3 Simple Rules – A History
Sycamore Creek Church
3 John
September 5, 2010
Tom Arthur
Peace, Friends!
What comes to mind when you think of rules? Usually rules have a negative connotation. Don’t they? But there are life-giving rules too. Consider various rules while driving. One particular life-giving rule is to stay in your lane on your side of the road. If you ignore that rule, you, and someone else, may lose their life. Or consider the various rules that make sports fun and safe, like the no facemasking rule in football. You can’t grab the facemask of someone and use that to tackle him; it might cause their neck significant injury or even death! Then there’s all the rules for cooking that keep your insides working well like cleaning your cutting board between cutting meat on it and cutting vegetables. There’s also some pretty basic rules for friendship that keep our relationships thriving. No lying is one that comes to mind. If you’re “friends” with a compulsive liar, your “friendship” really won’t be that great will it? Or what about the rules that govern the most intimate of friendships: marriage? A basic rule that keeps your marriage going strong is don’t cheat on one another.
In each of these instances, rules aren’t something that takes away fun, but rather lay the tracks down for fun, thriving, and loving living. We’re entering into a series called Three Simple Rules where we’ll look at three simple rules for a thriving life. They are simple to understand, but they’re not always simple to live out. When we do follow these three simple rules, we find that we live much more fully into the abundant life that God has called us to and created us for. So what are these three simple rules? Here they are:
- Do No Harm.
- Do Good.
- Stay in Love with God.
That’s it. Rules as simple as they come. But where did these rules come from? And how do they come to us today? In this message I’d like to introduce to the history of these rules and where they came from so that you’ll have a better appreciation for the power that they can hold.
Let’s begin with scripture. We’ll be looking at John’s letters throughout this series with special attention on the third letter of John. It’s a very short letter. So short that it has only one chapter. Here it is:
3 John (NLT)
1 This letter is from John the Elder.
It is written to Gaius, my dear friend, whom I love in the truth.
2 Dear friend, I am praying that all is well with you and that your body is as healthy as I know your soul is. 3 Some of the brothers recently returned and made me very happy by telling me about your faithfulness and that you are living in the truth. 4 I could have no greater joy than to hear that my children live in the truth.
Caring for the Lord’s Workers
5 Dear friend, you are doing a good work for God when you take care of the traveling teachers who are passing through, even though they are strangers to you. 6 They have told the church here of your friendship and your loving deeds. You do well to send them on their way in a manner that pleases God. 7 For they are traveling for the Lord and accept nothing from those who are not Christians. 8 So we ourselves should support them so that we may become partners with them for the truth.
9 I sent a brief letter to the church about this, but Diotrephes, who loves to be the leader, does not acknowledge our authority. 10 When I come, I will report some of the things he is doing and the wicked things he is saying about us. He not only refuses to welcome the traveling teachers, he also tells others not to help them. And when they do help, he puts them out of the church.
11 Dear friend, don’t let this bad example influence you. Follow only what is good. Remember that those who do good prove that they are God’s children, and those who do evil prove that they do not know God. 12 But everyone speaks highly of Demetrius, even truth itself. We ourselves can say the same for him, and you know we speak the truth.
13 I have much to tell you, but I don’t want to do it in a letter. 14 For I hope to see you soon, and then we will talk face to face.
15 May God’s peace be with you.
Your friends here send you their greetings. Please give my personal greetings to each of our friends there.
This is God’s story for us today. Thank you, God!
So what’s going on in this community that John is writing to? Let’s look specifically at verse five:
Dear friend, you are doing a good work for God when you take care of the traveling teachers who are passing through, even though they are strangers to you (3 John 5, NLT)
Here we see that traveling teachers (maybe from John) have come to Gaius’ community and Gaius has taken care of them. But when we read further we see that not all have welcomed them. Diotrephes and his crew aren’t so hospitable to these traveling teachers. John is writing to say, “What’s up with that? Who are these people who aren’t showing hospitality to us? We were the ones who saw, touched, and heard Jesus, the light and truth of God!” So we’ve got traveling teachers who are accepted by some and rejected by others.
This same basic dynamic happened some 1700 years later in what became known as the Methodist movement in the Church of England. But how do we get from 3 John to the 18th century? Here’s a quick history lesson covering those 1700 years.
So we begin with Jesus and his disciples. Shortly after the beginning of Christianity Christians begin to be persecuted by Rome. But in the 300s something rather extraordinary happens. The Roman emperor Constantine converts to Christianity and stops the persecutions. In 313 he issues the Edict of Milan which doesn’t make Christianity the state religion, as it is often said to have done, but makes Christianity acknowledged by the state as one of several acceptable religions. The state and Christianity become intertwined from this point on, and the merits of this event continue to be debated today.
The first really big split in the history of the church is between the East and the West. In 1054 the Eastern Orthodox church and the Western Roman Catholic church split. Our story follows the Western branch of the Christian family tree
In the 16th century there is an increasing dissatisfaction with the Roman Catholic Church throughout Europe. Reform movements within the church begin, but some of those movements break away and form new churches who “protest” the Roman Catholic Church. They are thus called “Protestant” Churches. The first of these is founded by Martin Luther in 1517 which we now know as the Lutheran Churches. In 1530 John Calvin’s reformed movement begins which results in the reformed churches of today such as the Christian Reformed Church and the Presbyterian Church. Another branch of Protestants are the Anabaptists. “Ana” means again so the Anabaptists baptize again those who were baptized by other churches.
The branch of Protestants that we find ourselves following is the Church of England which separates from the Roman Catholic Church in 1534 when King Henry VIII wants a divorce from his wife and the Pope won’t grant it to him. Here we see the total integration of State and Church because King Henry declared himself the head of this new church!
After several hundreds of years within the Church of England many were becoming restless with the spiritual state of the Church of England. One of those was a Church of England priest named John Wesley.
Wesley was born in 1703 to Susanna and Samuel Wesley, who was himself a priest in the Church of England. When Wesley went to Oxford to study to become a priest he formed a group of friends who met daily to hold one another accountable to self examination around various virtues. They used particular “methods” like journaling and soon became known as the “Methodists.” This was at the time not a nice name.
In 1736 Wesley accepted an assignment as a missionary to the colony of Georgia. On the way to Georgia, his boat ran into a horrible storm on the Atlantic. There were a group of Moravian Christians on board who seemed to Wesley to have an amazing peace in Christ while looking death in the face. Even though he was a priest in the Church of England he didn’t have the same peace himself, and he wanted it.
When he got to Georgia he began what was ultimately a fairly unsuccessful ministry in the colony. His ministry came to a crisis point when he refused to offer communion to a woman, Sophy Hopkey, who had accepted the marriage proposal of another man rather than his own marriage proposal to her! The biggest problem this posed to Wesley was that Sophy had friends and family in high places in Georgia and a warrant was soon put our for Wesley’s arrest. He high-tailed it out of Georgia back to England.
As you can imagine, this was a particularly low point in Wesley’s spiritual life. Shortly after returning from Georgia in 1738 he tells us in his journal that he went “very unwillingly to a society in Alderstgate.” They were studying the book of Romans. While they were reading Martin Luther’s preface to the book of Romans, Wesley had the kind of experience he had been searching for. He writes in his journal, “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” This experience did not always stay with Wesley, but it did catapult him back into vigorous ministry.
Wesley began preaching a heart-felt faith in the pulpits of the Church of England. One by one, these churches didn’t like what he preached and began barring him from ever preaching there again. So Wesley and his friends from his Oxford days, began taking the message to where the people were. They began preaching outside! Sound familiar? Remember 3 John 5:
Dear friend, you are doing a good work for God when you take care of the traveling teachers who are passing through, even though they are strangers to you. (3 John 5, NLT).
The response was amazing. People everywhere began making commitments to follow Jesus. A serious renewal movement swept through the Church of England. Wesley and his brother Charles, presided over this movement and sent preachers here and there to various groups of Methodists. Wesley believed that if the people heard only one preacher over and over, their faith would become stagnant, so he kept them on the move every three months or so.
Wesley soon found that if the Methodists only heard sermons, they wouldn’t commit to the life-changing habits required to follow Jesus, so he set up small groups within the Methodist movement to help people grow in their faith. Every quarter the small group leader would review the spiritual lives of the members of the group and issue tickets to those who were taking things seriously. You had to have a ticket to come back the next quarter!
These groups were split into three different sizes. The largest group was the Society. A Methodist Society was made up of all the Methodists in a given area, called a parish. This was not a separate church from the Church of England but a renewal society within the Church of England. It was at the society meetings that Methodists sang and heard the preachers. The focus here was on the head or gaining knowledge about faithfully following Jesus.
The middle size group was the class. This was made of 10-12 people and was co-ed. If you were in a Methodist Society you were required to be in a Methodist Class. The focus of the class was on the hands or will power. These classes followed three simple rules:
- Do no harm.
- Do good.
- Stay in love with God.
Sound familiar? These classes met regularly to help one another retain the will to avoid sin, love others, and stay close to God.
The smallest group within the Methodist society was called a band. This was an optional group made up of about six people. Bands were gender specific and also made up of people of similar age and marital status. The focus of the band was the heart or training one’s emotions. Bands met for serious accountability and intense spiritual growth. They provided a space for ruthless honesty and frank openness not just about what one was doing, but about one’s motivations for doing it. There were also several different kinds of bands. There were recovery bands for those seeking to escape the grip of addictions such as alcohol and there were “select” bands specifically for current and/or future leaders of the Methodist movement.
All of this should be sounding like deja vu at this point. SCC is based on a very similar model. So how did we get from Wesley to SCC? That’s the second half of the story.
In 1771 Wesley sent a young Methodist Preacher named Francis Asbury to America to help provide direction and support to the Methodist movement which had already begun to spread in the American Colonies. At the time of the revolutionary war in 1776, one in eight-hundred Americans was a Methodist. In 1784 the American Methodist movement split from the Church of England and the British Methodist movement for fairly obvious reasons. What is surprising is how long they remained connected to their English parents after the American Revolution: eight years! In 1791 Wesley died and in that same year the number of Methodists in America exceeded the number in England. In 1795, four years after Wesley died, the British Methodists followed their American counterparts and left the Church of England to form their own church. By 1812 Methodism in American had grown at such a rate that one in thirty-six Americans was a Methodist!
The story from there in America is much too complex to tell briefly, but it involved several more splits, particularly North and South over slavery, and reunifications, especially the North and South.
As Methodism grew the numbers of people began to stretch the Methodist “method” of discipleship. It became respectable to be a Methodist in America. In 1866 the requirement to be in a class was dropped from Methodism. Methodism became more about a civic religion. It was the right thing to do as a good citizen. It became less about a real transformation of the will and heart. In many ways Methodists lost their desire for authentic life in Christ and their desire to grow. But that need not be so today!
We read in 3 John that the traveling teachers “began their journey for the sake of Christ…so that we may become co-workers with the truth” (3 John 7-8, NRSV). The early traveling preachers of the Methodist church also began their journey for the sake of Christ. They did this so that we too may be their co-workers with the truth of Jesus Christ. They, John Wesley and the early Methodists, began their journey as itinerant traveling preachers for the sake of spreading the good news of Jesus Christ and the transformation of the world. Let us too continue to be co-workers with them by practicing three simple rules: do no harm, do good, and stay in love with God.
Throughout this series and for some time beyond our small groups will be reading a very small and simple book by Reuben Job titled, Three Simple Rules. They’ll be looking at these three simple rules and seeking to help one another live into them. Will you join a small group and become “co-workers of the truth” with John’s traveling teachers, John Wesley, and the early Methodists? There’s a group that meets on almost every day of the week. Find one and join it.
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