Missional Mandate

Gospel Clarity for Missional Calling

/ Dennis Griffith / 3 Comments

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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by Josiah Bancroft

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.

Mission @ the Heart of God

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

There are the five parts of the Bible:

  • The God of the Old Testament is a missionary God, calling one family in order to bless all the families of the earth.
  • The Christ of the Gospels is a missionary Christ; he sent the church out to witness.
  • The Spirit of the Acts is a missionary Spirit; he drove the church out from Jerusalem to Rome.
  • The Church of the epistles is a missionary Church, a worldwide community with a worldwide vocation.
  • The end of the Revelation is a missionary End, a countless throng from every nation.

So I think we have to say the religion of the Bible is a missionary religion. The evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable.

Mission cannot be regarded as a regrettable lapse from tolerance or decency. Mission cannot be regarded as the hobby of a few fanatical eccentrics in the church. Mission lies at the heart of God and therefore at the very heart of the church. A church without mission is no longer a church. It is contradicting an essential part of its identity. The church is mission.

~ John R. W. Stott, from Authentic Christianity

Being a Transforming Presence

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

As followers of Jesus it is as imperative for us to fight every inclination toward dualism as it is to fight against legalism.  While legalism is widely recognized as relating wrongly to the Law, the error of dualism is not as widely acknowledged in our Evangelical circles.

Simply put, dualism is like split vision, seeing things only as either spiritual or secular.  All things are spiritual.

Walt Mueller reminds us that there are two kinds of dualism common in the church:

  1. Escape – When personal salvation is viewed as an escape from the world into the church, and that the world around us is then to be avoided.
  2. Segregated Spheres – Believing God is only concerned about the spiritual dimension of our lives, we dedicate our spiritual lives to the Lord, but then are shaped by the world in our professional and social lives.

Jacques Ellul offers this critique:

This dissociation of our life into two spheres: the one “spiritual” where we can be “perfect”; and the other material and unimportant, where we behave like other people; is one of the reasons why the Churches have so little influence on the world… All we can say is: That is the exact opposite of what Jesus Christ wills for us, and of that which he came to do.

Here are three teachings of Jesus that should remind us that God intends for his people to engage the culture around us.  We are not to avoid it. We are to attack it stealthily.

Matthew 5.13 – Salt of the Earth

Matthew 5.14 – Light of the World

Matthew 10.16 – Sheep among Wolves

Odyssey of Church Outreach

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

Outreach and evangelism are among the most important responsibilites the Christian has to his/her community. They are also perhaps the most intimidating. 

A friend of mine, who is not a pastor, took over the the outreach ministry of his church. He was aware at the outset that this ministry was in need of an ovehaul.  During the ‘heydays’ in this congregation most of the growth occured through transfers from neighboring churches experiencing turbualnt times. The church had never really cultivated a healthy outreach/evangelism ministry.  And recently this church had itself just emerged from a prolonged period of conflict. Consequently, little effort had been made in a few years to reach out to the community. Mere survival and self-preservation had been the prevailing mindset.  But the dust having settled, many in the church had been developing a renewed interest in their missional responsibility.

One of the first things my friend did was to take an informal survey of other members of the congregation.  What he found was somewhat unexpected.  Many of the members expressed a genuine willingness to reach out to the community.  This part was as he suspected.  But what surprised him was the nearly universal sense of inadequacy that the church members felt.   They would be willing – even anxious – to reach out to their neighbors.  They just didn’t think they knew how.  So they had never taken any initiative.

I don’t think this is an uncommon problem.  I remember my own experience.  As a Junior at the University of Tennessee the director of Athlete’s in Action, Doug Pollock, was mentoring me.  He suggested it was time I learned to do evangelism.  The idea of actually introducing others to a vital relationship with Jesus was exciting.  But it was also overwhelming.  Consequently I was paralyzed by the thought.  (I learned, by coercion – which I don’t recommend. Eventually, though, I faced my fears and began more freely sharing my faith – with varying effectivenss.) 

I also remember reading about the amazing beginnings of the Calvary Chapel movement. In the early days the founder of the movement, Chuck Smith, faced a congregation laced with fear of evangelism. He recognized this as a very common issue in most churches, and for most Christians. He also thought about the approach most pastors – including himself – employed to combat the paralysis: Guilt.  But as he re-diagnosed the problem a different solution came to mind.  He realized that the primary problem most people experienced was not a lack of desire, but a lack of confidence.  Guilt would not remedy this problem, only compound it.  Instead he realized that outreach needed to be modeled and taught. Smith believed that when the people grew in confidence that they would neither dishonor God nor destroy friendships in the process, evangelism would become natural and common.  And he was right! 

KEY CONCEPTS

Two key concepts to remember concerning evangelism are Intellectual and Incarnational. 

Intellectual deals with the content of the faith, an awareness of people (including ones self), and to some degree an understanding of the methods employed.  (Methods may not be the best word, because it seems to connote a formula. That is not my intention. But I’ll elaborate on methods in another post, which I hope will bring some clarity.) All of these things are important for effective evangelsim.  It will likely take the average person a little work to develop a competent grasp of these things. But while the old saying is true: “nothing worth doing is easy”, these things are not as complicated as many seem to think.

Incarnation means “in the flesh”.  It is used uniquely of the person and ministry of Christ. But it is also applies appropriately, I believe, to the followers of Christ who are commissioned to carry on his work on earth.  Jesus himself said: “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” (John 20.21) 

Jesus’ statement requires us to ask oursleves: “Just how did the Father send Jesus?”  When we understand the answer to that question we have a picture of what Jesus intends for his followers, his church.  And without trying to oversimplify the doctrine of the Incarnation, we must understand that fundamentally it means the Father sent Jesus “in the flesh”. (See Philippians 2.5-8, John 1.14). Or as Eugene Peterson wonderfully puts it: “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.”

While it is important to recognize that Christ is unique in his Incarnation, and that there are aspects that cannot be replicated, it is also important to recognize that he has conferred an incarnational mandate upon his followers. We are commissioned to live and proclaim our faith in our neighborhoods.  Media may provide some helpful tools in the work of evangelism, but it is no substitute for living out our faith in the midst of both other believers and non-believers.  To do what Jesus commissioned us to do, to act as Jesus acted, we must “move out into the neighborhood”. We cannot stay behind the fortress-like doors of the church and simply invite select people to visit us there.

OBSTACLES

The two “I’s” – Intellect & Incarnation – are import, inseparable, and inconvertible.  Understanding these concepts is a good start. But we also need to be aware that there are obstacles that need to be addressed if we want to experience frutiful evangelism, and have effective outreach from our churches

In the couse of subsequent posts, I  will address six common obstacles that hinder Christians, and churches, from effectively

1. Lack of Understanding of the Gospel

2. Prayerlessness

3. People Blindness

4. Outdated Methods

5. Timidity

6. Motives