Baptist Preaching: A Global Anthology

21. Unity in Our God

162 Baptist Preaching kicks up, help is accepted and appreciated. People need a shoulder to cry on; the drunk and vulnerable need help to get home safely; angry young lovers accept grandmas and grandpas, who are not obvious candidates for hanging around clubs at 4:00 a.m. in the morning, to act as mediators. This is not rocket science! It’s about trying to ensure that vulnerable people don’t get hurt. Street pastors are not exceptional people (though what they do is indeed “awesome”); they are very ordinary people, who are passionate about being alongside those in the street who are hurting. They do not condemn what they see but care about what is happening and want, by their presence, to express the compassion, acceptance, and love of the God who has met them and loved them out of vulnerability into the knowledge and assurance of God’s grace. “Living the tradition” means being broken and poured out for the sake of the gospel. Ordinary people everywhere make this their passion, some compelled perhaps by logical, passionate preaching; others perhaps most by the experience of the self-giving, self-emptying grace of God, which they have encountered in Christ. Either way they are driven by the resources of a dynamic faith, which has been faithfully cherished and handed on to them by the saints that went before. 21 unity in our god (Ephesians 4:4-6) Teodor B. Oprenov Sofia Baptist Church Sofia, Bulgaria BIOGRAPHY Oprenov has been the senior pastor of Sofia Baptist Church (Sofia, Bulgaria) since 1996 and also serves as the general secretary of the Baptist Union of Bulgaria. Among his previous posts, Oprenov was the principal for the Baptist Theological Institute (Bulgaria). He has received a master’s of theology from the International Baptist Theological Seminary in Prague. Oprenov also acts as the president of Good Samaritan Charities, which aims to provide “Winterhelp” (i.e., help with life-threatening crises during the harsh Bulgarian winters), medical clinics, and orphanage support. He is married to Dimitrina V. Oprenova, who is also a pastor of Sofia Baptist Church, and they have two daughters, Anna Margarita and Sophia Alexandre. Part IV—Europe 163 SERMON COMMENTARY Oprenov preached this message on a special occasion—a communion service held in Amsterdam at the four hundredth anniversary of the Baptist movement . The EBF meeting frames his remarks on Christian unity. He makes an appeal for unity based on the text chosen, personal experience, secondary sources, and the transcendent nature of unity in God. The presence of the Lord’s table must have added a trenchant quality to his appeal. When sermons deal with heavy subjects, ponderous concepts, and significant abstractions, the leitmotif of humor gets the sermon heard. Preachers do well to move their emphasis from their mouth to the listeners’ ears. A significant question is not so much, “Can I get this said?” as it is, “Can I get this heard?” Oprenov opens with an engaging, humorous, invented dialogue that creates a sense of anticipation before the dialogue is resolved. Yet he immediately juxtaposes this with a serious quotation from a government minister in Bulgaria pointing out the confusing multiplicity of Baptist bodies. To make this abstract concept concrete, he uses a long quote from Max Lucado comparing the church to a ship and all that goes on in the ship. In this allegory he imports into the sermon almost every situation that causes disunity yet makes all of it palatable to be received by his listeners under the guise of allegory. This figurative mode of representation has a venerable history , ever since John Bunyan, the tinker of Bedfordshire, offered the Christian life to the world in the form of allegory. In a surprising and categorical move Oprenov first roots Christian unity in the heart of the individual. Disunity at the center of the person creates disunity at the circumference. The locus of Christian unity begins with a single heart. Among several striking personal stories highlighting this sermon, he relates a personal experience with an old pastor who should have been embittered but was not at all so. He next turns to the use and misuse of the gifts of the Spirit. The Spirit gives the gifts to promote Christian unity, but we often misuse them for personal aggrandizement. Oprenov aptly circles around the subject of unity, approaching it from the oblique angle of our personal interior unity and then supplying the proper motivation for the use of the...