Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Inreach and Outreach

    My previous post, The Most Wasted Piece of Architecture, didn’t generate discussion here, but it was picked up by Locusts and Honey with a substantial quote, and some interesting discussion took place there.

    The discussion seemed to center a good deal around the specific issue of church sanctuaries. But what I would hope we would consider would be the balance between inreach and outreach both in our personal lives and in the lives of others. Church sanctuaries are beautiful. I do appreciate them. But I have to ask whether they represent the best use of resources to build the kingdom. I’m writing this on Sunday morning. Once I hit the “publish” button I’ll be headed to church, where I’ll meet with the pastor and pray with him before he goes out to preach three services for the day. I’ll attend one in a very nice old sanctuary, and I will be spiritually fed there. All of this will do me good, but is it the best Sunday morning possible in terms of building the kingdom?

    I don’t question the need for inreach. Church members must be motivated, trained, empowered, and released for ministry. That will take resources, in space, time, and money. My question, however, is just where we will find the balance. How much do we spend maintaining the machine, and how much do we spend using it? We can come to different answers on sanctuary design and value, but I think none of us can avoid asking just how well we are stewarding the resources God provides us in the church.

    What I’m really asking of my fellow Christians is that we honestly evaluate our resources and our use of them, not asking what we like, but rather asking what will do kingdom work in the best way.

  • Asking Questions of a Biblical Text

    An excellent technique for digging deeper into a Bible text is to formulate questions about the text, and then look for answers to those questions. I discuss this briefly in my essay Reading the Text Precisely.

    A starting point for this is simply to ask basic fact questions about the text. Many difficult and angry debates about the meaning of a text result from one or more persons not carefully reading what the text says. Very frequently, a person is making a very good point, but the text they are quoting doesn’t explicitly support that point. Asking fact questions about your text can prevent you from making this error. In your sharing, you can also help defuse such arguments by suggesting that all parties go back and look at the text. That may not make you agree, but it will help clarify what you are discussing.

    Here are some good example questions:

    1. Who is speaking in this passage?
      We have a narrator who tells us what God observed (v. 5) and how God responded (v. 6). Then we have the words of God, reported by our narrator, saying God’s attitude and God’s intention to act (“I will wipe . . . humanity from the face of the ground”). Then we have the narrator again to inform us that Noah found grace (v. 8 ).
    2. What is God’s response?
      God repents or is sorry.
    3. What does God promise to do?
      To destroy human beings and all living things.
    4. Who finds grace?
      Noah.

    There are a few more possible questions and some of these are bound to seem overly simple to you. But it is a good idea to make sure that you notice precisely what the passage says.

    In addition, you need to look at questions about the meaning of the text from different perspectives. Let’s take as an example my previous entry on Genesis 6:5-8. Frequently when I am teaching from this passage the first question from the study group deals with God’s justice, and whether God would actually kill that many people. Were they all absolutely evil? Was there no way to save them? Those questions show a personal perspective–What is God telling me today from this verse? But you have to first ask what the passage meant originally, and then follow the track through.

    I can identify at least three viewpoints on this passage, and Bible students should be able to think of a fourth pretty quickly. First, we have Noah himself, to whom God first addresses these words. Noah is inside the story and things are happening to him. The second perspective is that of the Israelites, for whom the story was written. Whether you believe this was written by Moses himself, or produced later and compiled, it was still intended to address the people of Israel, presumably about some situation(s) that they faced. Finally, we must look at what this story means to us. (If you’re wondering, a fourth view that might be helpful would be that of Jesus (Matthew 24:38-39), who used the flood as an illustration of the last days, which also might suggest looking at the text from the perspective of one living in the very last time events.)

    In the first instance, we can ask what Noah’s situation might have been when God approached him. If we take the story as it stands, we might expect that Noah felt besieged and hopeless. It is possible that he was threatened by violence. You can ask yourself just what was Noah’s situation when God sent the flood. It’s OK to speculate on that, and in fact that is much better than to simply make an assumption without thinking about it. I find that most people assume a world that is carrying on quite nicely, but God doesn’t like it, and is upset about a little bit of bad behavior, so he gets Noah to go build an ark. Noah has no problems, builds it, and escapes.

    But supposing instead that there was a world on the edge of cataclysmic destruction. We don’t know what they were up to, but they could have been about to die in a plague, or they could have been about to wipe themselves out in wars, and take Noah with them. It’s not impossible to imagine that the flood, with the ark itself, simply saved one righteous family from a destruction that was going to happen one way or another. I don’t necessarily mean that they were going to bring a flood on themselves. They could have merely been about to go kill Noah and his family and then wipe each other out in wars over a period of time. Sometimes the application of a limited amount of violence (and the flood was limited, even though those limits were pretty broad) can be used to prevent even greater violence and destruction.

    With that thought in mind let’s move forward to the time of the Israelites who would be reading this story for the first time. I don’t care if you think they first read it during the Exodus itself, during the time of the judges, the monarchy, or even after the exile. A similar message can be heard. The crowd can go massively against God, and can get into sin (think “behavior that is destructive of self and of others) beyond the point of no return. God will judge and intervene at some point, but God will also provide a way of escape. Even if there is only one righteous family that needs rescue, God will provide a way of escape. Can you see how that message might have been heard as one of grace under those circumstances? (Consider Abraham’s argument with God over Sodom. He talked God down to 10 righteous people–if there were only 10 righteous people, then God would save Sodom. Do you notice that there are less people than that who are saved in the flood? God’s grace doesn’t require a certain number.)

    To look again from our perspective, what does this tell us? Well, ask how we are similar to the Israelites and how we are different? How much must the message change for this text to apply to your community, your church, your world?

    In reading a Bible story, ask the questions in that order, starting with the people who are inside the story, then looking for those for whom the story was first written, then looking at how your situation is similar to and/or different from the situation of those in the story or its first hearers/readers. You’ll be amazed at how often the story becomes directly relevant.

    I think there is much more that can be said about the presentation of the flood story, and I intend to do so as I continue my series, but I think these few notes on asking questions points the way to a deeper understanding.

  • The Most Wasted Piece of Architecture

    As I was driving with my wife yesterday, I made a comment that had been bugging me all day.

    “You know,” I said, “A church sanctuary is the most wasted piece of architecture you’ll see on the landscape.”

    Now my wife knows not to go wild when I say things like that. She didn’t ask me if I’d started to hate church, or if I was giving up on Christianity. Some of you may want to do so, but bear with me.

    What is the purpose of our church sanctuaries? What are they designed for? Well, they’re a place where we go to worship. Indeed, I really enjoy church services. I’m one of those folks who will look up a nearby church when I’m traveling and go out of my way to be in worship on Sunday morning. It’s not because I have to, or because someone’s watching me. I simply enjoy worship services. I especially enjoy visiting a church I know nothing about and watching what their service is like. It’s no great merit; it’s just fun! (OK, I’m weird.)

    But picture the standard church sanctuary, steeple, pews, pulpit, altar area, and so forth. The building, the room, and the furniture all serve for a couple of hours per week. Many of you will point out that you have other meetings in that sanctuary–committee meetings, youth meetings, classes, and so forth. But notice that the room isn’t really designed for those things, and you’re actually working around the architecture and interior design in order to use that space for that purpose. It’s true that there are many newer buildings, especially amongst small, non-denominational churches that are much more flexible, and much better designed for multiple uses. Even so, I would ask you to look at the schedule of use for your office building, the conference room at your place of work, and similar structures, and consider the cost involved and the amount of use.

    I don’t have statistics in hand, but in my experience, churches spending as little as 5% of their money on outreach regard themselves as “mission oriented.” Add to that evangelism and budgeting for charitable projects, and you’ll get the total spending for outreach. (Don’t forget the salaries of staff members who are assigned to such tasks.) Look at your own church budget. How much of your money goes to maintaining facilities and paying people to maintain the membership. How much of the spending goes to people in the club?

    I had the privelege of speaking at a church a couple of years ago where the pastor told me their goal was to get to 50% spending for missions/outreach by the time their congregation was 10 years old. I know at the time they were working on acquiring a facility to use to house people coming out of drug rehabilitation to help them transition to the “real” world. They supported the Pacesetters Bible School mission to support orphans in eastern Europe. That was a small new church.

    Very often “spiritual people” don’t want to get involved in budget issues in your church. But when you’re going out and inviting people to church and they don’t seem very interested, you might consider what the appearance of your church and your church budget is telling them about your priorities. The good news of the gospel is not that there’s a church in your neighborhood and you can attend worship. It’s rather that God loves you enough to reach out to you, and according to James chapter 2, we’re supposed to be on the same program. In general, however, our church budgets don’t support that notion. If spiritual people want to be heard, they’re going to have to get involved in the money process and force a change.

    Please don’t hear a liberal vs conservative message here. My problem is not whether you are preaching the gospel or practicing it. I do believe you should be doing both, and that it’s very scriptural to do both. My problem is with the amount of money spent on maintenance, on keeping the members of the club happy vs the amount spent on outreach.

    I think that God has placed sufficient resources in the churches of America’s Christians that we could make a serious dent in the various problems we moan about when we get together and meet. In United Methodist churches (I’m Methodist, I fulfill my membership covenant, I get to complain!), we complain about declining membership while our budgets show pretty clearly that our concern is not with bringing people in, or helping people in general. Our concern is with maintaining the ones inside. It’s not an accident, however, that the gospel commission starts with the word “Go!” (For those who like to nitpick me, yes, I will defend this statement from the Greek.)

    If our budgets, our buildings, our activities, and our lives reflected the gospel, then we wouldn’t have so much trouble getting people to listen. We have the power to turn the world upside down, to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives (physical and spiritual), and to free the prisoners. Given what we have available, the state of our world is nothing short of scandalous.

  • Christian Carnival CXL

    Christian Carnival CXL has been posted at Lux Venit. There’s a good deal of good stuff to check out.

    Without prejudice to the whole list, I’d like to call special attention to the following:

    • Tight Theological Hatbands
      I’m not reformed in theology, but I have long thought one of the strengths of the reformed camp was in thinking about theology. I love to listen to them, but I often don’t like to dialogue with them, because they’re so sure of themselves. Well, here is a reformed Christian talking about dealing with disagreement, and he makes good points. Some people seem to think dialogue means giving up whatever you believe and assuming that all thoughts are equal, but I disagree. Good dialogue requires you to have a position, but you need the humility and confidence (yes, both together) to test that view in conversation with others. This one is an excellent post.
    • Madonna Commits Blasphemy (Yawn)
      OK, who might have guessed that Laura would have another outstanding entry? 🙂 This one supports what I call “off-switch censorship” aka “channel-changer censorship.” If you don’t like it, don’t watch. There’s some real garbage out there, and it doesn’t need any extra attention.
    • Diversities
      A Penitent Blogger talks about 1 Corinthians 12 and the diversity of gifts in the church. Personally I don’t think I can read 1 Corinthians 12 too often. It reminds us to be humble. It reminds us to celebrate the gifts of others. It reminds us to be under the one Spirit.

    Thanks to Leslie for a nice looking, easy to read carnival post.

  • The Prosperity Gospel

    And another exciting entry, more than a week old, from Ben Witherington, this time, ‘Just in Time’– ‘God Wants You Wealthy’, dealing with the “health and wealth gospel” or “prosperity gospel.”

    I’m very slow to condemn movements, but the prosperity gospel seems to be just about diametrically opposed to the spirit of Jesus Christ.

    Go, read, and enjoy, especially the TOP TEN REASONS WHY GOD DOESN”T WANT YOU WEALTHY.

  • Ben Witherington on the Pope’s Speech

    While I have reflected largely on the single item in the Pope’s speech and the Muslim reaction, Ben Witherington has posted an analysis of the larger content of the speech. He underlines some things that I would want to debate in the speech as well.

    A key item from my point of view here is that Christianity is also dealing with the relationship between faith and reason and the question of when, if ever, violence is justified. I don’t think the Pope lives completely in a glass house, but there are plenty of large glass windows in modern Catholic theology through which one might throw a stone or two. But the discussion should be good.

    For Muslims not to welcome such an opportunity tends to demonstrate the Pope’s point, at least in perception. Moderate Muslims should point out the common areas of reform, and suggest that both Islam and Christianity need to clean up their houses. That could spark a useful dialogue.

  • Genesis 6:5-8: Cause of the Flood

    I’m trying to take this passage in smaller chunks than I usually do so that I don’t end up with so many incredibly long posts.

    We’ve been watching the deterioration of the human race throughout these chapters. Genesis 3 gives one view of the start. Chapter 4 carries that story forward. If viewed in conjuction with Genesis 11, Genesis 5 hints at the problem. Genesis 6:1-4 again expands on the theme. Alden Thompson, in his book Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God? titles his second chapter “Behold it was very good – and then it all turned sour” in which he discusses this theme. (Bias warning: Alden Thompson was one of my undergraduate professors and I publish his book.) However one debates the details of Genesis 3 and the nature of the first sin, one thing is incredibly clear. Genesis presents a clear picture of increasing separation from God and from God’s will.

    Thompson says,

    To summarize the argument of this chapter, we can say that God did create a good world. In this world he placed free creatures. They chose to rebel and align themselves with the Adversary. His attacks on God set the stage for demonic rule, a rule which a freedom-loving God chose to allow as necessary evidence in the cosmic struggle between good and evil. The Old Testament gives ample evidence of the impact of the demonic rule. At the same time, however, it testifies to God’s patient interest in his own people, a people through whom he hoped to demonstrate to the world that there is a God in heaven who is the source of everything good. God had much that he wanted to show and tell his people. As soon as they were ready, he passed on the good news. The tragedy was that they were so seldom ready. Yet God was still willing to watch and wait. That is the glory of the Old Testament and the glory of our God (pp. 31-32).

    Now I’m extremely interested in the broader topic of God’s commands for violence, and with moral issues that are raised by stories like the flood, but that is not the focus of this passage, so I’m going to try to stick more to what this particular passage says first and then discuss these broader implications in another post. I believe that the paragraph I quoted above is a good summary of the message here. Let’s look at the scripture passage:

    5And YHWH saw that the evil of humanity was great on the land, and the whole thrust of human thought was only evil continually. 6And YHWH was sorry that he had made humanity on the land, and it made him sad in his heart. 7And YHWH said, “I will wipe humanity which I created from the face of the ground, from human beings to cattle, to creeping things, to the birds in the sky, because I’m sorry that I made them!” 8But Noah found favor in the eyes of YHWH. — Genesis 6:5-8

    There are several points to see in these verses. Let me break them out into bullet points:

    • The total deterioration and evil of humanity
    • God’s sorrow, leading to his statement that he’s sorry (or repents) that he’s made them
    • The universality of the proposed punishment or cleansing
    • The favor that Noah found, later attributed to Noah being found righteous (Genesis 7:1)

    Modern theology is concerned with two things that the text does not emphasize, first the violent and massive destruction that God carries out here, and second with God repenting or being sorry. But as far as the story is concerned, God is not to be questioned as to his cause–it’s assumed to be an adequate reason for the destruction. Further, God’s “repentance” is a common feature of the Hebrew scriptures, and does not cause the Bible writers the type of discomfort it seems to cause us.

    In addition, this is a good summary of the gospel (if we can deal with the destructive God issue), the good news about God: Big trouble is coming, God offers grace, people are saved.

    One note: The Hebrew word nicham won’t give much help to those who are uncomfortable with God’s repentance or God being sorry. It does mean what it appears to mean, and it appears frequently with reference to God in Hebrew scriptures. Thus I’m going to leave the two issues–God’s repentance and God’s violence–for further discussion, as I think that the solution to the two problems is quite similar.

  • Christian Carnival CXL

    Christian Carnival CXL has been posted at Lux Venit. There’s a good deal of good stuff to check out. I’m not in there, but we’re working on that.

    Thanks to Leslie for a nice looking, easy to read post.

  • Violent God

    As I approach the actual story of the flood in my series on Genesis 1-11 on the Participatory Bible Study blog, my attention is drawn to the problem of violence in the Bible generally, condoned by God, commanded by God, or even carried out by God.

    Recently on the web I’ve seen quite a number of comments on this issue. On Adrian Warnock’s blog, Andree posts about God’s absolute hatred of sin. After reading a number of incidents from the Israelite wilderness wanderings, and adding in the death of Jesus on the cross, she concludes,

    1. God hates sin more than anyone.
    2. God is more merciful than anyone.

    And certainly one cannot read those passages without hearing at least the message that God deplores sin. God is clearly portrayed here as acting violently against sinners, often in what we might call an arbitrary and capricious manner. The context of hatred for sin certainly intensifies the meaning of the atonement. But is it enough to state that God truly hates sin, and to point out that God provides atonement? Does this explain why God behaves as he does?

    In Genesis 6, on which I will be blogging shortly, we are told that God planned to wipe out all livingthings on the earth, though he made an exception for those who are saved in the ark. But I’d like you to ask yourself this question: If this story were told about a god from any religion other than Chrsitianity or Judaism would you think of the deity as good or evil?

    Lingamish discusses a similar problem. He’s wondering how one can read the book of Judges devotionally. He said:

    I just finished this book and I was amazed at the violence, idolatry, and misogyny it documents. One way of trying to not reject Judges is to see it at as a depiction of negative heroes. That is, Judges is not showing behavior to emulate, but rather behavior to avoid. But what do we do then about Hebrews 11 where many of the judges are held up as “heroes of the faith?

  • Revelation Before and After Jesus

    Some time ago (September 5, 2005) Adrian Warnock wrote an excellent entry on the need for a Christian experience in the present (hat tip: Peter Kirk). As usual, whether I agree or disagree, Adrian does a fine job of presenting his position, and in this case, I do agree.

    He continued that entry with another that discussed the nature of revelation both before and after Jesus. To get a clear picture of Adrian’s position you will need to read more than I can quote here, but the following should give the general flavor:

    Such a widespread outpouring of the Spirit cannot ever be purely for Scripture-writing and authenticating. If “all flesh” can prophesy, it is inevitable that they must have something by which to judge those words, for they cannot all be of equal weight or authority. In fact, Jesus was the last true Prophet in the sense of being authoritative and inerrant in everything He said. So where, prior to Jesus, authority rested in a few people who prophesied, but did so inerrantly, in the new era authority rests solely with Jesus and operates through the Scriptures, but the Spirit is poured out so that “all flesh” can prophesy whilst those prophecies are to be judged by the authoritative revelation contained in the Bible.

    (more…)