Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Christian Ministry

  • Don’t Judge Discipleship by Numbers

    This post is to call your attention to a post by Beth Quick, Mark Driscoll, Mainline Churches, and The Numbers Game (Hat tip: MBWR #82, with strong second to the Best of the Methodist blogosphere! note). I’m also closing the comments here so that any additional discussion will be centered around her blog.

    I want my church to grow. But I also think people can be simply attracted to what is new, flashy, easy, convenient, socially fulfilling. I think some churches, both mainline and other, can grow for wrong reasons too.

    How do we assess growth in discipleship, really? I’m not sure we can do it by the numbers, the stats.

    Go! Read! Think!

  • Conscience of a Christian Publisher

    A friend tipped me off by e-mail to a post, and I think it is appropriate to respond. The poster, Centurion, expresses his concern about Christian booksellers and publishers, and their choices in terms of what to offer their customers, especially considering that many of them regard their business as a ministry as well.

    I’m a Christian publisher, a very small one, offering 15 titles at this point, some of them my own, and I certainly do have a conscience about what I publish. My conscience, however, seems to tell me something substantially different than Centurion’s.

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  • From Saint to Sinner

    Lingamish comments today on sinners becoming saints and touches on the possibility of saints becoming sinners.

    It’s high drama for a sinner to become a saint (Read St. Augustine’s Confessions) but higher still is the tale of a saint who becomes a sinner. A fictional example from Spanish literature is San Manuel Bueno Martir by Miguel de Unamuno. I read that story in a Spanish Lit class in college and it has haunted me ever since.

    This is a question that haunts many, many people, and my own experience had led me to be very interested in it. I left the church entirely out of seminary, and only returned 12 years after that. I discuss it at some length in my post on the Participatory Bible Study Blog, Hebrews 6:4-6: Can Those who Fall Return?. I link from there to my personal testimony as well. Here, however, I want to discuss point of view in answering this question. See my discussion of Hebrews 6 (linked above) for more scripture on the topic.

    The issue of falling away and returning is a very contentious issue, and I think it is contentious precisely because it cuts very close to the heart. All of us are probably acquainted with people who are terribly fearful that they are not really saved, and that God is going to get them because of some minor failing. Perhaps they will commit the sin of adultery in their heart and then be run over by a bus before having the opportunity to confess it. Living in that type of fear is a terrible thing, and spiritually debilitating. On the other hand we probably also know people who are so sure that they have the inside track to God that they don’t feel any need to seek spiritual or ethical growth. In each case, we may tend to react against unbalanced teaching that led to the problem.

    I believe there are at least three perspectives from which one might answer the question:

    1. Biblical
      I think the Bible is a bit equivocal on this issue. There are plenty of scriptures that support our security with God, but also plenty that warn against overconfidence, or more accurately self-confidence.
    2. Theological
      This one is often the hardest. What precisely is true. Can someone lose their salvation? I recall a class with a Calvinist student. In one discussion I told him that I had serious problems with a God who could predestine some people to eternal damnation. He responded that he didn’t particular like it, but that was what he thought was true. I don’t think the Bible makes it quite that clear.
    3. Pastoral
      The answer from a pastoral perspective will often depend on who’s asking the question. Is this a person who is short on security? Are they concerned that God can’t accept them? One might need to emphasize security. Is this a person who is inclined to carelessness? Perhaps the firmer version of Hebrews 6:4-6 would be more applicable. Of course, a pastor needs to work within what he understands to be the truth as well.

    For me, the answer must come largely from the pastoral perspective, because I think that’s the way the Bible tends to answer the question. Looking at the entire book of Jeremiah we can see how an entire nation, and especially the city of Jerusalem, became very confident that because of God’s promises they did not need to fear destruction. The promises were needed because the people needed to comprehend the value of a stable relationship. The judgment was required because people became so complacent in an assured relationship that they let that relationship die.

    I suspect that God looks more at the pastoral perspective on these issues. For myself, I often reduce this to the following: It’s possible for someone to reject salvation after apparently accepting it, but it is never accidental.

  • Implementing a Doctrine

    I’ve been discussing essentials of Christianity, as I see them, and emphasizing the doctrine of the incarnation. In the process I’ve mentioned implementing and expressing doctrines. What do I mean by those two terms?

    First, I do not regard the expression and the implementation of the doctrine to be part of the essentials. I believe that our implementation and expression of any idea will be limited at best and may be quite flawed. We do not always know best how to express our love, for example. Recently my wife and I were teaching for a weekend at a church, and one of the members recalled an experience. She told us that a woman had visited her church, and that numerous people had gone up to her, greeted her, and done their best to make her feel welcome. At some point, the woman told one of the folks that she really wanted the opportunity to experience the worship service without being bothered so much. Now let’s assume that the visitor was being honest. In this case a number of church members expressed their love sincerely and to the best of their ability, but the message received by the visitor was something different. We aren’t omniscient; things like this will occur.

    Let me look briefly at the incarnation, its expression and implementation.

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  • Missionaries and Mission

    John at Locusts and Honey called my attention to Mike Lamson’s post Getting rid of “missionary”. Many of my liberal and non-Christian friends are very surprised to discover that I’m not willing to abandon terms like “mission,” “missionary,” and “evangelism.” I think there are two potential problems with simply changing our terminology. First, we can change the term and keep whatever bad behavior was associated with it, in which case we just revisit the issue in a few years to change terms again. Second, we can change the term because we don’t want to keep up with the good behavior that should be associated with the term.

    It reminds me of the Bible translation term “dynamic equivalence,” a term that has been abandoned by most writers on Bible translation (I think so, at least; I haven’t done a survey). But to me the term conveys something that needs to be accomplished in the process of translation. I think that many who disparaged the term were actually hostile to what it meant. Finding a more congenial term didn’t make people do better things; it just changed the words, and in some cases I think it allowed people to claim that they were doing a better job of translation while they kept on doing the same old thing.

    In the case of missionary and mission we have a set of terms that have acquired some baggage. We have missionaries calling on people to convert or die, we have missionaries following behind armies, or destroying cultures by their bad behavior. But the fact that there are bad missions and bad missionaries doesn’t mean that there are no missions that need to be accomplished, and that we don’t need people to accomplish them. And those people would be missionaries.

    I am the son of missionaries. My father is an MD, and my mother an RN, and they served in medical missions both at home (Canada and the United States), and abroad (Mexico and South America). Caring for the sick was a mission for them, and they were missionaries.

    As Christians we are kingdom people. As kingdom people we always have a mission, which is to be witnesses. The particular form that may take will be different from time to time. We are not called to convert people, because that is something that the Holy Spirit will do. But the Holy Spirit will do converting around one’s witnessing. Sometimes witnessing is simply a matter of living one’s life. Sometimes it’s a matter of talking. But in all cases it’s a matter of being a kingdom person.

    Now obnoxious people have given the term missionary a dirty name, but the kingdom person will still be on a mission, a mission to be the salt of the earth, to be that little bit of leaven that will change lives and communities. I don’t think changing the term is necessary or useful. I think we do need to change our thinking. But as often as not the problem for mainline Christians especially is not that we are too pushy, i.e. we shine our light in people’s faces, but more that we hide such light as we have under a bushel. A sense of mission would be really helpful to many mainline churches.

    In fact, I would suggest that this is the one piece of theology that is most decisive in making mainline churches shrink and more conservative or charismatic churches grow. In the mainline we’ve tended to lose any sense of mission, any sense of direction, any sense that we have anything worth sharing.

    I’m talking about the incarnation in another series of posts. Isn’t living a life worthy of the incarnation a mission worth taking on? Isn’t helping someone else to find the power of the resurrection in their own spiritual and emotional life a worthwhile mission? It’s not about being pushy or obnoxious. It’s not about being critical or talking down to people. It’s not about threatening them with the fires of hell, which aren’t under your control in any case. It’s simply about having God’s love in your life, knowing that it’s important, and making it real for others who need it.

  • Working in your Call

    And YHWH spoke to the fish, and it spit Jonah up on dry land.
    Then YHWH’s word came to Jonah a second time, saying, “Get up! Go to Nineveh! . . . ” — Jonah 2:11-3:2a

    I knew a man who almost got a law degree, but dropped out during the last year of law school. He was incredibly intelligent and creative. He could have done many things. His parents thought a law degree was a good idea so that he could make money and have a respectable profession. Once he dropped out of law school he lived a life of frustration, always “almost getting there” with the things he really wanted to do.

    In secular life and in the church, you can create a life of frustration for yourself by not doing what it is that you’re actually called and gifted to do, something that usually corresponds to what you want to do deep down in your heart. I’m not talking about that desire to go fishing, or to spend your life on the beach and get someone to pay for it, but your genuine desire the accomplish something with your life.

    Too often, the people who are already out there, living their own frustrating lives, take out their frustration on the next generation by telling them that their goals and their dreams are somehow not respectable enough or important enough. We tell the talented musicians, artists, and actors that the church really needs pastors, secretaries, and administrators, and if they want to earn enough money and make it in the world, they need to be doctors, lawyers, or nurses. Sometimes instead we point them to easier paths than they would choose, because we think they can’t make it.

    I don’t mean we don’t need to encourage our young people to count the cost and decide on a realistic basis what they really want to do. I do mean is that we need to let people look inside themselves, listen to God, and choose where it is that they can really be fulfilled and can really make a contribution that counts eternally.

    As a Christian and member of the United Methodist Church, I believe I see this in our church structure. We are overwhelmingly focussed on the offices of the church and church staff positions that are aimed at maintaining what we already have. If we want to see revival in the United Methodist Church, and in the broader Church we need to start recognizing roles other than pastors and our standard staff. We need to have career paths for evangelists, teachers, apostles, and prophets, the other four from the traditional five-fold ministry. But that’s not enough. We also need paths for artists, dramatists, multimedia experts, and internet specialists.

    And when we have all those paths open, we must encourage people to find their call and follow it, and gear up the church membership to support it financially and with their time.

    Business as usual isn’t working now, and it’s not going to start working. For the church to answer God’s call we need members who answer God’s call. We need to let God out of the box, get out of our box, and be ready to affirm and empower others as they apply and share the gospel in the 21st century.

    Avoid the frustration! Get with God’s program!