Missional Misgivings by Dan Kimball, Out of Ur

Dan Kimball, the pastor of Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, California, just posted this writing asking this question,"Small, indigenous churches are getting lots of attention, but where's the fruit?"

I hope I am wrong. For the past few years, I have been observing, listening, and asking questions about the missional movement. I have a suspicion that the missional model has not yet proven itself beyond the level of theory. Again, I hope I am wrong.

We all agree with the theory of being a community of God that defines and organizes itself around the purpose of being an agent of God's mission in the world. But the missional conversation often goes a step further by dismissing the "attractional" model of church as ineffective. Some say that creating better programs, preaching, and worship services so people "come to us" isn't going to cut it anymore. But here's my dilemma—I see no evidence to verify this claim.

Not long ago I was on a panel with other church leaders in a large city. One missional advocate in the group stated that younger people in the city will not be drawn to larger, attractional churches dominated by preaching and music. What this leader failed to recognize, however, was that young people were coming to an architecturally cool megachurch in the city—in droves. Its worship services drew thousands with pop/rock music and solid preaching. The church estimates half the young people were not Christians before attending.

Conversely, some from our staff recently visited a self-described missional church. It was 35 people. That alone is not a problem. But the church had been missional for ten years, and it hadn't grown, multiplied, or planted any other churches in a city of several million people. That was a problem.

Another outspoken advocate of the house church model sees it as more missional and congruent with the early church. But his church has the same problem. After fifteen years it hasn't multiplied. It's a wonderful community that serves the homeless, but there's no evidence of non-Christians beginning to follow Jesus. In the same city several megachurches are seeing conversions and disciples matured.

I realize missional evangelism takes a long time, and these churches are often working in difficult soil. We can't expect growth overnight.

But given their unproven track records, these missional churches should be slow to criticize the attractional churches that are making a measurable impact. No, I am not a numbers person. I am not enamored by how many come forward at an altar call. In fact, I am a bit skeptical. But I am passionate about Jesus-centered disciples being made. And surprisingly, I find in many large, attractional churches, they are.

Yes, people are attracted by the music, preaching, or children's programs, but there may be more to these large churches than simply the programming. There are also people being the body of Christ in their communities. When these disciples build relationships with non-Christians, the evidence of the Spirit in their lives is attractive. The existence of programs and buildings does not mean mature disciples are not a significant reason why these churches grow.

There are so many who don't understand the joy of Kingdom living here on earth and the future joy of eternal life. This joy motivates me missionally, but I also cannot forget the horrors of hell. This creates a sense of urgency in me that pushes me past missional theory to see what God is actually doing in churches—large and small, attractional and missional. Where are disciples actually being grown? What is actually working?

I hope there are examples of fruitful missional churches that I haven't encountered yet. I hope my perception based on my interaction with the missional movement is wrong. But for now, I would rather be part of a Christ-centered megachurch full of programs where people are coming to know Jesus as Savior, than part of a church of any size where they are not.

Denominational Diagnostics: What I look for to find a healthy church

An interesting article from Philip Yancey in the latest issue of Christianity Today...

This past year my wife and I conducted an experiment. We decided to go through the Yellow Pages under "Churches" and visit each one listed in our local phone book. Although we live in a small town, we found representatives of most denominations, as well as several unaffiliated churches—a total of 24 congregations if you leave out fringe groups like Jehovah's Witnesses.

I learned that churches offer wide variety these days. A few still have organs and choirs, whereas most feature worship bands with electric guitars and drum sets. Oddly, a Church of Christ that forbids musical instruments because they are not mentioned in the New Testament sees no contradiction in projecting hymns on PowerPoint slides. At some churches attendees dress up; at others they wear blue jeans and cowboy boots (I live in Colorado, after all). Churches meet at 7, 9:30, 10:30, and 11 A.M. on Sunday morning, a few meet on Saturday night, and one Lutheran church even meets on Thursday night. Some follow a prescribed liturgy; others apparently make up the order of service on the fly.

With an intuition difficult to explain, I could usually sense the "aliveness" of a congregation within five minutes. Were people conversing in the foyer? Did I hear the sound of laughter? What activities and issues did the bulletin board highlight?
To my surprise, the aliveness factor had little to do with theology. In two of the most conservative churches, members slumped in their seats and glumly went through the motions, even as the pastoral staff conveyed the distinct impression that their primary goal was to get to the benediction. Meanwhile, a liberal church (it had rewritten familiar hymns and even the Lord's Prayer to make them politically correct) showed the most energy in community and global outreach programs.

Thanks to this experiment, I now have a clearer picture of the qualities I look for in a healthy church.

(1) Diversity. As I read accounts of the New Testament church, no characteristic stands out more sharply than this one. Beginning with Pentecost, the Christian church dismantled the barriers of gender, race, and social class that had marked Jewish congregations. Paul, who as a rabbi had given thanks daily that he was not born a woman, slave, or Gentile, marveled over the radical change: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
One modern Indian pastor told me, "Most of what happens in Christian churches, including even the miracles, can be duplicated in Hindu and Muslim congregations. But in my area only Christians strive, however ineptly, to mix men and women of different castes, races, and social groups. That's the real miracle."
Diversity complicates rather than simplifies life. Perhaps for this reason we tend to surround ourselves with people of similar age, economic class, and opinion. Church offers a place where infants and grandparents, unemployed and executives, immigrants and blue bloods can come together. Just yesterday I sat sandwiched between an elderly man hooked up to a puffing oxygen tank and a breastfeeding baby who grunted loudly and contentedly throughout the sermon. Where else can we go to find that mixture?
When I walk into a new church, the more its members resemble each other—and resemble me—the more uncomfortable I feel.

(2) Unity. Of course, diversity only succeeds in a group of people who share a common vision. In his great prayer in John 17, Jesus stressed one request above all others: "that they may be one." The existence of 38,000 denominations worldwide demonstrates how poorly we have fulfilled Jesus' request. I wonder how different the church would look to a watching world, not to mention how different history would look, if Christians were more deeply marked by love and unity. Perhaps a whiff of the fragrance of unity is what I detect when I visit a new church and sense its "aliveness."

(3) Mission. The church, said Archbishop William Temple, is "the only cooperative society in the world that exists for the benefit of its non-members." Some churches, especially those located in urban areas, focus on the needs of immediate neighborhoods. Others adopt sister churches in other countries, support relief and development agencies, and send mission teams abroad. Saddest of all are those churches whose vision does not extend beyond their own facilities and parking lots.
In my visits I never found a perfect church (nor should we expect to, if the New Testament gives any indication). But when tempted to judge, I simply remind myself that disappointment with the church traces back to God's own bold experiment: to allow ordinary people like us to embody his presence on earth.

The Gospel and the Happiness Paradox by John Ortberg in Leadership Journal

A great article from John Ortberg when he was asked to try and articulate what the gospel really means...lots to think about and react to in here...

Can eternal happiness be achieved by selfish pursuit?

What is the gospel? Folks in the most interesting places are asking that question these days. When I was growing up, in the 1890s, no one had to ask what the gospel was. We knew. It was the answer to the question: "If you were to die tonight, how do you know for sure you'd go to heaven?" The gospel was what got you saved. We knew what getting saved was, too. Getting saved was being placed in the heaven-bound category. And we knew what heaven was. Heaven was the pleasure factory where everybody wanted to go after death.

But now folks like N.T. Wright (from a New Testament historical perspective), and Dallas Willard (from a spiritual formation and discipleship perspective), and Shane Claiborne (from a community perspective), and Brian McLaren (from a general gadfly perspective), are calling us to rethink what the gospel really means. Recently someone asked me to comment on it. (Actually it was my wife. And she did so only because I asked her to ask me to comment on it so I'd have an excuse to write about it.) So here are a few thoughts.

I recently subscribed to an actual, academic, peer-review journal called Journal of Happiness Studies. "Positive psychology" is the big new trend in social science over the last decade, so all kinds of researchers have decided to explore the northern rather than southern hemisphere of human emotions.

One theme that keeps cropping up is the happiness paradox: "the more directly one aims to maximize pleasure and avoid pain, the more likely one is to produce a life bereft of depth, meaning, and community." One article listed eleven separate facets of the happiness paradox. Another explained the principle of indirection: happiness, by its nature, cannot be obtained by direct pursuit. You have to sneak up on it. Or rather, you have to let it sneak up on you while you're pursuing something more important.

It struck me that the traditional expression of the gospel I heard growing up fell into a similar trap. There was not much serious thought about the true nature of heaven. (If you've been avoiding God all your life, would you want to be in heaven? It appears that God will be very hard to avoid there.)

Maybe the "if you were to die tonight" version of the gospel falls victim to the happiness paradox. If "heaven" is understood as "ultimate happiness," then I can seek to obtain it while remaining trapped in my self-centeredness. If "heaven" is understood as the eternal pleasure factory, then obtaining it has no intrinsic relationship to transformation, therefore no intrinsic relationship to discipleship.

But if the gospel really is the announcement of the availability, through Jesus, of the "with-God life," then things begin to fall into place. Grace is not just the forgiveness of sin, it is the power to live the with-God life from one moment to the next. Heaven is not a pleasure factory that an angry God chooses to shut some people out of because they don't pass a theology test; it is a community of servanthood that can only be enjoyed by a certain kind of character.

Discipleship or obedience is not something we have to cajole people into by obligation or gratitude ("after all, Jesus died for you; the least you can do is deny yourself happiness for a while on earth"), it is simply the process of learning to enter into the good, with-God life. The gospel becomes social as well as personal—not because individuals don't matter, but because to be "saved" means (among other things) to be delivered from the chronic selfishness that contributes to the world's hurt and to my misery.

We do have a ways to go on one great task regarding the gospel. And that is how to articulate a biblically sound, spiritually powerful gospel in a way that calls for great clarity of decision.

One reason the old "if you were to die tonight" gospel was so popular (and, I think, has been used by God to a large degree), is that at least it helps people be very clear that they've made a decision about something. ("I'm not going to earn my way anymore; I'm on the grace plan.") And that decision itself is often enough to start people on the road toward God.

In our day, I think, we are seeing more accurate ways of understanding the gospel. But we need clarion calls of directness to help people respond today.

When Jesus walked the earth, the call "Follow me" was easily understood. People would actually, physically, bodily, walk with Jesus. People knew if they were following.

When the church formed, the call to follow Jesus was easily understood. There was an alternative community that met daily, that radically transformed people's financial lives, social lives, time, learning, allegiances, and hope. People knew if they were following.

In our day, that experience has become so diluted and enculturated that people have a hard time knowing.

The availability of life, with God, in his favor and power, as a gift of grace we receive by repentance and trust, through the death and resurrection of Jesus—that's the gospel with power. What needs still to be done is to find ways to express this with great clarity and simplicity, ways to help ordinary people know for sure they have made the great decision, the great commitment of their lives.

Five common, but flawed, approaches to reading the Bible

Here's a summary of a presentation done by Scot McKnight’s at Catalyst Conference dealing with ideas he discusses in his new book “The Blue Parakeet”...

1. The Morsels of Law Approach
These people search the Bible and extract ever commandment. They see Scripture as fundamentally a book of rules to be obeyed. The problem, says McKnight, is that no one really obeys—or even tries to obey—every commandment. And we’re not just talking about some obscure stuff in Leviticus. Scot mentioned a number of New Testament commands that many Christians dismiss as well. We are all selective.

2. The Morsels of Blessing Approach
McKnight says publishers are always sending him daily calendars that have a different promise or blessing from the Bible printed on each day. It’s a nice way to start the morning, he notes, but it gives people a skewed view of Scripture. The Bible is a lot more than warm thoughts from our Creator to carry us through our day. Finally fed up with these calendars, McKnight wrote to one of the publishers offering to write a daily calendar with nothing but passage about God’s wrath.

3. The Rorschach Approach
Most people are familiar with the Rorschach Ink Blot test often used by psychologists. Patients are asked what they “see” when looking at symmetrical ink patterns. Because the blots don’t really resemble anything, the patient’s answer tells the therapist more about the patient than the image. Similarly, McKnight notes that many people see in Scripture what they want to see, not what’s really there. For example, political conservatives see justification for capitalism. Liberals see justification for a welfare state.

4. The Systematic Theology Approach
Some folks, the particularly left-brained and anal retentive (my perception, not McKnight’s), believe that God has scattered facts throughout the Bible. These snippets of truth need to be located, rather like an Easter egg hunt, and categorized into buckets. Finally, the pieces are assembled into a systematic theology without ambiguity or mystery to explain God, humanity, creation, and history. The fatal error in this approach, says McKnight, is that large portions of Scripture are never included because they refuse to fit into our neat systems.

5. The Maestro Approach
McKnight shared about his love of Italian food—particularly risotto. The best risotto he ever had was prepared by a chef in Italy while on vacation. Since then he’s compared every other risotto dish with that one. We all have favorites; someone we consider the maestro, the master, we compare all others with. So it is with the Bible. Some people have a master book of the Bible—Exodus for Liberation Theologians, or Romans for Reformed pastors—and then they force every other part of the Bible to fit that book’s framework. Some favor the Gospels and Jesus’ focus on the Kingdom, but they don’t read about the Kingdom in Paul’s writing. So they force the Epistles to submit to the Gospels. The opposite also happens when Jesus is only read through Paul.

These five approaches, says McKnight, are all very common, and all very flawed. His solution? We must read the Bible as a story. But it’s not just a story that we read, it is a story that we live. “We must let the Bible’s story become our story,” he said, “so that it becomes us, and we become it.”

Anonymous Piece on Transformation #2

This outstanding and real piece of writing was submitted by a sophomore in our Spiritual Formation Bible class...

Transformation

Often times transformation happens when you are least expecting it. Other times you can be looking for it. No matter where you find it, you can’t go through a transformation without God’s help.

Transformation is a big word…what does it mean? What does it take to under go a transformation? Only two things. A transformation takes a willing heart, and the help of God.

About five months ago I went to a Christian conference for teens in America with my youth group. Every day for the three days we were there, there would be a speaker who would share a message that kids could relate to. The third day of the conference I walked into the ballroom where the conference was being held with one of my best friends. We found our seats, and the day started the normal way, with a band playing, and then an offering. After that, a man and a woman got up on stage to do a skit. The two people were playing high school students who had never met each other, but learned a lot about one another in the few minutes they talked. The man found that the girl was cutting herself, was sexually active, and had completely given up on God, because of what a guy had done to her and how he had affected her life. The girl learned the man was a dedicated Christian. After talking with him for a little while, she started to see how different he was because of his faith and in the end of the skit; you could see a transformation beginning to take place in her life. When the skit ended the speaker got up on stage and the first things she said was: “Ladies, no guy can ever fill the hole in your heart meant for Jesus Christ.” And she began to tell her story of how she always felt so empty and tried to fill that hole with guys, but never felt right about it. She began to drink and do drugs in order to try and feel right about what she was doing with guys. She finally got so bad that she was ready to end her own life. But one day she walked into a church, and met a man there who helped her realize who she was, and how much God loved her for her, and how he would always love her even though she had made so many mistakes in her life. That day she became a Christian. She was transformed right there on the spot, and from then on she was a different person. She found Jesus, and no longer felt the need to use guys to fill that hole, because Jesus had completely taken over her life. She ended her talk with: “Remember…NOTHING can take Jesus’ place in your heart. Not guys, not girls, not ANYTHING. Jesus loves you for you. And he will always forgive you.” By the end of her speech I was in tears, and my friend was hugging me. As we walked back to the dorms we were staying at, he asked me if I wanted to talk. I said yes. So we went sat in the grass in front of the dorm and I told him my story, the reason that her speech affected me so much.

Several months before the conference my self esteem was at a resounding ZERO. I began to form my identity in whether or not guys found me attractive or if I had a boyfriend. I was starting to become anorexic because I didn’t feel good about myself. Thing after thing was happening in my life and I had almost completely given up on God. I began to cut myself to ease the pain. I wasn’t suicidal, though many thought I was and although I wasn’t sexually active, I was likely headed down that path. I was a wreck. I no longer felt God’s love for me, and was sure that if there really was a God, he would NEVER forgive me or love me. But I didn’t show what I was feeling to many people. Only a handful of my closet friends knew what was going on. So when I wasn’t with that group of friends I tried so hard to be that happy person who helped people with their problems and was completely right with God. But I wasn’t. I had on a mask so thick that I didn’t even know who I was anymore. I missed my old self, the person I used to be. Not long before this conference I had talked to my pastor and my parents and told them what was going on and I was getting help with my insecurities. Her speech reminded me so much of myself, and how I was struggling with a lot of the same things she had.

As soon as she said her closing line, that God will always love me and forgive me, I felt a sense of peace that I hadn’t felt in a long time. That moment I was transformed. I promised myself that I would no longer cut, that I would begin to live the way Christ wanted me to live, and that I would seek to find my identity in God and not guys. I didn’t want to be anorexic or upset or dependent on people for everything. I realized that I needed to rely on God. I wanted that to be my life. I wanted to live for God and not care what anyone else thought about me. But without God’s help, and the want in my life for a change, where would I be today? I probably would have been anorexic, been cutting, and not have been in a relationship with God. Instead, I’m not anorexic, I haven’t cut in months, and I actually look forward to and want to grow in my faith. I’m not trying to say I’m perfect. I still have insecurities just like most other teenage girls, but I was definitely changed. I would never be where I am today without God’s help. He gave me the want in my life for a transformation. If anyone ever has issues with a girl, or guy, or the way they look, just remember that you can’t fill the whole in your life meant for Jesus Christ with anything but Him. If he gives you the opportunity for a transformation, don’t pass it by. If God puts a want in your heart for a change don’t ignore the feeling. It will benefit you for the rest of your life, and you WILL be a much happier person.

Transformation can happen when you least expect it. But the only way you can truly transform is if you have a heart that wants to change, and if you have the help of God. If everyone experienced a transformation people would be much better off. And when you think of all those people who have already gone through a transformation, you have to remember that all the credit goes to God.

An Anonymous Piece on Transformation

This outstanding and real piece of writing was submitted by a sophomore in our Spiritual Formation Bible class...

Spiritual Inauthenticity

Whoever you are, you probably shouldn’t read this article. In fact I would rather that you didn’t. Because you might find out more about myself than I would like you to know- more than I would like anyone to know. I could stretch the truth, I could tell you how authentic I am, or maybe how great my relationship with God is. But that would be a perfect example of inauthenticity. Because the truth is, that would be a bold-faced lie. So, am I spiritually inauthentic? I guess that it would depend on your definition of a few different things. The dictionary definition of authenticity is this, not fake, not an imitation, real. So, am I real? Are you? Is anyone? Take yourself to a school classroom with me. Sit down in a desk, look around at the other students, and glance at the teacher. Now sit back and listen to the class discussion. They are discussing something about poetry, and inevitably, someone will raise their hand and say something about Jesus. It may or may not have anything to do with the discussion, but someone will bring Jesus into the discussion, and maybe quote some Scripture. Did I mention that we are in a classroom at a Christian school? Now, what could possibly be wrong with this? Nothing at all, if the person speaking really means what she is saying. And who am I to judge? But, oftentimes, the person speaking says something super spiritual, then settles down in their desk with a proud expression on their face. They then will proceed to glance around the room and see who heard their comment. You see, quite often in the Christian community, people feel the need to “show off” their spirituality. And essentially, some people in the room will become discouraged about their own faith. And this happens everyday. Being “spiritual” is in fashion for some in the Christian community, the same way that sweaters and ballet flats are in fashion. In a world where pretending to be perfect is a way of life, then how can there possibly be any hope for authenticity? A big part of spiritual authenticity is the question why. Why are you doing what you are doing? Is it for God, or is it to make you look good? I have a confession. I am inauthentic. I am one of those people who pretends to have it all together. There are a lot of us. I know, I see them. We pretend that we don’t need anything or anyone; we keep our conversations on the surface, discussing fairly shallow things. We can talk for a long time about nothing, just to keep the conversation from going deep or personal. We bury our feelings deep inside. Personal questions make us uncomfortable and we don’t really like to share our hearts with other people. We tell white lies, and sometimes not-so-white lies. If someone asks us what is wrong we will usually shrug it off and assure them that we’re fine. We keep secrets-usually big ones that we don’t want anyone to know-that we can't have anyone know. We don’t trust people. We are generally afraid to get close to people, because they might end up hurting us. We fake smiles. And sometimes, we look into the eyes of a desperate, searching person, and find that we are looking at ourself. Left alone for long enough, these people will eventually lose touch completely with their emotions and any sense of who they are. And another thing, they will probably lose any relationship with Jesus that they might have had. Because chances are, they will just stop trying. Some of us are at this point already, and some of us still have a way to go before we get to there. Is there anything that can be done for this? I honestly don’t know. What if people in the church were more open about the issues that they face? What if Christians really took the time to get to know each other? What if we all made a deal to take off our masks together? What if we didn’t judge? What if the church could be known for their honesty and openness about the various struggles that we all face? What would happen if we admitted that we don’t know as much about the Bible as people may think that we do and that we really don’t like to pray? What would happen if more and more Christians focused on being real? Fortunately, it can be done. So lets all give it authenticity a try and see how our lives and the lives of people around us change.

THE ALTERNATIVE STORY--A theological response to the bail out plan

Ivan Illich was once asked, ‘What is the most revolutionary way to change society: Is it violent revolution or is it gradual reform?’ He gave a careful answer: ‘Neither. If you want to change society, then you must tell an alternative story.’

In a world where every thought of every person was only evil all the time, Noah told an alternative story and built a wooden freighter in his back yard in the middle of a drought. His story saved the world.

In a world where people worshiped rocks shaped like frogs and painted logs sticking out of the ground, Abraham told an alternative story of a personal God who speaks directly to people and births a new nation out of a geriatric barren woman’s womb.

In a world where his family rejected him, his boss’s wife framed him as a rapist and his friends forgot all about him, Joseph told an alternative story to the face of the most powerful man in the ancient world when he told the Pharaoh to trust the Living God, Yahweh, the only one powerful enough to truly bail out nations on the edge of economic collapse.

In a world where he and all of his countrymen were the slaves of a tyrant and a bounty was on his own head as a murderer, Moses told an alternative story to the face of his oppressor when he said, “You can’t have this nation anymore. We are God’s people and he’s been pretty clear this time. I just got back from a magic burning bush. This is what the Lord says, “You let my people go. They have a better story to tell than the one you are telling.”

In a world where the greatest leader of their nation had died and millions of families wandered as political refugees in the desert for four decades, Joshua told an alternative story as he slid his general’s sword into his scabbard and said, “Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go. Our story is already written, Our story is God’s story and it is not a story that ends in defeat, but in victory.”

In a world where the good people of the world were being beaten and pillaged and raped by an evil nation, God sent a messenger to tell Gideon, a frightened weakling of a man, an alternative story. The angel said, “On your own you are nobody, Gideon, but with God you are a mighty warrior. Get up and trust God to bail his people out of this mess.”

In a world where two superpowers lined up opposite each other for war and the destiny of two real historical nations hanged in the balance, a shepherd teenager carrying a basket of bread for the soldiers was the only one brave enough to tell an alternative story. David said, “ I’m just a boy with a rock and he’s a giant with a spear, but I got a Living God and he worships a bronze plated goat. My story wins.”

In a world where everyone he knew was killed or taken captive to a foreign land – a world where he himself was a slave for his entire life, Daniel told an alternative story when he approached king after king, decade after decade and said, “There is only one Living God and He’s not your god, He’s mine. And He’s got a message for you – your story is temporary but his is eternal.” They put his friends in a fiery furnace and threw him to the lions, but in the alternative story fire’s not all that hot and hungry lion’s make wonderful house pets.

And then it happened.

The Alternative Story became flesh and he lived among us. The Alternative Story was with God in the beginning. The Alternative Story was God. He came to the people of the alternative story, but his people did not recognize their Author. They rejected the Alternative Story for a different story – one that seemed more reasonable and possible and palatable and safe. And when it came time to give the Alternative story a name, the peasant teenage girl who birthed him named him Jesus whish literally means “God Saves Us” or “God Rescues Us” or “God Bails Us Out.”

For three years God Bails Us Out taught us that the alternative story was breaking into humanity in a fresh, real and dangerously significant way. He came to let us know that on the day he left us, the very last chapter of humanity’s alternative story would begin. And we believed him. He asked us to trust him – to trust God. And we trusted him. He warned us that we can’t always trust the religious leaders or the politicians or the economists or the powerful militants, but we can always trust him.

Then he died. But not before giving death itself an alternative story. In our new story, death begets life, not the other way around. So though he died, he lives. And we have the same promise.

And the story continued.

Peter told an alternative story to the masses in Jerusalem and 3,000 believed in one day. They abandoned their old story for the new alternative Jesus story.

Paul told an alternative story to those farthest from God and they started little churches in most every town in the ancient world. Little churches that would spread like a good cancer all through the Roman Empire.

100 years later, Polycarp, the elderly pastor of the church in Smyrna, told an alternative story to those who burned him at the stake for his faith when he boldly said his last words – “86 years I have served him, how can I now deny my savior who bought me?”

A century or two later, an ex-slave named Patrick from Britian came back to his captors after escaping from Ireland and told an alternative story that lead to wildfire revival and free flowing green beer for centuries to come.

700 years after that, a wealthy snot-nosed son of a fashion designer named Francis told an alternative story when he rejected all his father’s wealth to start a movement of compassion and radical generosity in the village of Assisi.

Martin Luther told an alternative story when he questioned the corruption and materialism of the church at a time when thing like that could get a monk killed and in doing so he turned history on it’s head.

And on it goes from there: John Calvin to the Wesley Brothers to Martin Luther King Jr. to Billy Graham. Dozens of names you would recognize and millions of names you would not. They all boldly stood up in their time and place and told an alternative story of a God who bails out people and offers hope for the hopeless.

A generation ago, a man named John Wimber told an alternative story that the supernatural could happen naturally in the church, that worship could happen simply and God is still in the business of Kingdom expansion and doing the “Jesus stuff” today. That story launched what we call the Vineyard movement.

A few decades ago, Steve Sjogren and the founders of my church told an alternative story when they proclaimed that we would love our city in practical ways until every last soul in Cincinnati was touched by the love of God.

Dave Workman told an alternative story in our church two years ago when he said the unthinkable – that we would raise a bunch of money, but the money isn’t going to be spent on ourselves. We are going to spend it on the poor of our city, the next generation of our future and the practical needs of those people dying today in nation of Nigeria. That’s the story that got me out of southern California 14 months ago. I came here to tell the story that a church can, despite all of its weaknesses, be relentlessly focused on seeing the alternative story expand to the poor, the hurting, the lost, the far away and the near-by.

I came here for one reason: to tell an alternative story with you. This place isn’t perfect, not even close. But we’ve got a story to tell. And all I know is this: when God’s people end up in a time in history that seems difficult or scary or hard, we are to have but one reaction. We tell our story louder. We do not shrink back, but press forward. Only we hold the alternative story that the world needs. That’s what it means to be the church – to be engrafted into the story of God and Israel through Christ. To be a Christian is to join the alternative story. To follow Jesus is to say, “in god we trust” when we are tempted to trust anything or anyone else who tells a story different than ours.

What Is An Evangelical? by John Ortberg

I thought this was a strong look at a word that carries lots of meaning, baggage, and questions for the future...and maybe JO is right, maybe it will mean nothing or something different to the students I am teaching in the years and generations to come...we will see...

Coming to terms with terms isn't easy.

I have always loved words. One of my favorite early memories is of my dad reading to us at bedtime. One of those books—Alice in Wonderland—had a scene about words that delighted and puzzled me.

Alice ran into Humpty Dumpty, who had an attitude and an unusual verbal style. He used the word glory, for instance, to mean "there's a nice knock-down argument for you." Alice objected, "Glory does not mean a nice knock-down argument."

"When I use a word," Humpty said in a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty, "which is to be master—that's all." He explained that he always paid a word extra when he made it do a lot of work.

One of the words I think about a fair amount these days is evangelical. I grew up in a Swedish pietistic evangelical denomination. I went to college in Wheaton, Illinois, which then was the Vatican City of evangelicalism. I attended Fuller Seminary, founded to advance evangelical scholarship. I went to Young Life and Campus Life meetings in high school (depending on which had the cutest girls at the time. Then I prayed according to the ACTS structure—adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication—and those girls were variously part of the "T", "C", and sometimes the "S" section.) I read The Living Bible. I sang "It only takes a spark to get a fire going." I went to Explo '72—all marks of evangelicalism at the time.

British historian David Bebbington writes that evangelicalism is marked by four characteristics: conversionism (an emphasis on being born again); biblicism (an emphasis on the ultimate authority of the Bible); activism (involvement in sharing the faith); and crucicentrism (a focus on the atoning and redeeming work of Christ on the cross—and a word Humpty Dumpty would have had to pay extra.) Though it was characterized by these qualities, the evangelical movement never had a duly authorized spokesman the way that Rome or Canterbury did.

Except maybe for one.

It is hard now to describe the impact that the name Billy Graham had on the little world in which I grew up. He met with presidents, consorted with world leaders, commanded the media, and remained the most admired man in America in poll after poll. He represented and defined and, in some ways, embodied our little subculture.

I think it was Mark Noll who said that you could peg someone's position relative to evangelicalism based on his response to the name Billy Graham. The seminary I attended still lists him as an emeritus trustee. Leadership journal and this website both are part of a publication entity Billy Graham dreamed up one night. I am part of a generation of preachers for whom he was an inescapable icon and inspiration. The only recognizable impersonation I can do is his. My wife, Nancy, and I spoke at a retreat at Montreat, North Carolina, last summer, just a week or so after the death of Ruth Graham. The weight and depth of the Graham legacy was palpable. American evangelicalism was the movement of which Billy Graham was the leader.

All this leads me to wonder what evangelical will mean in the next generation. How will it be understood? How much does it matter?

Here are a few clues. Not long ago, two articles in USA Today defined evangelicals as people who are "conservative in their political, economic, and moral beliefs."

David Kinnaman, in his widely read book Unchristian, discovered that among folks who are outsiders to the Christian faith, the number that had a good impression of the word evangelicals was 3%. To the rest, they were unknown. Or they were defined by what they are against.

The Pew Foundation recently reported the most widely targeted survey of religious attitudes to date, and one of their more striking findings was that 21% of all people who defined themselves as "atheists" also say they "believe in God." It made me wonder if they were a little unclear on the category. But apparently these are folks who are so turned off by organized religion that they defined themselves as atheists to make sure they are in no way identified with a faith—even though more than a fifth of them actually say they are believers.

Maybe the fate of the word evangelicalism doesn't matter all that much. I always liked evangelical. It seemed to me different from fundamentalism and mainline. It seemed more substantial than born-again, which often was used in ways that were intentionally divisive. To me it meant people who loved Jesus and took the Bible seriously, but were not afraid to read all kinds of books and discuss all kinds of ideas, and who cared about culture and statecraft and the arts. But it may not mean that to other people. Maybe the subculture I grew up in will eventually give in to confusion and competition and irrelevance. God is always getting people to sing new songs.

Words and labels, as old Humpty Dumpty knew so well, shift over time. The word that carries freshness and compels the heart in one generation is oppressive to another. There was a time when "a committee" (a group of people with a common commitment; with the capacity for dedication) was inviting. Now it's like asking people to sign up for rheumatism.

The evangel itself, the gospel, doesn't need any of us to worry about it. It was embodied a long time ago by the one Person who will always be around to put things back on the right track.

There will never be a "next Billy Graham." God just doesn't seem to go in much for cloning.

But the task of trying to describe and define Jesus' movement—to paint the portrait of his bride and sing his new song—that falls to every generation. It falls to every church. It falls to you.

I hope you find the right Word.

John Ortberg is pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in California, and is editor at large of Leadership Journal.

The Future Direction of Theology by Scot McKnight

Here's an interesting piece looking at where contemporary theological thinking in the church is going in one respected biblical scholar's opinion...I've enjoyed reading both of the "wrights" books myself in the past year...


Scot McKnight says N.T. Wright and Christopher Wright show the future of theology.


Recently I was asked where theology was headed. I assured my reader that I wasn’t “in the know” but that I would hazard a guess or two. First I thought we were likely to see a more robust Trinitarian theology, one deeply anchored in the great Cappadocian theologians like Gregory of Nyssa. But in some ways all the main lines of Trinitarian thought have already been sketched by great theologians like Karl Barth, James B. Torrance and others. With this first idea now set aside, I had a second idea of where theology is going: “The Wright Brothers.”

No, not those Wright Brothers, but another set of Wrights (who aren’t even brothers, except in Christ): Tom and Chris. Even if they don’t map where all of theology is headed, these two scholars and devoted churchmen, both Anglican, do set before us two words that have become increasingly fruitful and I think will be the subject of serious theological reflection in the future. The two words are “earth” and “mission.” Each scholar discusses both, but I will focus in this post on Tom Wright’s focus on “earth” and Chris Wright’s focus on “mission.”

Increasingly we are seeing more and more Christians own up to the earthly focus of biblical revelation—the claim God makes upon this earth through his Eikons (humans made in his image). We are seeing a deeper reflection on what it means to participate in the historical flow, in government and politics and society and culture, and we are seeing a renewed interest in vocation and work. One of the more striking elements of this new surge is that theologians who are deeply anchored in the Bible also see our eternal destiny having an earthly shape.

And not only are we seeing the increasing presence of “earthly,” but we are seeing a reshaping of theology itself so that God’s mission in this world becomes central. Everyone knows that the latest buzz word is missional but not enough are thinking carefully about what mission means in the Bible and what it means to speak about “God’s mission” (missio Dei). But there is a surge of thinking now about this topic and it will continue to spark interest both for pastors and professional theologians.
Now to the Wright brothers.

Tom Wright, in his book Surprised by Hope, relentlessly critiques the gnostic-like preoccupation so many have with heaven as a place for our spirits and souls—the place where we really belong, and the sooner we get there the better. It is not that Tom Wright denies heaven; no, he affirms it robustly but he argues that the eternal home for the Christian is not that old-fashioned view of heaven but the new heavens and the new earth. And he argues the new heavens and new earth are something brought down from heaven to earth. (Read Revelation 20—22.)

I think some have made far too much of this, as if it is a revolutionary insight. What it is, in my judgment, is a strong critique of how dualistic we’ve become. And it is a welcome call for us to see that what we do now prepares us for what we will do in the new heavens and the new earth. I think Tom Wright’s emphasis here is spot-on: we need to grapple more directly with the connection of what God calls us to do now as continuous with what we shall be called to do for eternity. I hope many will see their way to read Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle, for it addresses similar themes.

This emphasis of Tom Wright’s actually forms a foundation for Chris Wright’s exceptional study The Mission of God. Here we find yet another theme that is reshaping so much of where theology is going: mission. I wish people asked this one simple question: What is the mission of God in this world? Chris Wright, taking his cues from the Old Testament—he’s an Old Testament scholar—says the mission of God is to make his glorious Name known throughout the whole world. This mission, found so often in the prophets, shapes how we not only read the Bible but how we live out the Bible in our world.

God makes his Name known through God’s people, first Israel and then the Church. Most centrally, God’s mission with a Name becomes fully visible in Jesus Christ—in his life, death, resurrection, and the gift of the Spirit. This Story, this grand narrative of God’s mission, is reshaping how theology is being done.

There is a converging hook here: Chris Wright ends his book on the theme of God’s mission involving the earth—the whole earth. Tom Wright ends his book about earth on mission—the mission of God in this world. I think they are both right.
I can’t see into the future, but I can see down the road a bit, and what I see is an increasing emphasis on earth and mission. Those two themes are likely to take us into the next two decades.

Back to Sunday School

Here's a fascinating interview with a former WA dad and respected Wheaton prof around the issue of spiritual formation and the church's shrinking role in the discipleship process...and the book is a great read for those seeking to put together a spiritual formation vision in a ministry context...

The author of Spiritual Formation as if the Church Mattered says the church must reclaim its disciple-making infrastructure.

"Spiritual formation is the task of the church. Period." That's how James C. Wilhoit opens his new book, Spiritual Formation as if the Church Mattered. Wilhoit, professor of Christian formation and ministry at Wheaton College, has been teaching about spiritual formation since 1981. He says he owes a great debt in his own spiritual formation to Dallas Willard, whose foreword to Wilhoit's book reiterates the theme: spiritual formation, he says, is the "central problem facing the contemporary church."

Wilhoit spoke about the book and how churches often misunderstand the task of formation.

Your title suggests that most people do not have the church in mind when they talk about spiritual formation.

A lot of the patterns of spiritual formation give a sense that the church doesn't matter. These are things that you could largely do on your own. I came to write this book after people would sometimes call me and say, "We're interested in doing spiritual formation in the church."

And I asked, "What are you doing?"

"Oh, we're using Richard Foster in this class on spiritual disciplines."

But teaching a couple of classes on Celebration of Discipline is not what it would mean for the church to be about its business of formation.

So when you talk about spiritual disciplines, you're not just talking about the 13 that Richard Foster outlined in that book?

Certainly you have those classic disciplines that Foster talks about. But the trouble with those disciplines is they can become kind of "quiet time only" activities. So I want to put emphasis those disciplines that are distinctively relational. We all are in the midst of being formed and challenged in relationships, and we just have to be intentional about that — about engaging people in the margin, about offering forgiveness to people that have hurt us. And so that has to be there.

Foster's introduction is so helpful in emphasizing this, and a lot of people's lives, like mine, were changed by it. But a lot of people read the book and practiced these activities in a way that never touches their life.

I want to emphasize the context as well as the practices. What I have seen with my students is if you take a legalist and teach them Richard Foster, they simply become a far more adroit legalist. We constantly need to go back to this theme that it is all about seeking to live out the gospel and live out of our brokenness.

How do you define spiritual formation?

I want to have a definition of spiritual formation that has a strong community focus to it, that is not just aimed at one's self. So Christian spiritual formation refers to the intentional communal process of growing in our relationship with God, in being conformed to Christ and the power of the Spirit.

How does that relate to church activities like worship?

Not all of what the church does is spiritual formation, but if one is thoughtful, one recognizes that all components of the church have a formational dimension.

There are ways that you can ask how to structure worship in service of spiritual formation without so privileging spiritual formation that everything is meant to serve that. Worship has the goal of taking us into God's presence. That's a sufficient telos [end purpose].

In the book, I talk about the four Rs of spiritual formation: receiving, remembering, responding, and relating. Worship is one of the ways that orients us to receiving from God's grace, and it makes us aware of our creatureliness and our dependence on him. Worship is one of those things that should set us up for spiritual formation and is an important vehicle in that formation.

In February, we polled our online readers about the church's most important responsibility, and almost a quarter selected "helping non-Christians find Christ."

On one level, they're right. I have many students that come to my course as Christians, and the gospel is introduced to them as if they did not know it. They had perceived the gospel as a kind of front door for the church, not as a road map.

One of the ways the church could do spiritual formation much better is to conceive many of its ministries as gospel-oriented. They need going to remind people that the way one becomes a Christian and the way one grows as a Christian are essentially the same thing. We come to believe the gospel more fully, to understand the depth of our sin, to understand the beauty and attractiveness of Jesus Christ, and to learn to trust his words more fully.

Over time we can begin to lose the reality of sin, the Cross, and redemption. I continually need to come back. The gospel is a daily reminding myself of the Cross, a daily reminding myself that I'm loved and accepted in God through the Cross.

In evangelical churches today, what do you think is the main enemy of spiritual formation?

There are a variety of things. I'd like to do a top-ten list. But for one, out of a short-term pragmatism, we are disassembling structures that have served the church well in terms of formation.

Like what?

Sunday morning adult education courses. Evening worship services that have an emphasis on testimony, accounts of world Christianity through missions, and more informal, life-related messages. This kind of formational infrastructure is being taken apart.

You also have other factors, like the rising emphasis on the sermon. It is being asked to do things that the sermon alone cannot do.

What are evangelicals doing well in regard to spiritual formation?

Varieties of things. Certainly if you look to compare the broadest religious groups, people are being exposed to the Scriptures. People are also particularly involved in missions. Short-term missions programs have a remarkable effect upon formation. The use of small groups is certainly something that is very positive.

How Public Is the Gospel? by Collin Hansen from Christianity Today

N. T. Wright's latest book renews debate over evangelism and good works.

I found this article to be quite thought provoking...with opinions from 3 folks whose writings I really enjoy and who seem to take somewhat different journeys in trying to answer this title question...it is worth reading each of the three books mentioned from Wright, Keller, and Dever as we seek to interpret Scripture, fully embrace the Gospel, and answer this question from a Christ-centered viewpoint...

Has anyone seen N.T. Wright sleep? It seems like no week can end before the Anglican bishop of Durham publishes yet another groundbreaking book. Christianity Today recently excerpted his latest effort, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church.

As with his other works, Wright has encouraged his many fans on both sides of the Atlantic even as he has provoked some critics. Wright's position as a leader in the Church of England exposes him to jabs from all sides. But this role also makes him quite influential. He wants to hold out the gospel for a largely post-Christian United Kingdom, in part by refuting the faulty scholarship of biblical critics. But he also wants to challenge Christians to see the gospel in a new way. Thus, he takes issue with Luther's view on justification by faith alone. He also worries that many Christians have unbiblically privatized the gospel, stripping the Good News of its public imperative.

This last point has renewed a vigorous theological debate. Wright argues in Surprised By Hope that the "mission of the church is nothing more or less than the outworking, in the power of the Spirit, of Jesus' bodily resurrection. It is the anticipation of the time when God will fill the earth with his glory, transform the old heavens and earth into the new, and raise his children from the dead to populate and rule over the redeemed world he has made."

Echoing the long-standing concerns of evangelical leaders such as John Stott, Wright goes on to explain that Christians must never choose between saving souls and doing good works. "Thus the church that takes sacred space seriously (not as a retreat from the world but as a bridgehead into it) will go straight from worshiping in the sanctuary to debating in the council chamber; to discussing matters of town planning, of harmonizing and humanizing beauty in architecture, green spaces, and road traffic schemes; and to environmental work, creative and healthy farming methods, and proper use of resources," he writes.

"If it is true, as I have argued, that the whole world is now God's holy land, we must not rest as long as that land is spoiled and defaced. This is not an extra to the church's mission. It is central."

Now here's where the controversy really begins. How, then, should Christians lobby? How can we know what issues to prioritize? Wright says the "number one moral issue of our day" is relieving Third World debt. "I've studied the problem of global debt quite intensively," Wright told blogger Trevin Wax. "In fact, I've read probably more books about contemporary economics recently than I have contemporary biblical studies. Curiously, I find myself drawn into that world, and it's quite likely that I'm getting a lot of things wrong."

Idaho pastor and blogger Douglas Wilson sure thinks so. He believes relieving Third World debt could only end in "horrific humanitarian disaster" or "resurgent neo-colonialism." In typically pointed fashion, he says Wright is inadvertently "insisting on the humanitarian disaster option … in the name of Jesus." In response, Wright says he is calling for mercy, not a complicated debate over the effect of debt on national economies.

In his talk two weeks ago at the Together for the Gospel conference, pastor Mark Dever also criticized Wright. Dever's lecture, "Exercises in Unbiblical Theology," (mp3) became the meeting's hot topic. Unlike Wilson, Dever did not engage Wright's politics. In fact, he wondered whether church leaders should enter such discussions at all. "As I read the New Testament, I do not see any example of the church understanding its gospel or its mission to be the direct shaping of the laws of the land or the improving of its structures," said Dever, senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. "Certainly, the apostle Paul never tells the church to spend its time explicitly instructing the Roman emperor or shaping the pagans' view of culture."

According to Dever, Christians must never confuse implications of the gospel with the gospel itself. "The gospel that has been committed to us is the Christian message that Jesus has died in the place of sinners in order to reconcile them to God," Dever said. "That gospel has been uniquely entrusted to the church, and thus it must remain the center of our message and our mission."

It is no coincidence that leading pastor/scholars have taken up this question about the gospel's public implications. How you answer the question affects how you lead your church. Wright praises God when Christians in the churches he oversees go "straight from worshiping Jesus in church to making a radical difference in the material lives of people down the street." Dever makes frequent evangelistic appeals in his preaching, and he encourages church members to seek opportunities for personal evangelism.

Tim Keller and his Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City fall somewhere between Wright and Dever. Writing for Leadership, Keller answered this year's question for the Christian Vision Project, "Is our gospel too small?" (The article is not yet available online.) In so doing he took a stab at defining the gospel. "Through the person and work of Jesus Christ, God fully accomplishes salvation for us, rescuing us from the judgment for sin into fellowship with him, and then restores the creation in which we can enjoy our new life together with him forever."

It's the last clause of this sentence that makes the difference. Is God's plan to renew creation part of the gospel message? If so, is it the center of the gospel or a peripheral component of the Good News? Again, how you answer these questions affects how you will live, and how you will expect fellow church members to act.
"When the third, 'eschatological' element is left out, Christians get the impression that nothing much about this world matters," Keller wrote. "Theoretically, grasping the full outline should make Christians interested in both evangelistic conversions as well as service to our neighbor and working for peace and justice in the world."
Since at least the late 19th century, evangelicals have struggled to strike this balance. Fundamentalists blamed modernists for shrouding the gospel in social garb. Carl Henry led an evangelical movement by calling for renewed application of the gospel to the world's social ills. Billy Graham and John Stott disagreed over the proper balance. We may not solve these questions in our day, either. But to ask them is to engage in a defining evangelical practice.

Is Social Justice Serving Christ? by Remoy Philip, RELEVANT MAGAZINE

Here is a very solid and challenging article addressing a questions that comes up almost daily in my own life and the life of so many younger followers of Jesus today...and it is ever pertinent as I head to Zambia tomorrow night...

I am in sheer amazement at what I have seen in the last few years and what has been consistently growing throughout our present day. It seems now more than ever, we as humans see and feel—what we could call a sense of awareness—what all of us as humans have an unalienable right for. Food, shelter, healthcare and education have been expended all throughout the world to stabilize the areas lacking the aforementioned needs of this world. This can be seen throughout Gap ads, Time magazine cover stories, and we even see sports stars lending their sizable hands in the act of “doing more” for humanity’s sake. What seems to be more encouraging, is seeing the Evangelicals, the Emergent ones, and all the rest who call themselves Christians, leading in this fight for humanity. I am boastful and proud of the modern day Church, yet I am still left wondering or at least feeling that something is askew. Something in modern day Christendom may be facing the way of the Lord but there is still the question, are we living in the way of the Lord?

Our current day is no different than centuries past when it comes to the battles that define our religious-based spirituality. Nowadays I find myself somewhat wavering or unsure when faced with certain questions about my Christianity—moreover our Christianity. What is Truth? Science vs. God; who will win? Homosexuality vs. what seems like an antiquated view of sexuality. Is the Word adaptable, and more so, malleable to fit our current times? All these questions are warred over by theologians, scholars, televangelists and lowly wise day-to-dayers.

I do not think it would be a bold statement to say that a majority of our generation who were born into a supposed modern Christian home was witness to the polarization of the term “Christian.” We were witness to the word “Christian” becoming somewhat of a prefix to other words such as movies, music, television, books and so forth. After recovering from this iconic movement in spiritual trends, a lot of our generation may feel torn and moreover manipulated by what was done with our spirituality. Throughout this modern technological telecommunication age a sardonic voice can be heard from our age group that stirs to discredit this polarization. With all this said, I worry that we, as a generation and social demographic, are on the verge of repeating our mistakes. Not in the sense that we find a modern day birth of a TBN generation with the selling and promoting of WWJD slap-on bracelets, but more so with the focus on social justice.

I am not going take back my words when I said I was proud of what our leg of Christianity has done with social justice, but I am worried that we may be again creating a skewed social dogma for Christianity. I tread softly through this claim hoping not to create a backlash against the “do-gooders” because I truthfully wish I had more do-good in me. But I ask, tactfully, where do we draw the line for the markings of social justice in our servitude of Christ?

Our motivation has to be grace and redemption (Love plays a major role, but that is not for me to define or extrapolate at this time). If we don’t follow suit in this idea of humble grace, we enter into the cyclical motion of fixing the flaws of our father’s generation. We just replace one morality code with another morality code. What keeps the playing field level for all of us is sin. Sin has the ability to prick the conscience in a way which one is no better than the prince of evil himself. We are all aware of this conspiracy of sin. The time when you don’t know what motivation could have ever driven you to hurt someone you cared for, but you did; the idea that popped into your head you know should never leave your mouth; the action that just seemed to happen with no thought process behind it—we are all prone to these evils. Yet all of us, through a trust and belief in Christ have the will, motivation and humility to live with one another making up for one’s sins and excusing our faults. That, I feel, should be the only social barometer for where the walking, breathing and thinking who surrender themselves to Christ should carry their moral standard of doing.

Romans three appropriates Paul’s letter to the scandalous argument of Law vs. Works. But what shouldn’t be missed is the heart of what Paul is saying. He seems to be the most avid fan of grace. He boasts of the new life we as humans from all walks of this world can share in being the living representation of Christ. To the ambiguous existential left and to the altruistic religious right, nothing can be proven unless we as a social group come together by extending grace for one another’s faults and shortcomings. The world will not see how Christ has saved the world by how many people we feed or save from AIDS; Clooney and Pitt have done a solid job at that and Eggers and Bono have written a strong motivational appeal for that. However, when we, as the ones who choose to be the living representation of the invisible God, choose to forgive one another and extend grace for one another, then the world will ask: “What is it, deep inside of you, that makes you so different?” Then they will see His glory.

SOLITUDE AND PRAYER

Here's one more piece of writing from a sophomore student at WA...

The world seems to move at a pace that is almost impossible to keep up with at times. Juggling work, school, family and friends can become too much and push you over the edge. So how do we keep going? Well, some of us don’t. In a way I don’t know how we could survive in a world like ours without solitude and prayer.

When thinking of solitude you probably imagine yourself alone in a secluded quiet area away from people, relaxing, thinking and perhaps writing. Sounds wonderful compared to a six hour day of school.

A couple months ago I was really stressed out. I was snapping at my family for no reason, giving attitude, complaining, and just always being in a rotten mood. I knew I had to find something to help me and make me stop acting the way I was acting. And naturally I just knew I had to get away and think about what was bothering me so much. So one night it was about nine o’clock, my family had gone to sleep already and I was lying in my bed and I just had so many thoughts running through my head at once; I needed some air. I jumped out of my bed and walked right out my back door. I started walking to the fields behind my house. I laid down in the grass, stared at the stars. Waiting for something miracle- like to happen, like God’s face appearing in the sky and telling me everything was going to be alright and have a life changing experience. No-God didn’t appear in the sky but I did have a life changing experience. So I laid there for ten minutes alone in solitude. Nothing happened; I was still angry, confused and lost. I thought about what I was angry about, hurt about, nervous about and I felt alone with these problems. I then thought “Geez, I haven’t prayed or talked to God in months.” So I started praying, I must have been in that field for an hour and a half. But when I left I walked away knowing the answer to all my problems -give God the steering wheel.

If you are going through anything hard in life like a break-up, a divorce, a death or money problems and you don’t know what to do; just talk to God, tell Him “Lord I cant do this on my own”, “I’m lost, please help me, guide me through this, take control because I cant do this on my own.” Just that simple let Him take total charge and you’ll be able to get through the toughest situations in life. Listen to Him. Solitude is nice but, it is nothing without prayer. I could have laid there in that field for an hour and a half in solitude but I would have walked away the same way I entered; lost and miserable. Prayer is the key to solitude. You can get a lot of answers through solitude and prayer. So I challenge you to open yourself up to God, give God a chance to connect and speak to you without any distractions and actually have you be able to hear Him. You may not be able to hear Him like you would hear a friend talking out loud to you but you’ll know that he is there with you just like He is all the time.

If everyone practiced this discipline of solitude and prayer on a regular basis I think we would have happier surroundings and some of us would be in a better state of mind. Remember Solitude is nothing without prayer.

FRUGALITY by Chris Easley

Here is a fantastic post from sophomore WA student Christopher Easley...I recently had the chance to teach on the topic of homosexuality in their Christian Thought and Culture classes and was very impressed with their desire to engage Scripture as they consider issues in our larger culture in the classes taught by Jeff Brooke...this piece of writing is from one of their class assignments...

In American society today, “frugality” is generally a disliked characteristic in a person if they possess it. The word conjures an image of Ebenezer Scrooge, neurotically counting his money while keeping the heat low on a cold winter day. Such stinginess is legitimately seen as an unpleasant quality. However, the traditional concept of “frugality” is actually focused towards developing a generous spirit, and most people today seem to be unfamiliar with the concept.

Our cultural ignorance about this discipline is actually relatively new. Not too long ago, a person of “economy” was praised for their ability to stretch a dollar. Now it has become socially expected to spend money very frequently. When a group visits the mall or goes downtown, those who choose to restrain their desire for more stuff are often labeled “cheap.” Even our generosity is sometimes connected to our materialism, as can be seen by the popularity of efforts such as (PRODUCT)RED, a group of products whose developers send a portion of profits to relief efforts around the world. Yet frugality and generosity have been connected by the testimony of Scripture and centuries of earlier Christian tradition.

Simply stated, frugality is the giving up of unnecessary things we would otherwise freely enjoy in order to give to God and the work of his kingdom. I have found this personally challenging and my attempts at it have sometimes been guilt-ridden. A few years ago I began asking myself “Would this money be better spent helping a starving child?” before spending anything. Purchases of candy at summer camp left me struggling with questions as to whether any of life’s (expensive) pleasures should be acceptable when so many still do not have their daily needs. Yet a thorough study of Scripture reveals, alongside calls to generosity and sacrifice, encouragement to provide for oneself and family and even pay for celebratory activities.

Given the encompassing view Scripture provides of how we should spend our money, perhaps I could better ask myself, “Is this dollar doing the most it can for the Kingdom of God?” before spending. An honest evaluation will reveal that we often spend an inordinate amount of money on ourselves and do not enter into the kind of sacrifice Scripture calls for. A holy practice of frugality is not guiltily depriving oneself of legitimate goods or services, nor forgetting the needs of the poor, but entering into an honest questioning of how we can best spend our money to God’s glory. This includes both meeting our needs and giving up certain things for others.

At a practical level, each of us should honestly consider how and why we are spending our money the way we are. Do we drink (and pay) for coffee or soda as much as we do because we think it is a legitimate way to help us concentrate or relax and thus build God’s Kingdom? Or would we better serve God’s kingdom by buying less and giving the extra money towards ministries that bring Living Water to the thirsty? Asking ourselves questions such as these is perhaps the best way we can begin. Entering into such discussion with other believers (to facilitate true honesty and provide accountability) could also be an important step to take.

May we have the courage to pursue a holy, counter-cultural, generous frugality.

Is Your Bible Big Enough? by Gordon MacDonald, Leadership Journal

So often I have found myself as a Christian wondering which Bible version is the best or laughing at the latest trendy Bible I've been sent to get out to today's hip students...and yet the Scriptures remain that which I have built my whole life upon...my job, my family, my lifestyle, my future, my soul, my eternity...I think I do take it for granted sometimes when I look up and see sixteen different copies on my shelf...but it the only book I have that many copies of...and perhaps that ultimately shows its remarkable worth for my life and our world...now if I could only get my students in class to have one with them when we want to study it...

What makes our Bible precious in a land that publishes so many?


How many Bibles have I owned since childhood? Oodles! The first of them (white imitation-leather) was probably a gift from my parents or a Sunday school teacher and came as a payoff for memorizing Scripture verses.

In the years that followed, my Bible collection grew to include black, red, and navy blue leather- and calf-skin-bound Bibles. My prized possession? A most-memorable wartime military-brown Bible produced for soldiers.

My inventory grew to include pocket Testaments, red-letter Bibles (the sayings of Jesus in red ink), Scofield Reference Bibles, Thompson Chain-reference Bibles, KJV's RSV's, TEV's, NIV's, ASV's, paraphrases (Phillips, Living, and Amplified). Oh, and I must not forget the plethora of study Bibles, which offer notes for youth, athletes, business people, women, contemplatives, and truck drivers, to name a few. Given my recreational inclinations, I have been waiting for a kayaker's Bible.

In my early teen years I was given a special flaming-red evangelism Bible designed to be carried to public school and positioned on top of one's textbooks so that other kids would notice and ask how to get saved. But I was never asked.

I met guys who, for five dollars, would draw a "reference ladder" on the edges of your Bible's pages so that you could immediately thumb your way to obscure Bible books. Ladders would have been illegal, of course, if one were competing in a Bible search contest—sometimes known as "a sword drill" (I was once a record-setter in such competition). Today, ethics and scandals being what they are, all Bibles in a sword drill would have to be inspected for ladders just as baseball bats are inspected for cork implants.

Today there are software products available that offer Scripture in more translations than one ever knew existed. Every word, every phrase of Scripture can now be searched, compared, and matched in milliseconds. It's scary to think of what Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, or John Calvin could have accomplished with such computer tools. It often makes me wonder if Saint Paul had any idea that his words would one day be sliced and diced, cross-checked and stretched, debated and defined as they have.

Bottom line: like many other North Americans, I have abounded in Bibles all my life, enough to start a small book store.

That fact was greatly impressed upon me 25 years ago when I visited China soon after it opened its doors to American travelers. My travel partner and I met a Christian woman who had not seen a copy of the Scriptures for two decades. When she spoke to us of the Scriptures, her recollection of certain stories was faulty or distorted. What could you expect from someone who hadn't seen a Bible for that many years?

Since all Bibles in the possession of travelers entering China at that time had to be registered at the border, and since we did not sense a calling to be Bible smugglers, my traveling companion and I could not pass on the Bibles that each of us had with us. But, on the other hand, it occurred to us that we could tear out certain pages from our Bibles and offer them to her. At least we were brave enough to feel certain that Chinese officials would not check our Bibles closely enough to see if every page was there. (By the way, if you could only give someone 15 pages of your Bible, what sections would you choose? You have minutes to decide.)

I must confess that several times over the years I have dreamed of a middle-of-the-night knock on the door of my home and of a Chinese border policeman demanding to inspect my Bible. Of course, if that happened, I could respond with a straight-faced, "Which one in my collection would you like?" With my stash, I could keep him looking for missing pages for some time.

That experience in China nevertheless impressed upon me what it might be like to live in another world where the Scriptures are rare and therefore precious.

I can never remember a time in my life when the Bible has not been a dominant presence in the way I think and live. Sometimes I like to refer to myself as a biblical person rather than a Christian. The latter term, Christian, is becoming so innocuous, even pejorative in today's world. It can mean many things that are actually counter-productive. But identifying myself as a biblical person seems to align my identity with the source documents of my faith. My faith, my life, I am saying, is grounded upon the God of the Bible.

A Multifaceted Gospel by Al Hsu in CHRISTIANITY TODAY

Here's an interesting article promoting the multi-faceted dimension of the Gospel where the author suggests that we shouldn't necessarily be threatened by new tellings of the Good News...a very interesting issue as we continue to consider how and what we must communicate to a world deeply in need of knowing Jesus...

At the 2006 Ancient Evangelical Future conference, historian Martin Marty commented briefly on the Atonement theories proposed by the early church. Did the church fathers hold to penal substitution, Christus Victor, or Anselm's view of the Atonement? Yes. All of the above.

Panelists pressed Marty to declare one view or another the "right" one. Whatever one thinks, he responded, the reality is that the church held to multiple versions.

The same is true today, in evangelical thinking about the nature of the gospel. Because we are a biblical people, we want to preserve the gospel in as pure a form as possible, which is why many people and institutions (like this magazine) prioritize substitutionary Atonement. But because we are an evangelistic, missional people, we want to contextualize the gospel to reach as many as possible.

The danger of the conservationist impulse is that it can lead to static reductionism. The danger of the entrepreneurial impulse is that it can lead to utilitarianism or relativism. At our best, we hold these impulses in tension, creating gospel approaches that are both timeless and timely. The result is multiple ways of explaining the gospel—and that makes some of us nervous.

Communication theory teaches that messages are conditioned by the social location of both sender and receiver. You can tell two people the same sentence, and they might hear entirely different things. Likewise, people naturally tell the gospel in their own particular way. Some focus on a change of heart, mind, or direction; others major on judgment or conviction of sin. Some speak about the promise of new life, now and eternally; others stress individual transformation or societal and cosmic renewal.

We need all of the above. Jesus did not speak the same blanket message to all people. Instead, he used a variety of metaphors to explain his identity: light, door, bread, way, truth, life. Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman received very different messages. Jesus proclaimed the Good News sometimes in parables, sometimes through denunciation, sometimes by action.

Indeed, some might criticize Jesus for not presenting the gospel comprehensively on every occasion. Sometimes he mentioned "eternal life" or "the kingdom of God." Other times he didn't. Sometimes he called for repentance, but not always. Jesus, and the New Testament writers who followed him, modeled cultural creativity and contextualization by telling the Good News in multiple ways: "Come, follow me." "The kingdom of God is at hand." "Jesus is Lord." "Repent and be baptized." "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved." "For God so loved the world."

We need not pit these passages against one another. Plurality does not equal pluralism. The ancient creeds, echoing 1 Corinthians 15, say that for our sake Jesus was crucified, buried, and on the third day rose again. God's people have been reflecting on these declarations ever since. We will never exhaust their implications, whether expressed as "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life," or "I once was lost, but now am found."

Every gospel summary has pros and cons. None is comprehensive; indeed, some may well be deficient. But different approaches can provide necessary correctives. Thus, we need what Joel Green calls a "kaleidoscopic" understanding of the Atonement, or what Scot McKnight calls "stories of the Story."

Evangelicals needn't be afraid of new approaches to the gospel—the church has been coming up with them for centuries. We managed to get through 1,900 years of Christian history without the Four Spiritual Laws and the bridge diagram. The formula of "accepting Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior" is also fairly recent. And what worked in the post–World War II context might not be appropriate in the early 21st century. Many people today have different questions, assumptions, and concerns.

Hence, we need variety and creativity in our gospel witness. A chorus of voices from N. T. Wright and Dallas Willard to Allen Wakabayashi and Brian McLaren calls us to rediscover the kingdom of God. Scot McKnight tells a story about the restoration of cracked eikons (image-bearers). Kevin Vanhoozer places the gospel in the context of an unfolding drama. James Choung's True Story offers a "four worlds" diagram in which we are designed for good, damaged by evil, restored for better, and sent together to heal.

Let us continue to explore and share the gospel in ways old and new. Whether we talk about justification by faith or defeating the powers, sight for the blind or reversal of entropy, freedom for the oppressed or healing of the nations, it's all good. The gospel is all of the above, and so much more.

People of the Book by John Ortberg in LEADERSHIP JOURNAL

This is a fabulous writing by perhaps my all time favorite preacher/teacher/author as he invites us to truly be people of the one book that transforms lives, history, antions, and hearts...read and be blessed and moved and be given a thirst to crack open the book...

God's people are distinguished by one thing; my job is to teach it.

Ever notice, when you're preaching, how few Philistines drop by the church anymore? Or how rarely Moabites get converted and lead a small group? Or how no one has a cousin married to an Amalekite?

Pretty much all the nations and tribes from Bible times that were of Israel's size are gone. So why did Israel survive? Not just survive; in the words of Thomas Cahill, how did a tribe of desert nomads change the way the world thought and felt? What distinguished Israel from everyone else?

It wasn't power. Most of its history Israel was a vassal nation.

It wasn't wealth. Israel was never a major economic player.

It wasn't size. Israel was dwarfed by Greece, Egypt, Babylon, and Rome.

What did Israel have?

A book. Scrolls really, with books like Genesis or Isaiah written over the centuries, that most people, being illiterate, had to hear being read. They had a book like no other.

Their book said that instead of little tribal gods locally, there was one God who created all things and planned on redeeming all things.

It said life was not an endless cycle of repetition. It said history was a story—God's story, with a beginning, a crisis, and in a day to come, a climax.


Fewer than half of all Americans can name the first book of the Bible.

It said that human beings made by and accountable to this God can now know how to live.

This book so defined them they were called "people of the book." To help their children learn the book was the greatest task of every parent.

To be able to teach this book—to be a rabbi—was their greatest ambition.

The historian Josephus wrote: Time and again we have given practical proof of our reverence for our own scriptures … it is an instinct with every Jew, from the day of their birth, to regard them as the decrees of God, to abide by them, and if need be, cheerfully to die for them. Time and again the sight has been witnessed of prisoners enduring torture and death rather than utter a single word against them. What Greek would endure as much for the same cause?

Humanly speaking, the book is what they had to offer the world. The book is what shaped them and held them together. The book started every morning: "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One"). The book didn't say, "O Israel, think for yourselves. Follow your bliss. Go with your gut." It just said, Hear. It was the source of all wisdom, the guidance for all problems, the authoritative appeal in every debate. The rabbis often disagreed over what it meant. But everybody understood its status. It was the last word. They never got over this awe that in this book God has spoken—"What advantage is there, then, of being a Jew? Much in every way! First of all, they have been entrusted with the very words of God" (Rom. 3:1).

They had the book. And now this book, with some significant additions, has become our book. Now we are its stewards.

But we have cable.

We have Oprah and Dr. Phil and Forbes and Suze Orman and Jack Welch and Dear Abby. We are free to pick and choose. No one is in a culturally-assigned position to say, "Hear O San Francisco …"

As a preacher, my charge is to proclaim the message of the Scriptures. To help the people in my congregation become a people of the book. I love getting to do this. But it isn't getting easier. Over the past decades, the Scriptures have not changed.

But the people we preach to have. There was a time when many if not most people in our culture accorded some sense of authority to the Scriptures, even if they were not churchgoers. A postmodern generation is more skeptical. David Kinnaman notes that only three in ten people in America think that the Bible "is accurate in all the principles it teaches."

Even inside the church, attention spans are getting shorter. The rate of biblical illiteracy is growing. The questioning of authority—the "hermeneutic of suspicion"—is stronger. Information overload—about biblical scholarship along with everything else—keeps growing.


Congregations shaped by the Scriptures have preachers shaped by the Scriptures.

It's a strange thing: the book has never been so accessible. According to The Guinness Book of Records, L. Ron Hubbard's writings of scientology have been translated into 65 languages; the Koran is supposed to be read in Arabic so it hasn't been translated as much; the Book of Mormon is in about 100 languages. But 2,656 languages have all or some of the Bible.

Some 65 million copies of the Bible are bought or distributed in the U.S. every year—nothing else is a close second. The average house has at least three. People cheer the Bible, buy the Bible, give the Bible, own the Bible—they just don't actually read the Bible.

According to George Gallup:

One third of those surveyed know who delivered the Sermon on the Mount.


Fewer than half can name the first book of the Bible;


80 percent of born-again Christians believe the phrase God helps those who help themselves is in the Bible (it's actually Ben Franklin).


So I'm thinking a lot these days about how to help the people that God brings my way to know and love the book. How do I proclaim the Scriptures in a way that honors their authority, and at the same time recognizes where my hearers are (as opposed to where I wish they were)?

Here are some of the assumptions that help me to teach Scripture in a culture that isn't always big on hearing.

The Unavoidable Starting Point

The first assumption involves the life of the teacher. I cannot give what I do not have.

I was at a conference recently on generosity, and I asked a man who works full time with churches in the area of stewardship what typifies generous churches. His immediate response: "They have generous senior pastors."

Whoops.

It was a reminder that, for those of us who work at churches, we never get to start with our congregations, only with ourselves. Before I can think about how I present the Scriptures to my congregation, I have to start with me. Do I regularly let it wash over me? Do I enjoy reading it? Am I learning it in fresh ways? Do I ever experiment with trying to do what it says?

Congregations shaped by the Scriptures generally have preachers who are shaped by the Scriptures.

I know of no substitute, if I want to preach the Scriptures with power, for carving out chunks of time to read the Bible, so I can fall in love once again with the only words that bring hope to the world.

When You're Given a Hearing

A second assumption involves those being taught.

I was talking recently to a guy in his twenties whom I'll call Mike. I like him a lot. His parents were divorced when he was two. He grew up in Connecticut, in a family that was post-Christian. He went to church a few times in grade school on a holiday.


We who preach have one tool. We are people of the book.

He is happy in some respects, and troubled in others. He gets anxious sometimes. He has never had a romantic relationship.

Mike does not consider Christianity to be a live option. It's not that he has studied it and rejected it. He just assumes that it's just not something an educated person would take seriously. Might as well ask him if he's considered becoming a Druid. When I talked to him about my faith, he listened with more politeness than curiosity.

However, at one point in our conversation I told him: "I don't think you are alive by accident. I think you were planned. I think someone created you. I think you have a purpose." He got very quiet, and tears filled his eyes for a few moments. There is a hunger for God in him. He has no good alternatives.

He ended up going to church for only one reason. He has a friend, a classmate who listened to him and invited him along as part of an inner-city AIDS ministry. The only starting place for his journey with God was relational.

There was a time when Christianity was more or less our society's civil religion. That may still be true in certain regions. But not where I live. Gather a few hundred people together at random here, and if you use "The Bible says …" to start a sentence, people are not likely to swallow it without hesitation.

In many ways our situation is increasingly like that of the early church. The gospel had to compete in a multi-religious, pluralistic environment where, as Edward Gibbon put it, "the masses considered all religions equally true, the philosophers considered them equally false, and the politicians considered them equally useful." Historians like Rodney Stark say that the reason the church exploded across the ancient world was, to a large extent it was because the church incarnated the word—cared for the poor, fed the hungry, embraced the orphan, risked sheltering the sick.

The gospel had to win a hearing by being incarnated along with being proclaimed. Those of us who preach the Scriptures, along with being nourished by it ourselves, have to figure out along with our congregations how we can incarnate the gospel in our community, or we will preach to a religious ghetto.

Opportune Suffering

I assume that everyone I talk to knows about suffering. They are suffering now, or know someone who is, or will be suffering in the near future. And it will break them wide open. I assume that brokenness—from addiction, divorce, depression, isolation—is more widespread and closer to the surface than ever.

I was talking to a friend recently, a wise man who has suffered deeply, and he said that he has grown so much through his pain that he thinks that when he enters into eternity, he will ask why he did not suffer more. I'm not sure I have that much maturity. But I do know this: suffering causes people to ask questions like no other force in the world. It snaps the threads of our illusions of control and sufficiency.

And no book addresses suffering like the Bible does. So I come back on a regular basis to books like Ecclesiastes, or the psalms of lament, or the story of Job, the books of "wintry" spirituality to use Martin Marty's term.

One practice that has changed for me over the years helped me in preaching on Job. The practice: to identify a text or teaching in Scripture you don't understand, and study it until you understand how it made sense to the author.

In Job it took this form: I never liked the epilogue in chapter 42 where Job gets new kids. It seemed callous—how can you replace children?

Then I read a wonderful treatment of Job by Ellen Davis. She noted that:

The questions God asks Job toward the end of the book have a trajectory; they point to how God is "irrationally loving and extravagantly generous to his least 'strategic creatures' ";


In chapter 42, the text lists the names of Job's daughters but not his sons (unheard of in Hebrew genealogies);


They are oddly extravagant names—one meant dove, one was a spice like you might smell when you go into Cinnabon and know there's a God, one name was a kind of make-up, like naming your daughter Maybelline;


Job gives his daughters an inheritance; never done in the ancient world because that money would support their fathers-in-law and not him.


That epilogue that I had never liked was a teaching of enormous beauty: that when Job saw who God was, he became like him—irrationally loving and extravagantly generous. It was pursuing the part of the text I least understood and least liked that yielded the deepest meaning.

In a simpler vein, I saw a sermon recently where the preacher showed pictures of three people in the congregation who had died recently, and talked about their lives. It was impossible to look at those faces without opening up to the reality of death and what's beyond in a way not usually done in everyday life.

An Edge Driven by Urgency

I assume that the people who most need to be reached will not be reached by a sermon that is an abstract reflection, a few interesting ideas, or the saccharine telling of a few stories from Chicken Soup for the Soul. I assume that if preaching the Scriptures is going to get under the skin of people I speak to, things will have to get a little edgy.

We get so used to the Bible, we miss its edginess. The prophets were the original performance artists. What they did was much more like radical street theater than it was like a church service. Ezekiel spent over a year laying on his left side just to make a point. He ate food that he publicly baked over cow manure. (And it took some bargaining between him and God to avoid even worse fuel.) Jeremiah buried an undergarment till it was putrid and then wore it around to show people what judgment looked like. Hosea married a prostitute to show people how much forgiveness costs a breaking heart. Jesus cursed fig trees and threw tables over in the Temple and took a whip to religious leaders.

I use a flip chart sometimes.

I think, if I'm honest about it, what holds me back is not lack of creativity. It's lack of urgency. I don't think the main force that drove the prophets was creativity for creativity's sake. I think it was spiritual reality. There was such a desperate awareness of the need for God to come fix things up that it drove them to do anything to make space in peoples' awareness for God.

I'm not a performance artist. I know that I work within a "jar of clay," as we all do. I don't want to be creative in a way that draws more attention to the creativity than to the message.

But I also don't just want to drone on while everybody goes to sleep. And I find the teachers I most learn from often find non-verbal ways to drive home what they are teaching: having a potter throwing pots while they are teaching about Jeremiah and the potter's wheel; Nancy Beach bringing an autumn leaf to teach on the beauty of the Creator; Bill Hybels having a bent reed and a snuffed candle and a jar that was used in the ancient world to capture tears while teaching on these images of the comfort of God. I think of Rob Bell with a goat to teach on the freedom of forgiveness.

Essential Belief

I assume God uses the Bible to change lives.

Jerome Frank wrote that the most powerful variable in healing is this: the agent doing the healing believes it will actually happen. And I believe there is a similar dynamic with the Scriptures. The Scriptures really are used by God in a unique way to change lives. But those of us who teach them must be gripped by this conviction. It cannot be faked or forced. It comes as a gift.

Max DePree had a young grandson who once locked himself in the bathroom. Nothing his mother did could get him out. She called the police, and they too were helpless. Next she tried the fire department, who came in full force with several trucks. They broke down the bathroom door with their axes.

The boy's father got home when things were in an uproar. He could not figure out why, when there was no smoke or fire, his door and frame were in shambles. He was still grousing about it the next day to a friend, who passed on a sage observation. A fireman has two tools: an axe, and a hose. If you want someone to pick a lock with a paper clip, try a locksmith or a cat burglar. If you call a fireman, you're either going to get the axe or the hose.

Those of us who preach have one tool. We are a people of the book. Other people will be more expert in social sciences and philosophy and literature. Other people will be more expert in communications theory. Other people will be better at story-telling and motivational speaking.

I want to learn what I can from all those practices, because they can help me do what I do better.

But they are not my axe.

A doctor has a little black bag. A CPA has a calculator. Wolfgang Puck has an oven.

Those of us who preach have lots of other helps: commentaries and dictionaries and small children we pay to say cute things, but in the end only one thing is indispensable.

Someone told me about a preacher who would often say, "People don't care what I know. They care about what I'm learning." And I do want to be open about the life lessons I am picking up along the way. But the main thing I have to offer my congregation does not fit under the category of personal wisdom.

We are people of the book.