From a sermon by Steven Cole:
I just read K. P. Yohannan’s powerful book, Revolution in
World Missions [gfa books]. He grew up in India and didn’t wear
shoes before he was 17 (p. 55). He has preached the gospel all
across India. He is not oblivious to India’s oppressive poverty. But
he strongly contends against getting distracted with meeting physical
needs, but ignoring the spiritual needs. He says that India has
seen 150 years of schools and hospitals brought to them by British
missionaries, but it has not had any noticeable effect on either their
churches or society (p. 103, 110).
Yohannan says that it is one of Satan’s lies that people will not
listen to the gospel unless we offer them something else first (p.2
109). He has sat on the streets of Bombay with beggars who are
about to die. He has told them that he does not have material
goods to give them, but he has come to offer them eternal life, and
he has seen many respond.
He says (p. 111), There is nothing wrong with charitable acts—but they are not
to be confused with preaching the Gospel. Feeding programs
can save a man dying from hunger. Medical aid can prolong
life and fight disease. Housing projects can make this temporary
life more comfortable—but only the Gospel of Jesus
Christ can save a soul from a life of sin and an eternity in hell!
Thus our emphasis should always be first and foremost on
evangelism and discipleship. Social concern is a result of the gospel.
We must not put the cart before the horse (pp. 106, 99).
Showing posts with label ministry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ministry. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Friday, July 10, 2009
What in the World is the Missional Church?
Wow, wow, wow, wow.
That is all I can say in response to this lecture by Jonathan Leeman (Capital Hill Baptist and Nine Marks Ministries) on the missional church. Go here and click on Jonathan Leeman's talk "What in the World is the Missional Church."
In this talk Leeman critiques the "missional movement" calling to task such evangelical leaders as Tim Keller, Mark Driscoll, and, yes, even Ed Stetzer. He acknowledges his respect for them and how much he has learned from them, yet, as he says, they are not Jesus and so are able to receive some criticism. He also talks of what we can learn from missional leaders and here is where I found myself in need of repenting.
Good, good stuff.
If you find that the history stuff at the beginning bogs you down, skip to about a third of the way through where he begins his response. But then go back, the whole thing is worth listening to.
As I listened I found myself, at times, reflecting on the minutes of past Baptist Associational meetings that I have read and how when pastors got together back in the 17 and 1800's in America, they did it to wrestle with theological issues and to support each other in rightly dividing the word of truth. I found myself lamenting the fact that we don't do that today.
Talks such Jonathan's by Southern Baptists such as him are much needed. May there be more in the future.
BTW- It would do my heart good to know that somebody is actually reading these posts-even better yet, if someone else would post some things. If this website has proven to be of no help, let me know, and we'll just shut her down.
-Doug
That is all I can say in response to this lecture by Jonathan Leeman (Capital Hill Baptist and Nine Marks Ministries) on the missional church. Go here and click on Jonathan Leeman's talk "What in the World is the Missional Church."
In this talk Leeman critiques the "missional movement" calling to task such evangelical leaders as Tim Keller, Mark Driscoll, and, yes, even Ed Stetzer. He acknowledges his respect for them and how much he has learned from them, yet, as he says, they are not Jesus and so are able to receive some criticism. He also talks of what we can learn from missional leaders and here is where I found myself in need of repenting.
Good, good stuff.
If you find that the history stuff at the beginning bogs you down, skip to about a third of the way through where he begins his response. But then go back, the whole thing is worth listening to.
As I listened I found myself, at times, reflecting on the minutes of past Baptist Associational meetings that I have read and how when pastors got together back in the 17 and 1800's in America, they did it to wrestle with theological issues and to support each other in rightly dividing the word of truth. I found myself lamenting the fact that we don't do that today.
Talks such Jonathan's by Southern Baptists such as him are much needed. May there be more in the future.
BTW- It would do my heart good to know that somebody is actually reading these posts-even better yet, if someone else would post some things. If this website has proven to be of no help, let me know, and we'll just shut her down.
-Doug
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Multi-site campuses redux
From today's 9 Marks Blog comes this post from Jonathan Leeman. As I've noted before, I'm not a big fan of multi-site campuses and Leeman gives yet another reason why we should pause before jumping in. Good stuff.
-Doug
You won't believe it, but I found a page torn out of a church history book written one hundred years from now--in the year 2109. It comments on the present multi-campus "church" phenomenon. Here's what the page reads:
...the principle difference being caused by developments in technology. In the first millennium of the church’s existence, a heterodox bishop could corrupt the churches within his ambit in decades, maybe years. Even then his influence over other congregations was indirect, occurring through its leaders. In the twenty-first century, however, the bishops of so-called multi-campus churches could exert greater influence over entire congregations instantaneously via video-feed. No longer did the multi-campus pastor have to persuade the leaders of other congregations over years. He could project his own face before numerous assemblies week after week, and do untold damage in seconds.
Few anticipated how quickly these pragmatic, seemingly inconsequential shifts of polity would corrupt the churches throughout an entire nation. Ninety-six percent of evangelical Christians in America belonged to approximately one hundred multi-campus “churches” by 2030—the franchises swallowing up the mom-and-pop shops. Some of these franchises were originally orthodox. Yet many of them were not, which meant that the wolves now had a mechanism for multiplying their influence exponentially. Furthermore, the orthodox bishops were often replaced within a generation or two by less orthodox successors, in a way that unorthodox bishops are seldom, if ever, replaced by faithful men, simply by virtue of the kinds of trees the unorthodox pastor plants. The cumulative trajectory was downward, then, away from orthodoxy.
Gone were the days of the “ordinary pastor,” the man whose skills were not extraordinary, but sufficient to guide a ship with a hundred eternal souls safely through stormy waters to the distant shores. His sermons weren’t made for television. His music wasn’t good enough for the recording studio. Therefore, churches, feeling themselves entitled to professional excellence in all things, politely dismissed him, tore down the old buildings, built high-tech stadiums, and gave the league all-stars seven-year, multi-million dollar contracts.
Unawares, the leaders of the orthodoxy were all too happy to heed the siren call of pragmatism, believing the new mediums simply enlarged the reach of their orthodox pulpits. They failed to see how the medium would affect their message. Their congregations—plural—could no longer know them, and they could no longer know their congregations. Life and doctrine became separated, thus distorting the doctrine. Not only that, bigness was no longer the exception, but the norm, meaning that everyone became oblivious to the dangers peculiar to size.
A century which began with several bright stars—a proliferation of good literature, biblical preachers of the first order, even what some called a Reformed Revolution—ended darkly. Indeed, some of the century's best preachers, driven by the very desire to propagate the good message in their day, helped to undermine that message for the next generation by following the strategies of the marketplace. No one expected the devil to once more usher in the corruptions of the ancient Roman church through such a peripheral matter like church polity, even though he had done it before. (He always does his best work in the places where people forget to look.) Only now he did in decades what earlier he had taken centuries to accomplish. By the middle of the twenty-first century, the devastation was…
-Doug
You won't believe it, but I found a page torn out of a church history book written one hundred years from now--in the year 2109. It comments on the present multi-campus "church" phenomenon. Here's what the page reads:
...the principle difference being caused by developments in technology. In the first millennium of the church’s existence, a heterodox bishop could corrupt the churches within his ambit in decades, maybe years. Even then his influence over other congregations was indirect, occurring through its leaders. In the twenty-first century, however, the bishops of so-called multi-campus churches could exert greater influence over entire congregations instantaneously via video-feed. No longer did the multi-campus pastor have to persuade the leaders of other congregations over years. He could project his own face before numerous assemblies week after week, and do untold damage in seconds.
Few anticipated how quickly these pragmatic, seemingly inconsequential shifts of polity would corrupt the churches throughout an entire nation. Ninety-six percent of evangelical Christians in America belonged to approximately one hundred multi-campus “churches” by 2030—the franchises swallowing up the mom-and-pop shops. Some of these franchises were originally orthodox. Yet many of them were not, which meant that the wolves now had a mechanism for multiplying their influence exponentially. Furthermore, the orthodox bishops were often replaced within a generation or two by less orthodox successors, in a way that unorthodox bishops are seldom, if ever, replaced by faithful men, simply by virtue of the kinds of trees the unorthodox pastor plants. The cumulative trajectory was downward, then, away from orthodoxy.
Gone were the days of the “ordinary pastor,” the man whose skills were not extraordinary, but sufficient to guide a ship with a hundred eternal souls safely through stormy waters to the distant shores. His sermons weren’t made for television. His music wasn’t good enough for the recording studio. Therefore, churches, feeling themselves entitled to professional excellence in all things, politely dismissed him, tore down the old buildings, built high-tech stadiums, and gave the league all-stars seven-year, multi-million dollar contracts.
Unawares, the leaders of the orthodoxy were all too happy to heed the siren call of pragmatism, believing the new mediums simply enlarged the reach of their orthodox pulpits. They failed to see how the medium would affect their message. Their congregations—plural—could no longer know them, and they could no longer know their congregations. Life and doctrine became separated, thus distorting the doctrine. Not only that, bigness was no longer the exception, but the norm, meaning that everyone became oblivious to the dangers peculiar to size.
A century which began with several bright stars—a proliferation of good literature, biblical preachers of the first order, even what some called a Reformed Revolution—ended darkly. Indeed, some of the century's best preachers, driven by the very desire to propagate the good message in their day, helped to undermine that message for the next generation by following the strategies of the marketplace. No one expected the devil to once more usher in the corruptions of the ancient Roman church through such a peripheral matter like church polity, even though he had done it before. (He always does his best work in the places where people forget to look.) Only now he did in decades what earlier he had taken centuries to accomplish. By the middle of the twenty-first century, the devastation was…
Sunday, December 7, 2008
D.A. Carson's ironic advice to the SBC
I was listening to an interview with D.A. Carson, N.T. professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (if you haven't read his book "The Cross and Christian Ministry," go get it now and devour it, it will benefit you immensely), this weekend and he was asked if he had any advice for the S.B.C. This is his response:
"Learn again to go back to the Bible to expound the Bible as the whole counsel of God, check things according to the Bible again and again and again. I know there are some really excellent Bible teachers among SBC pastors…but I do get the impression that there is still a shockingly high number of people who still do not handle the Bible well…there is an awful lot of preaching that is cliche driven, cutesy, eviscerated of the Bible that is profoundly discouraging….there are rising movements for which we should thank God but there are other movements which are drawing significant numbers but which are of a more sociologically driven agenda."
Unfortunately, church planters seem to be among the worst offenders in this arena. By nature, we are entrepreneural and it seems to me that we are often so focused on building a congregation that we are apt to play loosey goosey with the text to justify any means we can concieve of to meet that end. If you would ask me, I would have to say that planters are often times more pragmatists than they are biblicists.
Lets be honest. When is the last time you heard a planter grapple with the Jurassic Park question (paraphrased): "Instead of asking 'can we do it,' the right question is 'should we do it.'" My answer is "almost never." It is often assumed that the ends justify the means. But on what do we base that assumption?
And if you challenge anyone on something they are doing they pull, what I'll call, the "1 Corinthians 9 card" : "Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone to win as many as possible...I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some" (1 Corinthians 9:19,23).
Apparently, according to the Church Planter's Exegetical Guide, this verse frees church planters up to do virtually anything to grow their churches. A plant in my town offered people $10 to visit their church. I've heard of others raffling away free cars and even promising free beer to visitors (which turned out to be rootbeer).
But is that what Paul had in mind?
What do you think?
What is Paul saying here? How far is too far- or is there such a thing?
-Doug
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