Ecclesia Spokane

What resources  for forming missional theology and action are you recommending and using with the wonderfully regular folks you live and serve among?  I ask this for a couple of reasons.  First, there are a host of books and such that I have enjoyed and found beneficial.  However, many of them are not accessible to a lot of my friends due to academic language, length, etc (This is not because the folks I mention are unintelligent, etc. but due to the disconnected nature of such language and philosophizing to the everyday world of work, child raising, and the like.).  Second, a lot of the resources I find are targeted towards those who serve as pastors or who are concerned with how to do church.  However, many of my friends are not interested in such things, though they are deeply interested in being the church in the places God has planted them.  So again, what are you utilizing and recommending?

Scott Thomas, director of Acts 29, talks with Jeff Vanderstelt (Soma Communities, Tacoma) about leading your church toward disciple-making together. You can check it out here, and notice that there are 3 separate posts: How to share your Faith, Being on Mission, and Life on Mission.

May’s Ecclesia Spokane Gathering will take place on Wednesday May 5, 2010 at Ha Ha’s Grillhouse.  Please be sure to RSVP by responding in the comments section, and spread the word! This month we’ll be discussing how we are developing Missional Communities. With all the buzz about being missional, and all the names for these kinds of groups (neighborhood groups, city groups, gospel communities, small groups, etc), it is easy to lose sight of what they are and the purpose they serve.

How are you equipping your people to live as a gospel community on a disciple-making mission? What are your measurements of health when you think about your groups? How are you forming and resourcing your groups? What challenges are you facing in this arena? What insights have you gained that could help us all be more fruitful and effective in this area?

It seems to me there is a deeper issue, even, underneath the practical challenges. The question I often find myself asking is this: Why is this not naturally happening already? Why does it seem like such incredible labor to get people to stop attending church and live as disciples who make disciples all the time? Is it simply that we’ve not told them enough times that they should? Is the Bible not clear enough on what it means to be the church? Are we preachers not talking about the Lordship of Jesus enough?

What needs to happen in your church community to move your people out of the seats and into their neighborhoods and workplaces, living in deep community together as servants of Christ, joyfully talking of the greatness of their Savior to each other and to the world?

Author and playwright Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957):

“So that is the outline of the official story—the tale of the time when God was the under-dog and got beaten, when He submitted to the conditions He had laid down and became a man like the men He had made, and the men He had made broke Him and killed Him. This is the dogma we find so dull—this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero. If this is dull, then what, in Heaven’s name, is worthy to be called exciting? The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused Him of being a bore—on the contrary; they thought Him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround Him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified Him ‘meek and mild,’ and recommended Him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.”

From Michael Horton’s The Gospel-Driven Life.

Just wanted to put this out there if anyone is interested… Acts 29 is putting together a regional event in Pasco on March 17th.  More info here.

For those of you who are interested, the next Ecclesia gathering will be February 3rd at noon. We are reading and discussing Dynamics of Spiritual Life by Richard Lovelace, and we’ll be covering chapters 4-5. The discussion will be most beneficial if we’ve all read the book up through chapter 5, so stop by the Book Parlor and pick up a copy today!

For those of you who missed the discussion last week, I thought I’d post a brief synopsis. Lovelace’s stated goal: “To seek the fullest possible current understanding of these principles of revitalization [in the church], using biblical and historical resources, in order to restore the Evangelical movement and the whole church of Christ to a level of reformation appropriate to a new and continuing empowering of the Spirit.” (p.53)

From there, he traces historical and biblical renewal movements, and begins to talk about the various elements involved. He breaks these elements into Pre-conditions, Primary Elements, and Secondary Elements, and then goes on to apply each of these to the local congregation. Our discussion centered around chapter 3, the Pre-Conditions. He argues (from a reformed perspective, though it was debated among us how influenced he was by this) that the pre-conditions for renewal are the same for initial conversion: “Acceptance of Christ and appropriation of every element in redemption is conditional upon an awareness of God’s holiness and conviction of the depth of our sin.” (p.81) Apart from really seeing and “tasting” both of these elements, the good news has little transformative power in the life of a believer: “Most congregations of professing Christians today are saturated with a kind of dead goodness, an ethical respectability which has its motivational roots in the flesh rather than in the illuminating and enlivening control of the Holy Spirit.” (p.92)

We discussed whether or not the issue in dead goodness is really a “justification” issue (ie, people don’t know deeply the magnitude of the cross) or a sanctification issue (ie, people don’t know that they should be increasingly conformed to the image of Christ). Lovelace argues it is the first because the second is nothing more than a fuller application of grace: “The root behind all other manifestations of sin is compulsive unbelief – our voluntary darkness concerning God, ourselves, his relationship to the fallen world and his redemptive purposes. For this reason the entrance and growth of new spiritual life involves the shattering of our sphere of darkness by repentant faith in redemptive truth.” (p. 90, emphasis added)

A ruthless conviction, not so much to Christ (as in my commitment to him), but toward walking in the light and constantly appropriating his gracious acceptance of me (that is, his commitment to me), is one of the primary ways we talked about this working out. If we and our churches deeply believed in the gospel of justification by faith we’d be both humble and courageous, winsome and bold, accepting of all and committed to truth, and fully committed to a discipleship lifestyle that magnifies the lordship of Christ while fully displaying his gracious acceptance of sinners.

The People Walking In Darkness

What do we know about darkness?
To us, darkness is yellow.
It’s the color of street lights.
It drains the world of color but not of detail.

What would it be like to see…nothing?
To feel isolated and alone?
To live under the control of empires and powers too strong to oppose?
To long for change, but fear to hope that change is possible?
To lose confidence that God has any power to alter the world?

But darkness is also a place of concealment.
A place where we can mask our true selves.
A place to hide the things we don’t like about us.

Perhaps we know darkness after all.
The people walking in darkness have seen a great light…

Ah yes, the light.
We know about that!
The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes.  But little lord Jesus no crying he makes.
But this baby is also the light of the world.
The harsh light of day, penetrator of dark corners, revealer of blind spots
Who tramples on rose colored glasses and heals jaundiced eyes.

This is the light that will not be tamed, controlled or confined.
We coo over the baby in the manger, and attempt to cut God down to size,
And make him in our image.
For what could be dangerous about a tiny child?
Yet the coming light will overturn empires, rule with justice and righteousness,
See into the heart of us and save the world.

God was born as a boy and made his dwelling among us.
That doesn’t mean that because we know babies,
We know all there is to know about God.

So watch and prepare for the coming of the light.
Greet the coming with joy, and also fear.
Watch and wait.
Expect to be surprised.
But not comfortable.
Watch and wait.

via Grace, A community in Ealing UK

From Jonathan Dodson, church planter in Austin, TX:

The Holy Spirit is, for Evangelicals, the red-headed step-child of the Trinity. It’s a shame, really shameful. We’ve allowed our fears of charisma to get the best of us, leading to a devaluing of God and a disfigured relationship with him. For those struggling in this area, I strongly recommend that you take your eyes off of charismatic extremes and place them back on the Spirit. Begin talking to Him, know him through study, and consider all the commands to “pray in the Spirit” and begin talking to the Spirit in prayer. One reason we are weak on the Spirit because we are weak on prayer. It is the Spirit who knows the depths of God and freely discloses the understanding of God’s will and Word (1 Cor 2). Therefore, to cut Him off is to diminish our understanding (and enjoyment) of God. It stifles the advance of the Gospel.

Here are some practical steps:
1. Repent for diminishing and ignoring the third Person of the Trinity. Repent for sinful self-reliance and fear-motivated neglect of the Holy Spirit. Mortify the sin that has been an obstacle to your knowing and walking with the Spirit. Receive God’s gracious forgiveness in Jesus and rejoice that the Spirit is in you!
2. Begin addressing the Holy Spirit in prayer every day. Talk to him as a Person; don’t ignore him as an energy force. Ask him for filling and direction for your entire day. Ask him to guide your decision-making, to direct your thoughts, and to fill your heart with affection for Jesus.
3. Read the Bible with a Holy Spirit lens. Look for him in the Bible and ask yourself: “Who does this text tell me the Spirit is?” Then, refine the way you relate to him. It’s like getting to know your wife, the more you study here the better you can love her.

Here are some thoughts from Tim Keller that are shaping my thinking along the lines of the Hirsch’s central confession of “Jesus Is Lord.” I felt like there was something “off” about his presentation of it, and I think Keller hits it on the head. The whole article can be found here and the audio messages are here. This quote comes from his message on Church and Culture.

“Where do we go from here? First and foremost, we need a richer yet sharpened understanding of the gospel. Evangelicals today are in turmoil over the nature of the gospel. Many look at the traditional evangelical gospel and complain that it has been individualistic, shallow, and ‘gnostic.’ A classic street version of it was ‘Jesus died for your sins so you could have a personal relationship with him.’ They argue that this older articulation of the gospel gives the impression that escaping this world into heaven is all that matters.
“In the place of this older formulation, many evangelicals say that the gospel is ‘Jesus is Lord, the kingdom is at hand.’ In this narrative, Jesus’ death doesn’t assuage God’s wrath against our sin so much as it absorbs the world’s evil and violence. In his death he defeats the powers of the world, shows the way of non-violence and service, and calls us to join his kingdom community and work for peace and justice in the world. Those who speak in terms of kingdom and overcoming the powers rather than substitution assuaging the wrath, want a gospel that shapes the practices of the Christian in the world. They see the effects of a more individualistic gospel on people who treat it as just a ‘get out of hell free’ card that does not transform their lives. In general, the counter-culturalists and many of the evangelical relevants lean toward this way of communicating the gospel.
“The trouble is, however, that this way of speaking often obscures the sharpness of the distinction between Law and Gospel that the Reformers expressed so well, and which was at the heart of the great awakenings. We are saved by grace through Christ’s work, not through our own work. If the gospel is mainly, ‘repent of living for yourself and join Jesus’ kingdom program’ it can be just one more legalism. The pietists and the conservative activists will rightly object that the law-grace distinction is often obscured in the efforts to show the gospel’s rich relevance to human life and problems. We must get to the place where we see both the richness and the sharpness of the gospel. Even more, we must see it is its sharpness that makes it so rich. The implications of the gospel of grace-not works can transform and reshape all attitudes, views, relationships, and cultural interactions. Look at how this works out in the Corinthian letters. When Paul denounces the Corinthians’ divisions and party spirit (1:10-17) he says that they comes from pride and boasting, a betrayal of the gospel of sovereign grace (1:26-31.) When Paul deals with the issue of sexual sin and discipline in chapters 5-6, he gives directions for behavior and grounds his appeal in the gospel of justification (6:11) and the fact that they were ransomed by the death of Christ (6:19- 20.) In 2 Cor 9:13 he says that radical, humble generosity is being ‘submissive to the confession of the gospel’ (i.e. materialism fails to take seriously the gospel of Christ’s sacrificial death for us.)

“Similarly, in Galatians 2:14 Paul challenges Peter’s racist attitudes toward Gentile Christians by insisting that he was not ‘walking in line with the truth of the gospel,’ that truth being the gospel of forensic justification. Gospel ministry, then, is not only proclaiming it to people so that they will embrace and believe it, it also teaching and shepherding believers with it so that it shapes the entirety of their lives, inside the church and out in the world. For evangelicals to move forward, they must be able to come together around a richer understanding of God’s will for a renewed world without losing the sharpness and power of the classic Protestant understanding of the gospel. If our strategy does not arise out of our grasp of the gospel, then will be just one more effort to control culture through some technique. We will then just be like everyone else.

“If we do arrive at a consensus, and together hold a rich and sharpened understanding of the gospel, what will our strategy for engaging culture look like?”

“The ‘ultimate concern’ of most church members is not the worship and service of Christ in evangelistic mission and social compassion, but rather survival and success in their secular vocation. The church is a spoke on the wheel of life connected to the secular hub. It is a departmental sub-concern, not the organizing center of all other concerns. Church members who have been conditioned all their lives to devote themselves to building their own kingdom and whose flesh naturally gravitates in that direction anyway find it hard to invest much energy in the kingdom of God. They go to church once or twice a week and punch the clock, so to speak, fulfilling their ‘church obligation’ by sitting passively and listening critically or approvingly to the pastor’s teaching.

“Sometimes with great effort they can be maneuvered into some active role in the church’s program, like a trained seal in a circus act, but their hearts are not fully in it. They may repeat the catchwords of the theology of grace, but many have little deep awareness they and other Christians are ‘accepted in the beloved.’ Since their understanding of justification is marginal or unreal – anchored not to Christ but to some conversion experience in the past or to an imagined present state of goodness in their lives – they know little of the dynamic of justification. Their understanding of sin focuses upon behavioral externals which they can eliminate from their lives by a little will power and ignores the great submerged continents of pride, covetousness and hostility beneath the surface. Thus their pharisaism defends them both against full involvement in the church’s mission and against full subjection of their inner lives to the authority of Christ.”  (Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life p.204-5)