Gospel

revelation

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I am reading Revelation with my Wednesday morning coffee group.  I encouraged them to read it through in one sitting.  I made my read on Sunday afternoon and thoroughly enjoyed it.  Revelation is a text full of encouragement on how to walk with Jesus in a world where it doesn’t appear that He has won or is winning.  I am astonished that it is the actual revelation of Jesus Christ to His churches.  I am thankful that it comes via the pastoral heart of John. 

I made my first reading of Revelation as a teenager, 13 or 14 years old.  I remember being enraptured by the imagery of the text.  Why it competed with that of Lord of the Rings!  As well I was also taken with fear that perhaps I might be the one who was somehow complicit with the Devil’s rebellion against Jesus.  Besides my fearful self-centered reading I was also deeply influenced by questions of when all this was happening and when Jesus was coming back and who all the national or global players in the events described might be.

I have read the text many times and with each reading I take heart with the promise that by simply reading it I will experience the blessings of God.  “Blessed is the one who reads the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.”  Revelation 1:3 NIV  I do find that I take it to heart.  However, my concern is not so much for when this all happens but for who it all happens.  I want to know and live for my Lord Jesus Christ who has pulled back the curtain on a reality that He knows but I miss.

It is easy to read the Revelation of Jesus Christ and fear that pain and persecutions would be the death of faith and the church.  However that does not appear in the text as the greatest challenge to those who claim the name of Jesus.  Complaceny is the greatest challenge.  The “letters to the churches” set the scene for us to get a glimpse of how quickly the heart is drawn away from attentive devotion and obedience to Christ the Lord.  I believe the rest of the text then calls us back to Jesus by giving us a glimpse of the “end game” to which all of humanity is hurteling.

Through our journey through Revelation I am now reading Darrell Johnson’s Discipleship on the Edge; An Expository Journey Through the Book of Revelation.  I invite you to pick up your own copy and join in on the conversation.

the e’s of mission–reprint

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Andrew Jones has compiled a list of responses to a recent Washington Post article regarding short term missions.  This is a conversation close to my heart as I have been on several different types of short term missions.  My sense of God calling me into ministry even comes out of a one-week experience in New Orleans.  I do believe that there is a place for apostolic partnerships and the mobilization of churches for the mission.  However, some of the criticism about cost and the inefficient projects is true.  In the last year I published an article regarding short-term missions at my old site.  It seems fitting to reprint the article here. 

The e’s of mission  (first printed at Craig O’Brien Blogs, June 2007)

A couple of weeks ago I had a lively discussion with Nazim, one of the pastors at Cityview.  In it I gave voice to 3 “e’s of mission” and have since added three more that I think could help us craft a long-term approach to short-term missions.  Attention to these e’s of mission would help the church confront several issues: 1.  How to engage the church in a holistic application of the Great Commission and the mission of God.  2.  How to free the church to invite those people who share their values but not our Christ as of yet to participate and even collaborate in the mission.  3.  How to extend the relationship between churches across continents or cities beyond a week to years.  Here they are.  I believe mission today could seek to create collaborative ventures for

Environmental improvements:  regions of the world and small communities are facing devasting environmental realities.  Improvements would seek to raise the quality of water, air, and soil through the initiation of best practices with the ethical application

Educational improvements:  Educating both boys and girls raises their ability to process information and even synthesize information.  Education must include agreed upon foundations of knowledge but also stimulate the diverse styles contained in people.  The development of facilities is especially helpful in some regions.

Economic improvements:  For the past four years I have been seeking to learn more about micro-loans and the establishment of family enterprises.  This is an exciting area for marketplace Christians from church settings to share their knowledge.

Energizing family systems:  (Ok I cheated a bit on this one.)  Mission in regions devasted by AIDS, natural disaster, war, etc, must address the devastation of family systems.  I have been challenged by Stephen Lewis, a former Canadian Ambassador to the UN, in his book, Race against Time; his account of villages ravaged by AIDS was most striking when he recorded the reality of lost learning that was present when the generation gap meant a generation was just not alive any more. 

Evangelism of the Lost:  God is seeking the lost and has commissioned His church to declare the Gospel of the Kingdom of His Son, Jesus Christ.  The church is uniquely commissed by God with this “e of mission.”  And furthermore, God is uniquely gifting and shaping His people for the declaration of the Gospel.  Mission teams must seek the appropriate means for communicating the message of forgiveness of sin through faith in Christ.

Empowerment of the Church:  As much as possible I believe that apostolic witness must seek to empower the local, indigenious church to thrive.  Our brothers and sisters who are suffering through trials of many kinds, must answer the question, “What does God want us to do?  and then offer this invitation: “Here is the challenge we would like you to collaborate with us on?”  Even as a new church begins in a community because of the apostolic witness of those on came on mission, I believe there must be a shift in the way the “missionaries” approach the emerging believers that encourages their own responsiveness to God and the development of their ownership of His assignment to their local congregation.

If you are part of a church that is engaged in short-term missions, what have you all been learning through your experiences?  What do you think about these “e’s of mission?”

resistance is futile?

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I re-read Josh Packard’s paper, Emerging Church Research Summary today.  Josh has done a great job of summarizing what is the challenge of formto all those who take up the challenge of living the life of a disciple in fellowship with other believers not just for those who are part of the “emerging church conversation.”  What Packard calls the “danger of institutionalization” is this key point:  “Routines are dangerous for groups and people which value diversity in individual expression.”  In other words, the longer a group exists the more likely that the group will establish patterns and routines and then exercise controls in order to maintain those patterns and routines.  These controls are particularly problematic to organizations when people stop adjusting to a changing environment; they pursue traditions for the sake of traditions; they forget why they are doing what they are doing; they become entrenched in behaviours that may no longer yield the intended life once envisioned.

The latter issues are close to my heart.  Developing form and patterns of life is what living organism do so I am not up in arms about form;  all things living, except the Spirit of God have form.  The problem is when form is no longer functional to the intended vision.  Or when form is imposed on a people for whom it makes no sense.  Packard’s research on emerging church congregations demonstrates that these congregations have developed meaningful strategies that resist institutionalism and regularly re-new contextualized patterns of interaction.

Packard highlights 4 strategies:  be intentional; don’t reinvent the wheel; use professionals wisely; and compel questioning.  I won’t unpack these–read his summary.  However, I do want to note that these strategies are healthy for any organization–its just that some are unwilling to pursue them.  I have watched some churches close with their generation because they were unwilling to go through such a process of metamorphosis. 

Perhaps the church as a whole benefits from the emerging church conversation through their appeal to what Packard calls the “de-churched.”  He writes,

“Many people, commonly referred to as the “de-churched” as opposed to the “un-churched,” are disenchanted with traditional, institutionalized churches due to bad prior experiences and are thus drawn to those congregations which take avoiding institutionalization as a primary goal or pathway to success.  The previous half-century has witnessed the consistent marginalization of a particular kind of believer by the institutionalized church, and thse people now make up a very broad market of potential congregants.” 

Beck in 1995 Carol Davis from Church on Brady now Mosaic shared with Cityview that it would be healthy for our small groups to seek one new group, two restorations, and three salvations per year.  These very simple outcomes of a small group actually highlight for me how two types of patterns need to exist parallelto each other; the development of routine or patterns and the creation of new relationships in response to where God is working.  I, my family, my small group, and our church have routines and patterns–some might call them disciplines, we call them stances–that help connect us to God and to each other.  However we are holding some values that also move us outside of those to respond to God and people when He shows us that He is doing something new.  We may need to stop doing something in order to take up the new; or we may to commit ourselves to the new for a season in order to pursue it well.

I suppose I hope that we are continually emerging from form to form with a keen sense of the kind of disciples that will respond to Jesus as Lord and hold to vibrant biblical and theological perspectives.  I hope we can avoid confusing unity with conformity.  Jesus has created us as individuals in the church and called us to be distinct even though we are diverse.  The church is not a Borg–resistance is necessary.

i want love

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One of the saddest songs and music videos that still echos through my brain is I Want Love by Elton John.  Here are the lyrics if you haven’t contemplated them lately.

I want love, but it’s impossible
A man like me, so irresponsible
A man like me is dead in places
Other men feel liberated

I can’t love, shot full of holes
Don’t feel nothing, I just feel cold
Don’t feel nothing, just old scars
Toughening up around my heart

But I want love, just a different kind
I want love, won’t break me down
Won’t brick me up, won’t fence me in
I want a love, that don’t mean a thing
That’s the love I want, I want love

I want love on my own terms
After everything I’ve ever learned
Me, I carry too much baggage
Oh man I’ve seen so much traffic

So bring it on, I’ve been bruised
Don’t give me love that’s clean and smooth
I’m ready for the rougher stuff
No sweet romance, I’ve had enough

I find this to be a brilliant song that describes the conundrum in which we find ourselves–wanting love without constraints, wanting love but feeling incapable of it, wanting love but completely misunderstanding the nature of genuine love.  Is it possible to give what you have never received?  If I asked you for 40 billion dollars could you give it to me?  Most likely no.  But that even begs the question of whether or not it would be particularly beneficial for you to give me 40 billion dollars if you had it.  But the scoop on love is that it is terrible difficult for us to give love if we have not been given love.

Timothy Keller in his book, Reason for God in an Age of Skepticism says that many people have been inoculated against the Gospel.  But it may be worse than we imagined.  It seems to me that many of us may be inoculated against personal relationships with God and with each other that might be characterized by love.  Many of us feel called on to love and yet are radically incapable of it because we have yet to experience the freedom that comes from realizing that that though we are imperfect we are lovable.  I experience the temptation to masquerade as a perfect person through the performance trap and the lie that, “People who fail are unworthy of love.”  Incredibly through Jesus and the Gospel of God’s love poured out through the Cross I am confronted with a God who loves me though I fail.

The confusion about love abounds around us.  Last week I was confronted with how imperfectly I love and how difficult it is for others to receive kindness when their experience floods them with mistrust, doubt, suspicion, and fears of rejection and abandonment.  I want love, but “I want it on my own terms.”  The problem then is that the “lover” who loves well has boundaries and a healthy unwillingness to just make another person happy by doing everything the other wants.

I am not the first to write on the dilemma of loving and being loved.  As you can see I have not yet sorted through the layers of this onion.

community interrupted

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Every culture has communities.  These communities either function well or they do not.  Each community or network of people makes some contribution to form what might be identified in that time and place as society.  By functioning well I mean that people love each other rather than just tolerate each other.  The needs of children and the “weak” are provided for through the cooperative efforts of extended family and neighbours.  The gifts and passions of people are harnessed for the good of the community through patterns of trust and creativity.  Reality–both that which is delightful and that which is awful–is consistently integrated into the common conversation and metabolism of the community.  In a community that functions well “looking back” is means of extracting story and values that move the current generations into wisdom onhow to pour out one’s life for the benefit of others.

The Great Catastrophe described in Genesis 3 shows us why community is so easily interupted.  Rejection of communion with God has set us into the perversion of relationships as accomplished by Satan who seeks to destroy those who bear the image of God.  Humanity is pictured as racing toward chaos with the first murder and the first war, and ultimately towards the judgement of Noah’s days.  And then Genesis 11 makes it obvious that our efforts toward community building are so easily sidetracked into the creation of structures for our own glory.  The spirit of lawlessness as described in 2 Thessalonians reminds us that the one who undertakes the Gospel work of city or community tranformation does not fight against people.  There is a spirit that wages war against the Spirit and community of God.

Don’t let anyone decieve you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction.  He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God…And now you know what is is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time.  For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way.  2 Thessalonians 2:3-7

“Sin,” writes the elder John, “is lawlessness.”  (1 John 3:4)  It is a consuming desire to throw off restraints and make self the centre of life.  I have observed the agony of lawlessness in many cultures and settings.  In fact my heart was awakened to Jesus’ call on my life in a setting where the transforming work of the Gospel was set against the desperate conditions of lawlessness in New Orleans in 1986.  I have since delighted in the description of a community interrupted by the cross from Titus 3.

Remind the people to be subject to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready to do whatever is good, to slander no one, to be peaceable and considerate, and to show true humility toward all men.

At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures.  We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another.  But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not becuase of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.  He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that having been justified by grace, we might become heirs haveing the hope of eternal life.  This is a trustworthy saying.  And I want you to stress these things, so that those who have trusted God may be careful to devote themselves to doing what is good.  These things are excellent and profitable for everyone.  Titus 3:1-8

I have been encouraged by Bob Roberts in his book, The Multiplying Church:  The new math for starting new churches.  He says the direction of our mission should be:  Gospel–Disciple–Society–Church.  In this way the Gospel transforms a disciple who contributes to the transformation of society from which the church emerges.  I live in a city that has a thin veneer of community constructed on self-righteousness.  Perhaps you don’t believe me; case in point: a few years ago concerns over our water supply sent people racing to the stores to purchase bottled water.  Fist fights erupted in the aisles!  With such little pressure we became overcome by our fears and our sins.  Imagine the pressure on people in a community that is not functioning well!  When community identity located in the gifts of God is displaced generationally, lawlessness gladly takes its place in the void. 

As I read the New Testament my imagination is captured by what it would be like for every disciple captivated by Jesus and His Gospel to live in their community with the redeeming work of the Kingdom of God fully present.  My experiences last week reminded me that unfortunately the disciples of Jesus can get this out of order.  This is well known in the history of missions, the church, and Canada.  I think that disorder came about through a serious misunderstanding of the Gospel-Disciple-Society-Church transformation process.  When the church seeks transformation through the imposition of the “church” and that church’s culture on a people then a community is interrupted.  However, when apostolic people hold fast to the Gospel and loosely to their culture, then new disciples transform their own society and the church emerges as an indigenous reality.