lifeasmission
exploring the mystery of life and mission as one and the same
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Archive of "gospel" Category
A ViralHope Video
A few months back I mentioned the release of the book ViralHope: Good News from the Urbs to the Burbs (and everything in-between). I am one of 50 different authors who offers a brief reflection on what the “good news” might mean for my city (which was Memphis when I originally wrote). The book has been doing quite well from what I understand and it now boasts an excellent promotional video.
You can still get single copies of the book through Amazon, or order multiple copies through Ecclesia Press. I hope you’ll consider spreading this video around, maybe with a link to the book.
The video was made by Aaron Nee of the Brother NEE. Check out this trailer from their feature film, The Last Romantic.
An Interview with N.T. Wright
The guys over at Homebrewed Christianity recently posted an interview they did with N.T. Wright. The interview was full of some really great sound bytes that I went ahead and divvied up to make your life easier
You can listen to or download the interview in its entirety here.
On being a bishop.
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On the unfortunate split between church and academy.
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On returning to fulltime academic work.
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On Bart Ehrman.
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On Marcus Borg & John Dominic Crossan.
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On Jurgen Moltmann.
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On E.P. Sanders.
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On Karl Barth.
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On Stanley Hauerwas.
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On his most recent book, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters and why he chose to write about eschatology before ethics.
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On the difference between Aristotelian virtue and Christian virtue.
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On the role of character and virtue in other religions.
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On cultural virtue.
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On the renewing of our minds when they have become largely detached from the rest of who we are.
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On Christianity Post-Postmodernity.
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On the after-after life.
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What NT Wright is reading, thinking, and planning for his “big book on Paul” as the next in his Christian Origins series.
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What we can expect from NT Wright in his new role.
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Reviewing Deep Church by Jim Belcher
Jim Belcher, the author of Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional, and I have much in common.
We both did masters degrees at Fuller Theological Seminary.
We both have a heart for church planting.
I teach a class on the Emerging Church based on the intensive that he references in his book. (35)
We get frustrated when people talk past one another, defaulting to caricatured stereotypes rather than embracing a posture of openness.
And we both value looking for a “third way” to approach dichotomistic thinking.
He is right when he says,
It seems that every time someone criticizes the emerging church, they pick the worst-case scenario or the most extreme statements. (49)
He is also correct in noting,
It seems the emerging church, for rhetorical purposes, uses sweeping generalizations about the traditional church that are unfair. (76)
The larger Body of Christ would indeed be served well by discourse that is deeper, more specific, and marked by a sense of humble openness. Belcher’s chapters on Deep: Truth, Evangelism, Gospel, Worship, Preaching, Ecclesiology, and Culture, are essentially his attempts to facilitate just that – a worthwhile enterprise in my opinion.
While Belcher’s book is truly helpful in this regard, I’m not sure he really hits the mark in terms of articulating a true “third way” as a means of engaging these topics. Very often, his conclusions in these chapters are a combination of a chastened version of the EC position he articulates and an expanded version of the traditional position he articulates (usually w/ reference to Tim Keller and his church!). I suppose this is a kind of “third way,” maybe even precisely the one Belcher desires, but I’m not certain it’s the most helpful kind of third way for the Church to pursue.
The mistake, I believe, comes in the assumption that one can simply pit the positions of the EC against the positions of the traditional church. The main problem here is that many in the EC camp are themselves trying to articulate and maneuver a “third way” between the modern categories of conservatism and liberalism, a feature that Belcher seems to either overlook or discount w/o comment. An indication of this is his quick dismissal of the Anabaptist tradition from which many in the EC draw as one which is able to circumvent many of the dichotomies addressed in this book on account of its fundamentally, Christendom-rejecting, stance. Belcher never seems to ask, “How might people in the EC camp already be searching for a third way in response to classic approaches to these issues?,” but assumes that their positions are simply reactions against the positions of traditional churches.
Belcher sets himself on this course in stating,
We need to define it [the emerging church] as a movement, particularly its theology. The best way to do this is to look at what the emerging church movement is against – the things they are protesting and the rasons why they are calling for change. (38)
For the life of me, I can’t grasp why someone would want to define a movement by what they are against (even it it is a protest movement) rather than what they are for. We certainly regard what the classic reformers were for as far more more important than what they were against! But more than this, Belcher fails to identify missiology as a core motif for the EC. For many, if not most, in the global EC movement, it is an attempt to participate with God and God’s mission in the world that is reshaping how they understand the sorts of topics that Belcher raises in his book, not vice versa.
These criticisms notwithstanding, I am glad that Jim wrote this book and don’t doubt for a second that it has an will continue to help many.
**Jim has recently decided to resign from his position as lead pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, CA. You can read a letter he wrote to the congregation regarding this transition here and some additional discussion about this sort of trend here.
The Holy Saturday Gospel
A day of utter despair. Our people have known these before. Hopes crushed and lives threatened, we question God and his plan for us. We weep and mourn in fear and despondence. Why? When? For how long? Why?
In the midst of our loss, our fear, and our pain.
On this Holy Saturday.
We worship.
For here is where God meets us.
God is in our loss.
God is in our fear.
God is in our pain.
The Gospel.
Toward A Missional Vision of Theological Education: Contextual Training
Previous posts in this Series:
Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | The Fruit of the Problem | New Soil | Community Rootedness | Character Formation | Conviction Shaping
I have tried to make a case that a missional vision of theological education is one rooted in community that emphasizes the formation of Christan character marked by Kingdom convictions. I would further suggest that a missional vision of theological education will seek to train leaders contextually.
This is missiology 101. Urban ministry is different than suburban. Ministry amongst the poor is different than ministry amongst the affluent. Ministry with adolescents is different than ministry with senior citizens. Traditional theological education, however, is not equipped to train people with these nuances in mind. The dominant expression of theological education within Christendom has been training at geographically specific institutions. These schools of course bring their own context to bear on the training they are doing, but are necessarily limited by that same feature. Geography isn’t the only problem, the very model of education employed in the seminary environment distances, if not outright separates, theological education from contextual factors. Some schools have begun trying to correct this problem through online education, allowing students to continue serving in their present context while doing intensive biblical & theological study. As I said here, these innovations within the current system of theological education are helpful, but they aren’t aimed at the other aspects of missional theological education that I have already covered. So, the question before us is,Within a missional vision of theological education, how will contextual leadership development take place?
I can think of at least three aspects of a beginning answer to that question.
1) Networks
Church networks are the missional answer to the decay of denominations. For good or for bad, denominations are crumbling. In an era of post’s (post-modernity, post-Christendom, etc.) you can add to the list post-denominationalism. Springing up in their place are inter-denominational networks of churches. In my opinion, the best of these are striving to make a shared vision of missional living more central than individual points of doctrine. Besides always being rooted in a particular context, the realities of globalization and pluralism mean that no one congregation has the capacity to train leaders for the church of the future by itself. It must look outside. If leaders are to be identified by local communities and if these same communities are to take primary responsibility for their holistic formation and contextual training, then meaningful involvement in a healthy network of missional churches through the sharing of resources and common ministry is a big part of how we accomplish the contextual training of leaders.
2) Apprenticeship
The most valuable resources to the spiritual formation & training of leaders are men and women who offer years of faithful service within a given context. Reading, writing, and peer discussion all have a vital place in the formation of missional church leaders, but all of these dimensions gain their final value in terms of their practical implications in a given context. Seasoned leaders are invaluable in helping to achieve this goal. Cultivating missional church leaders who have the skills necessary to help a body of people understand the gospel and its implications in contextually appropriate ways calls for a mentor-apprentice(s) dimension to any process of theological education.
3) Civic Engagement
Civic engagement needs to increasingly become a hallmark of both missional church ministry and leadership formation. Immersion has long been a defining mark of truly cross-cultural ministry. Therefore, those churches who embrace the West as a mission field should immediately resonate with the idea that the best way to become incarnationally faithful is to immerse themselves in their context. The reason for this is at least 2-fold 1) To discover where and how God is already at work. 2) To discern what incarnationally faithful witness to the gospel will mean and look like.
If it’s not already obvious, this aspect of a missional vision of theological education is tied directly to the centrality of the Missio Dei for a missional ecclesiology. A big part of what makes missional churches missional is their abdication of attractional approaches to church and ministry in favor of incarnational ones. All that Jesus said and did was said and done in light of the people he was speaking to and the place he was speaking in. In both ministry and leadership formation, we do well to follow this pattern of contextual wisdom.
What has your experience with contextual leadership training been? Do you see other ways to accomplish this goal in or outside of traditional models of theological education?
In my next post, I hope to round things off with some thoughts on cultural pioneering as a final mark of a missional vision of theological education.
Idolatry, Desire, & the Lion’s Roar
We interrupt this series to being you an important service announcement.
OK, not so much an important service announcement, but a few streams of thought have come together for me and I needed to get them down while I was thinking on them.
A few months ago I listened to a message on the gospel and idolatry. The speaker was talking about how our living and proclaiming of the gospel always confronts the idols in our culture, the places we live, and of course, in our own lives. How are we to give ourselves completely over to God and his mission in the world unless the things we love more than that are unmasked?
I think this is a helpful corrective for those who would define or even emphasize the gospel as social justice. To the extent that local churches rightly strive to be a blessing to their communities and make a place for any and all, these ought always to be seen not as ends in and of themselves, but as a means of exposing idols on the road to full participation in the mission of God in the world.
A few weeks ago, listening to another message a different speaker had this to say…
What we want… has a massive control on what we can believe. If you want something badly enough and believing the truth will take it away from you, you will see the truth as error and remain enslaved to your want.
This I think, is a helpful corrective to those churches who would spend the bulk of their time and energy trying to get people to believe the right things. This is a dead end. The real task of the Body of Christ is to live and love in such radical ways that the world yearns for a taste of it. It is only then, when people “taste and see that the Lord is good,” that they may have eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to obey all that God calls Good.
Currently, Amy and I are reading through The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. Ashamed to admit it, I have never read them before. We recently finished The Magician’s Nephew and I thought it was amazing. I’m sure I’m not the only one, but one of my favorite part is when Aslan sings Narnia into existence.
The Lion was pacing to and fro about that empty land and singing his new song. It was softer and more lilting than the song by which he had called up the stars and the sun; a gentle, rippling music. And as he walked and sang, the valley grew green with grass. It spread out from the Lion like a pool. It ran up the sides of the little hills like a wave.
The connection between this and what I’ve written above comes when Lewis provides us with Uncle Andrew’s perspective…
It had not made all the same impression on him… For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are. Ever since the animals had first appeared, Uncle Andrew had been shrinking further and further back into the thicket. He watched them very hard of course; but he wasn’t really interested in seeing what they were doing, only in seeing whether they were going to make a rush at him… he had disliked the song very much. It made him think and feel things he did not want to think and feel… And the longer and more beautifully the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe that he could hear noting but roaring. Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you already are is that you very often succeed. Uncle Andrew did. He soon did hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song. Soon he couldn’t have heard anything else even if he had wanted to. And when at last the Lion spoke and said, ‘Narnia awake.’ he didn’t hear any words: he heard only a snarl.
If you’re not already seeing how these things come together, let me try and summarize.
What’s really wrong with humanity is that we want the wrong things – this is the result of sin. When we think, speak, and act in ways contrary to how we were designed to think, speak, and act, we cultivate the wrong desires. Subtly, silently, deceptively, those desires create idols in our lives. There’s no shortage of options of what we might idolize; money, acceptance, friends, family, work, material possessions, even our cherished versions of truth. When things like this get a grip on our hearts, it effects what we give ourselves to, what we love, what we worship. And our worship of those things dulls our hearts and minds to competing desires. Thankfully, this cuts both ways. The more we give ourselves to, love, and worship God, the less appealing the things of the world seem.
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