You may know that our name changed on December 15th from New Grace Church to Grace Anglican Church. I am excited about this for several reasons:

It’s time to update our website, logo and signage.

It could help build on the great momentum we have right now.

It’s helping us clarify our identity for ourselves and others curious about us.

It’s a step of obedience to God’s initiative.

This last one is what I want to address today. Hearing God is a practice that is not always easy, but is essential for Christian obedience. Whenever you think God is speaking to you, STEP 1 is to press in toward him for clarity. You can pray, “God, was that you? I’ll assume so and draw near to you so I can hear more clearly. Please speak again for your servant is listening.” This first step is about RECEIVING the message. The second step is INTERPRETING and the third is APPLYING.

The name change started for me with an impression. We were reading our daily office passage back in January of this year and I had a hunch, a feeling, an impression that God was speaking to us as a church in a specific way through an ancient passage of Scripture. The Bible is still living and active (cf. Hebrews 4:12). Our passage that day was John 1:29 and following. The Apostle Andrew found the Messiah and brought his brother Simon to meet him. Jesus immediate changes Simon’s name to Peter. God does such a thing quite a bit in the Bible and apparently still does today.

I didn’t follow step 1, but jumped to action. I correctly discerned he was changing our name, but I incorrectly presumed he was changing it to “St. Andrew’s Fleming Island.” That’s a good name but not what God was after. I enlisted the vestry and eventually the whole parish to seek God’s voice on this. Now we were all pressing in to hear what God was saying. Step 1 was finally in progress. I was now actually listening again and not just acting.

Two funny things happened. Skeptics call these coincidences. Christians call these God at work. I drove to Atlanta with two lay leaders to interview a potential worship director. Most of the ride, my companions and I discussed how to hear God. Sunday morning of the interview, I had two hours alone at a coffee shop to read the Bible and pray before church. As I walked back to the hotel across a parking lot, I kicked a nickel on the ground and heard in my head, “Let me give you a nickel’s worth of advice, kid.” I laughed out loud at the playfulness with which God was handling me. He had spoken again. Now he had my attention completely. I pressed in, “So what’s the advice, Lord? I’m listening.”

The second funny thing happened when we got to church. The service started off fine. The worship director was a nice guy. The music was great. But the voice of God for me was in the sermon. The pastor stood up and began. “The sound of your own name is one of the most priceless experiences you can have,” he said. He spent the next thirty minutes giving a sermon entitled “Gospel Challenge to Self Identity. His text was the account of Jesus calling Peter “the rock” on which he would build his church. You can listen to it at http://www.intown.org. It’s the one dated 5/25/14 by Terry Gyger.

STEP 2 is INTERPRETING what you think you’ve heard. The experiences in Atlanta confirmed right away that God was indeed speaking and I hadn’t made this up myself. God gets too much credit for human ideas. The words, “God told me that…” have preceded some pretty awful things. I was beginning to interpret my January experience to mean that God was nudging me to call our church to clarify our identity. (It’s helpful to note that step 1 took from January until June and included a lot of prayer). We spent the summer in prayer and fasting as a whole parish and had a few town hall meetings to share what we were hearing. I learned a few things from our people that led us into step 3. First off, very few people liked the name New Grace Church and several were adamantly against it. Secondly, our parish was very proud to be aligned with the Anglican way and wanted it proudly in the name. The freedoms we enjoy in the new Anglican Church in North America came at a hefty price, of which our lender kindly reminds us each month. We are connected to about 80 million other Anglicans on mission around the world. We’re proud to be a part of that. Thirdly, grace is not just our name but our witness as well. This is the message we live and preach. We are sinners saved by grace alone. Being named as such helps us proclaim it.

STEP 3 is APPLICATION. There was one other thing that surprised me in this process. When it became obvious that the direction forward was to propose to the church the name Grace Anglican Church, there were no grumbles. At all. None. No one complained. No one stormed out. No one threatened to stop tithing. One person who was was initially against the idea even wrote the proposed name on his tithe check the next week before we made a decision! How is such unity possible? God did this! The Spirit of God spoke to the hearts of his people in this place.

I don’t think a change of name was all that God is after in this. The name change is a means to another end. It took Peter several years to grow into the identity for which Jesus named him. This was not an easy thing. The renaming incident was only one of the first words God spoke to Peter. There were many others that followed as God molded him into the great Apostle he became.

Lord, please help us become a Anglican church that is marked by your grace in all that we are and do.