New Blog

Please check out my new blog at fivefortogo.com. I will not be posting here any more.

 

The Authority of the Church

I was studying Galatians 2:1-10 today while preparing for a group study  tonight.  As usual,  several  tangential thougths began to overpower my brain.

The Scripture is the following (NIV):

1Fourteen years later I went up again to Jerusalem, this time with Barnabas. I took Titus along also. 2I went in response to a revelation and set before them the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles. But I did this privately to those who seemed to be leaders, for fear that I was running or had run my race in vain. 3Yet not even Titus, who was with me, was compelled to be circumcised, even though he was a Greek. 4This matter arose because some false brothers had infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus and to make us slaves. 5We did not give in to them for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might remain with you. 6As for those who seemed to be important—whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not judge by external appearance—those men added nothing to my message. 7On the contrary, they saw that I had been entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel to the Gentiles,^[a] just as Peter had been to the Jews.^[b] 8For God, who was at work in the ministry of Peter as an apostle to the Jews, was also at work in my ministry as an apostle to the Gentiles. 9James, Peter^[c] and John, those reputed to be pillars, gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship when they recognized the grace given to me. They agreed that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the Jews. 10All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do.

Paul has been led by God to confer with the Jerusalem leaders about his work. He wants to make sure that the church stands in unity over his work with Gentiles, especially the teaching that they do not have to be circumcised. The Jerusalem leaders go along with this. In fact, the only thing they mention in addition to what Paul has said is to remember the poor.

We can look at Paul’s other writings to see what his teachings are regarding the gospel: the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, the reconciliation of all people to God and each other, among other things.

It appears that Paul was not looking for approval for his teaching, but instead acceptance and agreement. Did Paul say some things that the Jerusalem leaders did not agree with? Knowing Paul, being the opinionated guy that he was, he probably got a little upset during the discussion. He may have even sounded a little extremist. But he did not feel rebuked by the leaders, instead he left feeling affirmed.

Which leads me to ask the question, what are our churches responsible for or not responsible for concerning doctrine. If another church is teaching “false doctrine,” how should we respond? Should church leaders legislate a response to divorce/remarriage or deal with each case differently? Do churches need to make “region-wide” stands regarding what is appropriate in worship? Do churches need to make stands and public outcries about the treatment of the poor? What should we “go public” about, because when we do, the whole church is watching.

If we look closely at the Jerusalem church, I think we can learn some things. See the Jerusalem council in Acts 15 for another example.  Think about what “authority” the church has to “legislate” or “make stands.” Who has authority and where does authority come from?

 

You know you’re from Memphis . . .

if you think barbecue is one of the major food groups.

if your college basketball team can beat your professional one.

if you have the best musicians in the world.

if people tell you they don’t want to move here and you say “Why? The people are great!”

if your pyramid is made of glass and holds a lot of bass.

if you consider John Grisham a historian.

if you wonder if Justin Timberlake and Elvis are related.

if you know where “Six Flags over Jesus” is.

if you know what COGIC means.

if your politicians do a lot of consulting work.

if you can pray in your schools.

if one snowflake can shut down schools for the day.

if you hope that Dr. King didn’t die here in vain.

 

Super Bowl Musings

In a moment that reminds me that sports are not the most important thing in life, it’s been interesting to watch Super Bowl commentary the past two weeks.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the broadcasters, announcers, coaches, and players talk about how they’re ready to stop talking about the game and “just blow the whistle and get started!” Two weeks of debating Eli Manning’s poise or the Patriots videoing skills are almost too much for even the biggest sports geek.

Sometimes I feel that way about church. We do a lot of talking. We have a lot of classes. We hear a lot of sermons. We debate a lot of theological points. Sometimes, like the guys on ESPN, I just want to say, let’s get it on with it! Isn’t the point of going over the basics to be able to actually get to the game?

So what is the game? Where is the battle fought? Just the fact that we have to ask this question may show that we are too comfortable in the world. If we were fighting the right battles, would our kids keep attending church when they leave high school because they had seen the value of what we are doing?

Something to think about.

 

Dr. King’s Legacy

I thought I would chime in on Dr. King’s legacy a couple of days late.

You cannot live in Memphis and not think about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his legacy.  He was not a perfect man.  He would not have claimed to be.  You can read about his life in many biographies and see his problems.  That is not the point.  Or is it?

Dr. King made himself a public figure to right some wrongs. Did he choose to become so popular or was it thrust open him? Maybe a little of both. But he did not shy away from whom God had made him: an incredible speaker with a passion for justice who seized a time in history when we needed him.

As I think about my life, am I “seizing the moment” every day? Probably not. But, in the big picture, is my life heading on a course that allows God to use me? That should be my goal.

We will probably never reach the celebrity status of Dr. King, nor should we seek it. But we should allow God’s agenda to intersect our own no matter the cost. That is something we can share with Dr. King.

 

Goodbye to the Kennells

Our good friends, Mark, Nicole, Maddie, and Michal Kennell are moving back to Togo tomorrow.  They have been in Memphis for two and a half years and we have enjoyed every minute of our time with them.

We will miss Mark’s insightful thoughts that are often over our heads, Nicole’s fun and carefree personality, Maddie’s intellectualism, and Michal’s fun and carefree personality (Know who I think she’s like?).

I poke fun but I think the Kennells are some of the most inspiring, faithful, and fun people I’ve ever met. I’m glad they’ll be back with us for a while this summer!

 

Sound Doctrine

I am currently in a personal study of how to better understand the role of Scripture in the practice of the church. The following is from an article by N.T. Wright found at www.theofframp.org/ntwright. It’s a long article so I include just a part of it here:

Authority in the church, then, means the church’s authority, with scripture in its hand and heart, to speak and act for God in his world. It is not simply that we may say, in the church, ‘Are we allowed to do this or that?’ ‘Where are the lines drawn for our behavior?’ Or, ‘Must we believe the following 17 doctrines if we are to be really sound?’ God wants the church to lift up its eyes and see the field ripe for harvest, and to go out, armed with the authority of scripture; not just to get its own life right within a Christian ghetto, but to use the authority of scripture to declare to the world authoritatively that Jesus is Lord. And, since the New Testament is the covenant charter of the people of God, the Holy Spirit, I believe, desires and longs to do this task in each generation by reawakening people to the freshness of that covenant, and hence summoning them to fresh covenant tasks. The phrase ‘authority of scripture’, therefore, is a sort of shorthand for the fact that the creator and covenant God uses this book as his means of equipping and calling the church for these tasks. And this is, I believe, the true biblical context of the biblical doctrine of authority, which is meant to enable us in turn to be Micaiahs, in church and how much more in society: so that, in other words, we may be able to stand humbly in the councils of God, in order then to stand boldly in the councils of men. How may we do that? By soaking ourselves in scripture, in the power and strength and leading of the Spirit, in order that we may then speak freshly and with authority to the world of this same creator God.

Why is authority like this? Why does it have to be like that? Because God (as in Acts I and Matthew 28, which we looked at earlier) wants to catch human beings up in the work that he is doing. He doesn’t want to do it by-passing us; he wants us to be involved in his work. And as we are involved, so we ourselves are being remade. He doesn’t give us the Holy Spirit in order to make us infallible-blind and dumb servants who merely sit there and let the stuff flow through us. So, he doesn’t simply give us a rule book so that we could just thumb through and look it up. He doesn’t create a church where you become automatically sinless on entry. Because, as the goal and end of his work is redemption, so the means is redemptive also: judgment and mercy, nature and grace. God does not, then, want to put people into little boxes and keep them safe and sound. It is, after all, possible to be so sound that you’re sound asleep. I am not in favor of unsoundness; but soundness means health, and health means growth, and growth means life and vigor and new directions. The little boxes in which you put people and keep them under control are called coffins. We read scripture not in order to avoid life and growth. God forgive us that we have done that in some of our traditions, Nor do we read scripture in order to avoid thought and action, or to be crushed, or squeezed, or confined into a de-humanizing shape, but in order to die and rise again in our minds. Because, again and again, we find that, as we submit to scripture, as we wrestle with the bits that don’t make sense, and as we hand through to a new sense that we haven’t thought of or seen before, God breathes into our nostrils his own breath-the breath of life. And we become living beings-a church recreated in his image, more fully human, thinking, alive beings.

That, in fact, is (I believe) one of the reasons why God has given us so much story, so much narrative in scripture. Story authority, as Jesus knew only too well, is the authority that really works. Throw a rule book at people’s head, or offer them a list of doctrines, and they can duck or avoid it, or simply disagree and go away. Tell them a story, though, and you invite them to come into a different world; you invite them to share a world-view or better still a ‘God-view’. That, actually, is what the parables are all about. They offer, as all genuine Christian story-telling the does, a world-view which, as someone comes into it and finds how compelling it is, quietly shatters the world-view that they were in already. Stories determine how people see themselves and how they see the world. Stories determine how they experience God, and the world, and themselves, and others. Great revolutionary movements have told stories about the past and present and future. They have invited people to see themselves in that light, and people’s lives have been changed. If that happens at a merely human level, how much more when it is God himself, the creator, breathing through his word.

Ryan’s note:

Limiting Scripture to a rule book or “timeless truths” to discern does not do it justice. It is much more than that. It is a part of God’s story, an incredible adventure that he wants us to join!

 

The Forgotten Ways

I am reading an intriguing book that came out last year. It’s The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch. It contrasts the church before 300 AD with the church after 300 AD. He believes that our current western culture is more like the culture before 300 AD (before Constantine made Christianity the official state religion.)

One of his early conclusions is that instead of being an institutional, “clergy-led,” “attractional” church, we should be the following as the early church was:

don’t need church buildings, often “underground”

recognizes more roles in leadership, not just the preacher

grassroots, decentralized

church is on the margins of society

church is about “sending out,” not just “bringing in”

(These categories are from page 64.)

As I’ve said before, hopefully this “missional”  conversation will continue for us as we take the changes of postmodernism seriously. The days of “build it and they will come” are dying out for the megachurches and for us.

 

Good Friends

Friendships are at a premium these days. In our busy and disconnected world, people find it hard to find the time to build deep friendships.  We have a hard enough time to spend enough time with our own physical family, let alone our spiritual family.

Churches need to think about this as we plan our meeting times. Are we worshipping together as a crowd of strangers at times? Paul teaches in I Corinthians that acceptable worship of God includes caring about each other.

How can we build better friendships in the church? Women are better at sharing feelings in building friendships. Men, as a whole, bond better around tasks.  I tend to think that our small group ministries should be built around Bible study, ministries, and other interests.  We will need to explore the best use of our meeting times as we respond to the changes in our culture.

 

Missional Church

Below is a copy of notes presented on the “missional church.”  “Missional church” is a popular buzzphrase right now.  Here is a Presbyterian take on it.

 I think there is a lot of good here that we need to be discussing.

“MISSIONAL FOR DUMMIES”: AN INTRO TO PGF

The following Power Point presentation was recently made to a couple of congregations in the Atlanta area as an introduction to the work and mission of PGF…

A few weeks ago somebody was telling me about a church conducting a search for a new pastor.    Apparently, this congregation is in a bustling and growing suburb of Atlanta.  More and more people are moving into the area; local business and real estate are showing similar signs of new life; and the congregation itself is excited about the prospects of adding more people to its rosters.

But there is one big catch.  The church is dying: each year more people leave, the budget shrinks and morale gets worse.  In short, this little congregation in an Atlanta suburb is just one more casualty among the fastest dying breed of mainline Christianity…the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. 

[Slide 1:  The Presbyterian Church U.S.A. is dying.]

I asked my friend for his take on why the church is dying.  My friend’s answer was eye-opening.  He told me that the congregation keeps focusing on keeping its building pretty and finding a nice, friendly pastor to offer spiritual care, all the while thinking that by making their church more “attractive,” people will start coming to their church in droves… 

[Slide 2:  The Old “Attractional Church” Model..."If you build it, they will come."]

…But people aren’t coming.  They’re not coming because what may’ve worked fifty years ago, when the “Sunday Christian” phenomenon and “Christian” values were still big, when going to church was still the mainstream, conservative, culturally acceptable, suburban activity of a lot of Americans, no longer works…and, for good riddance, too, because that kind of staid, boring existence, can’t come close to measuring up to the suspense and adventure of following Jesus where He goes– on a great, big mission from God to heal the sick, cast out demons, forgive sin, and fight evil and injustice.  That, after all, is the story of Jesus we read about in Scripture…(and it’s supposed to be our story, too.)

So the death of mainline Christianity as we know it is actually an opportunity!  It’s an opportunity because it frees us up to be the “church” God intended us to be in the first place—a people sent out right behind Jesus to be salt and light to a needy world and caught up in the great drama of the missio dei, the mission of God to redeem His world.

PGF: Our Origins

Well, if we mainline Presbyterians are going extinct, as illustrated in my introductory example, you’re going to hear today about how the movement called “Presbyterian Global Fellowship” (PGF) will get us off the endangered species list and back into the arena where God is at work breathing life into fresh, creative expressions of “missional  church.”  But before we talk about where we in PGF believe God is calling us to go, I want to remind us a little about where we come from.

[Slide 3:  “Dangerous Memories” (Brueggemann)]

And that story, as I’ve already intimated, begins back in the Good Book that tells us who we really are:  beloved children of God, friends of Christ, partners with the Holy Spirit, a chosen people set apart to be a blessing to the nations.  We know this is our identity, because God deigned to become one of us in the person of a man named “Jesus,” thereby crossing all boundaries of space, time and the sin that leads to death just to show us how much He loves us.

[Slide 4: “Dangerous Memories” continued]

And this Jesus was a radical, subversive revolutionary who in the act of living, dying and rising from the dead overturned all of the tall tales we human beings have told ourselves since the beginning of time– that our lives don’t have eternal significance, that our world is beyond repair, that we can’t make a difference, that our lights are better kept hidden under a bushel…the list goes on. 

As is often the case, the tall tales can tend to win out, at least for a time.  To be sure, the early church, basking in the dazzling aftermath of Jesus’ subversive story, chose to live on the margins of the Roman Empire as a peculiar people.  The church of that time was known as people of “the Way”—they were on the move and on a mission, following the One who called Himself “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”  (We can catch a glimpse of the excitement of those early days from reading the book of Acts, where ordinary men and women, none of them ordained, none of them CPM-certified, were doing extraordinary things in Jesus’ name.)

[Slide 5: “Christendom”:  A Working Definition]

But starting in the fourth century, the church in the West began to settle down to a more comfortable routine: under the auspices of Emperor Constantine the church sidled up to the institutions of state and culture and stayed there, cozy, well-fed and comfortable, like a great big bear in hibernation…And she stayed there for centuries, in a state dubbed “Christendom.”

Of course every metaphor has its limits, and by comparing Christendom to a bear in hibernation, I don’t want to forget the many contributions to mission that took place during the life of Christendom—many of them made by Presbyterians.  In fact, the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. is itself historically rooted in an understanding of the church as a “missionary society.”

[Slide 6: “Christendom” Images]

But, if you will permit me to indulge the metaphor, only recently did the great bear begin to come out of her hibernation.  Some fifty years ago, expressions of “Sunday Christianity” were still as woven into the fabric of American culture as “Leave it to Beaver” and mama’s apple pie; but today, as evidenced in my opening story, the last props of Christendom have collapsed.  We now live in a secular age in which the church is once again on the margins of what constitutes “mainstream” America.

[Slide 7:  “Are you an exile?”]

This post-Christendom context has left many feeling exiled, with one foot in the church and the other in the world, with no sense of real belonging.  In fact, there is a whole crop of exiles out there.  If you’re an exile, you’re somebody who no longer feels at home in church when “church” constitutes little more than quaint, lifeless buildings and empty theatrics for “Sunday Christians.”  You’re somebody who feels shipwrecked in a sea of “cultural” and “consumerist” Christianity, where the gods of Western culture, gods like sex, power and materialism, often claim our allegiance over the cross of Jesus Christ.  And if you are an exile, you are uncomfortable offering skin-deep answers to the deep cries for help all around us in the forms of human suffering and injustice and alienation from God.

If you belong to this category of “exiles,” then you are not alone…because among the ruins of our denomination and greater mainline Protestantism, a growing number of individuals and congregations—we call ourselves “Presbyterian Global Fellowship”—have wondered the same things.  We’ve asked ourselves whether all we can or should do as members of a dying institution in the West is to cloister ourselves away in our pretty buildings, demand spiritual “T.L.C.” from our leaders and offer little more than shallow answers to the plight of our world…And we’ve concluded that we can and should not do that, because of our origins in the life, death and resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.  His is an answer not just for his church but for the whole world.

We believe that if what Jesus says of himself in the Scriptures is true– that he really was sent by God on an unprecedented mission to take away the sins of the world, and lived, died and rose again to show us that– then we have a living Answer that is so convincing, so urgently needed, so life-saving, that we can’t hide it any longer under the bushel of insular denominational squabbles and captivity to other gods.  We believe that God has summoned us back to the drawing board, back to the basics, of following Jesus and of looking around, beyond the walls of our congregations, both overseas and locally, for where God is already at work in fields ripe for harvest…so that we might join God in the great adventure of seeing Him transform lives.

So PGF has emerged from the grandest and most important story there is, of a God at work redeeming the world in the person of Jesus Christ, and at a critical time in history when our old ways of existing as “church” no longer make sense.

Our Identity

[Slide 8:  Who the heck is PGF?!]

So a closer look at who we are.  We are Presbyterian:  we are a movement that has taken root within the context of the PCUSA and as a constructive response to the challenges facing our denomination and mainline Protestantism in the West. 

We are global: we believe that in the 21^st century, we have much to learn about where God is at work all around the world, and we can learn this best by strengthening relationships with our brothers and sisters in Christ overseas. 

And, we are a fellowship:  we are not another organization trying to restructure the PCUSA back to health; nor are we a mission agency—we have able partners like The Outreach Foundation and Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship to do that good work; and, we’re not trying to start a whole new denomination.  What we do believe, as a movement of congregations, is that God has called us to “get on with the mission of the church” and that we can do that best together, in finding news ways of connecting.

Our Destination

[Slide 9: Where are we going?]

So we’re on a journey together to relearn Jesus and the exciting challenge of following Him with the goal of furthering God’s mission to the world. 

[Slide 10: End destination]

The end destination of that journey will be congregations like First Presbyterian Gainsville living as missional communities following Jesus Christ. 

[Slide 11: And, what the heck is ‘missional,’ anyway?]

But what does that mean, really, and what does that look like?  If ‘mission’ is, simply put, the outward impulse of God’s people ‘sent out’ to declare the Lordship of Jesus Christ in all and over all, then ‘missional’ describes what happens when ‘mission’ becomes the central, organizing principle of our lives.

We want to see each and every member of the body of Christ, with his or her unique gifts, serving as an apostle (the word in Greek, after all, connotes being “sent”) to the world…We want to see God’s people living with one primary purpose—to be messengers of the Gospel, ‘little jesuses,’ in their families, communities, neighborhoods and world, because that, not the tall tales, is their only real story line.

Some helpful images for understanding ‘missional’…

[Slide 12: ‘Missional’: from ‘picture people’ to ‘drama people’…which are you?]

The late Raymond Nogar distinguished between the “picture” people and the “drama” people.”  The picture people view the Gospel safely and from afar, as one might view Salvador Dali’s “Last Supper” in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.  The drama people are not satisfied with being mere spectators: like the audience engrossed in a great play they are caught up personally in the drama of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. 

[Slide 13: ‘Missional’: from ‘Love Boat’ to aircraft carrier…which is Conyers Pres?]

Another way to describe what ‘missional’ looks like is to borrow from a naval metaphor: churches need to go from being cruise ships to being aircraft carriers. The typical church today, Vic Pentz says, is a cruise ship, like the Love Boat. We all get together to have a swell time with the pastor as cruise director. We love each other. We love our ship and, of course, we love God too.  But the aircraft carrier launches God’s people out into “enemy territory” with the purpose of extending God’s kingdom.  (Of course, the military image is not perfect because our enemy is not flesh and blood, but realms of injustice and exploitation, the abuse of power, hopelessness, unbelief, materialism and all the false gods that stand against the righteousness of God’s kingdom.) In this model, Pentz likens elders and pastors to naval officers who train the pilots to launch and establish air dominance, thereby extending the influence of God’s kingdom throughout the city. Each goes out to fulfill his or her mission to extend the reach of God’s love, authority and kingdom, in Conyers, Georgia and beyond…

And the real-life stories of when this happens are contagious!  There is Julie Riggs, a recent University of Georgia graduate who has made her vocation ministering the Good News of the Gospel to the women who work in the strip clubs of Athens, Georgia.  And there is John Armbrust, a young man who used a winning knack for poker to raise a big sum of money to support the good work of Presbyterian Education Board of Pakistan.  Then there are folks like Bill and Nancy Warlick who have devoted their whole life to serving in various capacities as missionaries to Africa…and congregations like North Avenue Presbyterian, who discovered that they happen to be on one of the busiest corners for child sex trafficking in Atlanta and began to do something about it.  Further abroad there are stories like that of a handful of Catholic nuns who decided to move into a run-down tenement building in a poor, low-income section of England just to be closer to the people they were ministering the love of Jesus to.