What’s the hook (Part 2): The gospel and the gospels

It’s a question of where to start.

Intuitively, there is so much going for starting with the gospels if you want to present the gospel. The focus is so beautifully on Jesus, the personal reality of God present amongst us.

However, for 2 reasons, I wonder whether the disadvantages outweigh the advantages:

the gospels say a lot of stuff that you might not want otherwise to include – what do you think about Mk 13, let alone how do you teach it?? The other side of the coin is that they don’t say a lot about stuff you might want to major on – eg. the doctrine of the atonement, or justification by faith is not exactly prominent

the gospels start in the middle of a story – the story of creation, and God’s determination to restore it from the devastation of sin, and his image bearers to their rule. It is within that story that Jesus, and the gospels, make sense. But our culture has now completely lost touch with even the basic rudiments of this story.

So maybe the gospels are not the best place to start the gospel! In which case, where?

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What’s the hook?

Where does the gospel gain traction for unbelievers who are very decent people?

A few months ago, I had the privilege to spend 8 evenings with a family who wanted to know about Christianity. They are a terrific family – super-responsible people, caring for their children, contributing to their extended family and broader community, and with a vague sense of thankfulness to God for all the good things he had poured into their lives – health, house, holidays etc.

What’s more, they agreed with almost everything I said! Except they didn’t really. It didn’t get through into their hearts.

I tried every hook I could think of:

From flickr by !fatima

1. they were sinners, whose sins would take them to death and judgment – except they didn’t really have a concept of sin that touched them deeply.
2. sin is mostly about a failure to love God with all your heart – except they said they had a personal response of thankfulness to God.
3. they should join God’s kingdom program of doing more than just living for themselves and their little world – except that they were contributing.

So, my question is this: where do you go – what is the gospel hook – for post-Christian, decent deists?

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The importance of the ascension

I am preaching on the ascension this Sunday at one of our traditional services (it being the Sunday after Ascension Day). I came across this quote, which makes a terrific point:

what happens when you downplay or ignore the Ascension is that, basically, the church expands to fill the vacuum. If Jesus is not someone other than the church – while of course at the same time being present with his people through his Spirit – then we have created a high road to triumphalism of the worst kind.

Ministers need to hear this loud and clear. Commitment to church life and programs can never be identified with commitment to Christ, precisely because Christ is absent – ascended to the right hand of the Father – even as he is present by his Spirit.

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When faithful is fruitful

If there’s one thing that keeps you going in the Christian life, and in Christian ministry, it’s that God is sovereign. Lose your grip on that and you slide away into workoholism, or madness. It is God who gives the growth!

And at the same time, within his sovereignty, he calls us to faithfulness with what has been entrusted to us – our gifts, time, abilities, resources etc.

And it would be nice to leave it at that – God: fruitful; us:faithful.

Except that Jesus doesn’t allow things to be quite so easy. There is quite a a lot from Jesus that indicates that faithful is fruitful – Matt 24.45-51, Matt 25.14-30, Jn 15.1-11.

Even saying that the fruitfulness in these passages is our own godliness doesn’t change the basic structure of the point. The fruit of the Spirit is the fruit of, well, the Spirit. It is still God’s sovereign work in our lives “enabling us both to will and work for his good pleasure” (Phil 2.13). And we are held accountable for that fruitfulness. 

I think this impacts at the point of ministry culture. At the moment, it seems to me that we are not surprised at fruitlessness, and are by default comfortable with a ‘faithfulness not fruitfulness’ paradigm. It’s a quick answer we give. What if we were to change paradigm, so that faithful fruitlessness was not the norm or the expectation, but the exception? What if it was something that we only came to after long hard examination? It’s still a possibility, but a conclusion slowly drawn.

The danger, of course, is feelings of failure and being overwhelmed (right now, quite a few of things I am involved in have plateaued, do I know this all too well!). But maybe, as a mate of mine put it, we just need to ‘suck it up. princess’. After all, it’s not about me!

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Truth, goodness … and beauty

These are the classic ‘3 transcendentals’ It seems to me that we are good at the first 2, and are not really sure what to do with the other. 

So, here is a case of ‘less talk, more action’. My fabulous wife has started painting again, and here is her latest effort.

 

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Essentials vis a vis optionals?

Here’s a line from an email by one of the best evangelical minsters around:

it is fascinating to meditate on the way that the essentials don’t seem to make for growth, but the (theological) optionals/pragmatics do

By essentials he means all the stuff that is absolutely necessary for faithful gospel ministry, as well as the ministry structures that make obvious gospel-sense: expository preaching, heartfelt prayer, a concern for the lost, small groups, SRE, Sunday school, contemporary services that speak the language, etc

By and large, all our churches are doing these things; and by and large, they are not growing. 

I guess there are 2 options.

1. say that growth is not a goal for the church, so that the only thing that matters is continuing to do those good things. Except that as a Diocese, we’ve not gone down that path, and for 3 good reasons. 1 – God takes no pleasure in the death of sinners, but rejoices when people repent. That is his purpose, and it should be ours, as Spurgeon put it, to be ‘insatiably hungry for the salvation of souls’ – and that means growth; 2. There are some churches that are doing those things and are growing, which shows it can be done; 3. In any case, the ‘noble faithful but fruitless’ response is a conclusion to be arrived at very slowly – it can too easily be a quick letting off the hook!
2. But there’s another option – what if our list of theologically driven elements for a local church is actually theologically thin? What if we are not quite the fully theologically-orbed churches that we think we are? What if we’ve left some things out? In other words, is there an opportunity / necessity for us to be theologically self-critical?

For me, the fact that hardly any churched have any ‘community care’ programs – the simple overflow of the no-strings-attached love of Christ to the local community, at a structural/program level – is an example of something that could well be added to the list of bog-standard, theologically driven, faithful gospel ministry.

Any thoughts?

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If IRTD (Part 15) … I’d raise the evangelistic temperature

It all depends on whether you’re a glass-half-full, or a glass-half-empty kind of person.

One way of looking at it is to say that more than half of Sydney/Illawarra/Mountains doesn’t know a Christian, and so we need to get out there and contact and connect with them. And there’s a lot going for that. But right from the git-go, it feels overwhelming – even massively so. The glass is way less even than half empty! 

I come at it from the other side. There are 60,000 odd members of Sydney Anglican churches, each of whom has varying degrees of contact and connection already with unbelieving friends and family members. The building blocks are (mostly) in place. Overwhelmingly, we believe in the uniqueness of Christ, the necessity of conversion, and the reality of hell. That’s what happens when you have a great theological college and expository preachers.

From flickr by jeannot7

So to raise the evangelistic temperature several notches, we need to do 2 things:

1. Teach a prayer. The single most important thing to increase our outreach is to pray. At CCIW, we have started embedding this prayer in our culture – we pray it at services, in growth groups and individually (hopefully daily). Gracious God, you desire all people to be saved. Please open the hearts of people in this area to you, open doors of opportunity for the gospel to me, and give me the courage and wisdom to walk through them.

If we pray a prayer like this regularly, I find it hard to imagine that the Living Lord won’t answer it. 

2.  But second, what happens when God does answer this prayer? We need to put a resource in the hands of regular non-expert church members, so that if and when someone does pipe up because God has opened their heart, the Christian knows what to do. 

The resource needs to be a clear statement of the gospel, as well as:

• designed for a non-expert (most of the courses around are designed for experts – ie. theologically trained people);
• designed for a 1-1 context (most of the courses are designed for groups);
• less than 7 sessions;  
• if it’s a book, less than 100 pages (much more is too intimidating for both Christian and inquirer).

Two resources come to mind: John Dickson’s new course The Life of Jesus looks terrific – incredible production values, focussed on Jesus (obviously), and meets all the criteria except length (the book is 200 pages).

On the other hand, I wonder whether in a post Christian society, that no longer has even the whiff of the Biblical world-view within which Jesus makes sense,  we need to start further back. And so I have written a course/produced DVD called God’s World, which starts with creation and sin, and moves along a thematic trajectory.

In the end, the resource doesn’t matter so much.

But do these 2 things – pray and resource – and the evangelistic temperature will go up hugely!

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If IRTD (Part 14) … I’d work really hard on the caricature

Go into any pub, party or pool hall, and ask a few random people what comes to mind when they hear the words ‘Anglican church’, and what do you think will come next?

From flickr by disneymike

In reaching out to our post-Christian society, we face a massive uphill battle – a caricature which paints us as narrow, arrogant, sexist, homophobic and divisive. It’s a rough base from which to get a hearing!

Like all caricatures, it is in part a weapon wielded by those who oppose the gospel, a political tool designed to ensure that Christ is not honoured. And at the same time, like all caricatures, there is truth in it.

On the one hand, there is truth that we have no option but to uphold faithfully – we are ‘narrow’ in insisting on the uniqueness of Christ; we are ‘arrogant’ in claiming that he is the truth; we are ‘sexist’ in that we believe men and women are created for a unity which includes difference and complementarity, and that the NT pattern of ministry is that the senior teaching-leaders of local churches should be men; we are ‘homophobic’ insofar as we can never endorse a gay lifestyle as pleasing to God; we are ‘divisive’ in that truth is not to be sacrificed for love, and sometimes that means dividing from others.

But there’s the rub. Truth and love. We are known for our holding to the truth, but not especially for exhibiting love, and especially not for exhibiting love to our enemies. This is the other element of truth in the caricature. Surprisingly, enough, the world expects better of us – even in our narrowness, arrogance, sexism, homophobia and divisiveness – to find a way so that at the same time as we hold our views firmly, to love, love, love and love some more. The evangelical way is to live such good lives, individually and corporately, that though they malign us as evil-doers, they may see our honourable deeds, flooding the world.  And in particular, of all the things we gospel people should know, any fool can love their friends; it’s how you treat your enemies that shows whether you know anything of the Father’s heart (Matt 5.43-47). 

How then can we work on the caricature? A single thought – engage. At every opportunity, engage with our culture and especially engage with our enemies (in the world and in the church) – not to throw another stone at them, but to be alongside them in every way possible, be seen and heard to be every bit as much against injustice, oppression, cruelty, discrimination and violence as we are for truth. Of course, it won’t erase the caricature, and our enemies will always wield that weapon. But it might pixilate the picture a little

And to examine our hearts – to make sure that there’s not a whiff of the wrong sort of truth in the caricature.

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If IRTD (Part 13) … I’d get some help

Given that the majority – even large majority – of the churches of the Diocese are either plateaued or declining, there’s nothing much more important to do than to have a plan to help them turn around.

The best plan going (as far as I can tell) is the the 3-fold strategy of consultation, coaching and clusters.

But … leading a consultation weekend to begin the turn around process of a church is a finely honed skill. So the next thing to do is to get some help. But not endless help. What we need to do is to generate the necessary expertise, so that after a while we can implement the strategy without help. What’s needed is a ‘train-the-trainer’ approach.

So, here’s what I think is the way forward.

Find someone – straightforward evangelical, experienced church leader – who has been involved in the turn-around of 200 or more churches. Less experience than that is not good enough. Pay him to consult with 6 churches throughout the Diocese over the course of 2010. BUT, with each weekend consultation, bring together for training a group of 10 proven, effective Rectors. They must be leading churches that are growing, and which have broken through the 200 barrier. Each of these Rectors needs to attend 2 such training sessions, which run for the Wed-Thurs prior to the Fri-Sun weekend.

Over the course of 2010, 30 Rectors will be trained in the skills of consulting, coaching a church in implementing the consultation, and leading a cluster of Rectors for leadership development. With a task-force of that size, we would be able to run the turn-around strategy for up to 2o parishes a year. If only half of them turned around, it would make a massive difference to the 150+ parishes currently going either backwards or no-where!

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More sermons

For any who might be interested, I’ve added 8 sermon texts from Heb 1-6.

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