It falls to the role of the pastor to bring the congregation back to the main thing: Jesus Christ and his mission for the church. In this post from January 6, 2021, I suggest some ways you can restore peace to your church.

The post The Main Thing appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

“A constraint should be regarded as a stimulus for positive change — we can choose to use it as an impetus to explore something new and arrive at a breakthrough.”

If you believe that “God causes all things to work together for good,”¹ then you must be wondering what God is going to do to redeem the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Disruption’s Opportunity

Whatever our thoughts, stances, and opinions are in relation to the pandemic, one thing is clear: it has disrupted all of us. Disruptions are jarring because they are unplanned and usually happen very quickly. Typically, when disruptions affect us, our reaction is to think of them as problems. But their positive side—and yes, they have one—is that they force our attention on to a new reality and create an urgency to do something so that we survive the disruption with good prospects for the future. 

Now is an opportune time to reimagine ministry to meet the challenges of new conditions and take advantage of the opportunities they provide. I believe those opportunities are a gift from God to the church. While the pandemic is a terrible scourge, it is not beyond God’s power to redeem it by bringing some good out of it. We need to open this gift of opportunity and use it! How will you participate with God in drawing out that good to bless others? CCCC members can discuss this post in The Green.

Surviving a disruption requires a mindset that goes beyond incremental changes to how we think about and do our work. There may be some very helpful tweaks to make, and those should be done, but more importantly when in a disruption, we need bold, creative ideas for completely new initiatives that make the most of the possibilities inherent in the disruption. 

Some questions to start a discussion with your team about innovation in your ministry include:

• What new needs have been created by the disruption?
• What other ways to pursue our mission does the disruption make possible that weren’t possible or desirable before?
• How can we make sure we are open to the expansiveness of God’s possibility and will for our ministry in this moment and going forward?

Whether we like it or not, both we and our society will be changed by the disruption of COVID-19. But there is good news in that if we take the initiative and act proactively we can achieve greater mission success because of those changes. 

The choices we make might even bring about changes that are much needed and overdue.

Without minimizing the terribleness of the pandemic, this time of disruption holds an opportunity for churches and Christian ministries to further develop and expand how they work on their missions.

Making the Most of the Opportunity

The current disruption is already benefiting the church in that it has:

• Highlighted more than ever the difference between the church and its buildings,
• Forced us to find new ways to be the church without relying on buildings or large gathered groups, and
• Upset regular routines and practices, making people more open to change than usual.

What we learn from our experience during the pandemic can continue to be used when large gatherings resume. Our new skills and practices can go forward and augment (and in some cases replace) the traditional ways of doing ministry. 

To make the most of the disruption, churches and ministries need to think innovatively about their activities with respect to two time frames: what they can do during the pandemic and what they need to do to prepare for ministry after the pandemic.

During the Pandemic

“Saddleback has never been closed during these past eleven weeks,” Warren says. “On the contrary, we’ve been doing more in our communities than ever before. Our buildings have been closed, but the church is not a building. We are a living, breathing body …we are a people, not a place.”

Rick Warren

A number of churches and ministry leaders have shared how they are creatively responding to the pandemic. Follow the links to be inspired by their stories and then see what ideas your own team can come up with.

• The quote above comes from Rick Warren’s interview about how Saddleback Church is making the most of the pandemic not only to serve but also to evangelize through its members rather than its programs.
• This church transformed an existing program that was no longer needed as it was into a high value program meeting specific pandemic-related community needs. 
• Some churches are thinking about the new possibilities of being a church without walls.  
• Fresh Expressions helps churches build new forms of churches alongside themselves to attract non-church people. Their post discusses how distributed leadership makes possible a distributed church that can minister during the pandemic. It also covers integrating your church into the digital era and listening, loving, and serving your neighbourhood.
• Here are a number of suggestions for engaging and re-engaging people with your church while reaching out to new people with new programs.
• Christ’s Church of the Valley in Phoenix, AZ developed a new mental health program based on text messaging, their website, and telephone and is providing financial assistance to individuals for their first ten counselling sessions.
• A ministry leader offers ten creative ideas to continue effective ministry.
• Here’s a church that turned to the ministries it supports to find ways to help them with their missions. The church is also supporting its local Social Services office.

But don’t just look at what other churches or ministries are doing. For real game-changing ideas, look to see what other industry sectors are doing. We are all in the same boat, having to innovate during the pandemic. Secular charities could have great ideas and so could the retail, manufacturing, hi-tech and other sectors of our economy. Hospitals, for example, improved their patient management system by examining automotive factories. Look for transferable ideas from sectors that are very different from our own. 

For guidance and ideas in developing creativity, please see my post on imagination. 

Preparing for after the Pandemic

During this time of disruption, churches and all other ministries should re-explore their missions and take a deep dive with a fresh perspective into what the words of their mission mean, what success of their mission looks like, and how their mission can be fulfilled. A process for how to do this will be the topic of my next post.

Conclusion

If the church makes the most of God’s gift of opportunity in disruption, it will emerge from this pandemic fresh, reinvigorated, and highly relevant to whatever the new normal turns out to be. 

The post Finding God’s Gift in Disruption appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Here are some highlights from today for the two courses.

The Church Always Needs Reform

In the morning class, we covered the Council of Trent, which was the Roman Catholic response to the Reformers. I’ll share two points that are relevant to the relationship between church and society in our time.

We Need Theologians!

The Council recognized that people did not know the Bible because the priests were not trained to preach the Bible. Many did not know Latin and could not even understand the words they recited of the Mass. Because the people were not allowed to read the Bible, they got their theology from the gnostic gospels and other non-canonical books and tracts. These had lurid details of Purgatory that made people eager to pay for Indulgences and Masses for the dead. The lesson for us is that if parishioners are not getting their biblical-theological knowledge from their church, they will get it from somewhere, and the quality of what they get could be anything from very good to terrible!

The Council responded by creating many seminaries to train the clergy. It recognized that the job of theologians is to make the Bible intelligible to the church.

There are lots of passages even in the Bible that could be misunderstood from a simplistic reading. For example, when Jesus says to cut off your hand, should you? How do people know how to properly read and apply the Bible? How do we help Christians move from their first experience of faith in Christ to a mature, nuanced, understanding of what Christian faith is all about? How can we help them get an accurate picture of who God is? This is a task that theologians can help us with.

A good example of a theologian working to improve biblical and theological literacy among the laity is the “For everyone” series of books put out by theologian Tom Wright (a.k.a. N.T. Wright). Advent for Everyone and Matthew for Everyone are just two of the many books in this series. Few will read his Paul and the Faithfulness of God at 1,700 pages, but anyone can read the accessible books in the Paul for Everyone series, which are about 175 pages each. Small group studies are very helpful too.

Don’t Drag Your Heels!

Cardinal Cajetan extended an olive branch early on to the Reformers with three proposals:

1. The Communion cup would be given to the laity, not just the priest;
2. Clergy would be allowed to marry; and
3. Reformers could informally accept church doctrine—in other words, they would not have to say they were wrong, just that they believed as the church believed.

Unfortunately, the Council rejected the Communion cup proposal because it would mean admitting that the church had made a mistake in the past, and they rejected married clergy because it was “inopportune at this time.” The olive branch died on the vine!

I would hope that if the Evangelical church were in a similar position, we would not be afraid of admitting a mistake but would do the right thing without delay.

No Faith in Religion?

In the afternoon class we explored faith and religion.

Blaming Religion for Evil

When secular people blame everyone in a religion for any evil acts carried out in the name of that religion, we usually say that our faith was hijacked by insincere people with ulterior motives such as politics or greed. Sincere Christians of real faith would not do those bad things.

This may be true, but secular people don’t distinguish between religion and faith. And that defense doesn’t account for times when whole populations of Christians get carried away, for example, with a political agenda, and become vulnerable to being hijacked by someone running for office.

Responsible Christian leaders must ask the really hard question, which is, Why is religion so vulnerable to hijacking? Every pastor should take on the job of ‘street-proofing’ their church members. They should be biblically and theologically literate enough that they can assess for themselves whether this or that appeal for their loyalty truly represents authentic Christian faith.

Faith and Religion Defined

Faith is the disposition of the mind and will to entrust oneself and one’s interests to the reality, reliability, and benevolence of the Living God.

Religion is the formalization of faith with doctrine, discipline, creeds, organizational structures, sacred sites and symbols, etc.

The professor noted that the freedom which is inherent in faith is not typically experienced in religion. However, some structure (religion) is required if we are to express our faith in community. So one is not good and the other bad, we just want the right mixture—lots of faith, and just enough religion to hold our communities together.

A Great Story

We heard the story of Thomas Cooper, an Englishman born in 1805. He left the Christian church for all the same reasons that Richard Dawkins outlines in his book The God Delusion. It appears Dawkins has nothing new to say against Christianity but is merely repeating arguments from a century before!

Anyhow, Cooper became a leading speaker and author promoting atheism. He hooked up with about twenty other leading atheists and they formed the Organized Society of Atheists, which had members both in England and in America.

But that’s not the end of the story. The best part is that not only Cooper, but every other member of the Society, eventually reconverted to Christianity!! Cooper became a Baptist minister and pastored a church in Lincoln, England. In the late 1880s, the church honoured Cooper by changing its name to Thomas Cooper Memorial Baptist Church, known as tcm today.

Why did every atheist in the group return to Christian faith? Timothy Larson, in his book Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England says there were five main reasons:

1. They experienced skepticism as entirely negative. It had nothing positive to offer them. They found it shallow and unfulfilling.
2. Morally, they were running on the fumes of the morality they had acquired from their previous Christian faith. On its own, they saw that skepticism provided no moral direction.
3. They became skeptics because of their commitment to reason as the sole source of knowledge, as opposed to revelation. But they came to realize that humanity has other sources of knowledge beyond reason, including instinct, feelings, experience, etc. and this opened up the possibility of a world beyond the physical realm.
4. They discovered that skeptics had a far too simplistic view of Scripture and read it too literally and without nuance. When they gave it serious study, they discovered the Bible wasn’t as bad as they thought it was.
5. Throughout their skepticism, they had retained great respect for the man, Jesus, and ended up returning to him in his fullness as Jesus Christ.

While they were skeptics, everyone said how intelligent, wise, and educated they were. When they returned to Christianity, those same people couldn’t now claim that they were ignorant, foolish, and unthinking, the usual charges thrown at Christians!

Perhaps these same five reasons could appeal to skeptics today. I have not studied them enough to know, but I suspect they would still be helpful arguments. How could you make use of this knowledge in preaching to or relating with those who do not yet know Christ?

The post At Christ Church: I Heard a Great Story Today! appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

This Week

• The Church Always Needs Reform
• No Faith in Religion?

Next Week

• Christian Faith and Modern Thought: Are they incompatible?
• C.S. Lewis and the Christian Imagination.

Reformations

Since this is the 500th anniversary of Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg church door, the beginning of THE Reformation, the Summer School theme is Reformation: Reform and Renewal in Christian Life and Experience. There have been many reformations in the church over the millennia, and the question is, Are we in need of another reformation?

This is a timely question, and the opportunity to study up on how the church has historically dealt with upheavals of various types might be instructive for us today. How has the church decided what to hold fast to, and what is cultural and can change or adapt?

Monday was the first day of classes and I’ll just give some key ideas and impressions. Of course, these are provisional ideas because they will all be developed over the next four days.

The Church Always Needs Reform

Today we concentrated on the first three years of the Reformation: 1517-1520. All of the major issues that the Reformers had with the Catholic church were on the table by the end of this short period. Here are some interesting points from the lecture:

• Pope Francis said in a 2016 homily that there were two good things that came out of the Reformation:¹
  1. “With gratitude we acknowledge that the Reformation helped give greater centrality to sacred scripture in the (Catholic) Church’s life.”
  2. “With the concept “by grace alone”, he [Luther] reminds us that God always takes the initiative, prior to any human response.”
• The Catholic Church’s response to Luther was way too long-delayed to have any hope of healing the relationship with the Reformers. They waited 28 years before holding a council to address the issues, and then the Council of Trent took another 18 years to decide what the response should be! Forty-six years is a long time to formulate a response to a crisis! By then the horse was out of the barn and there was no returning. This made me think of the need for the church today to respond quickly to the issues of our times. If we don’t respond in good time, then the world will just pass us by. And when we do finally respond, it will be too late.
• The Roman Catholic church did make a surprising number of the corrections Luther had called for.
• Incidentally, it was from the time of the Reformation that the Catholic church became known as the Roman Catholic church, a far more accurate description of what it really is than just Catholic alone.

No Faith in Religion?

This course is promoting faith while critically assessing religion (the institutional structures of the church). It was heavily philosophical today, and I’ve never taken a philosophy course, so this is all heady stuff for me.

The whole lecture boiled down to a couple of key points:

1. Plato and his student Aristotle disagree with one another. The dichotomies between them have never been resolved, leaving everyone frustrated. Dominicans, such as Thomas Aquinas, follow one, and Augustinians, such as Martin Luther, follow the other. And that’s why Luther disagrees with Aquinas. The question is, Can we live with the tension between different philosophies without having to synthesize them?
2. I wondered why philosophy would be an issue at all when discussing theology. So I asked, “Given that the Bible is God’s self-revelation and that philosophy is humanity’s own thinking, why should questions about God and his nature be subject to the approval of human philosophy?” Some theologians reject Biblical-theological insights to God because they don’t fit within human philosophical concepts. The answer was that there are two ways that the Bible and philosophy interact, and to me these are extremely important because I think they explain the difference between Mainline (liberal) and  Evangelical (conservative) Protestants:
   • Philosophical Theology starts with theological reflection and then uses philosophical concepts as a servant to theology to help explain it. In essence, Biblical theology rules.
   • Theological philosophy does the opposite. Biblical theology is tested against philosophy and when the two are incompatible, philosophy rules.
   • As I read the four textbooks for this course, I had a major “Aha!” Conservative Protestants use Philosophical theology while liberal Protestants use Theological philosophy.
   • A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I wonder what a real philosopher would make of my little, but for me anyways, significant insight!
3. René Descartes messed everything up with his “Cogito, ergo sum” idea. Everything we experience in society today can be traced back to these three words. What “I think, therefore I am” means is that the only truth there is, is inside us. There is no objective truth ‘out there’. You can have your truth, and I’ll have mine, and they’re both equally valid even if they cannot both be objectively true! To me, Descartes’ thinking can have bizarre implications. Here’s an example: In the class, there was a projector on the table, and eighteen people in the classroom. How many projectors are there? This is not a joke! Descartes would say there are eighteen projectors because we all see the projector differently, each from our own perspective. The ‘imp’ in me thought, “Okay then, I’ll just get up and take my projector out of the room and leave the other seventeen projectors for them to use! Then we’ll see how many projectors there really are!” Fortunately, the wiser person in me did not say any of that out loud! But back to serious business. Subjectivism and individualism are the natural consequences of Descartes’ philosophy. The professor stated that we need to transcend Descartes, but that no thinker has yet toppled him. There needs to be a better way to think, he says, that draws us back into community. However, there is no quick fix to the way society thinks today. If Descartes is ever overcome, it will be a long time before society is transformed once again.

So there’s some food for thought for you. Hope you enjoy ruminating on it.

The post Monday at Christ Church, University of Oxford appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

A denominational leader was on the road promoting the denomination’s recipe for flourishing churches. Although I do not pastor a church, when I heard about his presentations I took the opportunity to sit in on one. He was quite passionate about what needed to happen and he observed that while some pastors were really doing it and their churches were flourishing, there were others who didn’t get it and their churches just existed.

During his presentation he said he wished he had enough money to be able to say to some of the pastors, “Look, if you’re not going to do anything with your church, please retire early and I’ll make up the difference between your pension income and your salary until you reach retirement age. Just give us back your church so we can do something with it!“

The church needs courageous leaders. By courageous, I mean leaders who are willing to risk their jobs by saying what really needs to be said to their own communities. We need leaders who understand the times, discern God’s direction, and then who are willing to stand up to any resistance to change in order to make the church or agency what God really wants it to be.

Change Demands Courage

We need courageous leaders now because our times demand courageous leaders!

• Our context has changed.
• We are a minority in our society.
• We differ from society over the relative priority of various values.

The church today is gradually waking up to the fact that “That was then, and this is now.” The world around us has changed, and the church must learn how to be the church in a different set of circumstances. That requires change.

The problem is that people tend to grow comfortable with the way things are and not want anything different. Resistance to change makes a ministry’s default future a continuation of the status quo. It will slowly fossilize. And someday, if nothing changes, that ministry will be no more.

Unfortunately, the group that wants no change is usually quite vocal and powerful. Typically they are the people who created and financed the current status quo. They may still be among your major donors and on your board. They are people who leaders tiptoe around. But of course leaders, for the sake of the mission and future of the ministry, must challenge resistance to change wherever they find it. Courageous leaders know that leadership is all about guiding people through change.

It takes courage to unsettle people. It takes courage to disrupt the routine. It takes courage to stop doing something that is successful now, in order to start doing something that is more vital for future success. It takes courage to do what’s right even when it is not popular.

Three helpful books for leading people through change are:

1. Leading Change
2. The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach a Changing World.
3. Who Stole My Church?

Becoming a Courageous Leader

A number of leadership models will help people become courageous leaders.

The Servant Leader

If leaders are reluctant to challenge people who are stuck to grow and become all that God wants them to be, then the servant leadership model reminds us that “a servant-leader focuses primarily on the growth and well-being of people and the communities to which they belong.”¹

This may mean that sometimes leaders see what people truly need for their own good even when they don’t see it themselves. John F. Kennedy wrote about this from a politician’s perspective:

The voters selected us, in short, because they had confidence in our judgement and our ability to exercise that judgement from a position where we could determine what were their own best interests, as part of the nation’s interests. This may mean that we must on occasion lead, inform, correct, and sometimes even ignore constituent opinion, if we are to exercise fully that judgment for which we were elected.²

Leading like this means that there will be times when you have to go through “short-term pain for long-term gain.” That takes courage!

The Steward Leader

Stewardship is often thought as preserving the past so it can be passed on. This is stewardship of the past. Christian stewardship of the past means that we steward our faith.

We are also stewards of the present. This stewardship is about accountability for what we are doing right now, for how we are currently using the resources and opportunities which God has already provided for us. This is stewardship of our organizations.

And then there is stewardship of the future. This is about investing today so our ministries can thrive tomorrow. It is about networking, exploring, and searching, looking out for new, creative, fresh ways of pursuing our mission over the next several years. It is about equipping our organizations and people for greater service in the future. It is about building healthy organizations that will be sustainable and effective for another generation after our time in leadership has passed. This is stewardship of our mission.

There is one thing that faithful stewards cannot steward. Ministry leaders cannot steward a certain way of doing things. That would be to steward the means. And if you believe you are to steward the means, then you have lost sight of the ends. As I wrote in my book, The Church At Work,

Luke says his gospel concerns only what Jesus “began to do and teach,” and yet his gospel and its sequel, Acts, show that Jesus’ time on earth came to an end shortly after the close of the gospel when he ascended into heaven. So how does Jesus continue to do and teach? Luke makes it clear that Jesus continues to work through the Holy Spirit….The Hebrew and Greek words for the Holy Spirit mean “invisibility, movement, power and life” and convey the idea of God in action. We live in an ever-changing world, so when we know that the creative and dynamic Spirit of God is actively guiding the church to meet new challenges, we should expect change and development to be the result.

Change may be as uncomfortable for the leader as it is for the group. It may take you out of your comfort zone to do something you haven’t done before. But because the world continues to change, you must steward the faith, the ministry, and the mission if you want to fulfill your call to ministry. It takes courage to really steward a ministry!

The Prophetic Leader

Prophetic leadership is both corrective and visionary. Its focus is on discerning God’s perspective and conveying it to the people you lead.

If anyone really wants to be a prophet, they should first read Abraham Heschel’s masterpiece, The Prophets. This outstanding analysis of Israel’s prophets shows just how painful it can be to be used by God as a prophet. It meant a life of suffering, of danger, of always being counter-cultural in some way. It was a lonely life to be a prophet and it was hard for them to be so misunderstood by those in power.

Being called as a prophet is one of the most difficult challenges God can call us to. And yet he does, because he must, because we so often get off track from where he wants us to be. This is why I wrote up above that the church needs “leaders who are willing to risk their jobs by saying what really needs to be said to their own communities.” This is the hard part of being the leader!

When churches stop challenging their members to lean in to God and grow in Christ and simply provide comfortable cocooning for them, a prophet needs to speak correction. When any ministry becomes more about ‘me’ than about others or about God, God will send a prophet to bring them back to his purpose for the ministry.

Ministry leaders, don’t wait for others to be sent by God to bring correction and realignment. Allow God to use you as a prophet and speak correction to your own community.

In addition to correction, God sends prophets to stir up vision. Prophetic leaders interpret the times and help Christians know how to think about them. The instinct in response to the many changes in society we’ve experienced is fight or flight—attack or retreat. Neither are options! We are called to engage the world and to advance the church’s mission, so we go forward. But we don’t need to go forward into battle. Rather, we go forward in service and engagement. Leaders need to show their people how to do this. This will take courage because they will be sending their people out to be up close with the messiness of the world that God so loves, and they will likely be very uncomfortable—at least at first. But for the sake of the mission, you must do that.

Courageous leaders can find help interpreting the times by reading Christian thought-leaders.

Leading Courageously

To lead courageously, you must be very sure of what God wants you to do (discernment). You must lead with confidence (faith). And you must lead with inner strength in order to persevere (reliance on God’s power). Let’s take a quick look at those three requirements.

Discernment

As Christian leaders, we are not left to our own devices to figure out what is needed. We have God’s mind to help us discern the way forward. Therefore:

1. We need to develop our ability to confidently use Christian spiritual discernment practices.
2. We can test and leverage our individual discernment of God’s direction by practising communal discernment with others in the body of Christ.
3. We can be willing to take risks and bear the consequences knowing that if we have done our best with the previous two steps, God will see us through if we have been faithful to him.

A great example is Paul’s decision to enter Europe. As I wrote in my book The Church At Work, Paul started his second missionary trip intending to revisit the churches from his first missionary trip, but Paul discerns that the Holy Spirit is frustrating that purpose (step 1). One night, Paul has a vision and he tests it with the rest of his team (step 2). They agree, and off they go to Europe (step 3).

Faith

The kind of faith that Christian ministry  leaders need has these aspects:

1. They know that they were called by God to do what they are doing. Therefore they have faith that God is with them through all the challenges (and the easy times too!).
2. They know that the ministry is God’s ministry, not theirs. So they have faith that God will care for his ministry and provide them with everything they need to lead it to accomplish his purpose for it.
3. They know that God is still actively at work, and so they have faith that if they ask God, he will answer.

Therefore, with bold confidence, knowing that we have done everything we can to be in God’s will and in submission to his leadership, we can lead through all sorts of challenges.

Rely on God’s Strength

Ministry leaders must learn to rely on God’s strength. The day that I think I can lead CCCC in my own strength is the day my effectiveness here will be over. I did nothing to get this job because it was entirely God’s doing (that’s another story), and it was God who provided the wonderful people on the board and staff who are helping me fulfill my call and CCCC’s mission.

Every day I start by acknowledging that I need God’s strength and wisdom to get through another day of leadership. God will provide. As I write this, just yesterday something almost miraculous happened in a meeting with another ministry and I was left in wonder at what God can accomplish when we simply make ourselves available to him!

Rely on God’s strength, not yours.

Conclusion

If you are not willing to be a courageous leader, then when you are done, your tenure in leadership will be marked as one of missed opportunity, of complacency, and of short-sightedness. It will be known as a time of management, but not leadership. A comfortable time, but not a visionary time.

Search the Bible for the word courage, and be encouraged as you read God’s repeated instruction to not be afraid, but to have courage. This is God’s word to his leaders throughout history: Be strong and courageous!

Key thought: Be strong and courageous; be a good steward and lead prophetically!

The post Leadership Courage appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Ulterior Motives?

The most important question though, is: What did Peter recruit these people for? Did he have another, unstated, goal for why he needed to recruit them? Did he have hopes of winning enough people to take over the government some day? Did he want to use the people to change Israel’s culture? No!

Peter preached, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.”¹

Peter’s only concern was for the people themselves. His one goal was to help them live the way God designed them to live, to be in relationship with God and to live with compassion, generosity, commitment to one another, friendship, and community spirit. Peter doesn’t say all this in the recorded part of his sermon, but we know this is what he preached because the immediate response of the people was that they did all these things.² It lines up with how the Ten Commandments tell us to live and it lines up with the entire Old Testament and all its lessons about living God’s way.

And the result of Peter bringing people to Christ is that non-believers looked at the new Christians and found the Christian way of life very appealing, so much so that “the Lord added daily to their numbers those who were being saved.”³

Attractive Actions

Moving forward a few years, we see the church developing its prophetic voice so that it could speak to people about God’s ultimate vision for humanity. They preached about how society could be, but they ‘spoke’ first through their deeds. They committed themselves to social action and cared for Christians and non-Christians alike. My favourite quote from this time period is Emperor Julian’s complaint:

“For it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galileans [Christians] support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us. Teach those of the Hellenic faith to contribute to public service of this sort.”

The church developed a powerful prophetic voice that could not be ignored because individual believers demonstrated, at their own cost, what a better society looks like, giving credibility to the church’s suggestions.

Our One Motive

The key thought for the church to remember today is that Jesus gave the Great Commission to the church, but God gave all of humanity the Creation Mandate, so the church is to help humanity do its job, not do its job for it. Our fundamental role is that of a helper, a servant, an advisor, not a ruler or a judge. We shouldn’t think of ourselves as over anyone else. A holier-than-thou attitude is not appropriate for Christians because we must always remember that “There but for the grace of God go I” We have received God’s unmerited love, and having found a good thing for ourselves, our attitude should not be one of superiority but of letting others share the great gift just as we have. We are co-labourers with the rest of humanity in stewarding this world. We need to help them steward it well.

We can be guided in how to help humanity by looking to Jesus and seeing how he helped us. Jesus came into our world and took on a lowly, humble form to serve humanity from within.

What We Can’t Do

For the church to move forward with God’s blessing, we need to get rid of any lingering spirit of triumphalism, hunger for power, desire to have status, or anything else that takes us away from a spirit of service. Any hurts we have suffered that cause us to want retribution, any harshness in our tone, has to go.

I don’t think these problems are widespread in the church at the organizational level, but I do think the problem is something we have to deal with more frequently at the personal level. I know how much I struggle when I’m with secular people who disparage Christianity. If you regularly step outside our Christian sub-sector, especially if you have contact with the social elites, you know firsthand the negative comments people make about Christians, and particularly evangelicals. My natural tendency would be to respond in an unhelpful way that would make me feel good but do nothing for my Christian witness, and it is only by consciously thinking about the points I’m making in this post that I choose to restrain myself.

We can’t let our own human failings get in the way of presenting others with the Gospel and the Christian way of life. We must present an authentic witness to the Gospel’s power and application in our own lives. We can’t give those who disparage us any excuse to see behaviour that confirms their opinion. Instead, when they encounter us, everything about us should jar them enough to challenge their stereotypes and prejudices.

Christian Service

We can be of service individually acting on our own, or as a group acting through specialized ministries or church programs. But whatever we do, we need to be attractive through our words and our deeds to those who do not yet know Jesus or God’s love.

There are times when confrontation is necessary, and Jesus had those times too, but our signature impression on the public should be one of love and service, showing a better way of life in which everyone can flourish and be all that God intended them to be.

Building Community

This beautiful window at Trinity United Church in Kitchener Ontario depicts Jesus during his ministry, and is a powerful reminder of the place of the church in society. Jesus is by the well, an important central part of community life, welcoming into his presence men, women, and children. He is not aloof, waiting for people to find him and come to him, but he has come to where they are, and is among them, touching a boy and looking directly at a woman and her child, inviting them to come closer. The people are the focus of his attention, and he is the focus of theirs. All eyes are on him, and everyone is drawn to him.

The Challenge

This is the exactly how Christ’s church should be seen today: people in our communities should find us out and about in the community, in the midst of their lives. They should see from what we do, how much we love them and care for them. And when they need help, they should know they can get it from us.

Key idea: The church is a servant to humanity, joyfully and lovingly serving all people

The post What Is Our Goal, Really? appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Evangelicalism reinforced the growing sense of the sovereign power of the individual….Evangelical conversion did not break the will of sinners, but energized and redirected it, giving them a powerful sense of control in their lives. People came out of conversion not with a sense of the incapacity of the human will, but as Christian activists imbued with a strong sense of the power of their own individual will.
Donald Scott in “Evangelicalism as a Social Movement.”

Pastors of evangelical churches, this post is primarily for you (although it has good thoughts for us all). Evangelicals currently have a pretty negative reputation in secular society. It would help our cause if every evangelical engaged with and made positive contributions to society as an openly evangelical Christian so that the public can see the good that we do (Mat 5:16). Do we stand confidently in the public sphere with a strong sense of our own God-given individual power? In the current polarized environment, I wonder.

Are your parishioners looking out church windows anticipating what they’ll do out there? Or are they looking out in relief that they are comfortably ensconced in a safe haven? Have they got the ‘fire in the belly’ that the ancient church had? A great question to consider is: How might we recapture the spirit of the ancient church?

My prayer is that every member of your church will feel strong, bold, powerful, and purposeful and that they will go out and fully engage with their world as evangelical individuals.

What Keeps Us Disengaged from the World

The problem is that many evangelicals do not feel strong, bold, powerful and purposeful. Many of us huddle in our churches and Christian enclaves. If we look out the window at all, it is only to more greatly appreciate the cozy room we have made for ourselves inside or to worry and despair about how great the darkness has become.

Various sources show significant problems in the whole church, and the evangelical wing is not immune. Even where reports show we are doing better than other branches of Christianity, the results are still nowhere near where they should be. Let’s look at several issues and see what pastors can do.

Indicators of Mission Success Are Declining

The biggest issue is the declining engagement by evangelicals with their own faith! The 2013 Canadian Bible Engagement Study found that between 1996 and 2013:

• those who read the Bible daily fell from 9% of the Canadian population to 5%
• those who read it monthly fell from 28% to 14%
• at the same time, weekly church attendance fell from 27% to 16%
• those who strongly believe the Bible is the word of God fell from 35% to 18%¹ and
• although evangelicals read more frequently than other traditions, the percentage of evangelical daily readers dropped by one-third since 1996!²

The Canadian Bible Engagement survey shows that those who identify as Christians fell from 83% to 67% of the population between 1996 and 2013, while another source reports that those who identified as No Religion increased from 12% in 1991 to 24% in 2013.³

We have to admit that we can’t go on as we have. The world is changing ‘out there’  and ‘in here’. If you disconnect from the primary means by which God reveals himself to the world (the Bible) and from the meetings designed to build up your faith (church attendance), your spiritual and missional life can only cool and eventually die.

The Canadian Bible Engagement Study finds that reading the Bible regularly is connected with:

• confidence that the Bible is indeed God’s word to us
  • so preach and teach about its reliability
• conversation about what the Bible says and how it affects the readers’ lives
  • so preach application for today’s world,
  • promote small group discussions (they should read the Bible and talk about what they’re reading, and not just watch videos about the Bible – direct engagement with the Bible is the way to really “own it”),
  • encourage people to share from the Bible as opportunity arises in their personal circles
• community that supports Christian faith.
  • This is a by-product of the first two points, but it highlights that church attendance and reading the Bible are very closely interrelated.
  • Christians should build their own communities of workmates, family, and friends in which they are a spiritual support as needed. One of the ironies of the always on, social media world is that people feel more alone than ever. Someone willing to be a real friend, and not just a virtual friend or casual acquaintance, may be just what they need.

Here’s the report every pastor should read:

Salvation: More than a Ticket to Heaven

Another issue is that some people understand salvation as nothing more than forgiveness of sins and an admission ticket to heaven. Once saved, they’re just putting in time until they die. These Christians squander a lifetime of productive activity that God has in mind for them to do (Eph 2:10) because they bracket out everything between their salvation and death/resurrection.

They do this to themselves because they’ve already done the same with Jesus’ life, jumping directly from Christmas to Easter. They’re the ones who say Jesus was born to die for our sins, which is true enough, but they forget that Jesus was also born to invite people into a newly defined community of God’s people, and to demonstrate how his Father wants us to live in the present time. Their Bible might as well contain only Genesis, Romans, and Revelation!

Remember, a tombstone with two dates separated by a dash tells you nothing about the person’s life. Their life was in the dash. So’s yours, and that dash is very important to God.

When evangelicals treat Jesus’ life and ministry as a dash, we are left with nothing to say or contribute to society aside from the salvation message. Evangelism is our primary mission, yet surely a Christian perspective on the human condition should produce many ideas for improving our world – ideas that secular people could accept as good ideas on their own merit and that would make life a little more like what God intended.

Pastors, be sure to tell the rest of the story. People know what they have been saved from, but do they know what have they been saved for? It’s not just heaven! Help people make the most of their dash. Preach that they have been saved for a purpose here on earth. Fulfilling the Great Commission must lead to fulfilling the Creation Mandate.

It’s Too Hard to Think about All the World’s Problems!

Another reason for not engaging the world is that it’s just a lot easier to ignore it. Reality requires hard work. It’s tempting to say, “I’d rather be thinking about what a nice life I will have in heaven than face the ugly truth that there are abused, starving, victimized people, and also abusive, oppressive, victimizing people, and even people who just don’t care about anyone else. Besides, isn’t God going to blow everything up and start fresh anyway?”

Well, on the latter point, there is significant theological debate about the “end of world” imagery used in Scripture. Regardless, surely no one would argue that we shouldn’t care for our world and alleviate suffering as best we can!

It seems human nature avoids hard thinking. For example, most people avoid thinking about their own death. Who wants to think about their Will, their burial, and life that goes on for others but without them? Well, the fact is, we die. That’s life!

In the same way, it’s hard to think about the world’s problems and how to bring God’s love into situations of misery and suffering. Life is much less complicated when you avoid the issues or blame them on the system, especially when the Bible says this is the way it is (eg., Mat 26:11). But we simply must address them because God has called us to be his people and live for the sake of the world. Avoidance never made anything go away!

Pastors, God saved us so that we could be his agents. Preach about the hard issues and give your congregation a biblical-theological perspective that will help them deal with:

• broken families
• war and terror
• poverty
• addictions
• practices that dehumanize people
• social justice
• harm to the environment
• commerce and the economy
• conflict resolution that avoids power plays

The list of sermon topics is as endless as the issues your parishioners face every day and as the issues reported in the news.

We Can Do Better

Pastors, I’ve laid out what you can do. May God guide you as you work through the suggestions.

Christian agencies, you have an important role because with your specialized knowledge, you can provide resources and thought leadership to our pastors.

And denominations, you can encourage your churches to see a new way of being the church. You can encourage creativity and risk-taking. You can share knowledge and provide thought leadership.

To all ministry leaders, do everything you can so that all believers think of themselves “as Christian activists imbued with a strong sense of the power of their own individual will.

Key Point: The church exists for the sake of the world, so it must address the problems of the world.

The post There’s a Big World Out There! appeared first on CCCC Blogs.