Integrating Missionally

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How we frame something determines how we understand it.

My own denomination is calling for a Great Commission Resurgence. One reason they are doing so is because they want to restructure the denomination. They are attempting to own it the Conservative Resurgence of the 1970’s-1990’s in this way. Their heart is in the right place in that they also want to see the convention be a leader in churches who are baptizing people. Others are calling for a Gospel-Centered lifestyle and a Gospel-Centered church.

Both ideas sound great. This is a movement calling for people to live and speak the Gospel and to go and tell the world of Christ’s love. What could be wrong with that? It sounds biblical. But is that really the case? How are we framing the discussion by using these terms?

Please Note: This is not necessarily an attack on those pushing for these ideas. This is as much a discussion on how we frame our words and how those words affect meaning as the methods being promoted.

To use Gospel-Centered in reference to Christianity or the Church places the church and Christianity in submission to the Gospel. That sounds nice, but its not biblical. The church is to be submissive to Christ alone. Otherwise, it is not a church, but a community organization.

To use Great Commission Resurgence language frames the discussion that a whole-hearted allegiance to Christ has been there all along, people are just not carrying out the Great Commission. I get the concept. It is an attempt to emphasize the behavior that corresponds to our belief. This is a danger of those who are trapped in modernity’s tentacles. This requires us to agree that belief and behavior can be separated. It cannot. You live what you believe.

One reason people aren’t sharing the Gospel is because they do not really believe the Gospel – with all their heart, soul, mind and strength. Another reason they do not share may be because of how we have taught them to frame the message of the Gospel. We frame the conversation in terms of the future, not the present. We tell people they can get out of hell and get into heaven. All they have to do is intellectually ascent to a few truths, and all is well. That is not the Gospel. That is an attempt to get people into a baptismal pool to increase numbers.

So why do we not need a Great Commission Resurgence?

1. We are emphasizing action without a consideration of the heart.

We are challenging people to tell what they may intellectually know, but do not fundamentally believe. Intellectual knowledge is not belief. What you believe will be demonstrated by behavior. If we want to see the Gospel shared more, we need to address the issue of relationship, not behavior.

2. Action stems from emotions and passions first, not intellectual knowledge.

According to Steve Addison’s new book, Movements That Change the World, every movement is a result of white-hot faith, then a commitment to a cause, then contagious relationships. Only then will rapid mobilization and adaptable methods take place. In other words, passion born out of a relationship leads to commitment and then passionate, contagious relationships. Those relationships lead to mobilization and methods. Until our passionate relationship with God through Christ is in place, a movement cannot happen.

3. We are focusing on the Great Commission while not emphasizing the Great Commandment.

The Great Commandment must come before the Great Commission. The great commandment speaks to relationships. The Great Commission speaks to behaviors that occur as a result of relationships. If we do not get the relationships part right, there will be no great commandment.

What do we need to do?

1. We must help people fall in love with Jesus all over again before we guilt people into actions that will be unsustainable. Again, we have framed the Gospel as unnecessary for this life. We have framed it as future focused, and all we need to do to ensure our eternal condition. How it has been framed means that there is no need for people to be involved in a community of Faith or in a relationship with Christ because it is not about relationships, it is about an intellectual understanding of events two thousand years ago. It may be that we need to share the real Gospel so that people can begin a real relationship with Christ.

2. We need to reframe the meaning of success for our churches. We have turned success into a numbers game that is killing pastors. They are so worried about the numbers they are burning out. Their relationships with God, Christ, themselves and others are unhealthy. We must help people understand that being obedient to God is more important than numbers. We must help people learn how to be healthy emotionally and spiritually. We don’t know how to do that; we aren’t even there ourselves.

3. We need to help our pastors model a healthy relationship with Christ, not necessarily a great understanding of theology. Theology is important, but only in the context of a relationship with Jesus. We need relational theology, theology learned and experienced in the crucibles of a relationship with Jesus. A life immersed in the power and presence of Jesus will be broadcast to the masses without words. Systems will not pronounce the Gospel; love will. Love of God, of ourselves, of others. They will know, by our love – of God, ourselves, and others – that we are followers of Jesus.

To say we need to focus on an object or behavior rather than Jesus to describe our Christianity or our community of Faith. We need to let our lifestyle, our actions, our communities be defined by Jesus and him alone.

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God's Glory

It is All About God Is. 48:1-22

The sermon was preached at Mission Fellowship Church in Middletown, DE on July 11, 2009. In this sermon, I looked at Isaiah’s statement about how it is all about God and His glory.

Maybe you have heard the saying, “Christianity can’t be true. Look at the people in the church. They’re sinners like everyone else!” It is true that the shoddy lives of Christians do cast doubt on the Gospel. In fact, Nathan said to David in 2 Sam 12:14, “You have given the enemies of God a great opportunity to blaspheme and ridicule God.” However, how does God think? Christianity must be true. Look at the people in the church. They’re sinners like everyone else!

What’s the difference in these two statements? The skeptical objection has as its premise works-based righteousness. The logic of God is grace: Christianity must be true, because only God would save sinners. God proves that he is God by his grace to sinners.

If you are in Christ, whatever God is doing in your life right now is not an experiment that he might abandon if he gets fed up with you. God would have to give up being God before He’d quit on you. And why is God devoted to you? It’s not because you risk looking like a failure. You already do. So do I. It’s because God will never let his purpose fail. The defeat of grace to sinners would be the defeat of God.

So why does God put up with us?

That is a great question. First, we are God’s people (1-2). Those whom God has redeemed and extended his grace are His children. Once a child of God, we are always a child. The way Philippians 1:6 is written, Paul says that once God starts something in you, there is nothing in heaven on on earth that can keep him from accomplishing that. Including us.

It is all about Him

God is Prepared (3-8). He prepared us for the good things that He would do. He announced them ahead of time so that we do not get glory or so that we do not give anyone else the glory. He prepared us for the bad so that we know what is coming by not being obedient. We are warned so that there are no excuses. He also prepares us for the New Things. God will surprise us in ways we would not understand. If he did not announce it, we would end up saying, “I saw it coming!”, trying to get the praise ourselves.

So it’s all about Him (9-11). Everything God does is for God’s sake, not ours. He works to demonstrate his sovereignty over all gods, over all peoples, and over all of creation. As a result, our performance does not secure us in God’s favor, our lousy performance is used by God to display his favor. In addition, He loves us for reasons that make sense only for Him and though we grieve his heart, we do not defeat Him

What are the Implications of God Putting up with Us? (12-22)

• God will never fail to be God (12-13)
  • He is the first and the last
  • He is never forced into anything
  • He succeeds over all opposition
• Even in our unwelcomed experiences, God is behind the obvious (14-16)
• In all the turbulence of life, God is teaching us and leading us forward (17)
  • He teaches us to “profit”
  • He teaches us what really matters
  • He teaches us a willingness to gladly suffer the loss of all things in order to gain Christ
• We must decide how we live (18-22)
  • There is a path of restlessness (18-19, 22)
  • There is a path of release and freedom (20-21)
  • God is a good Savior, wherever and however He leads

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Gorman's Book on Justification

Today, we continue looking at Justification from Michael Gorman’s book Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology. The last post ended with this following:

For Paul, then, in light of Romans 5 and 2 Corinthians 4, justification has:

1. an objective basis, or means, which is Christ’s death as a gift of God’s gracious initiative (Rom 5:1, 6-8, 9-11; 2 Cor 5:18, 21), together (implicitly) with Christ’s resurrection as God’s life-giving power;

2. a required subjective response, or mode, that effects justification/reconciliation, which is usually (though not always) explicitly labeled pistis, normally translated “faith” or (in its verbal form) “believe” (Rom 5:1; 2 Cor 5:20)

3. substantive content, which includes reconciliation, participation, and transformation (Rom 5:1-2, 9-11; 2 Cor 5:14-15, 17, 21)

The essential content of this transformation is fidelity to God and love for neighbor, the very heart of the covenant.

To demonstrate this, Gorman sets out to address three questions arising from these conclusions:

• What is the distinctive meaning of Christ’s death for Paul?
• What is his distinctive understanding of pistis? and
• What is the connection between the meaning of Christ’s death and the meaning of pistis, on the one hand, and the significance and character of the transformation inherent in justification, on the other?

This post will deal with Christ’s death as the quintessential act.

According to Gal. 2:15-21 and Phil 2:6-11, Christ’s crucifixion simultaneously manifests both vertical and horizontal covenant-keeping. As a result, it fulfills the two tables of the Law as the quintessential covenantal act. This aspect of Paul’s interpretation of Christ’s death has been largely overlooked, according to Gorman, resulting in a significantly truncated understanding of justification.

The death of Jesus is interpreted in the New Testament as an act of love. According to Paul, Christ’s death was a demonstration of God’s love (Rom 5:7-8; 8:31-39) and a manifestation of his own love (Gal 2:20; Rom 8:34-35, 2 Cor 5:14). Paul also interprets Christ’s death as an act of obedience to God the Father and as an act of faith, as in covenantal faithfulness or faithful obedience. Recent scholarship “suggests also that Christ’s death is depicted as his act of ‘faith’ or ‘faithfulness’ (pistis) in seven passages within the undisputed letters of Paul where the Greek grammar is ambiguous: Rom 3:22, 26; Gal 2:16 (twice), 20; and 3:22; and Phil 3:9.”

Since the Reformation, the ambiguities have been read as “faith in Christ,” but the arguments for interpreting these phrases as an example of the subjective genitive, translating them as the faith[fulness] of Christ are persuasive to many, including Gorman. If “faith of Christ” is the correct translation, “Paul says that Christ’s faithful death embodies the righteousness of God (Rom 3:22), constitutes the means of justification (Gal 2:16;3:22;Phil 3:9) as well as the mode of justification (Rom 3:26), and somehow even provides the manner of living in the present (Gal 2:20).” (59)

For Paul, “Christ’s death on the cross was simultaneously his act of self-giving faith(fulness) toward God (2:16,20) and his self-giving love toward humanity (2:20). It was a unified act of vertical and horizontal covenant fulfillment, of love for God and for neighbor.” (61) Therefore, “Christ’s death is not merely a reprentative, messianic act or substitutionary act. It is, more specifically and importantly, the quintessential covenantal act, in which love of God and of neighbor are joined and embodied in the one act of a faithful, loving death. And because Paul sees Christ not only as Israel’s Messiah but also as Adam’s antitype (Rom 5:12-21; 1 Cor 15:22, 45), such an act is also the quintessential human act.” (62-63)

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Corporate Worship

Destructive Idols
Is 46:1-47:13
The idea I worked with in this text centered around how the Babylonians could not see the destructive impact their worship of idols was having on their lives. God commands worship and because they would not turn from their idols because they could not see its destructive impact, God destroyed their culture.

As I sought to apply that to our church, I noted how our cultural lens impacts how we do church, how we do worship, how we do ministry, and how we view others in our community. We need to be careful about how we live a culturally-defined Christianity because it may not be biblical Christianity. I also talked with them about having people in their lives that can help them their behavior so as to be able to see the sin that so easily entangles us. We all need a editor in our life. We all need a coach.

We get born into a culture. In fact, if we never move between cultures, it is all we know. Ironically, moving between cultures makes us feel like a foreigner but it reveals our own view of the world because we are having to learn to cope with not being in our own culture.

Even if we move between cultures, we can get socialized into a culture. Over time as we live in culture we embrace the culture we live in and we move from a foreigner to an insider. We begin to talk, think, speak and live like the culture. Being an insider means that we don’t see culture, we see life through the cultural lens that shapes us. Seeing culture means we have to step outside of our culture to look back into it. We have to learn to see differently.

For the church, we need to be aware of how we see life through our cultural lens and how culture has defined us. If we cannot see life apart from our cultural lens we cannot adapt to the coming evangelical decline. This is going to be of great importance in the coming years in USAmerica.

It also means that culture has defined how we do church. That danger of that is that our practices become idols we worship rather the God. The activities of church can become idols we worship. The size of church can become idols we worship. The pattern and style of worship, even how we understand church can be an idol that we worship. My wife and I were in a church once were I got ripped for changing how we did communion on Christmas Eve. I was trying to make it meaningful, they saw it as devaluing their way of doing Christmas Eve communion. They methodology was an idol to them.

If we can’t see outside of our cultural perspective and outside of our socialized behaviors, we may find ourselves missing the worship that God requires. It happened to the Israelites on multiple occasions in the Old Testament. God warned them that it was not their activities of worship that were required, but love that saw itself being worked out through justice, love, mercy and humility.

It will also distort how we see other cultures and ministry in other cultures. I have people from the South talk with me often about how we could do ministry in the Mid-Atlantic. They suggest we talk to developers who would give us land for a building, or use the latest denominational material or organize around a particular teaching method. They see everything through their Southern Missiological lens. Truthfully, it is not effective most of the time, because our area of ministry is different than the Southern Cultural Christianity. I also admit that I see things from a Mid-Atlantic perspective and that impacts how I view ministry in other areas.

We all have biases. But we must have those around us that challenge our way of thinking. We need editors and coaches who can help us see the blind spots and who can help us not turn our traditions and practices into the ONLY way of living. We do not way our traditions and practices to become idols.

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His Strategy is Better Than You Think

These are some of the highlights from a sermon I preached at Mission Fellowship Church in Middletown, DE on June 20, 2009 entitled, God’s Surprising Strategies from Is 44:24-45:25.

Until now, the emphasis in Is. 40-66 has been on God’s power completely. The point has been to help Israel “see God”, the God whom Babylonian ideology has attempted to eliminate as a serious factor in the world.

Missing in this has been any discussion of human agency apart from a “victor from the east” and “one from the north”, a human agent summoned by God by not named. This changes with the end of Is. 44.

This section is important for another reason. It demonstrates the way in which biblical faith links the rule of God and human history. And it displays that truth that God works in mysterious ways.

God had ordered everything in life. He is now channeling all that creative power into the work of Cyrus. God works with a variety of people to carry out his will. In this case, it is Cyrus. Isaiah calls Cyrus “My Shepherd” and “God’s Anointed”. The Greek version of the Old Testament in Is. 45:1 calls Cyprus “Christos” or a “Christ”. It’s a messianic term. In addition, the Shepherd and anointed are titles of the royal line of David. Now, however, they are being transferred to a Gentile, Idolater King whom God has “called” to accomplish His task. What is the reality then? God uses whatever persons and methods He wants to, whether we like them or not. He uses them for a redemptive purpose, for accomplishing His redemptive will. In addition, even a Cyrus can foreshadow the true Messiah and Shepherd, Jesus Christ. If God is sovereign, all of history is his plan. All events have an ultimate cause, fit into an ultimate purpose, and find their significance in one final victory.

If God were a tribal deity, life would be much simpler. When the going got tough and you pray and things don’t get better, you would know that your local god is overwhelmed by a superior force. However, if God is really king of everything, the bigger questions get easier while the smaller questions get more complex and difficult. The smaller questions are questions like:

• Why do I have cancer?
• Will my bills get paid?
• Will I be able to retire?
• Will I ever find that special someone?

These are not smaller questions. They are weighty questions. Yet, they are smaller than:

• Does life have meaning?
• Is there any hope at all?
• Am I on my own in the universe?

The Gospel of Jesus leaves many of the smaller, urgent questions unanswered, but never fails to remind us of the greater redemptive purpose at hand: The re-creation of all creation and God’s love directed towards His people. Whatever God does, He is taking us deeper into His love and asks us to trust him enough not to take offense but follow Him.

Why? It’s all for a bigger purpose. In Is 45:1-7, Isaiah uses a participle of purpose (le-ma-yan) three times:

• That Cyprus may know that is it I, the Lord (vs 3)
• For the sake of my servant Israel
• So that people will know (vs 5)

It is first a reminder to Cyrus that he is being submissive to Yahweh. It is a reminder to Israel of God’s unfailing love. Finally, it’s a demonstration to all the world of the supreme power and love of God!

Isaiah reminds here that the very thing we perceive as problems, God perceives as his Glory. God owns the dark moments of life.

In our arrogance, however, we tend to reject how God wants to work. The Israelites certainly did. They could not fathom that God would use a pagan king to accomplish their release. They were insisting that God do things their way. In doing that, they were not letting God be God, they were trying to be God themselves. Yet, God will not do the things we expect. Surprise is often how God works.

• The incarnation was a shock
• The virgin birth was a scandal
• The cross was an embarrassment

God is too independent for faith in him to always be easy. However, whatever your struggle is, God wants you to know that “His plan is better than you think!”. Don’t doubt Him. Embrace the journey and embrace the work of God in your life. Let Him suprise you. His plan is better and more effective than anything we could concoct ourselves!

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