evangelism – Page 41 – Christ the Truth

Why the West needs winning.

GlenDecember 30, 2008Leave a comment

Why does Matthew Parris see God as the hope for Africa but not for Europe?

Well his diagnosis of Africa's problems boils down to this: too much crushing passivity and collectivism. And so...

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

While he makes excellent points about the need for Christian evangelism in Africa, we must ask: Is Africa the only place that needs 'liberation'? Surely to avoid an awful colonial condescension, we'd want to answer no! But the alternative is to say that the Christian God needs to liberate both the African animist and the Western atheist. Wouldn't it? But Parris is a western atheist. So what's going on?

Effectively Parris wants Christianity to convert Africa to the Enlightenment! You see Parris has his own gospel of fearless individualism that will transform Africa's fear-bound collectivism. The great trouble for Parris (and for all secularists) is that he has no basis for bringing this philosophy to Africa. He's not allowed to proselytise. The very autonomy that he prizes is incapable of crossing cultures. How can the individualist enforce individualism? Simply modelling it will not be enough as he himself admits. The group-think, the tribalism, the spiritual bondage to fear is too great. So what does he need? He needs a stronger spiritual power that can proclaim freedom for the captives. But what he also needs (yet doesn't own up to) is the warrant to cross cultures with such universal truth claims.

He's wants to piggy-back on Christian evangelism to bring one aspect of the gospel's fruit to Africa. This really shouldn't surprise us. The Enlightenment itself had to come via this route. It didn't have the power of its own rational cogency to birth itself! It flowed out of a distorted Christian gospel, and could only have done so.

You see, Parris's fearless individualism based on unmediated access to God isn't the Christian gospel. What's it missing? Well, notably - the Mediator and the community - Christ and His church.

Why has Parris missed such obvious elements of the gospel? Because this is precisely what the west collectively misses. If Africa's problem is 'fear-bound collectivism' who could deny that the west has an equally dire problem: 'me-first individualism'?

And from this problem the west, equally, needs liberation. And for this problem there is only one solution - the Christian Gospel.

We'll always have Parris

GlenDecember 30, 2008Leave a comment

It's been a busy week. I've only just read this from the the Saturday papers and now realise it's all over the blogosphere anyway - nonetheless...

Whenever evangelicals lose their nerve, Matthew Parris (columnist for the Times) can be counted on to set us straight - atheist though he is.

There was this famous piece in 2003, declaring that Evangelical Anglicans were right to oppose gay bishops.

As it happens I do not believe in the mind of God. But Christians do and must strive to know more of it. Nothing they read in the Old and New Testaments gives a scintilla of support to the view that the God of Israel was an inclusive God, or inclined to go with the grain of human nature; much they read suggests a righteous going against the grain...

Revelation, therefore, not logic, must lie at the core of the Church’s message. You cannot pick and choose from revealed truth.

Or there was this brilliant aside here when comparing climate change advocates with Christians:

British ministers talk about climate change in the way many Christians talk about their faith. If they believed only half of what they profess, then the knowledge would surely have galvanised them, shaken them rigid; they would be grabbing us by our lapels and begging us, imploring us, commanding us, to repent.

But his Saturday piece on Christian evangelism as the hope for Africa was just excellent:

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good...

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

Of course in among all those "M" words there's a glaring omission - but the point is well made no?

We’ll always have Parris

glenscrivDecember 30, 2008Leave a comment

It's been a busy week. I've only just read this from the the Saturday papers and now realise it's all over the blogosphere anyway - nonetheless...

Whenever evangelicals lose their nerve, Matthew Parris (columnist for the Times) can be counted on to set us straight - atheist though he is.

There was this famous piece in 2003, declaring that Evangelical Anglicans were right to oppose gay bishops.

As it happens I do not believe in the mind of God. But Christians do and must strive to know more of it. Nothing they read in the Old and New Testaments gives a scintilla of support to the view that the God of Israel was an inclusive God, or inclined to go with the grain of human nature; much they read suggests a righteous going against the grain...

Revelation, therefore, not logic, must lie at the core of the Church’s message. You cannot pick and choose from revealed truth.

Or there was this brilliant aside here when comparing climate change advocates with Christians:

British ministers talk about climate change in the way many Christians talk about their faith. If they believed only half of what they profess, then the knowledge would surely have galvanised them, shaken them rigid; they would be grabbing us by our lapels and begging us, imploring us, commanding us, to repent.

But his Saturday piece on Christian evangelism as the hope for Africa was just excellent:

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good...

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

Of course in among all those "M" words there's a glaring omission - but the point is well made no?

Some mission talks

GlenOctober 16, 2008Leave a comment

Here's a talk I did in the middle of a pub quiz (audio here). I posted up the script in advance here. In the end I modified it a bit. Essentially the original talk boiled down to 'Go and live for Christ!' The changes I made were basically to say 'See how He lived and died for you... Now don't you want to live for Him.' An improvement I think!

Here's a talk I did on John 4 (audio here). If I'd known about it, I'd have definitely included this quote from Malcolm Muggeridge (thanks Marc)

I may, I suppose, regard myself, or pass for being, a relatively successful man. People occasionally stare at me in the streets-that's fame. I can fairly easily earn enough to qualify for admission to the higher slopes of the Inland Revenue-that's success. Furnished with money and a little fame even the elderly, if they care to, may partake of trendy diversions-that's pleasure. It might happen once in a while that something I said or wrote was sufficiently heeded for me to persuade myself that it represented a serious impact on our time-that's fulfilment. Yet I say to you, and I beg you to believe me, multiply these tiny triumphs by a million, add them all together, and they are nothing-less than nothing, a positive impediment-measured against one draught of that living water Christ offers to the spiritually thirsty, irrespective of who or what they are. What, I ask myself, does life hold, what is there in the works of time, in the past, now and to come, which could possibly be put in the balance against the refreshment of drinking that water?

Sermon delivered at Queen's Cross Church, Aberdeen, 26th May 1968, reprinted in Jesus Rediscovered (Garden City NY, Doubleday, 1969) pp76-82 and also in Seeing Through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith edited by Cecil Kuhne (Ignatius, 2005) 'Living Water' p97

Barcode Gun or Magnum?

GlenSeptember 24, 2008Leave a comment

In this post I've been thinking about how we tend to pray before evangelistic efforts.

Often the prayers we say will sound something like:

'Lord, open hearts in advance of your gospel. Prepare people now so that later we will come across those upon whom your Spirit has worked.'

If this is how we think then we're basically conceiving of the gospel as a necessary instrument to salvation but it's not really at the heart of the action. The action happens in some prior (wordless) event. The gospel word merely comes as confirmation of a previous display of divine power - it's not the power itself.

On this view, the gospel is like a barcode gun.

We zap a hundred people and - glory! - we discover that five had been slipped the right barcode in advance.

The gospel here is confirmatory of a change that has happened elsewhere. As I've said, it reveals a prior power. It's not the power itself.

But there's another way to see the gospel.

The gospel is like a magnum!

The gospel is the power of God for salvation (Romans 1:16). Proclaiming the good news is unleashing divine power. We fire off a hundred rounds of the gospel and a hundred people have felt the power of God - whether for their salvation or their greater condemnation.

The gospel does not merely confirm a prior mark placed on a person. The gospel makes the mark!

So as you go out into the world with the gospel, let this affect your confidence, your reverence and your prayerfulness: It's not a barcode gun you carry - it's a magnum.

Where is the power? 5

GlenSeptember 22, 20085 Comments

We're in the middle of a mission at the moment (prayers always welcome!). One of the things we're doing is door-knocking our neighbourhood and we've seen people turn to the Lord even on the door-step. Praise God!

In our morning meetings there seems to be one kind of prayer that recurs more than any others - that God would prepare hearts so that when we arrive they are open to the gospel. Now I'll give a hearty Amen to all such prayers and, in His grace, God may well grant this. But when we think about hearts opened, wouldn't it be better to pray that the word itself will open hearts, conquer unbelief, awaken faith? Is it possible that we're separating word and Spirit by conceiving of evangelism in these terms? Is there a danger that the power is thought of as separate from the gospel and not as the gospel itself? (Rom 1:16).

I think I'd rather pray, "Lord, though the people we meet be stone-hearted, blind and lost in sin and blackest darkness, bring life and immortality to light through your gospel. May your word do its almighty work and bring life from the dead."

I'd certainly rather conceive of evangelism in those terms. When we tell the gospel we're not basically hoping that some have previously enjoyed God's power. Rather, we're going with the power of God which is unleashed upon all, every time we speak of Christ.

Love is the greatest thing… or is it?

GlenSeptember 3, 2008Leave a comment

Ok, another little example of engaging with non-Christian world-views. This is from a wedding sermon I gave a few weeks ago. The great majority of the congregation were not Christians. The couple asked me to speak from 1 John 4:7-12. I'll quote a part of the sermon and then make some comments. (Just so you know I've tweaked the last paragraph since giving the sermon.)

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Why is virtually every film, every TV show, every novel, every pop song obsessed with people falling in love and getting together? If they're not obsessed with falling in love and getting together, they're obsessed with falling out of love and drifting apart. You can't get around it: this kind of committed, mutually self-giving relationship consumes our culture and consumes our hearts.

Why? Why do all the songs say ‘Love is the greatest thing'?

Craig and Debbie know. That's why they chose this reading from the bible. Why does the world say ‘Love is the greatest thing.'?? Because God, the greatest thing, is love.

That's the famous phrase from our reading. Verse 8: "God is love." Coming into church this afternooon you may not have known any verse of the bible - now you know one. "God is love."

God's not just in a long-term relationship. God is an eternal relationship of committed love. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit love one another, uphold one another, pour their life into one another from eternity past to eternity future.

The committed love of marriage is a faint picture of the incredible love that binds the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Whether you believe in Him or not, whatever concept of God you've brought to church this afternoon, allow it to be shaped by God's own word. God is love.

God doesn't just do love. God is love. His very existence is an existence of love. Love is the very stuff of His being. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are who they are because they are constantly giving and receiving love.

Why do the songs say love is the greatest thing? Because the greatest thing, God, is love. To put your finger on the ultimate pulse of reality you will find the committed love of these three Persons. Of course the whole world sings of love. How could it not?!

But here's the terrible tragedy. The world doesn't know why love's the greatest thing. And so the world is left with this groundless, abstract thing called love. It becomes a mere feeling for us to praise and magnify, and, in all probability, to watch slip through our fingers. Love, without this grounding in God, becomes only a sentiment to be admired. But if that is all that love is, then today is robbed of it's meaning. If love is just a feeling, we may well smile at the happy couple, we will praise their participation in this grand myth called love. But then we'll go home wondering if there's any real substance to it all. But to all that, the bible says Perish the thought!! Love has a grounding. As verse 7 says "Love comes from God". That's why Craig and Debbie want us to think about these verses. The God who is love will breathe meaning back into that old cliche that 'love is the greatest thing'. And in doing so He will provide a foundation not only for Craig and Debbie's marriage but for all of our lives. So let's pay attention to these verses for the next couple of minutes...

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Four observations.

First, the Christian can take upon their lips non-Christian sentiments and use them truly. But in doing so we commandeer those propositions and press them into a quite different service. So 'love is the greatest thing' on the lips of a non-Christian means what? Well it could mean many things but at the end of the day it effectively boils down to 'love is God.' Love itself becomes the object of worship. But what does 'love is the greatest thing' mean on the lips of a Christian? Well in the kind of context I tried to give in the sermon, it becomes testimony to the entirely different truth 'God is love'.

Secondly, I really mean it when I wonder out loud How can the world not sing of love? I am happy to draw attention to this universal sentiment that 'love is the greatest thing.' But I will tell the non-Christian that he or she doesn't really know why it's their sentiment. And that even the terms of that sentiment are distorted into falsehood. 'Love is God' seems a hairs-breadth from the truth, in fact it's idolatry. And idolatry is not a stepping stone to true worship.

Thirdly, none of this depends on agreeing with a non-Christian definition of love. It's not a case of saying 'Hey, you love love, I love love, everyone loves love. Lemme show you the best love.' We can't do that because verse 10 describes love in terms that are completely off our natural radar screen. According to God's word, love is bloody, sacrificial, atoning death. And that for enemies. I've never found the non-Christian who will agree to that definition of love in advance! We simply do not share a common understanding of love from which we can argue to divine reality.

Fourth, I'm very fond of that kind of phrase: 'Allow yourself to be told...' I don't know where I first picked it up but it's kind of my whole theology of revelation. Preaching (but in fact all speaking of Christian truth) is declaring with divinely delegated authority: 'Allow yourself to be told something you do not know, could never anticipate and will never have under your belt... Put yourself in the path of this meteor from above... Receive something that you absolutely do not already have in your grasp.' It is news that we tell. Revelation. I try to have my rhetoric shaped by that.

Trivial pursuits

GlenSeptember 2, 2008Leave a comment

Here's an evangelistic talk I gave last year. I'm giving a version of it again in a fortnight so any critique would be gratefully received (especially in light of our recent discussions). It was given at the half-way point of a pub quiz...

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I don't really think this quiz is fair. I'm not doing half as well here as I do in London quizes. I think it might have something to do with my mobile phone reception. I tell you - the blackberry has trasformed the pub quiz has it not? Not so much a quiz as an internet research challenge.

But I'm sure that no-one here would do something so under-handed!

I'm Australian - I just say that because you might listen in and think I have an accent. You'd be wrong, I don't have an accent - you have the accent. I speak perfectly normally. I've lived here in the UK for about 12 of the last 14 years... give or take the odd deportation.

I have to say though that Australia and England share a common love of quizzes. We're all trivia lovers.

I love trivia. When I was growing up my favourite book was called ‘the Big Book of Amazing Facts.' And it was full of all sorts of trivia like the fact a squid has three hearts and a sheep has six stomachs and all polar bears are left handed and if you folded a sheet of paper 20 times you'd reach the moon but of course you can't because you can only fold a piece of paper 7 times. All those sorts of trivial facts fascinated me.

And trivia fascinates us as a culture. We're a very prosperous culture and a very safe culture today. In the history of the world we have never lived at a more prosperous time or a safer time and on planet earth there are few places that are richer or more secure than right here, right now. And in the absence of great life or death issues, our culture loves to stare at its own navel.

And so our best selling books are Sudoku puzzles and cook books and trivial lists called miscellanies. When you look to TV all our prime-time programmes are diets and cooking programmes, make-overs, celebrity nannies and reality TV. Of course reality TV is just trivial TV isn't it. Dull, lifeless, drab and excruciatingly boring. We are fascinated with the trivial.

Now it's fine to like trivial books and trivial tv, and it's fun to test our trivia knowledge. But wouldn't it be a tragedy if you got to the end of your life and the verdict on it was "Trivial"! That would be a very great tragedy.

But the scary thing is - all it takes to live a trivial life is for you to try very hard and be very productive and very successful at irrelevant things. That's all it takes to waste your life - simply to ‘major on the minors' as the Americans say. If you work hard at the side issues in life, your life is trivial. If you miss the main thing in life, you could be very industrious, very determined, very successful even but you would have utterly wasted the life God's given you. I don't want it said of anyone here on the Day coming that really matters - ‘your life was trivial. You missed the main thing.'

I want us to think about four words from the Bible this evening. They come from a letter in the New Testament written by the Apostle Paul. He writes to Christians and he says to them:

CHRIST IS YOUR LIFE. Christ is your life.

In 1998 my mother bought me a T-Shirt she'd bought at a London market. The T-Shirt had a cricket bat and a cricket ball on it, and it just said ‘Cricket is Life: The rest is mere details.'

This is because, at the time, cricket consumed my life. I was never happier than when chasing a small red ball around a park. Cricket was the driving passion of my life and every other priority in life had to give way. Friends, girlfriends, certainly school and university study - they all very much took a back seat, because cricket was my LIFE - the rest was mere details...

Now you are thinking - what a trivial pursuit - cricket! Is there anything more boring?

Groucho Marx once went to a cricket match at Lord's and halfway through the match he turned to his host and said "And when will the actual game begin." Cricket is dull. Cricket is trivial. But it was my life.

Do you know what I have to show for my years devoted to cricket? Any cricket fans here may know of Wisden which is the cricketer's almanac recording the more serious games of cricket that take place in the world. There have been 144 editions of the Wisden cricketing almanac and they each hold over a thousand pages. I am on one of those pages. Halfway down p886 of the 136^th edition of the Wisden cricketing almanac my name appears in 6-point font. And it's mis-spelt. That's what I have to show for years and years of obsessive devotion to cricket. You know what that means for those years - they were trivial.

And you know how I felt when I hit a level of cricket that was just too good for me and I got dropped from the team? I wanted to die. Cricket was life and when I failed at cricket I didn't just fail at a sport I failed as a person. That's how it felt. Because cricket was my life.

Whatever you devote yourself to has the power of life or death over you. So what about you? What's your trivial obsession. I've told you mine, now it's your turn, let's get up one by one... What's your life? What's on your T-shirt? What do you day-dream about, when you're doing the washing up or standing in the supermarket queue or the last thought at night. What do you think ‘if only I had that then everything would be ok.' What is it in your life that you think, ‘if I lost that, I wouldn't want to live.' That's your life. And that thing - whatever it is - has the power of God over you. If it comes through for you it feels like life, if it fails you, it feels like death. What's on your t-shirt? What is your life?

It might be something much more noble than cricket. I'm sure it is! Perhaps it's your job, perhaps it's your friends, perhaps it's your spouse or your family. But whatever it is - your life orbits around that thing. But let me assure you there is nothing on earth strong enough to take the gravitational forces you're putting on it. Family, friends, loved ones will all fail you - they'll either let down or they'll get sick and die. But one way or another, if they are your LIFE, your world will come tumbling down.

Our Bible verse says there's only one thing that ought to be your life. CHRIST IS YOUR LIFE.

But wait. Maybe you don't think Christ is strong enough to be the centre of your world. Perhaps you don't think this Galilean carpenter would make a very good life!

Well the bible insists He is far more than a Galilean carpenter.

In the book where this verse is found it says this. "ALL THINGS WERE MADE BY CHRIST AND FOR CHRIST"

Jesus is not just the founder of Christianity. Jesus is the founder of the universe. He is not just 2000 years old, He was there in the beginning. Everything came FROM Jesus and it is all FOR Jesus. The Bible insists that Jesus is our Creator and He is the Goal of all things. "All things were made by Christ and for Christ."

How can we get our head around that? Imagine this. Imagine a child blowing a bubble through a bubble ring. That's a bit like creation. Because God kind of blows the bubble of creation out through Jesus Christ. A bubble ring defines and shapes the bubble and Jesus Christ defines and shapes the universe. All things were made by Him and for Him.

You might have all sorts of questions about that. That's fine, Christ Church exists as a place where you can ask those questions and get answers. But that's what the Bible says - "All things were made by Christ and for Christ". You were made by Christ and for Christ.

Therefore the BIG question about whether you're living a trivial life is this: Are you FOR Jesus Christ? Are you FOR Him? Do you know Him, do you know Him as your goal, the meaning of your life, are you for Him? If you're not then you might be doing a thousand good things - but you're not involved with the main thing. The main thing is Jesus. Christ is your life... the rest is mere detail.

Imagine you were invited to Buckingham palace for tea with the Queen. You come back and all I want to do is ask you about what she was like, what she said, was she nice, was she bored, was Philip there, did he offend anybody?? Imagine you come to me and say, "I couldn't be bothered with the Queen or any of them. But, my gosh, let me tell you about the tea!"

I don't care about the tea, and you shouldn't either. You're invited to the palace to meet the Queen. And you exist on planet earth to meet Christ. Christ is your life - if you're missing Him you're in grave danger of living a trivial life.

When I failed at cricket - that was a gift from God. He showed me that I was trying to find LIFE in a place it was never meant to be found. He showed me I was living a trivial life. He used this massive disappointment to make me realise the MAIN thing in life.

But what about you? What is your driving passion?

Most of my wife and my friends are not Christians. And we have seen with them at least three different driving passions. The first passion was obvious - we met at university and so what did we talk about when we got together? Parties. We'd tell each other the best parties we'd been to, how drunk everyone got, the drugs everyone took. Parties were life.

Eventually my friends stopped partying so much. Why? Did they get religion or something? No, they'd just found a new driving passion - it was called career. Then every time we met up they'd brag about how many hours they were working. They'd say ‘I work 60 hour weeks. I work 70 hour weeks. I go to work in a nappy just to save on bathroom breaks.' It got ridiculous.

But you know, eventually they're getting over their workaholism. How? They've got new will-power? No they've got a new passion. And the new passion is family. So now they're up to their eye-balls in nappies and competing with the other mum's over who's the cutest, smartest, most likely to marry a footballer. Now ‘Family is life, the rest is mere details.'

But the point is this: No-one ever gives up on one driving passion without being convinced that there is a better driving passion on offer. No-one gives up the ‘My job is my life' t-shirt without being assured that there is a better t-shirt with a better life to put on.

For me, it took a time of great depression to realise, my life wasn't working. I'd tried the academic success t-shirt, I'd tried the sporting success t-shirt, I'd tried the women t-shirt. And they all failed me. All of those things are GREAT in their own place. Friends, relationships, family, job, sport, success they're all great in their own way - but they are not life. And what it took was for me to pick up the Bible and meet Jesus Christ in it. In Jesus I found a centre to my life big enough to take the weight of my hopes and expectations.

You'll only make Christ your life if you see Him in all His glory. And the Bible is a book that shows off the glory and the wonder of Jesus. It tells you that Jesus MADE the universe AND He stooped down to become a man. It tells you He rules over all creation AND He humbles Himself onto a bloody cross. It tells you He is worthy of all praise and service AND He comes and serves us. You've never met anyone like Jesus. But you need to meet Him - He needs to be the centre of your life. So why not come along to Christ Church tomorrow morning. Why not commit to coming to church and finding out who this Jesus is. Find out why He is the central figure of all history. Find out why the calendar revolves around HIS birth. Find out why He commands more allegiance than any other human figure. Come and meet Jesus Christ and then everything else falls into place - friends, family, work, play. Your life will find it's true order when Jesus is at the centre.

Well those are just a few thoughts from me. I hope you're enjoying your evening and that you enjoy your trivia. Trivia's fun, but I hope our lives revolve around someOne far more worthy.

The truth that is in Jesus 20

GlenSeptember 1, 200820 Comments

Ok, so we've noted the danger of fiting Jesus into a pre-fab system of truth. We don't want to do that. But Missy has asked the $64 000 question. It's basically this: What do we do when speaking to a non-Christian - isn't it desirable at least sometimes to bring Christ to them according to their preferred programme??

I'm not going to be able to answer this very well. But I'm just going to give some thoughts as they occur and then I'd love if others chimed in with how they go about this.

My first thought is this: If we're doing evangelism then we are necessarily relating Christ to non-Christian thought-forms. Even if all we do is read out the sermon on the mount it will be heard from within a pre-existing mindset. What's more it will be heard as remarkably similar, if not completely continuous, with human philosophies. Think about it. We all live in a universe made by, through and for Christ and which proclaims Him in every detail. Everyone is working with the same conceptual raw materials and can do no other than come up with some re-arrangement of Christian truth. When the pure stuff is brought to bear on discussion people will say 'Yeah, yeah. That's just like X.'

But is it? And is it ever true to say to a person 'You know it is just like X. And I'll add Y and Z to your X and we'll build towards saving knowledge of Christ.'

Well let's think about the nature of truth. Paul says we find truth in Christ - hidden in Him in fact (Eph 4:21; Col 2:3). Jesus says He is truth (John 14:6) and even goes so far as to say that God's word (which He also calls 'truth') when not related to Him, leaves people in terrifying ignorance. (John 5:39f; 17:17).

Truth is relative. It stands in strict relation to Christ the Truth (good name for a blog I reckon). His subjectivity is the one objectivity. What is there outside of Him in Whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden? Rearrangements of Christian reality yes - but because of that re-arrangement they are rendered blasphemous falsehoods. The true test of a proposition is not its conformity to an abstract notion of reality or reason or scientific law. The true test is its relatedness to Jesus.

It is simply not the case that discrete parcels of truth lie around the universe largely intact. It is even less true that sinful humanity has some capacity (or inclination!) to assess these propositions, divorced as they are from Christ. It's outright Pelagian heresy to imagine that such 'discrete propositions' and such 'objectively assessed' truth will lead a person to Christ. Christ leads us into the truth. Study of abstract truth does not lead us to Christ.

Now, what about non-Christian philosophies? Can a Christian take a sentence from Homer (either Simpson or the poet!) on their lips and use it to testify to Christ? Of course! But in doing so they have vindicated Christ not Homer. They have not given testimony to the rightness of that proposition in its own context. They have commandeered it and pressed it into Christ's service - the service it should have always rendered. This is precisely the language of 2 Corinthians 10:5 - taking every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ.

In this verse Paul paints the picture of these renegade 'thoughts' that have gone AWOL from Christ. We arrest them and press them back into the Lord's service. But what we don't do is grant these thoughts a civilian existence, as though they'll do the Lord's service no matter what uniform they're wearing. No. Either they're in obedience to Christ (explicitly wearing the uniform) or they're a pretension setting itself up against the knowledge of God (2 Cor 10:5).

Ok, but now we're back to the inescapable problem. Here is a non-Christian with all their presupposed notions of truth that can only lead them to error. Now here comes Christ the Truth. And we've already conceded that the non-Christian cannot but hear Christ according to their presupposed notions. So what do we do?

Well here's one tempting response. Simply oppose everything they say. They buy into post-modernism - we counter with modernism. They're comfortable with irrational claims - we respond with rationalism. They say 'truth is relative' - we insist 'truth is absolute.' They indulge in immorality - we preach morality. Well you may well get a discussion going. But have you brought them to Christ? Or to the 1950s?

Tim Keller ministers among the groovy lefties of Manhattan. What's his approach? Traditional religious values? No, as he likes to say the bible is not left wing or right wing - it's from above. Whatever we say into these debates must make that clear.

Another thought. Jesus did not come onto the world stage addressing 'universal human concerns'. He wasn't born into the Areopagus as the Ultimate Philosopher. He did not open with: 'We all know the truth about relationships, money, power etc. I've come to bring you the ultimate experience of these.' No. He comes specifically and almost exclusively onto the Jewish scene, addressing Jewish hopes and concerns. He comes as Messiah into a very specific, encultered setting which He had been meticulously preparing for Himself for centuries. A people had been formed, a law had been given, a land, kings, prophets, priests, the Scriptures. And the understanding, ideals, hopes and problems of this people are actually quite strange to the natural ear.

They worried about ceremonial cleanness and atoning sacrifice; about land and exile; about Sabbath and the throne of David. They were a particular people with particular patriarchs and a particular God called Yahweh who was (and is), among other things, their tribal deity. They were concerned about His particular promises - His covenant - and their particular fulfilment. The Jesus-shaped hole at the heart of Israel was a very peculiar shape indeed - at least to modern sensibilities. It is, in many ways, very different to what contemporary evangelists consider as the Jesus-shaped hole of today's 'enquirer'.

And so when the LORD incarnate comes as His own Prophet, He does a couple of peculiar things that we modern evangelists don't really do. First He comes in fulfilment of the Scriptures. All the Gospel writers do this but Matthew especially introduces Jesus as the fulfilment of the Old Testament. Here is the One at the centre of this history and this people and these hopes. Do we present Jesus like that?

The other peculiar thing Jesus does is to begin by saying 'Repent and believe the gospel.' That's not His punchline - that's His opener. 'Repent and believe the gospel' He commands. And then He unpacks the life of the kingdom. On those terms He speaks of relationships, money, power etc. First the beatitudes - the gatehouse to the kingdom - then a description of this kingdom life.

What would evangelism look like that followed this pattern? Something like this I think: "You've been speaking to me about love / freedom / fear / power / addiction / sexuality / abortion / capital punishment / healthcare / education / the state / animal rights / whatever. Jesus has a lot to say on those issues but I'm going to have to back up from our discussion and give you a bird's eye view. Let me give you the bible's view on X in three minutes." If your friend isn't willing to do this then they're not willing to have a serious discussion anyway. Present your biblical theology of the issue with Jesus at the centre. Now Jesus is your non-negotiable. He is the vantage point from which you address the subject. He is not in question - everything else is. Even use language like "For the sake of argument, work with me on this. I'm describing Christ's universe - He made all things, He came into the world to reconcile them etc etc... Doesn't that explain perfectly what we find when it comes to X?'

What you don't want to do is say 'X is absolutely true. Now please investigate Jesus and I hope you find that He fits the criteria already established by X.' I find Karl Barth's warning on this particularly salient:

The great danger of apologetics is “the domesticating of revelation… the process of making the Gospel respectable. When the Gospel is offered to man, and he stretches out his hand to receive it and takes it into his hand, an acute danger arises which is greater than the danger that he may not understand it and angrily reject it. The danger is that he may accept it and peacefully and at once make himself its lord and possessor, thus rendering it inoccuous, making that which chooses him something which he himself has chosen, which therefore comes to stand as such alongside all the other things that he can also choose, and therefore control.” (II/1, p141)

More Barth quotes here.

Anyway I've got a few more things to say but I've rambled on too long. Maybe a worked example or two would help. Perhaps that's what I'll blog next.

But I'll leave it there for now. What do you think?

Four Bishops, Four Pearls

GlenJuly 7, 2008Leave a comment

I was reflecting today that in the last fortnight I've received four pearls of wisdom from four Anglican bishops. That's right, I said Anglican bishops.

The first pearl came from retired Bishop John Taylor who spoke at our ordination retreat. He told the story of a pastoral visit to a very ill woman in hospital. It represents brilliantly what I think pastoral practice (and good evangelism) boils down to. Here's how I remember his re-telling:

I told her God's grace was for her - even for her.

She said "No, it couldn't be, you don't know what I've done."

I told her "Christ said 'The healthy don't need a doctor, the sick do. I've not come to call the righteous but sinner.' It really is for you."

She said "No."

I said "Yes!"...

...Eventually she received Christ.

Brilliant! The word from beyond comes, contradicts and finally comforts. It perfectly encapsulates my understanding of ministry.

The next pearl comes from my Bishop of Chichester in his charge to us priests prior to ordination. He spoke about public worship:

It is fundamental for biblical faith that God is the subject and not the object of the liturgy. In [OT] Temple worship, it is God who reveals himself, his presence, his name, his will. The cultus was not a kind of magical conjuring up of a compliant deity but the place at which by thankful remembrance of what God has done in the past God himself has the opening to disclose himself again, here and now, to renew faith and secure its transmission to the next generation... it is something which lies in God's own hands...

...Let me finish by trying to draw together a few scattered strands of this charge. First, I would like you to remember always that true worship is not something we do, but a moment in which God discloses himself to us. Second, I would like you to remember that both praise of God and thanksgiving for his actual gifts are central to authentic worship and third, I would like you to remember that worship has an important role in reconvincing people of his concrete, actual, historical acts of mercy so that they can become effective witnesses to those who do not believe. And finally, I would like you to remember that if our worship is genuine, it can be a powerful witness to both those who believe and those who do not yet believe, that God is real and has been among his people.

We do not pull God down (through our faithful preaching, our good music or our sacramental practice). These things, in God's good pleasure, are a means of His grace. The direction of the arrow is DOWN.

Next pearl was from my area Bishop, Wallace Benn who preached at my ordination. His passage was John 21:1-19. He spoke of the importance of feeding the sheep (v15-17) and of the sure expectation of suffering in ministry (v18-19). But first and foremost he drummed into us the vital importance of 'maintaining your love relationship with the Lord' (v15-17).

Finally, Douglas Milmine - former Bishop of Paraguay - was at my ordination. He's been ordained since 1947, been a bishop for 35 years and absolutely brim full of the joy of the Lord. Just minutes before the ordination service he said to us in the vestry:

I've only one regret in my ministry - that I didn't save more souls. That's the only reason we're here - saving souls.

Go bishops!