Author Archive

Posted on November 16, 2007 - by Anthony

Come here often? Prt 2

This is a follow up on some thoughts i have had after posting previously on visitors in our churches.  In those posts it was helpful to look at church services from the actual view point of the visitor, instead of trying to guess what they might think and feel about coming to church.  One theme of the two posts that i picked up on was the desire for the visitor not to embarrass themselves!  That really got me thinking because some of the horror stories coming out of the article about “hugging churches” made me cringe…a lot…a lot.  So in a sense it seems that for many, visiting a church means being unseen and yet also feeling welcomed.  For some of the journalists who had a good experience it boiled down to a sensitive Christian community that did not ignore them but made them feel welcome.  Easy, right?  Not quite, as i said before there is no formula because we are dealing with people and as much as humans exhibit the characteristics of the legendary lemmings, we cannot predict how people will react when they come into our meetings.

 Yet, i think we need to start with what i mentioned earlier, sensitivity to the visitor. This is key as i think for many churches we may have fallen into the trap that we are not expectant of the visitor, particularly the sceptical visitor.  Maybe we have stopped asking friends, maybe we have stopped listening to the world’s questions, or maybe we see services as times for Christians and should in no way should cater for the visitor.  For the Christian? Yes, first and foremost it is a time for us as Jesus’ disciples to meet together, encourage one another, hear from God’s Word, prayer together and generally fellowship.  But, our scheduled meetings are not some mystical time where God’s people are meant to meet “behind closed doors” ignoring the outside world.  Paul says to the Corinthians that there will be outsiders in their midst (cf. Paul’s assumption of the presence of unbelievers in the congregation in 1 Cor 14) and so as a church who meets together we need to be sensitive to this fact. Here’s an example that i know got me every time when i first started going to church meetings.  For instance, the service leader may tell the congregation that later we will “hear the Word of God” from the “preacher” who will come up and explain the Bible.  Now, try and put yourself in the visitors shoes and imagine what they might think of language like that? This takes us back to a questions i had in the previous post; What then is the purpose of our meetings?

Paul has one goal for for the public gathering of believers: to build one another up.  As Christians do this in love, it becomes a massive witness to the outsider.  However, what ever we do in our meetings needs to be intelligible and helpful for the outsider in order for them to simply understand what is going on.  This seems pretty obvious…until you think through the various practices we have at our Church meetings that we understand, but for outsider is completely irrelevant. 

Which leads us to the question: how much should the outsider’s perspective shape the way we do our church services? (or do church as a whole?) Is it just an issue of the language we use? or does it go even further to mindsets?

Here’s my take for what it is worth: sensitivity means understanding that there will be outsiders in our midst.  The cultural and perspectival gap between the believers and non-believers will be massive, that gap needs to be lessened.  So yes, the outsider should have a definite say as to how we do our meetings in order to make it relevant, fresh and missional.  If it becomes a “locals” club for Christians with only their preferences then how are going to connect with the unbeliever?

Lets try and be sensitive to the outsider and purposeful in bringing them in!

Posted on October 19, 2007 - by Anthony

Eina!

Eina!, originally uploaded by a_dOgshOw.

It’s been going around the net, but this is brilliant! Copy it and paste it to your fridge!

Posted on October 19, 2007 - by Anthony

Foto For Friday

African Beauty, originally uploaded by a_dOgshOw.

Ah, Cape Town…summer is finally here!!!

Posted on October 18, 2007 - by Anthony

Come here often? Part 1

Church and the newcomer often make for a bad combination. I don’t know about your church visiting experience but often going to church for a visitor is like reliving high school: people make you feel awkward, at times things get embarrassing and its one of those things in life where you just want it to end but seems to go on forever. This may not be everyones experience (it was mine when i went for the first time!) but there are some things i think we need to consider about the way we do church, particularly our Sunday services.

Here are a couple links about the visitor and their church experience. The one comes from a Christian perspective the other, definitely not!

Church from a visitor’s perspective

Church Marketing sucks is a website seeking to encourage better use of media and marketing within Churches to aid the Gospel. It comes a 9 part blog post series, not too long so its easy reading.

The Stranger

This is a local paper in Seattle who sent out 31 of their staff to some kind of religious Sunday meeting. From churches, to Mosques, to the living room for a bit of morning TBN, these guys each write about their experience of going to church. WARNING: there is strong language, sexual allusions and other naughty stuff in the article. I nor anyone at …daylight would endorse their perspectives as such, but we would probably acknowledge that’s the reality of the situation. So there is something to learn from this article i think as there are some who made up their minds about church before going and others who were pleasantly surprised

The reason i put these two together is that i realised that in running a church service on Sunday there is no formula that will guarantee the visitors comfort, engagement or acceptance of the Christian message. So, good decor, contemporary music, modern equipment or tasty chow will not guarantee that the visitor will like the service, the people or feel comfortable. It begs the questions;

What is the purpose of our services?

And how do we engage with the seeker in that purpose?

Posted on October 15, 2007 - by Anthony

Keller and the risks of being an Evangelical

Darryl over at DashHouse.com has put some notes together of Keller who recently spoke at the EMA in London.  Keller spoke on the risks of being an Evangelical in an age where the term has lost its meaning in so many ways.  Here are some excerpts:

• Evangelicalism used to occupy the middle ground between fundamentalism and liberalism. It was orthodox, pro-scholarship, and facing the world. Recently, evangelicalism has become more hostile and condemning of culture. A younger generation has given up on evangelicalism as a middle ground and are looking for a new consensus. This group goes by a number of names, such as post-evangelicals or the emerging church.
• A new gospel is being preached about the Kingdom of God and Jesus Christ overcoming the evil powers forces of injustice in the world. [Update: This version of the gospel rarely talks about personal sin and God's wrath.] The pendulum has swung the other way.
• To respond, evangelicals must understand and practice biblical repentance as a result of believing the gospel. This will allow evangelicals to admit their sins, even if they disagree with 80% of the criticisms from the post-evangelicals, and even if the remaining 20% is expressed poorly. To the degree that we understand the gospel, we will be able to freely admit our shortcomings as an evangelical movement.
• Don’t ever think that we can respond to legitimate criticisms of our practice by defending our doctrine. In defending our doctrines, we have not responded to the criticisms of our practices. Orthopraxy is part of orthodoxy.
• It is necessary to draw boundaries. What really matters is how we treat the people on the other side of those boundaries. People are watching. We’re going to win the younger leaders if we are the most gracious, kind, and the least self-righteous in controversy. The truth will ultimately lose if we hold the right doctrines, but do so with nasty attitudes and a lack of love.
• We need to approach the controversies with a repentant heart corporately and say, “Despite all the bad things that are being said here, there’s a core of truth here and we need to deal with it.”

Amazing insights, if you want to be challenged as a thinking Christian get hold of Keller’s stuff where ever you can find it.  Sell you car if you need to.  Actually, you can download most of his stuff off other sites (Redeemer Presby) so don’t sell you car…that would be silly.

Posted on October 12, 2007 - by Anthony

Freaky Friday Foto: The Sentinal

The Sentinal, originally uploaded by a_dOgshOw.

The home of the beast; Dungeons.

Posted on October 10, 2007 - by Anthony

To Judge or not to Judge…

I’ve been working on the Sermon on the Mount as part of a post grad program and have found it wonderfully satisfying as well as troubling at the same time.  Jesus’ words are both immensely encouraging and go right to the heart of hypocritical religion.  As I study it more, His words seem to stick to me as I slowly begin to realise my own religious hypocrisy.  One such text that has taken me aback is Matthew 7:1-6.  Jesus begins simply enough:  

“Judge not, that you be not judged.” 

This is his guiding principle for the text; if one of his followers displays judgment then they will be judged.  Before we go further, we need to realise that Jesus was critiquing the deficient righteousness of the Pharisees (cf. 5: 17-48) urging his followers to capture the true meaning of righteousness as putting Christ’s commands into practise.  So we have Jesus warning the disciples that if they display the same kind of critical, harsh judgemental attitude that the Pharisees did by condemning others then they are in danger of the greater judgement (see v2). This he helpfully illustrates in v3-5 where he uses the word picture of a man trying to help his brother remove the speck from his eye.  But Jesus condemns him as a hypocrite!  Why?  Because of the log in his own eye; this was the fault of the Pharisees who condemned others for their failings while not being able to see the greater problem of their own hearts, hearts hardened to God and others.  And so Jesus warns his followers to not fall into that trap of hypocrisy; Christians do not have the right to condemn a man, which is God’s ultimate job.  Ours is to love our neighbour and love God which is the sum of the Law (cf. 7:12).   

But don’t we see Jesus judging others?  The disciples are told to judge false teachers by their fruits so is this a contradiction? No, for the opposite extreme of being judgemental/condemning is just as bad a mistake.  That extreme is to suspend all faculties of critical thought and action.  This would mean to let sin go unpunished within a church community, this would mean allowing false teaching that wrecks faith to go unchallenged and that is why v6 is included in the context. It is puzzling and needs some research but the picture is that of a warning that Christians are not to give what is holy (the pearl) to what is unholy (the dogs and pigs) for they may turn and attack!  The pearl I take it is that is the Gospel message (cf. Mat 13:44-45) which must at some point NOT be given to these “animals”.  The animals come to represent those who are particularly opposed to the Gospel and its implications, who would at any opportunity seek to revile and mock Christ whenever they are given the message. 

So Jesus would have his followers love others by helping them and challenging them in their serving of God and men by not judging and condemning them.  Yet they must show some level of discrimination against serious opponents of the Gospel for the sake of the glory of God. So I take it that as we engage with non believers and believers we are to do so knowing our place, listening and loving.  Yet we cannot accept all that we hear without a critical eye or ear and must be ready to engage and challenge false living and teaching but always be focussing that critical eye to our own lives first (v5). Loving others means challenging their beliefs and life if it does not come in line with Christ’s ethic, but it’s how we do this that is immensely important!   

Posted on October 8, 2007 - by Anthony

Programs vs. People

Something that has always driven me mad (other than watching the Boks and Liverpool) is the consistent tension within our churches (maybe not yours, i don’t know…) to emphasise programs which ultimately come at the cost of building up people.  It’s a weird phenomenon within many churches at least, where they are even Gospel driven churches seeking to minister to, encourage and teach the wider congregation.  And so the right and natural step is to plan some kind of strategy in order to accomplish this.  Thus the “program” is born; a planned effort to achieve certain goals which may include that of teaching, training and evangelism.  Sounds great?  Of course, that’s how things are achieved, you achieve your goals by setting up these planned programs.

So what goes wrong?  Well, along the way the program seems to takes over, the plan overrules something very important; the people within the structures.  And so a church might be able to create many ministry opportunities and yet have a congregation of uncared-for people.  Goodmanson has come interesting ideas on how to remedy this problem, his take (in a general sense) however is to start over in the form scratch by planting a new church.  Question is, how do we avoid and fix this problem in our established church?

Posted on October 6, 2007 - by Anthony

It’s a Changing World…

Its funny, you go away for a couple weeks and everything seems to have changed. Looking into the blogosphere today is like driving through a new city; everything is different. Such is the nature of our world, ever changing which I suppose is why Brian McLaren has written a new book on why “Everything must Change”. Stephen posted something on this a while ago, he linked a review over at Tim Challies blog. But here is something from Scot McKnight, a friend of the Emergent. Should be interesting to see how he tackles this book. I have not read the book myself, but from first glance it seems interesting, especially since McLaren’s 4 systems seem to propose a certain metanarrative.

Posted on August 20, 2007 - by Anthony

Who is the man?

I’ve been studying Romans at college this semester, it has honestly been the most challenging and engaging course i have done in my Theologocial training.  Today we looked at Romans 2:1-29, and again i was struck by how badly this book has been preached in many churches today. Paul’s argument is a monumental polemic for the fairness of God’s judgement. One of the questions that so many of the commentators ask is who Paul has in mind in v1.  The Gentiles? The Jews? Or is he addressing the moral pagan?  Yet, the identity of Paul’s hypothetical opponent in this diatribe and chapter falls into perspective in v5: ALL store up wrath for themselves, and judgement will be revealed at the coming of Jesus Christ.

 But what has really struck me is Paul’s emphasis on works, by our works shall God determine who finally enters his Kingdom (v6).  This is a critical point and i found it surprising that Wright in his commentary does not pick up on the NPP agenda at this point (ie following a works-righteousness theology) but rather follows Moo very closely.  So in his resulting illustration of the two groups we are left scratching our heads as Paul seems to allude to a works-righteousness theology as he seems to contrast a group who will receive glory (v7, 10) and who will be judged (v8-9)…if not for v5 which programs this whole section.  Which is why Paul can say that God shows no favouritism; because even if you look like v7 and 10 its really not enough!  Why? because of v5 we can never meet those standards! Which is why a new righteousness needs to be revealed (3:21ff).  (He goes on to blow the Jewish worldview to pieces in v12-29 by showing their historical hypocracy and how they are still in state of judgement).  And yet our works are such an integral part to our salvation; as the evidence of it. This i think is something that we as evangelicals will leave out so easily because we have reduced the Gospel to something that it is not.  We have confused the message of the Gospel with the mechanics of the Gospel.  And so we have concluded that the Gospel is justification by faith alone. This is the heart of the Gospel as how the Gospel works but in itself is not the Gospel.  The Gospel is the message of the Messiah, King Jesus, come to reveal the Kingdom of God.  This includes the great Judgment day as integral to the Gospel message. Which makes the Gospel much bigger than we tend to preach it!

This can be a massive paradigm shift for anyone who has not realised this and has incredible pastoral and envagelistic implications. But the key to preaching or teaching this text is to use Paul’s own polemical device keeping as the sting in the tail as it were in v16. The secrets of men will be judged. It does not matter what you look like on the outside (yet it does) because God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ!