motionless Man: Make Him Laugh. Win $100." The temptation was irresistible. For three hours boys and girls, men and women performed every antic and told every joke they could dream up. But Bill Fuqua, the Motionless Man, stood perfectly still.
Luis Palau in his book HEALTHY HABITS FOR SPIRITUAL GROWTH, tells about Fuqua, the GUINNESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORDS champion at doing nothing. Fuqua, says Palau, appears so motionless during his routines at shopping malls and amusement parks that he's sometimes mistaken for a mannequin.
Fuqua discovered his unique talent at the age of fourteen while standing motionless in front of a Christmas tree as a joke. A woman touched him and exclaimed, "Oh, I thought it was a real person."
Doing nothing is really impossible ” even for the Motionless Man. Fuqua attributes his feigned paralysis to hyper elastic skin, an extremely low pulse rate, and intense concentration. He may not laugh at your jokes, but he readily admits that he still has to breathe and blink ” occasionally. (1)
I read about Bill Fuqua, the motionless man, and I thought about so many churches. So many congregations have mastered the art of doing nothing. We read about the church on the Day of Pentecost ” the flames of fire, the sound of a mighty wind, the strange excitement that catches the attention of passersby. This is not the church as we know it! The church on the Day of Pentecost was a church that was chaotic and yet caring, tightly joined as a group, yet reaching out with extraordinary vigor. It was a church ablaze with the Holy Spirit.
There was a news item sometime back about a man, Gail L. Boller, age twenty-seven, of Mankato, Minnesota, who was fined $100 for trying to set fire to an evangelist while he was preaching. (2) I don't know the background of this news item, but my guess is that there are a lot of evangelists, pastors and lay people who need to be set on fire in a figurative and positive sense. The church on the Day of Pentecost was afire with enthusiasm and excitement. What was there about this particular church that made them susceptible to this kind of outbreak of Christian fervor?
NOTICE, FIRST OF ALL, THAT THE CHURCH AT PENTECOST WAS A CHURCH OF INTENSE FELLOWSHIP. They loved one another. They enjoyed being with one another. They had strong bonds of care and concern.
Years ago Halford E. Luccock said that there are many kinds of churches. One is preoccupied with the mechanics of the organization. Activities loom larger than love. He calls such a church "the Church of the Holy Fidgets." Marked by busyness, it never gets down to the real reason for its existence.
He described a church in Chicago that is another kind of church. Named St. Stephens, it is called "the Church at the End of the Road." Luccock concluded that "the end of the road" is a fitting location for a church. There are so many people at the end of life's road whose strength and hope are gone, it is there the church needs to be. (3)
Halford Luccock was describing the church at its best ” a caring church, a church where love is experienced. Jesus said that the world would know his disciples by their love for one another ” and that was certainly true of the church on the Day of Pentecost. They ate together, sang together, worshiped together. They even had their possessions in common. They drew their strength from their powerful sense of unity.
Someone has drawn a helpful analogy about the importance of unity in the church to the life of a honey bee. As I understand it, honey bees cannot live in isolation. You always keep bees (plural), you never keep a single bee. If you isolate a bee, you can give it the most favorable temperature, you can give it plenty of water and plenty of food . . . but the bee will die within two to three days. There is something about the community of bees that keeps individual bees alive. You can keep bees, but you cannot keep a bee.
In a sense that is also true of the church. One of the chief sources of our strength is our unity. If we are not as vital in our witness as we might be, it is probably because our bonds of love are not as strong as they might be. The church at Pentecost had an intense fellowship.
NOTICE IN THE SECOND PLACE THAT THE CHURCH AT PENTECOST WAS A PRAYING CHURCH. We read in the 42nd verse of Acts 2 that they devoted themselves to "the breaking of bread and prayers." Prayer fueled their vitality.
I read about a new kind of occupational hazard that afflicts a certain segment of our population. Someone has dubbed it "Anglican knees." You've heard of tennis elbow, but I'll bet you've never heard of Anglican knees. Researchers in England this summer revealed that people who kneel a lot to pray have a greater risk of developing arthritis than those who don't. A study of 2,000 people showed that folks in the kneeling professions ” carpet-fitters, construction workers, as well as vicars, priests and nuns ” often end up with bad knees. Apparently kneeling for long periods puts the kneecap under strain and wears away protective cartilage, promoting arthritis. (4)
I don't want to sound too cynical, but I doubt if too many Christians nowadays have to worry very much about the wear and tear on their knees from too much praying. And it is sad. Where there is no prayer there is no power.
Irvin Jacob Goodwin tells of spending the Christmas season, in 1944, in a place called Ankang in what is now the People's Republic of China. Goodwin was an aircraft welder. Along with four other soldiers he had been sent from their base near Calcutta, India, to salvage two damaged B-29s at a fighter strip in Ankang.
One Sunday these five soldiers crossed the river and went into a small village. At a little open shop there was a large copper kettle over a charcoal fire. The soldiers started drinking rice wine from the kettle and singing American songs. They drank too much, and by afternoon only one of them was in condition to return to the base.
In the street they met a missionary who took them to his house outside the town. In the missionary's home a fire was roaring in a large potbellied stove. His wife handed out hymnbooks, then played the piano while they sang Christmas carols. Goodwin remembers that he cried. The missionaries gave the soldiers supper and put them to bed in an outer building. The next morning they fed them breakfast and took them down to the river. The soldiers got onto a sampan and went back to their base.
Goodwin says that God used the Christian hospitality of this missionary couple and their concern for them to prepare his heart to accept Christ as his Savior.
About five years ago Goodwin began an effort to find this missionary couple. His efforts failed until August 1993, when he heard that the Lutheran Free Church of Norway had had a mission in Ankang during 1944. He wrote a letter to the denomination in Oslo and found that the missionary couple in Ankang had been the Reverend and Mrs. Johan Tidemana Johansen. Rev. Johansen was dead, but on September 21, 1993, Goodwin phoned Johansen's widow, Margaret, then 93 years old. She had already received his letter from the mission office.
About three weeks after their phone conversation Mrs. Johansen sent him a letter that included notes from her diary from 1944. Entered on December 17 and 18 was the record of their stay in the Johansens' home. He read carefully these words for the night of December 17, 1944: "We fixed places for those soldiers to stay overnight and we prayed much for them." (5)
Here is the secret to extraordinary power. Prayer. No matter how much activity we carry on in the church, we will never be what God has called us to be, until we are united in prayer. That was the second characteristic of the church on the Day of Pentecost. They had an intense fellowship and they were a praying church.
FINALLY, THE CHURCH AT PENTECOST WAS A CHURCH THAT REACHED OUT. This was a church that was unashamedly evangelistic in its focus. It is no surprise that thousands were added to this tiny church in a short period of time. They saw that as their primary reason for existence.
I know. Not everyone in the church gets excited about outreach. A report in a Rochester, Pennsylvania, church bulletin read like this: "The outreach committee has enlisted 25 visitors to make calls on people who are not afflicted with any church." I trust that this was a typo.
It's interesting that in today's world only the church is embarrassed to reach out to people. Political parties reach out. Civic Clubs reach out. Certainly businesses reach out.
At the end of World War II, Robert Woodruff, president of Coca Cola declared, "In my generation it is my desire that everyone in the world have a taste of Coca Cola." Today Coca Cola is sold from the deserts of Africa to the interior of China. Why? Because Woodruff motivated his colleagues to reach their generation around the world for Coke.
Any healthy organization reaches out. If it did not, it would die. Why are we in the church satisfied to outdo Bill Fuqua in our commitment to remain motionless?
Mark Sutton compares us to a kindly old lady who was watching as a pair of golfers sliced their drives deep into the rough. The golfers went in search of their errant golf balls. The grass was high, the trees were thick, and tempers flared as they looked in vain through the underbrush. The elderly lady observed all this from the front porch of her house. After the search had lasted nearly half an hour, she finally called out to them, "I don't want to bother you men," she said, "but will it be cheating if I tell you where the golf balls are?" Mark Sutton goes on to say, "As we look around us, we see people searching for lost values, for real meaning in life, and for hope. We must not keep silent. Fulfilling the Great Commission means sharing Jesus Christ with those around. It means speaking up and guiding them to forgiveness of sins and salvation." (6)
Leighton Ford puts it like this: "There are too many churches with impeccable credentials for orthodox theology whose outreach is almost nil. They are sound, but they are sound asleep . . . It is far too easy for the Church to become a sort of religious clique where Christians retreat from the world," says Ford. (7)
The church on the Day of Pentecost understood that its primary mission was to reach out to the world. The unity that they experienced and the prayers that they offered were only to help them more ably fulfill the task that Christ had given them to make disciples of all persons. They existed not for their own benefit, but for the world's.
There is a legend that at the entrance to Heaven, two questions will be asked of everyone who comes seeking admittance. The first question is this: "Did you come alone?" And if ” tragically ” your answer is "Yes," the second question follows. "How could you?"
I don't want our church to be mistaken for a mannequin, do you? The answer is really quite easy: a commitment to fellowship, a commitment to prayer, a commitment to outreach. Pentecost can happen again, but it will only happen when those three attributes of the early church are present.
1. (Grand Rapids, MI: Discovery House Publishing, 1994).
2. John Kohut and Roland Sweet, COUNTDOWN TO THE MILLENNIUM, (New York: A Signet Book, 1994), p. 70.
3. Halford E. Luccock, MORE PREACHING VALUES IN THE EPISTLES OF PAUL, Vol. II, (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1961), p. 217.
4. THE OBSERVER, September 1994, p. 9.
5. "The Visit," as told to John T. Newton, Jr., DECISION, December 1994, p. 8.
6. Publication Source Unknown
7. Leighton Ford, THE CHRISTIAN PERSUADER (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).