12:13 PM Steve Scott’s latest essay is a real winner: Evangelicalism: Government Programs vs. Church Programs. Steve points out the irony that those Christians who want smaller and smaller government are often the same Christians who want more and bureaucracy in the church. In my book The Jesus Paradigm I referred to this as the “FDR-ing of the church.” Steve writes:
Continue reading Opposing Government Bureaucracy, But What About the Church?
As you know, I’m involved in writing projects up to my eyeballs. One book I am currently writing is called Godworld. (I think I’ll subtitle it something like Enter at Your Own Risk). Over the past few days I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this topic. Emerson once noted in his Journal that “Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.” For many years a considerable portion of my time has been devoted to the problem of ecclesiology. Being stubborn by nature and a professor by training and education, I hold to the notion that the status quo is rarely acceptable. John Wesley wanted his movement to recover the full message and power of what he called “the Primitive Church.” He was an ardent student of early Christianity. Wesley also studied the Anabaptist groups and the Moravians. Wesley and his followers knew that awakening interest in the church without bringing people to pursue Gospel living was a waste of time. When pre-Christian people talk about “church,” unfortunately they often refer to people whose alien language and jargon have nothing to do with the real world in which these same people live. Christians dress and act in abnormal ways. Their traditionalist churchianity is a language no one seems to understand. The New Testament, by way of contrast, calls Christians to “exegete” the culture that God entrusts to them and to indigenize their faith — witness the 18th century Methodists who wrote Christian hymns to be sung to the tunes people loved to sing in the public houses. As for missions, the New Testament calls all of us — clergy and laity alike — to live out our faith in our mundane professions. (Few are called to seminary!) We are to penetrate the culture for Christ and thus fulfill the second commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself.” The love of which the New Testament speaks is not so much a feeling as a disposition of good will and service toward others, including people outside our own social networks, nationality, and race. We are to love others as God does. It is just as important that we love the lost as it is to believe that Jesus died for our sins. Growing into the likeness of Christ is essentially “downward mobility.” Because people matter to God, they matter to us. The goal is not mere conversion but bringing people to full devotion to Christ. Evangelism is therefore normative for God’s people. It is simply living and sharing the amazing good news about Jesus in one’s own sphere of influence. This is the process I want to be involved in. It is the process of entering this amazing Godworld — and doing so at our own risk! I want to be involved in this Godworld, not because I am a professor in a seminary, but simply because I am a follower of Jesus.
“Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.” I would not pretend that I am yet consumed with a love for the lost as Jesus was. I have, however, begun to travel this downward path of Jesus. Just as all Christians have been joined to Christ and participate in His life, so all Christians are called to the ministry of witness and invitation.
Think about it.
(From Dave Black Online. David Alan Black is the author of Energion titles Christian Archy, The Jesus Paradigm, Why Four Gospels? and the forthcoming Will You Join the Cause of Global Missions?. Used by permission.)
7:10 PM Good evening, thoughtful bloggers of cyberdom! I want you to meet James. I thought of James while we were discussing Epaphroditus in Greek 3 class on Tuesday. James was my translator when I trekked among the Guji tribe in southern Ethiopia a couple of years ago. At the time he was a young and optimistic 24-year old, freshly graduated from the university. All who knew him loved him. His smile was infectious and so was his passion for the Gospel. Well, when Jason Evans (one of my elders at Bethel Hill) and I decided to minister among the Gujis, we needed a translator, but not just any translator.
7:55 AM Equipping is not delegating. Think about it. Pastors who think they are equipping may only be delegating.
6:02 AM Off to “regions beyond” (2 Cor. 10:16). Why? I’ve discovered that upward mobility is a downer. I’m haunted by the idea that God can take average everyday people like me and use them for His purposes. There was nothing special about the 70 whom Jesus sent out two by two. And I imagine they were scared to death to be sent too. But they did what they were told to do, because Jesus was their Boss. So they girded up their loins, tightened up their sandals, took a deep breath, and away they went, elbows swinging with every step, preaching, teaching, healing. And it worked! Miracles happened because He was with them.
Serving Jesus is like making a 60-yard touchdown run. (Yes, God plays football.) And the ball’s in our hands. Let’s get out of our holy huddles (especially those of you who have the “perfect” church) and run a play or two for Jesus. Yes, you will get scraped up (or beat up — ask Paul!) along the way. But it’s pretty hard to deny the need that is out there.
By the way, there’s no sense in playing unless you expect results. Don’t limit your playing field to the stained glass aquarium (or to your living room). Jesus is building His church worldwide, and He wants to use you. That’s why you’re here in the first place. Serve Jesus and there will be pain. Live for yourself and there will be pain. There will be pain either way. So why not get your pain working for you rather than against you? Let’s unleash foot soldiers for Jesus. Don’t need to go across the world to do this either. Know how to bake a pie and take it to a neighbor? Welcome to the mission field!
We’ll, enough preaching for one day. (I have a feeling you’re a member of “the choir” anyway.) As I leave for the airport I feel very much alive. The birds are singing, and the donkeys have started munching the grass (donkeys don’t “graze”; they “munch”). God has provided all of this and a good deal more — the stars, the sun, the breeze, wives and husbands and sons and daughters and “infants to sweeten the world” (to use a phrase from an ancient prayer). I am but a tiny speck in the universe, a ripple on the ocean of life, yet God does not overlook me, cannot in fact, because He created me, redeemed me, even promised He would never leave me nor forsake me, taught me to trust Him when I was only 8 years old, a mere child but old enough to realize that we are not doomed to meaninglessness, even in the wilderness of loneliness, even when “God’s megaphone” (C. S. Lewis) of pain shouts to us, despite my keen sense of past failures, my blindness, my selfish isolation. It is heartening to think that even when the work seems so daunting, even when I feel so inadequate, I can still be a vessel bearing the life of Jesus — the way that James Fraser gave himself to the people of China many years ago because God had called him to forsake selfishness and to cease to live for himself, or the way Jim Elliott taught the Aucas what God’s love looks like by dying for them. I have been given a small assignment, but no assignment is small when God assigns it, when it helps to complete the quota of Christ’s sufferings, when we say YES to what He requires of our journey with Him simply because it’s the journey He wants to share with us. And so —
“We follow, now we follow — Yonder, yes yonder, yonder. Yonder.”
— Gerard Manly Hopkins, The Golden Echo.
(From Dave Black Online. Used by permission. David Alan Black is author of Energion titles The Jesus Paradigm, Christian Archy, and Why Four Gospels?.)
From Dave Black Online:
9:18 AMOn this, the 67th anniversary of D-Day (our invasion of Nazi-occupied France), I can’t help but reflect on World War II. My parents’ generation has been called “The Greatest Generation” because they fought the Nazis and mobilized for the Cold War. What we forget is the fiscal burden they placed on their posterity, producing an American political system that seems utterly incapable of tackling any big multigenerational problems, including our national debt. America has entered an irreversible downward spiral. We had better understand this new era we’re entering. Continue reading A Legacy of the Greatest Generation
6:44 PM Lloyd Ogilvie, one-time chaplain to the U.S. Senate, once had a serious accident while on study leave in Scotland. One afternoon he was walking on the beach when he fell between some rocks and broke one of his leg bones. Almost fainting with pain, he managed to crawl for several miles until he found help. The break required many months of recuperation in a hospital in Scotland.
During that time Ogilvie confronted what he called the “seduction of the secondary.” Alone with his pain, and away from the strain of his work, he was reminded of the preeminent need to have a close walk with God, to live for the Gospel, and to find his identity solely in Christ and not in any other human being. Continue reading Life is Too Short to Live for Temporal Dreams
4:40 AM What my trips to Ethiopia have taught me:
(From Dave Black Online. Used by permission. David Alan Black is author of Energion titles The Jesus Paradigm, Christian Archy, and Why Four Gospels?.)
7:17 PM Today in Greek class we went on yet another rabbit trail, this time along the path of ecclesiology. Church structures must be participational rather than representative, I told my students. My excuse to bring up this topic? A very good one indeed. The vocabulary to today’s lesson included the adjective hekastos, which, as everyone knows, is one of the my all-time favorite New Testament Greek words — so much so that I even invented a new word in the English language in its honor (see my book The Jesus Paradigm for a reference to the doctrine I call Hekastology).
8:08 AM Sometimes I wish I had never read the Gospels. How simple and easy life would be if I had never been brought to realize some of the requirements of discipleship as Jesus brings them to life. How easy it would be to take life for granted and to live for myself. But having been reading the Gospels — really reading them — I am not the same person. What a contrast to the soft-minded pulp we humans produce in our efforts to say something profound about Jesus. Continue reading The Impact of the Gospels