This seems reasonable to me…
Church
Can Mission Become an Idol?
“There is a first-rate commitment to a second-rate mission.” That is what Roger, a leader in global church planting, said as he looked at the rock climbers ascending a cliff in the Alps. Many of us called into ministry feel the same way. Rather than giving our lives to climbing a rock, building a business, or amassing a fortune, we are committed to what really matters; a first-rate mission – advancing the Gospel and the Church of Jesus Christ.
But what if we’re wrong?
Roger spent decades serving Christ by planting churches on four continents. But after reflecting on his labors for the kingdom of God, his confession surprised many of us. “I’ve given most of my energy to a second-rate mission as well,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. Church planting is important. But someday that mission will end. My first calling is to live with God. That must be my first commitment.”
What Roger articulated was a temptation that many of us in ministry face. To put it simply, many church leaders unknowingly replace the transcendent vitality of a life with God for the ego satisfaction they derive from a life for God. Before exploring how this shift occurs in church leaders, let me take a step or two backwards and explain how I have seen this tendency within the Christian college students I’ve worked with in recent years.
Is impact everything?
The students I meet with often worry about what awaits them after graduation. This is a reasonable concern for any young adult, but for many of them the worry extends far beyond finding a job with benefits. They fixate, and some obsess, about “making a difference in the world.” They fear living lives of insignificance. They worry about not achieving the right things, or not enough of the right things. Behind all of this is the belief that their value is determined by what they achieve. I’ve learned that when a student asks me, “What should I do with my life?” what he or she really wants to know is, “How can I prove that I am valuable?”
When we come believe that our faith is primarily about what we can do for God in the world, it is like throwing gasoline on our fear of insignificance. The resulting fire may be presented to others as a godly ambition, a holy desire to see God’s mission advance–the kind of drive evident in the Apostle Paul’s life. But when these flames are fueled by fear they reveal none of the peace, joy, or love displayed by Paul and rooted in the Spirit. Instead the relentless drive to prove our worth can quickly become destructive.
Sometimes the people who fear insignificance the most are driven to accomplish the greatest things. As a result they are highly praised within Christian communities for their good works. This temporarily soothes their fear until the next goal can be achieved. But there is a dark side to this drivenness. Gordon MacDonald calls it “missionalism.” It is “the belief that the worth of one’s life is determined by the achievement of a grand objective.”
Go And Make Disciples…
Gospel Clarity for Missional Calling
The article below by World Harvest Mission‘s Josiah Bancroft is a tremendously insightful and clear explanation of the relationship of the gospel to culture. Not only is this an important understanding for the mission field overseas, but Josiah explains why it is essential even within the local church in North America.
The video above is an interview with Josiah by Collin Hansen of The Gospel Coalition.
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How do you keep the gospel clear and focused on missional calling when so many competing forces, influences, and voices speak into your life, ministry, and church? I am learning that gospel clarity is tied in large part to how we understand our cross-cultural mission in very practical ways.
For example, I was picking up a large short-term team outside of Dublin to introduce them to our Irish partners and co-workers. When the jet-lagged U.S. visitors stumbled from the bus, one of the passengers asked to pray and gathered us around her. She thanked God for safe travel, for the opportunity to serve, and then prayed for “all our boys in harms way” and asked God to protect our troops from our enemies.
As soon as she said a tearful and happy amen and walked away, my Irish friends inundated me with questions: Who were “our boys”? Was the church supporting a national war? How were those “our” enemies that the U.S. troops were killing? Of course Ireland was neutral in the war, so their questions were reasonable and predictable. After all, they were Christians, not Americans.
Navigating culture and mission with gospel clarity doesn’t just happen, so how—practically—can we keep clear about the gospel while pursuing our cross-cultural missional calling? We all interpret the world as cultural beings. That’s how God has made us. And yet many American believers have struggled with the basic idea that they are part of a culture or a sub-culture. That is now changing.
With the rapid changes in U.S. culture during recent years, our churches are beginning to see U.S. culture more clearly. Our culture has changed so much and so quickly that the church sometimes struggles to engage. We are hard pressed to maintain the mental and spiritual clarity that can respond powerfully to a such pervasive cultural forces. So what can help us with our struggle? I’d like to make a few suggestions.
1. We Need Clear Kingdom Identity and Allegiance
As missional people we belong to the kingdom of God and live in the United States as strangers and aliens. Keeping my kingdom identity clear as a believer keeps me from identifying completely with this present age. God has given each of us a role in our culture, so we should embrace our lives and do well here. But this present time and place isn’t everything, and this age doesn’t fully define a believer. So while I work to bring all things under the rule of Christ in my life and mission, I do it as an outsider. Where I forget this missional identity, I can confuse my interests and culture with the kingdom of God. Then I lose my gospel clarity and muddle the message with my culture.
Practical Help: Keep the horizon of God’s larger global mission clearly in view even in local ministry work, so that all your concerns are kept in the right perspective for new kingdom people. Without this missional global horizon, local ministry easily appears so large to us that it obscures everything else.
2. We All Answered the Universal Call to Cross-cultural Missional Life
Since we are each part of God’s mission to reach the world, and because we live as strangers and aliens, therefore all of our ministry and mission is necessarily cross-cultural. All church planting is a cross-cultural exercise. All evangelism reaches across cultural boundaries, even in our own families and neighborhoods. The struggles between generations are in part cross-cultural conflicts, because the world has shifted so quickly and radically. Every attempt to reach out or serve in the church must recognize and communicate to our own culture with cross-cultural understanding and sensitivity. All ministry here is cross-cultural.
Practical Help: We need a steady flow of outsiders and missionaries who bring in tales of the kingdom moving and struggles to take the gospel into difficult places. What worked in Congo? What is God doing in Russia? How is the God moving in the Czech Republic? Hearing how culture works and is navigated practically in other places gives us new perspectives on what things belong to the kingdom and what belongs to the culture.
3. We Enter Other Cultures
As a missional people we are responsible to cross the cultural barriers with the gospel rather than wait and require those outside to come and understand. Actually that’s one of the big differences that came with the church in the first century. Everyone doesn’t have to become Jewish to have access to God. Today in the church we must learn the new languages, not the nations . . . remember Pentecost? We adapt rather than require others to “eat kosher.” We go, rather than having everyone come to us. When I bear the weight of reaching out to others, here or in foreign countries, I best imitate Christ who became like us in love and won us with great sacrifice. When the gospel is small in my life, when my flesh and home culture press in, then I am unwilling to change or sacrifice for others to bring them the gospel. Missions pushes me to clarify my commitment to the gospel and to Christ.
Practical Help: Get a larger heart for the world by spending time with others who love their enemies. That love is what motivated Christ to do the work of incarnation. Roll up your sleeves and find a place to sacrifice time, work, and money for the expansion of the kingdom in places you will never see as well as in your hometown. Turn every group in the church outward with a cross-cultural eye to be true missional communities.
4. We Go
We know the gospel is how we enter the kingdom. The gospel promises are also how we live daily before God in repentance and faith. And the gospel is the central message of the church as we go into the world. This might seem obvious, but it is so easy to mix cultural pieces into our speaking about Christ that we need to be clear. Paul tells Titus in his church planting and leadership to emphasize—even insist on—and confidently affirm the gospel as the life and message of the church (Titus 3:8).
Practical Help: Get involved in short-term missions and create a global missional team to find those in your fellowship who need to go. Join with cross-cultural workers who have more experience so that you can learn from them. The New Testament way requires us to listen to these cross-cultural workers. Of course the greatest was Christ. But Paul also qualifies, and as a cross-cultural missionary he was wonderfully equipped to lead churches and planting in various places without confusing his culture or Roman culture with the call of the kingdom. I would love for our churches to find his gospel clarity and passion renewing us all for global missions and partnership in new ways.
Perhaps there is another way to say all of this simply. The gospel always leads us believers to a global vision and a heart willing to sacrifice for a lost world. That’s what it means to follow our Savior. And learning to keep our vision clear, listening to others engaged in that same struggle, and feeding your heart with the gospel promises and the kingdom calling from Scripture are all essential to keep our missional calling centered on the gospel.
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Both the article and the video first appeared on The Gospel Coalition blog.
Numbering Those on the Ranch
With the following illustration, Alan Hirsch offers a different way of gauging a church’s effectiveness:
In some farming communities, the farmers might build fences around their properties to keep their livestock in and the livestock of neighbor farms out. This is a bounded set. But in rural communities where farms or ranches cover an enormous geographic area, fencing a property is out of the question. In our home of Australia, ranches (called Stations) are so vast that fences are superfluous. Under these conditions a farmer has to sink a bore and create a well, a precious water supply in the Outback. It is assumed that livestock, though they will stray, will never roam too far from the well, lest they die. That is centered set. As long as there is a clean supply of water the livestock will remain close by.
The essential difference is between measuring Influence instead of simply membership and/or attendance. The bounded-set, as Hirsch calls it, draws a clear line between those on the inside (i.e. members and regular attenders) and those outside. The centered-set, on the other hand, measures how many people are in some relation to the ministry of the church and gauges the various relative distances from the center values.
Though I do not see these grids as being mutually exclusive, as if one must choose one or the other, I do find Hirsch to have provided a helpful distinction.
In our church, for instance, we have some precious members who do not regularly participate in any of the Life of the Church. They come occasionally to any number of things, including infrequently to the Sunday morning worship service. To assume we are having an active influence in their spiritual growth would be, at best, presumptuous. On the other hand, there are people who are not members of our church, nor even attenders, but who are being actively influenced through ministries of counseling, discipleship, mercy, etc. While these folks are not part of the quantifiable membership, they are nevertheless beneficiaries of the mission of the church. In many ways some of these folks are closer to our center-set than are some of the irregular members.
So again, as I think about it, I see both of these grids as being beneficial. In fact, I would hope to see growth on both gauges. We long to see our influence expand, and realize that many whom we influence will never become part of our congregation. Some are members of other churches, and therefore should stay there and bless the people in those churches. But we also should be laboring, and praying, for those who are not part of a particular congregation to become connected to some expression of of the visible church – hopefully many with ours.
So, I don’t see that we need to make a choice between these two ways of measuring our congregations. I think we ought to use both. But, I guess, since relatively few are aware of Hirsch’s Ranch, we would be wise to spend our energies to cultivate and cast the importance of the centered-set.
If Satan Ruled Your City…
Is there a big difference between gospel-centered and conservative moralistic churches? Michael Horton, in his book Christless Christianity, presents this picture:
“What would things look like if Satan really took control of a city?
Over half a century ago, Presbyterian minister Donald Grey Barnhouse offered his own scenario in his weekly sermon that was also broadcast nationwide on CBS radio. Barnhouse speculated that if Satan took over Philadelphia (the city where Barnhouse pastored), all of the bars would be closed, pornography banished, and pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The children would say “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am,” and the churches would be full every Sunday…where Christ was not preached.”
Loving Not Wisely But Too Well
Shakespeare’s Othello bellows:
“I have loved not wisely but too well.”
What he means is that his passions consumed him, and now he had destroyed what he loved. If you know the story, you will remember he had strangled his wife out of the mistaken fear that she had not been faithful to him.
Similarly, in his monumental book, Life Together, Dietrich Bohoeffer warns:
“The people most in love with community are in danger of destroying community.”
In other words, there are people who have made such an ideal of “Christian Community” that they are easily dissatisfied with the real thing. In their dissatisfaction they grumble, causing others to become disaffected, which further fuels their sense that this real Christian community does not meet the measure of idealized Christian community. In many cases such people eventually withdraw themselves from fellowship with the visible Church. In the end they devoid themselves of what they say they most wanted. And in their wake they leave behind others with feelings of abandonment, rejection, confusion, anger, and more inclination toward disengagement. These are the effects of their having loved “not wisely but too well”. Like Othello they kill what they claim they love.
I know people like this…
It is easy to love people hypothetically, or to love hypothetical people. It is quite another thing to love real flesh and blood. Real people are flawed. The better we get to know others the more apparent those flaws can become. That’s why the old adage is true: Familiarity does breed contempt. But more important, what Peter tells us is also true:
Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. (1 Peter 4.8)
As I think about the communities of which I am part my hope is simply that, rather than idealizing Christian community, we continually recommit ourselves to enact and embody John’s encouragement:
Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth. (1 John 3.18)
Such love is founded upon the gospel. It is rooted in the shared experience of grace through common faith in the atoning work of Christ. It realizes that we will let each other down. It seeks reconciliation of wrongs and grievance. It models the laying down of our lives, and our preferences, for the joy of seeing others prosper and the oneness Jesus prays for us to be realized.
Practitioners of Love
Studying love is exciting, being taught the doctrines of love is enlightening, praying about love is heart moving, and seeing love modeled is motivating, but in the end, we must lovingly obey God and sacrificially serve people. We must be practitioners of love, not theorists. We must be doers of love, not talkers. We must forge a connection between words and actions.
~ Alexander Strauch, from Love or Die
Moralism Trap
To reach people in our day, the gospel will have to be distinguished from moralism, because moralism is what most people outside the church think Christianity is all about – rules and standards and behavior and cleaning yourself up. Millions of people, both inside and outside the church, believe that the essential message of Christianity is: “If you behave, then you belong.” From a human standpoint, that’s why most people reject Christianity.
Church Consumerism
Wow! In this message Matt Chandler rants against the consumeristic climate catered to and cultivated by the contemporary Evangelical culture…
I wish I had said this!
OK, I have said this. I just wish I had said it as well as Matt does!
When People Go
Let’s face it, it is one of the bummers of being in ministry – or for that matter, of being a part of a church. While death and taxes may be among life’s inevitables, sadly, if you are part of a church, so is periodically watching people go out the doors.
With the Wal-Martization of the American church the contemporary mindset seems to be: “What’s the big deal?” Which makes sense. I’d be a bit perturbed if I got attitude from the manager and/or employees of Wal-Mart simply because they learned I had recently been frequenting Target. So what if someone decides to “shop” at First Church of What’s Happenin’ Now instead of the congregation in which they had taken vows to “support the work and the worship to the best of their ability”?
I get it. I just don’t agree. The church is not supposed to be like a Wal-Mart. It is supposed to be a Covenant Family. But not all church members see it that way; not all churches either, for that matter. So there is not much those left behind can do about it. Despite the revolving doors local congregations just need to press on.
But what if an opportunity presented itself to say something to one of God’s wayward wanderers? What would you say? What should you say?
In a recent article for 9 Marks blog by Jonathan Leeman muses:
Let’s face it: there are better and worse reasons to leave a church. Are you moving to another city? That’s a good reason. Are you harboring bitterness toward someone who has offended you? That’s a bad reason. Does the church neglect to preach biblical sermons weekly? A good reason. Do you not like the church’s style? Probably a bad reason.
The question is, how should you respond to a fellow member who is leaving for what sounds like a bad reason?
I really appreciated Leeman’s, thoughtful, Biblcial, practical, suggestions. To read the rest of Leeman’s post, click: What to Say to Church Members Leave for Bad Reasons.
How to Invite Someone to Church
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How NOT to Invite Someone to Church
Is John MacArthur Getting Crotchety?
Is John MacArthur getting crotchety in his old age? I will leave that for you to decide. My guess is opinions will vary. Some may even muse about the verb “getting”. But after watching a couple of brief videos he has me wondering.
Before commenting on the videos let me say that I think John MacArthur has earned respect. He has labored to faithfully proclaim the Word of God, in depth, for decades. He is a living example of someone who sees the message as sovereign and not the audience. For that he should be applauded. He will never be open to the accusation of “tickling the ears” of a fickle generation. That said, I will confess that while I respect MacArthur I have long found him a bit polemic for my tastes.
In a relatively recent interview with Christianity.com MacArthur demonstrates why I both respect and am perplexed by him. Below are two videos related to the discussion of the near future of the American Church. In particular is his prediction that the current Reformed Resurgence will reverse.
Beneath each video I will comment on what MacArthur says.
GRACE & PEACE 