February 28, 2009 • 9:11 pm
Last week I was made aware of this quote about the gospel. The content is great, but what I find most impressive about the quote is the year it was written- 1929. The “new” debate over the nature of gospel is not new at all. The church has been wrestling with this issue for decades if not centuries. Is the gospel about personal salvation only? Or is it about social justice only? Eighty years ago, someone accurately said it’s both…
“We must preach the whole gospel of personal salvation and social service, and whatever it means, have no fear of giving actual expression to love of the neighbor. It is imperative that social service should not be substituted for evangelical religion, as it sometimes has been, but be shown to be one of its integral characteristics … the gospel of salvation must be preached not only as a gospel of personal redemption, but also of social reconstruction, if we are to reach this age, and if, indeed, we are to preach the whole gospel of the New Testament.”
J. Ernest Rattenbury, 1929
Filed under: Justice, Theology
February 24, 2009 • 8:33 pm
Next week I will be traveling to the DC area for the National Gathering of the Ecclesia Network, a movement of missional churches. Among the presenters, I am most excited to learn from Dr. Darrell Guder, Professor of Missional and Ecumenical Theology at Princeton Seminary. I am presently reading his book, Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America. Among his many significant contributions to the church, his writing on the incarnation of Jesus and its impact on ecclesiology has most impacted me. Guder developed the terms “missional” and “incarnational” to describe the biblically-faithful church long before they became overused and empty buzzwords. Here are the details:
“Crafting Missional Expressions of Church” (conference pdf)
- Darrell Guder – Professor, Princeton Seminary
- Eddie Gibbs – Missiologist (ret), Fuller Seminary
- Mike Breen – Director, European Church Planting Network
- Jon Tyson – Pastor, Trinity Grace Church, Manhattan
Collective sessions include:
- Missionary strategies then & now
- Structures for incarnational church
- Barriers to mission in the Western context
- Guiding missional movements
- Scripture: a missional hermeneutic
- Communication: hearing the Good News in context
Focused sessions include:
- Discipleship that forms mission
- Developing local theology
- Preaching in the missional congregation
- Training and developing church planters
- Missional engagement and contextualization
Following the conference I will be writing a paper highlighting the major themes discussed and will be presenting them to Dr. Chilcote, my professor at Ashland. I will also post my thoughts here, likely during my two-week spring break that starts March 14.
Filed under: Church, Mission, School, Theology
February 15, 2009 • 10:08 pm
As I continue to trek through his book, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, I am increasingly struck by the sheer brilliance of Lesslie Newbigin. His thinking was monumental and his life remarkable.
The short biography on the back of my book reads this: Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998) was an internationally esteemed British missionary, pastor, apologist, theologian, and ecumenical statesman. His long career included serving as a village evangelist in India, minister in the United Reformed Church, bishop of the Church of South India, general secretary of the International Missionary Council, and associate general secretary of the World Council of Churches.
Beyond these titles, what strikes me most about Newbigin is his ability to decipher the allusions of culture with a disciplined and grand view of the biblical narrative. Though his brilliance cannot be contained in single quotations, here are a few that will give those who’ve never heard of him a taste of his contribution to our understanding of God, his mission, and our world.
“Neither at the beginning, nor at any subsequent time, is there or can there be a gospel that is not embodied in a culturally conditioned form of words. The idea that one can or could at any time separate out by some process of distillation a pure gospel unadulterated by any cultural accretions is an illusion. It is, in fact, an abandonment of the gospel, for the gospel is about the word made flesh. Every statement of the gospel in words is conditioned by the culture of which those words are a part, and every style of life that claims to embody the truth of the gospel is a culturally conditioned style of life. There can never be a culture-free gospel. Yet the gospel, which is from the beginning to the end embodied in culturally conditioned forms, calls into question all cultures, including the one in which it was originally embodied.”
“What would it mean, if instead of trying to explain the gospel in terms of our modern culture, we tried to explain our culture in terms of the gospel?”
“The church is a movement launched into the life of the world to bear in its own life God’s gift of peace for the life of the world. It is sent, therefore, not only to proclaim the kingdom but to bear in its own life the presence of the kingdom.”
“What is new is that in Jesus the kingdom is present…the kingdom was no longer a distant hope or a faceless concept, it had now a name and a face- the name and the face of the man from Nazareth.”
“I have come to feel that the primary reality of which we have to take account in seeking for a Christian impact on public life is the Christian congregation. How is it possible that the gospel should be credible, that people should come to believe that the power which has the last word in human affairs is represented by a man hanging on a cross? I am suggesting that the only answer, the only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.”
Filed under: Mission, Theology
February 10, 2009 • 4:10 pm
This is the question I answered in my most recent seminary assignment. In a five-page paper, I had to expound on a one-sentence definition of evangelism. No borrowing allowed. It had to be my own definition. Sounds easy, right? It was actually one of the most difficult tasks I’ve had thus far in grad school. This is my single-sentence definition:
Being rooted in the love and grace of the triune God to restore his sin-tarnished creation, evangelism is the activity of God through his church (a) to bear witness to the reality of the Kingdom of God inaugurated by and under the rule of Jesus Christ, (b) to invite men and women into the restored existence of this Kingdom, and (c) to mobilize Spirit-inspired laborers for the further realization of this Kingdom on earth.
I welcome your thoughts and critiques.
Filed under: Mission, School
February 7, 2009 • 9:17 am
Newbigin’s words capture me again today. Here he weaves together Jesus, the Kingdom of God, and the Holy Spirit to argue for the presence of God in the church:
“The presence of the kingdom is a hidden presence, hidden in the cross of Jesus, but precisely in its hiddenness it is revealed to those whom God through his Spirit grants the gift of faith. If we say- as we must- that the reign of God was present in Jesus, that it was present in his living, dying, and his risen life, we have to go on to say that in a secondary, derivative, but nonetheless real sense the reign of God is present (hidden yet revealed to eyes of faith) in the community that bears his name, lives by faith in his person and work, is anointed by his Spirit, and lives through history the dying and rising of Jesus…
…It is a sinful community. It is, during most of its history, a weak, divided, and unsuccessful community. But because it is the community that lives by and bears witness to the risen life of the crucified Lord, it is the place where the reign of God is actually present and at work in the midst of history, and where the mission of Jesus is being accomplished. This affirmation is not made as the conclusion of a survey of the history of the church and its present reality. On the contrary, it is made as an integral part of the confession of faith. Because I believe in one God the Father, one Lord Jesus Christ, and one Holy Spirit, I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church. And I believe that the reign of God is present in the midst of this sinful, weak, divided community, not through an power or goodness of its own, but because God has called and chosen this company of people to be the bearers of his gift on behalf of all people.”
Filed under: Church, Mission, Theology
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