Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Christian Mission

  • The Spiritual Importance of Separation of Church and State

    When I’m challenged on historical facts about the separation of church and state, I usually simply tell people that if separation of church and state was not part of our constitutional law (and I believe it is), I would still support it.  At least as strong as my political reasons for supporting the separation are spiritual reasons.

    Ed Brayton has been commenting on Berkley, Michigan where the decision has been made to turn a nativity display over to the city’s churches.  Ed notes:

    And it seems to me that the Christians there should be happy with this as well. Keeping the creche on city property required adding in a bunch of secular symbols as well, watering down the religious significance of the display. I can’t imagine why they would prefer to do that and keep it on city property rather than have it on church property where they have no such restrictions.

    I think it’s very bad for religion to acquire the power of the state for itself.  There is an immediate tendency in two directions.  First, we become lazy, expecting the state to do things for us.  Second, we start to compromise in order to keep everyone on board as we must in order to keep that official support.  The town of Berkley, MI may not have its nativity display on public property, a dubious blessing at best, but it will now have a Christian display.

    But it’s the first point I want to emphasize.  We are instructed in the gospel commission to make disciples.  Disciples don’t happen because somebody makes a law.  They don’t happen because of monuments to the 10 commandments.  They happen because one Christian is an effective witness to another person and then helps that person become a disciple.

    We have the means and the instructions for reducing the rate of abortions, divorces, drug addiction, murder, and other crimes.  It’s reaching out and making disciples, one person at a time.  The money is there in the churches, though often it is spent more to maintain structures than to carry out the gospel commission.  There are people in the churches who could do this, though many, if not most of them are sitting in the pews once a week.

    Christianity, or better being a follower of Christ, should be a voluntary effort, funded by the efforts of followers of Christ, and uncompromising because it is carried out by those same followers.  When we get government funding involved in religion I do believe there is a danger to the state.  There is a danger of people enforcing their religion on others.  There is plenty of evidence of this.

    But there is also the danger to spirituality, when the things that should be our passion–living Christlike lives characterized by the two laws–become simply a matter of custom and law.

    Christians should be concerned about preventing evil deeds.  But they should be more concerned about transforming the people who might commit those deeds.

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  • The Beautiful Gate

    I’ve been meditating a bit on Acts 3:1-10, the story of the healing of the lame man at the Beautiful gate of the temple. Often we look at stories like this and just think it’s a nice story of miraculous healing. But I believe that miracles are intended to communicate a message, and when they are told in detail, there’s a very important message there indeed.

    I see this one in two parts. Now some folks are going to agree mostly with the first half of what I’m getting out of this passage, while others will agree with the second, but I think they go together.

    There’s something ironic about a lame man begging at the “beautiful” gate. The name of the gate suggests attraction and welcome, and yet here he is, brought every day to watch people go into the temple and beg something from them. The others can go into the blessing of worship, but he’s left outside. There were some who felt that those who were deformed should not enter the temple (Leviticus 21:17-18 applied to priests; Deuteronomy 23:1-7 applies other restrictions, including those against foreigners, all to be removed according to Isaiah 56), but it was a rule that was to pass with the Messianic age (Isaiah 56:1-8).

    So as Peter and John pass by, proclaiming Jesus as the anointed one of God, there was a message to give. It was time for this man to enter the temple–and he did.

    This passage led me to thinking about open doors. How many people are sitting at the gates of the church, waiting to be let in. I’m not just talking about the physical doors to your church, but the doors to your community, to the body of Christ in your neighborhood. Are there people waiting just outside, looking for someone to help them? Are the folks just walking by, occasionally throwing them a glance or a even a coin, and then going on in, leaving them outside?

    What are the barriers? Class? Race? (Yes, it’s still a factor.) Theology? Drug addiction? Cleanliness? Sexual orientation? Known sin that disgusts us? (All theology to the contrary there are clean sins and dirty sins. Clean sins are the ones I commit, dirty sins are the ones everyone else commits. Not really–but you get my drift!)

    My church, the United Methodist Church, currently has a slogan “Open hearts. Open minds. Open doors.” There are some relatively slick ads to go with it. That’s the basic idea here. Is the door open?

    But despite believing that we need open hearts, minds, and doors in the church, I’ve been uncomfortable with the campaign as it is. When I have a tickling of discomfort about something I agree with, perhaps I need to think a bit more. And reading Acts 3, led me to that point.

    Peter and John tell the man that they have no money, but they will give him what they do have. Now I don’t think this is a statement against giving people money. Money is good and helpful, used in the right way. If we have money, it’s right to use it charitably.

    But what Peter says is this: “What I have, I give you. In the name of Jesus of Nazereth, stand up and walk!” After that he enters the temple. He enters the temple healed.

    We do need to ask whether our hearts, minds, and doors are open. But we need to go on and ask what’s going to happen when someone goes through those doors. Is there healing offered? Is there going to be a proclamation of the gospel inside? Will lives be changed? Too frequently in the church today we get people through the door and then leave them just the same. That beautiful gate needs to be open, but it needs to be open to lead to discipleship.

    Now please don’t hear me saying that the church needs to be filled with a judgmental attitude. Jesus suggests (Luke 14:12-14) inviting those who need to be healed, but he wants them fed. It’s not a matter of bringing people in and condemning them. Rather we bring people in and together we seek healing from God.

    The question I’m thinking about today (and it’s early Sunday morning, before I leave for the church) is this: How is coming through our doors going to change someone’s life? I’m praying that we’ll find a good answer to that. I’d like people to find Someone in our church who can heal them.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • The Church that is Always Emerging

    God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. 2 Corinthians 5:19

    Do you feel the depth of that statement? Can I recommend that you stop now and read 2 Corinthians 5, or at least verses 11-21 before you continue this?

    I often think that we Christians don’t nearly get the meaning of this passage, which is one of the better scriptural expressions of the meaning of the incarnation that we have in scripture. But then it goes on to bring it home to us, by saying that God has given us the ministry of reconciliation.

    To parphrase a question I was once asked after a sermon: If this is the message that we were given at the start, whatever happened to Christianity? Why do we have such a terrible time getting along? Why have we had such a long history of persecuting one another? We easily forget that we are a religion that results from the ministry of a man who spent his time breaking up traditional ground, who found extraordinary ways to make God’s message and God’s kingdom have an impact on a world that was not anxious to receive it. More than 2,000 years alter, we act a bit more like warring tribes protecting our precious doctrinal turf from the heretics down the street, often from people whose positions can only be distinguished from our own by theological experts.

    Enter the emerging church. I’ve not really spent much time on the emerging church, though I’ve read a couple of books and have generally liked what I see. I think part of my problem is that I’ve never called myself an evangelical, and so I don’t quite full feel the issues and the call that they do. Nonetheless I have felt that the movement was a good one for Christianity.

    Via MSNBC I found a Washington Post story on Brian McLaren, a leader in this emerging church movement. The article is titled Evangelical pastor challenges tradition. The emerging church movement does indeed challenge tradition. It tries to make the message of Jesus relevant to the modern world. And while I often wonder about some of their doctrinal positions, which sometimes are to my left even though they use the term evagelical and I don’t, they have one thing that is very traditional: Challenging tradition.

    What’s more traditional than doing what Jesus did? Some of the criticisms sound very much like the criticisms of Jesus. Emergent people don’t teach enough doctrine. They’re giving up the basics. They’re question non-negotiable doctrines. But of course we’ve been negotiating these doctrines for centuries, with some of the current basics being quite recent in their current incarnation. At other times we’ve been negotiating such doctrines with the stake and torture implements.

    It’s a conversation. That’s what the emergent church people say. And I agree. The one thing that has to continue is the conversation. It’s a conversation between various Christians, churches, groups, and ministries. It’s also a continuing conversation between each Christian and God. It’s also a conversation between us and the world. I would suggest that the greatest thing we can do as Christians is get other people listening to God–listening to the Spirit of Truth. We think that teaching them a set of doctrines is going to give meaning to their life, but there are thousands, probably millions of people who live in quiet despair with an evangelical theology.

    It’s not the fault of the evangelical theology. There are also many Christians who live fulfilled lives with an evangelical theology. The problem is that any theology that doesn’t get you into the big conversation is still going to leave you dead.

    Thank God for the emergent church. The church ought to always be emerging. It can’t be any harder than Jesus, emerging from heaven, and coming to earth.

  • Comic Sues Jews for Jesus

    Today CNN.com reports (an AP story) that Jackie Mason is suing Jews for Jesus over the use of his image and name in one of their pamphlets. (See the Jews for Jesus press release in response here.)

    I haven’t seen the pamphlet itself, but this action seems over the line to me. The only thing that should offend people in Christian evangelism is the gospel, not the way we deal with other people. When I recently attended a Jews for Jesus event, I was disturbed by a skit based around the song “Tradition” from “Fiddler on the Roof.” Because the folks on the platform say that they are Jewish, and I’m not, I may not be the best judge of such things, but the skit seemed disrespectful of Judaism. I don’t regard disagreement as disrespectful–I knew the group would disagree with mainstream Judaism–but there are respectful ways of presenting a disagreement, and then there are, shall we say, less respectful ways.

    It is my hope that Jews for Jesus will settle this out of court. I don’t think trying to force the issue of the use of someone’s reputation and image in this way is going to be good for the gospel or for interfaith relations.

    Update: Here’s the URL for the tract: Jews for Jesus Jackie Mason tract.

  • The Incarnation and the Two Laws

    34Now when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they approached him together, 35and one of them tested him by asking him, 36“Teacher, Which commandment is the greatest one in the Torah?” 37Jesus replied, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and with your whole being’ {Deuteronomy 6:5} and with your whole mind. 38This is the greatest and first commandment. 39And the second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ {Leviticus 19:18} 40On these two commands all the law and the prophets hang. — Matthew 22:34-40 (TFBV)

    I hope I’m getting across the idea in this series (starting with Christian Essentials: Incarnation at the Center) that rather than a list of doctrines and of standards I prefer a hierarchy. Both logically and in terms of importance various teachings fall into a hierarchy. At the center of all of this I see the notion of incarnation. I’m going to discuss my understanding of many other doctrines later, including ones I regard as non-essentials, and I believe in each case we’ll find the incarnation shedding light on how that doctrine should be understood.

    (more…)

  • 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.