Missional Living

This is from the Coram Deo blog by Bob Thune.

When we first set out to plant a missional church, we had some lively debates over what exactly it meant to live missionally. Does it mean moving into a disadvantaged neighborhood and working for renewal? Does it mean living in the same zip code so we can truly be a missional community? Does it mean deepening already-existing relationships with co-workers? Does it mean deliberately changing my patterns of life to bring me into contact with non-Christians “on their turf” (bars, music shows, nightclubs, etc)? Our conversations about these matters seemed easily to slide toward people moralizing their preferences and looking down on others who didn’t think like them. (Which is one reason why we consistently need to be reminded of the gospel!)

Tim Keller helps to answer this question by observing that the standard pattern of evangelism in the New Testament centered around the oikos (Greek for household). But the word household in NT times was much broader than we tend to think of it. “In the Bible, evangelism does not happen primarily through programs… it happens naturally through one’s oikos, or household… A household was not just your family, but… a fairly tight-knit, close set of colleagues, kin, friends, neighbors. It was understood that when you became a Christian, you had been called to be a steward, evangelistically speaking, of your oikos.”*

In our day, Keller suggests that the biblical term oikos applies to at least five networks: your kinship network (family and relatives), your neighborhood (those who live near you geographically), your colleagues (co-workers or co-students), your affinity network (people with a shared special interest), and your friends (those from the other 4 networks whom you develop a close relationship with). The relative strength or weakness of these five networks varies based on your context.

What it means to live missionally, then, is to have authentic friendship with people in these networks. That’s it. If Jesus is truly important to you, and if you have real friendships with people, then Jesus is going to come up sooner or later in the natural course of sharing life. You shouldn’t have to artificially shoehorn Jesus into every conversation, nor should you feel the need to hide or downplay your affection for him. Those in your oikos will get to know Jesus as they get to know you.

So – is missional living primarily about your neighborhood, your co-workers, your hunting buddies, or your non-Christian family members? The answer is: yes.

[*Quoted from "Evangelism and the Steward Leader," mp3 audio from Redeemer Presbyterian Church.]

9 Ways to Know that the Gospel is True

This article was written by John Piper in 1999.

1. Jesus Christ, as he is presented to us in the New Testament, and as he stands forth from all its writings, is too single and too great to have been invented so uniformly by all these writers.

The force of Jesus Christ unleashed these writings; the writings did not create the force. Jesus is far bigger and more compelling than any of his witnesses. His reality stands behind these writings as a great, global event stands behind a thousand newscasters. Something stupendous unleashed these diverse witnesses to tell these stunning and varied, yet unified, stories of Jesus Christ.

2. Nobody has ever explained the empty tomb of Jesus in the hostile environment of Jerusalem where the enemies of Jesus would have given anything to produce the corpse, but could not.

The earliest attempts to cover the scandal of resurrection were manifestly contradictory to all human experience—disciples do not steal a body (Matthew 28:13) and then sacrifice their lives to preach a glorious gospel of grace on the basis of the deception. Modern theories that Jesus didn't die but swooned, and then awoke in the tomb and moved the stone and tricked his skeptical disciples into believing he was risen as the Lord of the universe don't persuade.

3. Cynical opponents of Christianity abounded where claims were made that many eyewitnesses were available to consult concerning the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

"After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep" (1 Corinthians 15:6). Such claims would be exposed as immediate falsehood if they could. But we know of no exposure. Eyewitnesses of the risen Lord abounded when the crucial claims were being made.

4. The early church was an indomitable force of faith and love and sacrifice on the basis of the reality of Jesus Christ.

The character of this church, and the nature of the gospel of grace and forgiveness, and the undaunted courage of men and women—even unto death—do not fit the hypothesis of mass hysteria. They simply were not like that. Something utterly real and magnificent had happened in the world and they were close enough to know it, and be assured of it, and be gripped by its power. That something was Jesus Christ, as all of them testified, even as they died singing.

5. The prophesies of the Old Testament find stunning fulfillment in the history of Jesus Christ.

The witness to these fulfillments are too many, too diverse, too subtle and too interwoven into the history of the New Testament church and its many writings to be fabricated by some great conspiracy. Down to the details, Jesus Christ fulfilled dozens of Old Testament prophecies that vindicate his truth.

6. The witnesses to Jesus Christ who wrote the New Testament gospels and letters are not gullible or deceitful or demented.

This is manifest from the writings themselves. The books bear the marks of intelligence and clear-headedness and maturity and a moral vision that is compelling. They win our trust as witnesses, especially when all taken together with one great unifying, but distinctively told, message about Jesus Christ.

7. The worldview that emerges from the writings of the New Testament makes more sense out of more reality than any other worldview.

It not only fits the human heart, but also the cosmos and history and God as he reveals himself in nature and conscience. Some may come to this conclusion after much reflection, others may arrive at this conviction by a pre-reflective, intuitive sense of the deep suitability of Christ and his message to the world that they know.

8. When one sees Christ as he is portrayed truly in the gospel, there shines forth a spiritual light that is a self-authenticating.

This is "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God" (2 Corinthians 4:6), and it is as immediately perceived by the Spirit-awakened heart as light is perceived by the open eye. The eye does not argue that there is light. It sees light.

9. When we see and believe the glory of God in the gospel, the Holy Spirit is given to us so that the love of God might be "poured out in our hearts" (Romans 5:5).

This experience of the love of God known in the heart through the gospel of Him who died for us while we were yet ungodly assures us that the hope awakened by all the evidences we have seen will not disappoint us.

Brent Walker Speaks about Religious Liberty

Article by Marv Knox

Baptists must hold in tension three sets of paradoxical ideas if they are to remain faithful to their heritage and champion freedom, Brent Walker told participants at the T.B. Maston Christian Ethics Award Dinner Oct. 30 in Dallas.

The awards dinner is sponsored every-other year by the T.B. Maston Foundation, named for a pioneering Baptist ethicist who taught at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth much of the 20th century. Maston shaped the ethical thinking of generations of ministers and gained a reputation for leading Baptists to support civil rights and racial reconciliation.

The foundation presented its 2009 Maston Award to Leon McBeth, a leading historian of the Baptist movement who taught at Southwestern Seminary for 43 years.

The history McBeth chronicled showed Baptists to be people who “fought for religious liberty -- for others as much as for ourselves,” stressed Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty in Washington.

If Baptists intend to preserve religious liberty, they must maintain balance within three sets of ideas, he added. They are:

• The two religion clauses in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The nation’s founders gave religious liberty “double protection” by including two religion clauses -- No Establishment and Free Exercise, he noted.

“Both ensure religious liberty; both require an institutional separation of church and state as a means to that end,” he said. “As soon as government starts to meddle in religion or takes sides in religious disputes, someone’s religious liberty is denied and everyone’s is threatened.”

Walker proposed a common-sense exercise for maintaining the tension between the religion clauses: “Every time we say ‘no’ to government’s attempt to promote religion to uphold the Establishment Clause, we should find a way to say ‘yes’ to its Free Exercise counterpart. This allows us always to seek to find a ‘win-win’ solution and keep these two clauses in proper balance.”

• Religious freedom and responsibility.

“Our freedom in Christ can never be separated from -- and must always be limited by -- the responsibility that we have to one another,” Walker stressed. “Freedom and responsibility, liberty and accountability -- these dyads must always be held in tension.”

Freedom and religious liberty are not ends in themselves, he added.

“We are free, in the words of the Great Commandment, to love God and love one another,” he said. “… And our freedom in Christ must always be exercised in the context of the responsibility we have to one another. This also involves the ethical imperative of ensuring everyone’s religious liberty. An attitude of ‘religious liberty for me but not for thee’ is self-centered, irresponsible and sinful.”

• Civic withdrawal and engagement.

“Historically, for most Baptists, the separation of church and state has never meant a segregation of religion from politics or to strip religious talk from the public square. It does not relieve Baptists of their duties of citizenship,” Walker insisted.

Citing examples of Baptists who engaged government across the past four centuries, Walker observed, “We have always been committed to doing -- rolling up our sleeves, going to work and speaking out in the public square.”

Tensions are part of life -- including public life, he concluded. “It is my prayer, in our so-called post-modern, post-denominational time and throughout the next 400 years, we Baptists carry forward a proper understanding of these three issues and deal with them responsibly and constructively.”

Matt Chandler using Eugene Peterson to tell us "Don't Be This Pastor?"

Matt Chandler, in his chapel address, (and at the A29 Louisville Bootcamp) quoted the following from Eugene Peterson’s Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity (pp. 7-8):

For a long time, I have been convinced that I could take a person with a high school education, give him or her a six-month trade school training, and provide a pastor who would be satisfactory to any discriminating American congregation. The curriculum would consist of four courses.

Course I: Creative Plagiarism. I would put you in touch with a wide range of excellent and inspirational talks, show you how to alter them just enough to obscure their origins, and get you a reputation for wit and wisdom.

Course II: Voice Control for Prayer and Counseling. We would develop your own distinct style of Holy Joe intonation, acquiring the skill in resonance and modulation that conveys and unmistakable aura of sanctity.

Course III: Efficient Office Management. There is nothing that parishioners admire more in their pastors than the capacity to run a tight ship administratively. If we return all phone calls within twenty-four hours, answer all the letters within a week, distributing enough carbons to key people so that they know we are on top of things, and have just the right amount of clutter on our desk—not too much, or we appear inefficient, not too little or we appear underemployed—we quickly get the reputation for efficiency that is far more important than anything that we actually do.

Course IV: Image Projection. Here we would master the half-dozen well-known and easily implemented devices that that create the impression that we are terrifically busy and widely sought after for counsel by influential people in the community. A one-week refresher course each year would introduce new phrases that would convince our parishioners that we are bold innovators on the cutting edge of the megatrends and at the same time solidly rooted in all the traditional values of our sainted ancestors.

(I have been laughing for several years over this trade school training with which I plan to make my fortune. Recently, though, the joke has backfired on me. I keep seeing advertisements for institutes and workshops all over the country that invite pastors to sign up for this exact curriculum. The advertised course offerings are not quite as honestly labeled as mine, but the content appears to be identical—a curriculum that trains pastors to satisfy the current consumer tastes in religion. I’m not laughing anymore.)

3 Hard Truths for Me and other Pastors

This post came from the Resurgence and is written by Dustin Neeley, pastor of the Crossing Church in Louisville, KY. It hits me hard where I need to be hit.

3 Challenging Truths

Here are a few truths that I hope will challenge you to lead your family strongly while being a church planter or pastor:



1. The church can get another pastor, but your kids can't get another dad.

Like it or not, we only get one shot to raise our children. I talk to fathers all the time who lament their absence during their childrens' formative years because of working too much. Even though this is often true for pastors, it shouldn't be. Our biblical credentials for ministry deal mostly with how we lead our families and our own character, rather than how effective we are in ministry. And remember, no one reaches the end of their life saying "I wish I had spent more time working on my blog." Be the exception, not the rule.



2. The church can get another pastor, but your wife only has one husband—and she needs a good one.

Oftentimes our wives take the brunt of the beating of our ministries: they hold us together, they hear us complain, and they hear others complain about us and experience the angst of how to handle it in a gospel way. Take it from someone who has greatly failed before in this area: do as much as you can to set clear boundaries between the church and home, and frequently check up on whether or not she enjoys being a part of the church. If she doesn't want to attend the church where you are the pastor, then it is a problem you need to deal with.

3. A day off is not just a good idea. It is essential.
"Monday Funday" is as special as a 1910 Honus Wagner baseball card at our house. It is the day we play outside, eat Chinese food at a mall, and don't talk about the church. Our church knows about “Monday Funday” because I mention it in sermons, schedule around it, and unless someone is bleeding out in their kitchen, I do not violate it. My ministry and family are too important. Pick a Sabbath, keep it, and fight for it. Your soul and your family will thank you.

Never forget: The first flock you lead is not the one that gathers on Sunday, but the one that lives at your house.

Are you leading them well?

The Stress of Preaching

It is no longer stressful for me. A fruitful realization for me after being called to vocational ministry almost 15 years ago. I preached at a Diaconate ordination with no prior preparation and felt great. Now, I forgot my sermon at home to preach to a church out of town but I feel confident in God working through me.

I love serving Him! Thank God for taking away my anxieties and giving me a spirit of boldness and courage instead of timidity.

Dr. Blomberg always makes me Think

I respect but don't always agree with Dr. Blomberg on issues. Here is a blog he wrote about his time with the TNIV committee. It has me thinking about the importance of translations.

Having spent my annual week last week with my fellow members of the NIV-TNIV Committee on Bible Translation, sifting through large stacks of proposals for minor tweaking of how we translate this or that word or phrase in anything from Genesis to Revelation, I’m in the mood for writing a blog on translating Scripture. A series of conversations in recent months, linked only by the theme of Bible translation, has made me dramatically more aware than ever before of the following observations:

1) Many people, unchurched and churched alike, have never actually looked in any detail at multiple Bible translations and therefore don’t have a good feel for just how different and similar they are. As a result, they tend to think they are actually far more different than they really are, leading to strange questions like, “With so many different English translations, how do we know which one or ones, if any, we can trust.” The short and most basic answer is, except for those produced by unorthodox sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ New World Translation or Joseph Smith’s personal Joseph Smith Translation, or those deliberately designed to be a paraphrase and not a bona fide translation at all (like The Message or the old Living Bible Paraphrased), you can trust ALL of them. Not one will ever flawlessly come up with the very best rendering in every passage, but not one will ever lead you astray on any important matter of faith and practice. Do yourself the favor of getting the software that allows you to compare a couple dozen major English translations for a representative cross-section of Bible verses or passages of your choice and prove it to yourself!

2) Because of the passion with which some scholars and church leaders have advocated one of the bona fide translations above others or criticized one or more of those translations, way too many people both inside and outside of the church have the misimpression that you can’t trust all of them the way point 1) above phrases it. It’s time for those scholars and church leaders to come clean and correct these misimpressions. With the wealth and luxury of so many options in the English-speaking world, it’s time to put a lot less money and effort into internecine argumentation and a lot more into letting the world know the magnificent wonders of this collection of books we call the Bible, regardless of what translation one prefers!

3) We must help our people, and others, understand the difference between formal equivalence, dynamic equivalence, and mediating approaches. To oversimplify but to make the point, the more literal the translation is, the harder it will be for the general population at large to understand it. The more readable for one particular subculture the translation, the less literal it will be. It is simply inaccurate and thus irresponsible to say that the more literal a translation, the better, for all situations. The most literal translation of all is an interlinear, which is indecipherable to most people. The most readable, understandable and accurate, all in one package, will always be those translations that do not consistently aim for either formal equivalence (word-for-word renderings) or dynamic equivalence (thought-for-thought), but aim at a middle ground between the two—as literal as possible while still being as fluent and understandable by the greatest number of people as possible.

4) In light of this last point, and completely apart from debates about inclusive language, the tradition of translating represented by the NIV-TNIV continues to achieve this balance most consistently. The next best options aren’t even close.

Why? or Why not?

I try to keep telling myself that it doesn't matter that we remain affiliated with these groups but there is just a whole bunch of stuff that I don't like that goes on in them. Praying.

Retired BWA leader Lotz receives freedom award from Adventists

By ABP staff

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

BWA General Secretary Emeritus Denton Lotz (R) receives the ward from John Graz, secretary general of the International Religious Liberty Association. (BWA photo) WASHINGTON (ABP) -- Retired Baptist World Alliance General Secretary Denton Lotz has been honored by the Seventh-day Adventist Church and affiliated religious-liberty organizations for his contributions to furthering global religious freedom. He received the International Award for Religious Liberty June 18 at a dinner in Washington. The dinner and award are co-sponsored by the Adventists in conjunction with their religious-freedom publication, Liberty magazine, and the International Religious Liberty Association. Lotz is currently president of the association, which was founded by Adventists in 1893 but is non-sectarian and open to all supporters of church-state separation and religious freedom. Lotz, who was named BWA’s general secretary emeritus upon his retirement in 2007, was awarded for making “religious freedom a major focus of his ministry as church leader and church statesman," according to a BWA press release. In his response, Lotz said the award was recognition of the role that Baptists have played in the defense of religious liberty since the founding of the Baptist movement 400 years ago, in 1609. Baptists, he said, were often persecuted because of their anti-establishment stance and their defense of the liberty of conscience. “Baptists were a persecuted group,” he told the roughly 300 guests gathered in the ballroom of the Capital Hilton hotel. “We believe that where religious freedom is denied, all other freedoms are denied.” Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.) delivers the keynote address at the 7th Annual Religious Liberty Dinner in Washington. (Megan Brauner/Adventist News Network) Keynote speaker for the dinner was Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.), an ordained United Methodist minister who, prior to being elected to Congress, served as the first African-American mayor of Kansas City, Mo. “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, yet persecutions and atrocities are still taking place,” he said, according to the Adventist News Network. Cleaver underscored the fact that, more than 60 years after the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, hundreds of millions of people around the world continue to be mistreated because of their faith. “The choice to privately or publicly practice a religious belief or the choice to abstain from a religious belief or the choice to change one's own religious beliefs is unmistakably fundamental to human rights,” he said.

The Bentz Family to Lesotho

Mark and Linda Bentz and family from Milton, Wisconsin, are preparing to serve as missionaries in Lesotho, Africa. They were mentioned in the April 2009 Sabbath Recorder, and will again be featured in the upcoming July-August issue.

These are precious Seventh Day Baptists who are leaving the comfort of home and extended family to serve the Lord with African Inland Missions. They plan to spend the next two-and-a-half years teaching, assisting in childbirth, leading Bible Studies, witnessing and caring for the people of Lesotho which lies wholly within the larger Republic of South Africa. They still need support.

You may send your checks to Africa Inland Mission, PO Box 178, Pearl River NY 10965. If you’d like to contact and encourage the Bentz family, write to mbentz@aimint.net.

Also, you can check out the following blurb about the Bentzes at the Africa Inland Mission website.

Here is a Funny (If you are a Republican)

I recently asked my friend's little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President some day.

Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, 'If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?' She replied, 'I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people.'

Her parents beamed.

'Wow! What a worthy goal.' I told her, 'But you don't have to wait until you're President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my yard, and I'll pay you $50. Then I'll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house.'

She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, 'Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?'

I said, 'Welcome to the Republican Party.'

Her parents still aren't speaking to me.