Acts of Leadership

Week 5: Move Toward the Messes part 2
Pastor Rick Henderson             October 26, 2025

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Note: This manuscript isn’t a transcript of the sermon, but a planning guide showing what the speaker intends to say.

Ridgefest comments

The passage that we are going to read today is messy. There are parts of it that will make you cringe. You might even think it’s a bit gross. And there are parts of it that will inspire. This passage, on the whole, has inspired us. Believe it or not, this passage has shaped our church's imagination. We know why we exist.

MISSION: We exist to lead people to be fully devoted followers of Jesus.

But how do we want to be experienced? What kind of church will we be? It’s an aspirational question. The answer is our vision statement. This is the kind of church we aspire to be.

VISION: We want to be a church of all cultures, where curious, skeptical, and hurting people love to attend.

We’re not necessarily declaring that we are that. We’re declaring who we want to be. You’ve heard me say that our greatest contribution in life is who we are becoming, not what we do. What we do is important. It’s monumentally important. But it will never be as important as the kind of people we are becoming.

ACTS 15:1-21 Certain people came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the believers:

“Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.” ² This brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp dispute and debate with them.

This is messy and maybe cringeworthy. What is the deal with telling men that they had to get circumcised to be saved? This is what you need to know.

In the Old Testament, God created a covenant with the people of Israel. They were given a very important responsibility: to represent God to all people everywhere. That meant living according to God's way. And when people saw how they flourished, that would ignite curiosity and give them credibility when inviting all the people of the world to follow the one true God. That covenant came with a symbol. It’s normal for a covenant to come with a symbol. A marriage covenant has a symbol—a wedding ring. The symbol for the covenant between God and the people of Israel was the practice of male circumcision.

We don’t have time to talk about why that was the symbol. What we need to know is that covenant was always intended to be temporary. As soon as the savior came and instituted a new covenant between God and people, the old covenant would become obsolete.

When we have communion next week, keep your ears tuned for me to say this. I’ll hold up the cup and quote Jesus, “This is the symbol of the new covenant.” On the cross, Jesus inaugurated the new covenant. That means nobody has to get the old snippity snip.

Here was the messy, kind of gross, get out of my face with that, problem in this church. Some people were aggressively clinging to the old covenant and trying to make others follow it too. That means that gentile men, who never grew up Jewish, were being bullied into circumcision.

Because this makes me a bit uncomfortable, I want to make jokes to diffuse my own anxiety. Instead of laughing, would it be OK with you if we created a moment to grieve? We can’t relate to bullies in the church mandating that dudes come under the knife. But some of us may know what it’s like to be pressured to conform to things that have nothing to do with Jesus.

• What happens when a church’s culture says, Follow Jesus, and you have to vote like we do?
• What happens when a church’s culture says, Follow Jesus, and you have to dress like we do? What happens when a church’s culture says, Follow Jesus, and you have to educate your kids like we do?
• What happens when a church’s culture says, Follow Jesus, and you have to engage in culture wars like we do?
• What happens when a church’s culture says, follow Jesus and you have to whatever like we do?

You end up with a church that might mean well, but in the end, is just mean. So, Paul and Barnabas did what everyone else was hoping someone would do. They stood up to it.

A LEADER doesn’t wait for someone else to STAND UP.

When something is wrong, when people are being wronged, a leader stands up and refuses to tolerate it. A leader doesn’t wait for someone else to stand up. Throughout this series, we’ve asked these three questions to help us all engage with leadership.

3 QUESTIONS:

1. Who do I look to for leadership?
2. How am I leading myself?

I want to zoom in on this question. This question is about taking responsibility for what we contribute. Whenever we take responsibility for what we contribute, that’s self-leadership.

3. Who looks to me for leadership?

We’re going to see in just a second that even though Paul and Barnabas were apostles, they were not in a leadership position that empowered them to make a final decision or to fix the problem. Maybe they couldn’t completely solve the problem at hand. But they could contribute. Their contribution was to stand up and say, 'This is wrong.' It violates the gospel message. It violates love for non-Jewish people who are following Jesus.

This was not an agree-to-disagree moment. This was a line in the sand moment. N.T. Wright is a brilliant biblical scholar. He gives us some insight into why this was a burning issue for Paul.

For Paul, the unity of Jew and Gentile in one body was not an add-on. It was the visible sign that God’s plan to unite heaven and earth had begun. –N.T. Wright

In Paul’s mind, forcing Gentiles to act Jewish wasn’t just mean, it would mean turning our backs on what Jesus did for us. If there was ever anything about us that communicated to people, Follow Jesus AND become like us—we would be turning our backs on what Jesus did for us.

So Paul and Barnabas were appointed, along with some other believers, to go up to Jerusalem to see the apostles and elders about this question. ³ The church sent them on their way, and as they traveled through Phoenicia and Samaria, they told how the Gentiles had been converted. This news made all the believers very glad. ⁴ When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the apostles and elders, to whom they reported everything God had done through them.

⁵ Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses.”

Just because we are HAPPY about unity doesn’t mean we know HOW to have unity.

The people who stood up and said, Yeah, but they have to be circumcised, were also part of the group that was happy that Gentiles were following Jesus. They were being cruel, but they didn’t realize they were being cruel. They were happy and well-intentioned AND dead wrong. Just because we are happy about unity doesn’t mean we know how to have unity.

I want to be clear and helpful in how I talk about this, and I also want to be careful how I talk about this. I don’t want anyone or any group to feel accidentally picked on. I wish I knew how to communicate to you how much I love you. I adore you guys. The last thing I want is to make any of you feel accidentally picked on. Will you give me a little grace as I try to talk about something important, but I may do it awkwardly.

Years ago, I was out to dinner with a lovely couple from our church, Harold and Jennifer. Harold is an elder at our church, and he’s one of those guys who just instinctively knows how to make people feel seen and valued. I love this man. At dinner, he struck up a conversation with our server and invited her to Autumn Ridge. And because Harold is Harold and has a way of making people feel seen and valued, she felt comfortable giving us the unedited story of her visit to our church.

She said, and I quote, “Oh, I’ve been to your church and I’m never going back.” She told us that when she visited, she was new in town, and that she was going through a messy divorce. She came with her boys. At some point after the service, she was approached by a man who asked her a bunch of questions. It made her feel less like being seen and more like being interrogated. According to her, this man kept asking her questions about her husband and why he wasn’t there. They had been a bi-racial couple, and that was obvious when this guy saw her boys. She felt judged, diminished, and unable to simply be and be here.

Our hearts broke as we listened. Just because we are HAPPY about unity doesn’t mean we know HOW to have unity. I don’t want anyone to feel guilty right now. I want us to feel responsible. For those of us who say, this is my church and these are my people, we are each responsible for what we contribute. Over the next few minutes, I’m going to weave in some observations on a gospel-defined view of healthy self-leadership.

SELF-LEADERSHIP:

• I’m not going to assume that what comes naturally to me is good for me or others.
• I’m not going to excuse my negative impact on people by claiming my positive intent toward them.

The Pharisees who wanted to make gentile men get circumcised were just doing what came naturally to them. They had good intentions for people, yet their impact on people was horrible. And this triggers a question for me.

QUESTION: How did the no-fun party become a party in the church?

⁵ Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses.”

The Pharisees were a combo religious and political group that constantly harassed Jesus. They eventually felt so threatened by Jesus that they launched a plan to kill him. It’s wild that many people who were Pharisees, the group that killed Jesus, are now followers of Jesus and in the church! How do you get your mind around that? That tells me two things.

• The resurrection of Jesus was a real, historical event. That’s the only thing that would move those guys from being enemies of Jesus to followers of Jesus. Here’s the second thing.
• Church is messy. It’s God’s plan that church is a collection of people who don’t naturally get along. And that’s OK. Because the bond we share is supernatural. It’s a work of God.

I need him to make it happen. If I were there, I would want to tell those guys, “You’re lucky to be here, bro. You should sit down and shut up.” But that would just be me bullying them back. This is what happened.

⁶ The apostles and elders met to consider this question.

Every question deserves a thoughtful response because that’s what is required to love people. No matter the question, no matter the motive or attitude behind it, every question deserves a thoughtful response.

 ⁷ After much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them: “Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe. ⁸ God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. ⁹ He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith.

Peter stood up and reminded them of what happened in Acts 10. That’s what we talked about last week.

¹⁰ Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? ¹¹ No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.”

He was saying, You know that none of us were able to live up to the requirements of the laws in the Old Covenant. We all failed. And that was the point: to point us to Jesus. We need a savior to do for us what we could never do for ourselves. And since we weren’t able to save ourselves by keeping the law of the Old Covenant, why in the world would we try to make others do it?!

It was a mic drop moment. Jesus plus nothing equals everything.

¹² The whole assembly became silent as they listened to Barnabas and Paul telling about the signs and wonders God had done among the Gentiles through them. ¹³ When they finished, James spoke up. “Brothers,” he said, “listen to me. ¹⁴ Simon has described to us how God first intervened to choose a people for his name from the Gentiles. ¹⁵ The words of the prophets are in agreement with this, as it is written:

¹⁶ “ ‘After this I will return
and rebuild David’s fallen tent.
Its ruins I will rebuild,
and I will restore it,

¹⁷ that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord,
even all the Gentiles who bear my name,
says the Lord, who does these things’ ⁱ—

¹⁸    things known from long ago. ^j

¹⁹ “It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. ²⁰ Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood. ²¹ For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.”

This is our responsibility, and it’s the responsibility of every church and follower of Jesus. Are you ready?

Refuse to TOLERATE anything that makes it DIFFICULT for people to turn to Jesus.

You should expect that from our church’s leadership. Whether you’ve been here for 50 years or 5 minutes. Everyone should expect that the pastors, elders, and staff of this church will work to make it easy for people to turn to Jesus. But for that to define a church, our church or any church, then it must be something we all embrace. It means that everyone who says, This is my church and these are my people, we all take responsibility for what we contribute to this (pointing to the screen).

Here are some observations on what gospel-defined, healthy self-leadership would look like.

SELF-LEADERSHIP:

• I look at every person with this thought, “You’re my kind of person.”
• I’d rather be uncomfortable so that you can be comfortable.
• I’d rather have less so that you can have more.
• I am proactive, not reactive, in responding to things that make it harder for those who are turning to Jesus.

We don’t have time to talk about everything we do to be proactive. Let me hit just a few. We are a church where you can belong before you believe. You can reject everything that I’m saying and it’s not going to change the fact that we like you and want you here. You don’t have to think like we think or act like we act to be welcomed by us.

We love questions. Unanswered questions make it difficult for people to turn to Jesus. It’s why we do a live Q&A after the service on Saturday nights. It’s why we have a podcast.

SLIDE: ALPHA

It’s why we have class like Alpha. We may not be able to give you the answers you want. We may not even be able to give you the quality answer you deserve. And yet, we are committed to sharing the best answers we have, no matter what the question is.

Feeling like your needs are ignored by followers of Jesus, that can make it difficult to turn to Jesus. That’s a big reason we do Ridgefest.

SLIDE: RIDGEFEST

Our city needs accessible, family-friendly events. This is our attempt to simply love this city by serving a need. And it’s not easy. It’s hard work. Many of you said no to yourselves so that you could say yes to others. And you did with joy.

Did you know what you’re doing is not just making a statement here? It’s making a statement around the country. This year, Pastor Otis was contacted by churches in other states who want to replicate Ridgefest in their churches. This weekend, churches from three other states came to Ridgefest so that they can learn how to do it in their churches. Not only are you making it easier for people here to want to turn to Jesus, you are making it easier for other churches to make it easier for people in their communities to turn to Jesus.

Something that makes it difficult to turn to Jesus is when you not only have an unmet need, you have a crisis that overwhelms you. We want to be the kind of church that puts compassion in action when people are overwhelmed by crisis. Lack of adequate health care is at a crisis level around the globe. But what could we do?

SLIDE: GLOBAL HEALTH FORUM

Dr. Walter Kim is the President of the National Association of Evangelicals. I can tell you from experience that he is a thoughtful, intelligent, and gentle man. For me, it’s a tremendous honor to host him. He’s going to talk to us about how our faith compel us to respond to global health challenges with courage, compassion and advocacy?

I’m asking you to make it a priority to be here at one of our services on that Saturday or Sunday. Bring friends with you. This is a big deal. And for those of you who work in the medical field, there will be a Global Health Forum on Sunday afternoon. There are people traveling from Boston, Oxford, and all over to participate. If you work in the medical field or if you are on that trajectory, I want you to come to that. You will have a chance to ask questions and dialogue with global health experts who have been on the front lines.

I’ve been dreaming of this kind of thing for years. I think God has blessed us with a unique opportunity. This is a chance for us to explore ways that we can love others, and that always makes it easier for folks to believe that they are loved by Jesus, too.

Refuse to TOLERATE anything that makes it DIFFICULT for people to turn to Jesus.

When it was all said and done, that early church resolved that they would be a church that radically embraced everyone. There were no requirements other than to place your faith in Jesus. Let me read it again.

¹⁹ “It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. ²⁰ Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood.

Maybe you’re thinking that seems like conditional acceptance. Let’s talk about that. Turning to Jesus means turning away from what we used to live for and now living for him as our king. Turning to Jesus means dying to our old way of life.

I may not have as much time to talk about this as you deserve. I will talk about it more on the podcast this week. At that point in time, in almost every town you went to, there would be feasts to various idols. Attending those feasts was part of what was necessary to achieve and maintain social status. Participation in those feasts affected trade guilds, trade partnerships, and the ability to make money. These feasts centered food that was consecrated to idols. And these feasts frequently involved some sexual immorality.

There’s more that could be said, but what we need to know is this. When we turn to Jesus we are going to turn away from our way of living and from the way of the world. We don’t just honor Jesus with our stated beliefs. We honor with our bodies.

James was saying, may we be the kinds of people who honor King Jesus with every part of our lives, even when doing so jeopardizes our social standing, and or our ability to make money. Regardless of what we say we believe, regardless of engagement at church, when we live like people who don’t follow Jesus, we make it more difficult for people to turn to Jesus.

(Pointing to the screen) May we be people who refuse to tolerate anything that makes it difficult for people to turn to Jesus.