What does it really mean to be a Christian? I wonder if you asked that question of the non-church going population of our town, what their reply would be. What picture, what concept of what it is to be Christian have they developed from knowing us. What is their experience of people like us who have openly adopted the title 'Christian', through baptism into the Church, through our attendance at places of worship. I wonder how many of us could be easily recognised as Christians, and for what reason. Are we just a sanctimonious bunch of old do-gooders, a group meeting weekly away from the public gaze in order to gossip and cloak ourselves in the 'respectability' of churchiness? Or are we channels of God's peace, lights shining out the love of Christ, workers for the kingdom of Heaven on earth? Or maybe somewhere between the two.

So what does it mean to be a Christian? After the ascension of Jesus the disciples, and through them the Christian Church, became the embodiment of Christ's message, the word, on earth. As John puts it in his letter, 'anyone who believes in the Son of God has this testimony in his heart'. Belief then is central to being a Christian. Belief in God, and belief in His son as a living testimony of that God. Because of that belief we have already been granted eternal life in Jesus. John is clear about the link between belief and that promise. 'He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.' (1 John 5. 12.)

If we are sincere in our belief then we must also accept Christ's direction for us to carry on with his ministry on earth. In revealing the nature of God to us Jesus calls us to share in His own God given task. In a long passage in which Jesus prays to His father he says; 'As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world'. (John 17. 18) Jesus goes on to pray for those who will believe in Him through the message of those he has sent out. So through our ministry it is to be hoped that others will come to a knowledge of Jesus and follow in the path of belief in which we walk. In serving the world we must bear in mind that through our belief we are not to be centred in the world. That is to say that we are called to serve and minister to the world we are in, but we belong to another world, the Kingdom of God. We may long for heaven, but it is on earth that our work for Christ is done. In the acts of kindness that we show to each other, in the help and support we can offer to those around us, in the service we undertake for our local communities, in all these we work for Christ. 'What ever you did for the least of these my brothers you did for me.' (Matthew 25).

It is possible to be a good person without being Christian. You can be nice to people without believing in God. But if we truly believe in God, and his son, are we doing anybody any favours by hiding our Christianity in situations where we could help not only physically, in ways that alleviate suffering in this earthly life, but also spiritually in order to bring them to a situation in which they can decide whether or not to become children of God.

Through our acts of service, our charity, our generosity of spirit we act as witnesses to our belief. A witness presents evidence at a trial. From that evidence the jury must decide whether something is true, or whether it is not. It is Jesus that stands trial on our evidence, will he be accepted or rejected? But unlike a normal trial, Jesus has already served His sentence. It is the jury itself that must decide whether to accept the man, and join us in his promise of eternal life, or reject him and remain part of this world, unprotected from the evil one. And once the choice has been made that jury must report to the court, and recommend the verdict to society in general. If the jury were to deliberate on our evidence, our witness, I wonder what that recommendation would be.

In the reading from Acts the Jury of twelve good men seems very relevant. Peter points out that the twelfth place, left by Judas, the one 'doomed to destruction so that Scripture would be fulfilled', needed to be filled. It needed to be filled by 'one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us,’. It was important that the replacement was someone who had experienced Christ, that could act as a strong witness. We have not yet met Jesus face to face as Matthias did, but we owe it to ourselves and to those to whom we bear witness that our knowledge of Christ, through study of the Gospels and the writings of other witnesses, and through our prayer life becomes strong and clear in our own Christian witness.

There are many, particularly children, in our area, who have yet to see enough evidence to choose for themselves about Jesus. Can we do something about that?