Jonathan Dodson

Culturally Literate Evangelism

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

Abstract Modern Landscape

Jonathan Dodson offers an astute assessment of the cultural landscape and some practical suggestions about how this effects the way we as Christians ought to engage in evangelistic efforts.  What Dodson offers refelcts the best of contextual ministry: The message should not change, but understanding those to whom we are speaking, knowing their needs and desires, shapes the way we present the message of the gospel.  ~ WDG

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Cultural shifts have resulted in the collapse of Christendom, an official or unofficial relationship people have with their country and its civil religion. In America, moral views typically associated with Christianity have been replaced by more progressive views associated with libertarianism on marriage, sexuality, and gender.

In addition to loosening the American moral fabric, the collapse of Christendom has left behind a rubble of theological understanding. As the dust settles, we can no longer assume that people know what words like Christ, sin, faith, and God mean. For many, these words may no longer carry their original biblical meaning. We need to become culturally literate in order to be evangelistically fluent. If we don’t, the gospel gets lost in translation.

In secular culture people may actually hear us saying teacher for Christ, bad deeds for sin, wishful thinking for faith, or moldable deity for God. Today, it is a mistake to assume theological literacy. If we are to move forward, the Church must develop its ability to listen to new questions people are asking and learn how to translate the gospel into words and concepts that speak to the heart.

The Need for Cultural Literacy

Consider the need for cultural literacy in this story. A church planter in my city planted little wire signs in grassy medians around the city that read “RepentAustin.org.” I’ll admit it’s a pretty gutsy and confrontational tactic, but Jesus did call people to “repent and believe.” Yet, as I thought about this evangelistic approach, a major objection came to mind. These signs did not take into account contemporary understandings associated with the word “repent.” They conjure up images of judgmental people, filled with hatred toward “sinners,” who self-righteously speak words of condemnation. Instead of intriguing people, it probably elicited disinterest and, perhaps, unduly promoted a distorted view of the Gospel.

What makes this way of presenting the Gospel distorted? First, it does not call attention to Jesus — it focuses on a person’s need to change before they even get to hear about Jesus and what He has done. Second, there are strong cultural memories associated with the word, especially in the South, that are connected with a return to good, moral living — again, a response that has nothing to do with Jesus and what he has done. Many youths, when they hear the word “repent,” associate it with things like: stop listening to secular music, stop sleeping with your girlfriend, and start going to Church. This kind of repentance does not involve turning away from trusting in yourself to trust the Savior. It is simply a switch in lifestyles, secular to Christian. You can alter your behavior without altering your savior.

People adopt the trappings of faith—the religious habits, attempts at moral living, even a new Christianized culture that entails wearing a purity ring and listening to Christian music. But this cultural repentance is not a true turning to Christ; it is a turning to Christianity, to a religious subculture.

Slowing Down to Understand

To be effective in our new cultural landscape, we will have to slow down long enough to understand what people hear and how they speak in order to communicate the gospel in intelligible ways. This involves listening to what people think in order to communicate meaningfully what God thinks. This doesn’t require a PhD in Bible or theology. It requires love: sacrificing our time, tweaking our crammed schedules, putting away our canned responses, and actually conversing with people.

People don’t just need to hear a thirty-second gospel presentation. They need to understand why the Gospel is worth believing. To do this, we must learn their language and know their stories. We need to become “culturally literate in order to be gospel fluent, communicating the gospel in words and idioms that make sense to the people we talk to.

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Jonathan Dodson (MDiv; ThM) serves as a pastor of City Life Church in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Gospel-Centered Discipleship, The Unbelievable Gospel, andRaised? Twitter: @Jonathan_Dodson

Why Do People Find the Gospel Unbelieveable?

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

Why do people find the gospel unbelievable?  That’s the question Jonathan Dodson askes.

There is a sense in which people find the gospel unbelievable because it is incredibly good news that boggles the imagination.  And yet I suspect that it is probably not this that makes much evangelistic desire and effort unfruitful.

Dodson offers his thoughts, which have to do with both the substance and the presentation.  Give him a couple minutes, and consider if what he suggests has any merit.

Getting Through Challenges to Missional Community

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

Outward & Onward

As we have been encouraging the small groups in our church to add a more intentional outward face, I thought I would post this piece by Jonathan Dodson that provides a solid three-legged-base counsel concerning missional communities – which is what small groups embracing an outward face are in transition toward becomming.

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The popularity of missional community is rising among evangelicals, and yet, the American church is nowhere near a missional tipping point. I’ve faced missional highs and missional lows. Along the way, I’ve considered a number of things that are absolutely necessary for us to endure the transition to missional church. How should we respond to the challenges of missional community? Here are three things to keep in mind as you lead in God’s mission (and thanks for doing so).

1. Building Missional Community Requires Stretched Grace.

We need more than a drop of grace to get us going on God’s mission. We need an ocean of grace to swim in to continue on God’s mission together. Do you remember when you knew nothing about “missional church”? That’s where many people are. Do you recall how long it took you to process, assimilate, and live out the principles of missional community? This probably took a couple of years, and if you’re a leader, you are in it “full time”. When leading others in missional community, remember the slowness in your own story and extend others the same grace and patience King Jesus extended you. After all, the kingdom of God is slow, and thank God for that! We need more than a drop of grace to get us going on God’s mission. We need grace stretched across the length of our lives and depth of our missional failures and successes. Jesus secured this grace, so revel in it and splash it on others.

Leader Tip: Try to avoid making mission a new benchmark of religious performance. Instead, motivate people with grace. Grace preached and grace embodied. Embody the grace of Christ, who has put up with our missional fumblings for centuries, as you lead others on mission. When it comes to mission, it’s not perfection overnight but progress over a lifetime.

2. Community is What You Make of It.

In order to make progress with your community, remind them that community is what you make it. Community isn’t an idea; its real people, awkward, struggling, weird, different, funny, slow, arrogant, sheepish, humble, curious, skeptical, excitable. You get the idea. Jesus didn’t die to make cliques; he died and rose to form diverse communities. Diverse and different is hard. It requires love, effort, and patience. Community doesn’t just magically appear in a church. In fact, churches don’t have community at all; they are community. The question is, “What will you make of the community?” I’m falling in love with real community, which is really messy, with people who are so different from me and yet so alike in Jesus. There’s nothing like pursuing difficult people, being loved by different people, serving alongside a diverse people. What a display of grace (nothing else could hold us together). 

Leader Tip: In a highly consumeristic, individual-centered society, it will take at least a generation to get back to the biblical notion of community. And even then, we will need more than community to sustain community. Let’s all agree to shatter our ideal of community and enter the real community of people God has placed in our lives. Let’s lift Christ higher than the community. Jesus is head not the body. He’s lord of the church. He’s the hope of the community, not the community itself. Community needs a center deeper than connection and a purpose greater than comfort. It needs the Lord of Community, Jesus Christ, to knit unlikely people together as a display of our common need for grace. Insist on this.

3. Labor for the Lord of Mission not the Fruit of Mission.

With all the missional hype, our faith can easily slip from trusting in the Lord of the Harvest to trusting in the fruit of our labors. I’ve had several deep relationships with non-Christians dissolve over the past year and a half. This came after spending a lot of time with them over meals, out for philosophy discussions, in our home for counseling, and with our family doing fun stuff. They were loved and heard the gospel in ways that were profoundly relevant to their own fears, struggles, and hopes…and they walked away. They walked away from Jesus and created distance from us. That’s hard. If I’m putting faith in the fruit of my missional labors (at least at what I can see), then I’m discouraged. But if I’m putting faith in the Lord of the Harvest, I can be confident that he has been lifted up and that he is in charge of all salvation. He has endured much more to witness friends walk away from his costly sacrifice. He’s not only a model of missional endurance; he’s the hope for missional endurance.

Leader Tip: Put your faith in the Lord of Mission not the fruit of mission. It can be easy to congratuate ourselves when mission is high and berate ourselves when mission is low. That’s a sign that we’ve misplaced our faith. We put it in ourselves or our “fruitfulness.” Come back to the gospel every single day and ask the Spirit to put Jesus highest among your affections and greatest among your hopes. Keep repenting and putting your faith in Jesus and he will take care of the mission.

Fighting the Sin in Our Hearts

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

In Colossians 3, the Apostle Paul commands us:

Put to death therefore what is earthly in you:sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. (v. 5)

His list should not be seen as exhaustive, but rather suggestive.  There are many other things that could be included in this list – things which are mentioned in many other passages throughout the Old and New Testaments.

But while Paul’s list here may not be complete, his message is clear:  “Put your sin to death!”

For those who cling to the notion that once we are secured in the grace of Jesus that we have little or no need to give serious and ongoing thought to our sin and the lingering effects it has upon us – that all we need to do is look at the positives of the promises of the gospel – Paul’s words provide a much needed corrective.

Certainly, the promises of the gospel give us a tremendous status. But there is still much to be done; much we need to be doing.  The gospel gives us the confidence that no matter what we may find when we look deep into the recesses of our own hearts, we will never be forsaken.  Whatever we may find in the dark and dank depths of our souls, it is no surprise to God.  He already knows. And he is the one who is encouraging us to take a look for ourselves. God, our Father, does this with the reassuring promise that no matter what we find he will not love us any less.

Still, easier said than done.

I appreciate the work Jonathan Dodson has done to  develop the concept of Fight Clubs to help us put our sin to death.   Dodson bases Fight Clubs on three essential principles:

1. Know Your Sin

Look for the sinful patterns in your life and trace them to the “identity of the moment” that you are looking to for worth and/or meaning (good person, faithful parent, creative artist, successful entrepreneur, etc.).   For instance, your sin could be sulking and your false identity could be victim…

2. Fight Your Sin

Once you know your sin/identity issue, you can begin to fight it.

There are two primary ways God calls us to fight our sin.

First, confess your sin to God and ask for his forgiveness for your God-belittling desires and decisions. (1 John 1.9)  Follow your confession to God with confession to community so you can experience healing and encouragement of the church.  (James 5.16)

Second, encourage one another to take sin seriously, to “put sin to death”. (Romans 8.13 & Colossians 3.5) Don’t let identity-twisting sin just roll off your back. Get tenacious about glorifying and enjoying God!

In short, you could summarize it this way:

  • Confess your sin (to God and one another)
  • Get serious about fighting for true joy

3. Trust Your Savior

Trusting our Savior for gospel identity instead of an identity-of-the-moment is the most difficult and important part of being a disciple.

Robert Murray McCheyene said:

“For every look at sin, look ten times at Christ.”

How does Christ offer you a better identity than the false identity?

Dodson writes:

If my sin was sulking and my identity was victim, 2 Peter 1.3 reminds me that my identity is godly, a partaker of the divine nature. I was sulking in ungodliness because I thought I deserved better circumstances. I felt weak. Peter reminds us that we have “divine power granted to us for life and godliness.”

This scripture reminded me of my identity — godly — but it does not stop there.

It also offers us a Savior to trust, a counter-promise of divine power necessary to live a godly life, not a sulking life. What a relief! Our identity is godly, and our promise is divine power!

So, again, in short:

  • Find your Gospel counter-Identity
  • Trust your Biblical Promise

100 Ways to Love Your Neighbor

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

It seems as if it ought to be simple enough: “Love your neighbor.”  But experience tells me it is not as easy as it might seem.  And, if we take seriously the parables of Jesus, we learn it is not as easy as some tend to think.  When we read what Jesus holds up as the standard of neighborliness we realize that to love our neighbor is not the same as the absence of hostilities or even just the presence of genuine affections.  To love our neighbors we need to be involved in one anothers lives to some degree.  Even one insurance company gets that: “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there…”

But this is easier said than done in our fast pace, busy, world.  And Frankly, even State Farm’s claim seems a little dubious to me.  When I think about it, they’re only there for me when I pay them to be. Try dropping your policy and see if they seem like such “Good Neighbors” then.  I have my doubts.

But who can blame them? Life is busy.  And my neighbors are as active as I am.  How are we supposed to engage them, even if we commit to carving out the time?

Josh Reeves offer us a few suggestions.  Here are Josh’s Top 25:

  1. Stay outside in the front yard longer while watering the yard
  2. Walk your dog regularly around the same time in your neighborhood
  3. Sit on the front porch and letting kids play in the front yard
  4. Pass out baked goods (fresh bread, cookies, brownies, etc.)
  5. Invite neighbors over for dinner
  6. Attend and participate in HOA functions
  7. Attend the parties invited to by neighbors
  8. Do a food drive or coat drive in winter and get neighbors involved
  9. Have a game night (yard games outside, or board games inside)
  10. Art swap night – bring out what you’re tired of and trade with neighbors
  11. Grow a garden and give out extra produce to neighbors
  12. Have an Easter egg hunt  on your block and invite neighbors use their front yards
  13. Start a weekly open meal night in your home
  14. Do a summer BBQ every Friday night and invite others to contribute
  15. Create a block/ street email and phone contact list for safety
  16. Host a sports game watching party
  17. Host a coffee and dessert night
  18. Organize and host a ladies artistic creation night
  19. Organize a tasting tour on your street (everyone sets up food and table on front porch)\
  20. Host a movie night and discussion afterwards
  21. Start a walking/running group in the neighborhood
  22. Start hosting a play date weekly for other stay at home parents
  23. Organize a carpool for your neighborhood to help save gas
  24. Volunteer to coach a local little league sports team
  25. Have a front yard ice cream party in the summer

To read the rest of Josh’s ideas click: 100Ways.  Josh has a link at the bottom of his Top 25 list.

H.T. to Jonathan Dodson @ Creation Project.