Being “missional” is all the rage these days. Are you missional? Is your worship missional? Do you sing missional songs? All words are prey to sloganeering, and it appears that this one is in a bear trap. The more places I see it, the more it’s becoming obvious that those promoting it are the least missionally minded–that is, willing to confront unbelief with the Gospel of God’s grace.
My most recent encounter occurred at a “Reformed” church where the pastor talked (I can’t say preached) about his pet gerbil and lessons he learned about God from his weightlifting. In doing so, he robbed me of hyperbole. I just can’t top it. It’s funnier now. At the time I whispered to my wife that we need to come up with a point at which we leave the service. When does blasphemy lite become too much? (more…)
Lamin Sanneh notes the rise of Christianity in Africa:
“In 1970 there were 120 million Christians, estimated; in 1998 the figure jumped to just under 330 million; and in 2000 to 340 million. The projections call for over 600 million Christians in twenty-five years. If those projections are right–and I will not go to the scaffold for them–apart from South America, Africa will have more Christians than any other continent, and that for the first time.” (Whose Religion is Christianity?, p41)
Nathan O. Hatch comments on the preaching of Whitefield and Wesley:
The enduring legacy of the first Great Awakening, Harry S. Stout suggests, was a new mode of persuasion. Defying a church callous to its common folk, John Wesley thundered that he would preach nothing but “plain truth for plain people.” While Wesley and George Whitefield were concerned about theology, their primary interest was that each person have a profound experience with God. This required an idiom in touch with people by the time of the American Revolution, the warmth of such evangelical appeals and their ability to draw the unchurched into cohesive fellowships made evangelicalism a major social force on both sides of the Atlantic.
By the time Paul got to Athens, her greatness was setting. Roger Wagner notes that
The Roman poet Petronius, in his Satyricon, claimed it was easier to meet a god in Athens than a man. According to Pausanias, there were more statues of gods and heroes in Athens than in all the rest of Greece combined. This idolatry not only fed the gross superstitions of the masses, but in Athens it also coexisted with the intellectual and artistic pursuits for which the city had been historically famous. By the time Paul visited the city, however the intellectual life of the city was moribund.
The arete of the Greeks had a good run, but the Athens of Pericles and Aristotle was absent from the rear view mirror. (more…)
The author of the book of Hebrews says to “not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (13:2). Why is it easy to neglect hospitality? One primary reason is because we misunderstand what it is.
The phrase translated “show hospitality to strangers” is all one word in the original, the Greek word philoxenia, literally love of strangers. It could be rendered “Don’t forget the love of strangers.” This is the heart of hospitality. Although the word “entertained” is used, the idea is not to entertain in the sense of wine and dine your friends in your contemporary salon. There is also a word play going on this passage. “Entertain”, xenizo, also means to surprise or astonish. What is more surprising to a stranger than to get invited in to warm company? And yet who was ultimately more astonished, Abraham or the angels? In biblical hospitality, both the giver and recipient, host and guest, are in for a surprise. This is a wonderful adventure in every suburb of the kingdom of God. (more…)
Following Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well (the biblical setting for an engagement scene), John says “Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me all that I ever did” (John 4:39).
For those with sentimental views of love and a tighter-than-the-Bible views of the Gospel, Jesus’ confrontation with the woman loses its punch. He didn’t just deliver the bad news “we are all sinners” or talk about her failure to glorify God though both are true. In love, he spoke to her sin while she was trying to hide it from him. He’s talking about living water, and she if she doesn’t directly know Solomon’s comparison of clean water to sexual fidelity and delight (Prov. 5:15-20), she certainly knew the connotation.
Teachers often note the racial lines Jesus crossed talking to the Samaritan woman, and he did cross those lines. But he also crossed the line to point out this woman’s sexual corruption straight up the middle. She had had five husbands and was shacked up with her latest man. Christ’s kind and frank confrontation frees her, and what caused many of her countrymen to believe was this testimony. They did not believe because Jesus was a magic-man who somehow figured out her secret sins. He told her what she had done, and how to be free of it, in all mercy and love. This woman was notoriously immoral like any woman who has had five husbands, and what a testimony–someone who didn’t pridefully or scornfully shame her, but took the time to tell her the truth! All who would turn others away from not just sin, but their sins, must do likewise.
After Abraham offered his son Isaac as God had commanded (and then prevented), the angel of Yahweh says this:
“By myself I have sworn, declares the Yahweh, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.” Genesis 22:16-18
We are all children of Abraham, imitators of him who put his faith in God. And of course God is the greater Abraham who offered his only begotten son Jesus who died as the true lamb of God. All Christians know we are sons of Abraham and that God, foreseeing that God would justify the gentiles, preached the gospel to Abraham saying in him all the nations of the world would be blessed (Gal. 3:8). So the promises made to Abraham, the ones he believed, went beyond the land of Canaan, to other lands where all the unwashed goyim used to live.
So far so good. All spiritual promises, right? Now look back at Genesis 22:17. The promise include the children of Abraham possessing the gates of their enemies. It’s impossible to confine this promise to Palestine or gnosticize it away to gates of people’s hearts. Gates are places of authority and power–the capital buildings in our terms–and in Jesus’ kingdom power and authority is exercised through service and sacrifice.
We know that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal and we are not to do any possessing by worldly means; Malchus gets to keep his ear. But this is not the same thing as saying the church will not demonstrably advance and the nations be discipled. Unless a seed goes into the ground and dies it will not bear much fruit, and the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. But as the seeds goes in, a big tree really does grow up. Right now, that tree is estimated to be well over a billion large, a redwood of Trinitarian Christians worshiping Christ all over the world (though increasing in the southern hemisphere and the east with white Christians being an oxymoron in 30 years if things continue as they have been and Philip Jenkins is to be trusted, but I digress).
Believing the promises given to Abraham should be at the heart of any eschatalogical understanding. Lose the millennialisms and focus on the promises and the power of the atonement. Efforts to divorce such promises from the growth of the gospel throughout history only produces evangelical schizophrenia, knowing that all authority has been given to Jesus, but therefore going to give it a sure-to-fail try at discipling the nations.
Many often lament the unchurched state of northwest United States. It feels like a different world from other parts of the country where churches on every corner reflect an understanding of the world that is, on the surface at least (or at most?), Christian. We easily forget how young our country is and how the spread of the faith to the West has always been slow. I’m looking at a map here of the US in 1850. It’s only half settled, and Texas is the westernmost state. Every western state is less Christianized (138-288 Religious Adherents per 1,000 people) than the rest of the states. Frontiersmen were generally not church planters. Alexis de Tocqueville saw them as “adventurers impatient of any sort of yoke, greedy for wealth, and often outcasts from the States in which they were born. They arrive in the depths of the wilderness without knowing one another. There is nothing of tradition, family feeling, or example to restrain them.” Perhaps this is overstated. It came from a Frenchman afterall.
The Methodist preacher went after these wild lands and grew the church so effectively that historians have called the nineteenth century the Methodist Age. Nancy Pearcey describes them:
By contrast [to state supported clergy], the Methodist circuit preachers became a legend on the frontier. They traveled constantly, virtually living in the saddle. They were willing to preach to tiny frontier outposts, even to individual households. Most were single (they were on the road too often to maintain a family), worked for almost no money, and literally died young form the sheer hardship of their lives. One minister dubbed them God’s “light artillery,” perfectly adapted to the frontier. They had a reputation for braving terrible conditions and bad weather, so that during particularly bad storms it used to be said, “There’s nobody out tonight but crows and Methodist preachers.”
Physical danger is no longer the issue in the unchurched west, and now the church needs men who will put roots downward that will bear fruit upward for generations. The need is dire for new artillery.
Preaching on Ezekiel 34:26, “And I will make them and the places round about my hill a blessing; and I will cause the shower to come down in his season; there shall be showers of blessing”, Spurgeon offers this:
The object of God, in choosing a people before all worlds, was not only to save that people, but through them to confer essential benefits upon the whole human race. When he chose Abraham, he did not elect him simply to be God’s friend, and the recipient of peculiar privileges; but he chose him to make him, as it were, the conservator of the truth. He was to be the ark in which the truth should be hidden. He was to be the keeper of the covenant on behalf of the whole world; and when God chooses any men by his sovereign, electing grace, and makes them Christ’s, he does it not only for their own sake, that they may be saved, but for the world’s sake. For, know ye not that “ye are the light of the world;”–”A city set upon a hill, which cannot be hid?” “Ye are the salt of the earth;” and when God makes you salt, it is not only that ye may have salt in yourselves, but that like salt ye may preserve the whole mass. If he makes you leaven, it is that, like the little leaven, you may leaven the whole lump. Salvation is not a selfish thing; God does not give it for us to keep to ourselves, but that we may thereby be made the means of blessing to others; and the great day shall declare that there is not a man living on the surface of the earth but has received a blessing in some way or other through God’s gift of the gospel.
Eschatology should be determined less in the light of difficult millennial passages and more in the light of God’s promises and the efficacy of the atonement. Spurgeon was no postmillenialist by name, but he expected the Gospel to do the work of blessing every family on the earth, a consequence required by no other eschatalogical doctrine. I should be quick to add that all evangelistic progress is made by sacrificial preaching and living, that no crop comes unless a seed goes into the ground and “dies.” Jesus went into the ground and died, and biblical hope is nothing other than a bumper crop.
Our homes must be rife with the aroma of love. Those who visit us should notice immediately that they have left the world of self-serving, egocentric narcissism and have entered a safe harbor where people value and esteem others above themselves. Outsiders should enters our homes and never want to leave. Our neighbors should find excuses to visit us just to get another whiff of the fragrant aroma of love. The brokenhearted should long to be near us. The downtrodden and the abused should seek us out. Families on the brink of disaster should point to us and say, “Why can’t our home be like that?” –Voddie Baucham
What kind of impact would the church have if it was filled with homes like this? The church is always a work in progress, but this sort of home-life should be our goal. With loving, self-sacrificial and hospitable families, the work of the Gospel is plain and therefore the Word of the Gospel goes out.
