course at the MDiv level, and I teach the
Doctor of Ministry course on evangelism.
And they asked me to do that because I did my
Doctor of Ministry project on evangelism
while I was at the East County Church of Christ
where I was for 11 years.
And I'll just tell you up front that I would
have never dreamed that I would be teaching
in an academic setting, number one.
Number two, that what I would be teaching would
be evangelism.
I thought maybe preaching or liturgics or
leadership, but here I am teaching evangelism.
And it's become a passion for me.
And I'm in this little interpretive circle now
in my life where I had 11 years of congregational
ministry experience and fairly significant
turning in a congregation's life with regard
to evangelism.
And then I bring that learning to the
classroom, and I have smart people like these
two on
either side of me and others of you who have
taken my evangelism classes push me and show
me the places where I'm deficient, yet in my
understandings push me to kind of the holes
in what I've been doing.
And then I'm in conversations with brilliant
guys like Mark Hamilton and Fred Aquino and
Jeff Childers, and they push me.
And that enriches my learning, and I try new
things in the classroom, which hopefully Tracy
and Ben will talk with us a little bit about today.
And now I'm itching to pass it on to other
people who are in ministry context so they
can tell me if I've really learned something or
if I'm just whistling in the dark.
So that's kind of where we are.
This is Tracy Shilcutt.
Tracy teaches in the history department here,
but she's also a Master of Divinity student
here in the Graduate School of Theology.
And she is a recent student of mine in the
narrative evangelism class I teach.
And it was a joy having Tracy in class because
she's bright and she engages well and she
writes papers that teach me a lot, but she's
also new to the Guild and so asks questions
in ways that people who've been doing this a
while don't ask questions.
And so I wanted to invite Tracy in to the
conversation today, too.
And then Ben, this is Ben Reese.
Ben and I were on staff together for like six hours.
It was just over a day, I think.
Just over a day.
No, we were on ministry staff together for a
while at the East County Church in Gresham, Oregon.
Ben was the youth minister there while I was
the preaching minister.
I left and came here, and Ben missed me so much.
He followed me here to be a graduate student
and finished his MDiv this last spring.
And Ben is now the preaching minister for the
Bellingham Church of Christ in Bellingham, Washington.
Sterling Drive.
In Bellingham, Washington.
And Ben has had a little exposure to what we
did at East County, but also now has taken
my narrative evangelism class here.
And so we want to create a little community of discourse.
So how we're going to proceed is that I'm going
to kind of give you the broad outline
of what I'm trying to get after as I talk about evangelism.
And then Tracy and Ben are going to react to that.
So I'll talk for about 30 minutes or so, and
then we'll have a little conversation.
We'll take a break.
Let everybody stretch their legs.
We know it's after lunch, and Aramekaf's
already asleep.
And so we'll wake up, stretch, come back.
And then Tracy will make a presentation, Ben
will make a presentation, and then we want
to invite everyone into the conversation.
And if we still have time after that, then I'll
show you a little bit more of the kind
of constructive proposal that I'm after with
regard to evangelistic imagination.
This is taking place within, this is the third
in an afternoon series on missional church.
So the first day you heard Stephen Johnson and
some others talk about worship.
Today you heard Chris Flanders and Mark Hopkins
and Robert Foster talk about leadership and
the developing of a missional imagination.
Today we're talking about missional church and evangelism.
So the question today is, if your view of the
church changed, would that change how
you view evangelism?
If your view of the church changed, would that
change how you view evangelism?
More specifically, the question today is, if
you viewed the church missionally, would
that change how you did, practiced, thought of,
conceived of evangelism?
Well, let me unpack that question a little bit
more then, get some terms out.
What do I mean by this word, missional?
What do I mean by our understanding of the church?
Now, my hunch is that if I had you write a
paper on the church, you'd come up with all
kinds of great stuff.
Some of you would.
No, all of you would, I'm sure.
Some of you, I've read your papers, so I know
you would.
But I'm talking about your functional
understanding of the church, how you actually
do church,
how it unrolls.
And my hunch is that if you compared your paper
that you might write for Everett Ferguson
or for Jeff Childers or for somebody like that
to the actual practices of your church,
there would be a gap.
I want us to think about how we actually do
church, okay?
And here's my take on what most of us
experience as our functional view of the
church, that
the church is a collection of individuals who
have been saved, okay?
So that we define the church in relationship to
the status, needs, desires, destinies of
individuals, okay?
I could say a lot on that, but I won't.
We see the church as a dispenser of private salvation.
What's the most important thing a church can do?
Deliver to an individual the status saved, okay?
So the church exists to support the needs of
its members, hoping to attract others by
convincing them that we have what they need,
all right?
Am I going to have to make this case deeper?
Do you buy this?
You say, oh, that's kind of cynical.
Is it really cynical?
Do you think so?
I mean, let's think about this for a minute.
All right, let's unpack this for a minute.
I've made this observation often.
I'll make it again.
I feel sorry for elders in churches today,
because they don't have anything in their
toolkit that trumps personal dissatisfaction.
In other words, if a member comes and says, I
hate the preacher, the elder doesn't have
anything persuasive beyond appealing to their satisfaction.
In other words, we'll get a different preacher,
or we'll talk to that guy.
We can cut Sandeen's sermons down, he's, you
know, I agree, he's boring.
The elders do better customer service.
It's all they've got.
They don't have something that says, we think
you've misunderstood what we're doing around here.
We don't exist for you to be satisfied or happy.
We have a larger calling in mind.
Whether you like the preacher or not is
secondary to what we're doing around here.
We belong to a community here.
When I teach my undergraduate class in
evangelism, I have them write a paper, I have
them write
the same paper three times during the semester.
What is the meaning of salvation?
And the first time they write that paper,
almost universally, they define salvation
in relationship to the status of an individual.
Is an individual lost or saved?
So much so that when we start messing with that
in class, it's like brain lock for two
or three weeks.
It's like, how in the world could you think
about salvation in any other way?
Now, there's a long history to this.
From the time of St. Augustine on, Westerners
have psychologized religion to think that
religion is primarily about our internal state
as human beings.
But if you're an Eastern Christian, you don't
think that way.
They never got caught in psychologizing
salvation, making it about the interior state
of an individual.
We're in a long legacy of Western
individualism, and we tend to treat the church
as a collection
of people who are saved.
The canvas or the backdrop for what we do is
the life of an individual.
Think about worship.
I've done worship planning week in and week out.
Some of you guys do worship planning.
My hunch is that you do worship planning
related to the notion that we have to inspire the
lives of individual Christians.
Nothing wrong with that.
I'm just saying that that's your primary frame
of reference.
When you think about worship, you think about
lighting up individuals.
And so evangelism would proceed the same way.
What do we do in evangelism?
When you go to a crusade and when you see
crusade evangelism, what's the first move?
Isolate an individual's status.
Are you lost or are you saved?
It's not just Billy Graham or Louis Palau or
Jimmy Allen or, you know, it used to be
there was a church here in town that thought of
ACU as a really fertile evangelistic market,
and they would leave little tracks here and there.
I used to find them underneath the windshield
wiper on my car.
I found them under the photocopied lid, and I
have found them in the bathroom.
I roll up the toilet paper and one drops.
I mean, these people are ingenious in terms of methodologies.
It's a great idea.
I mean, what are you going to do?
You're going to read, right?
But in all...
Is that on tape?
It's my last lectureship.
What can I say?
It's Wednesday afternoon.
I'm tired.
But in all of these materials, the first move
is to establish a crisis of identity in your
life as an individual.
And my hunch, again, is that we can hardly
imagine evangelism in any other way.
And there's a long history here related to this.
Okay, so here's our ecclesiology.
The church is a collection of individuals who
are saved, a support group.
One of my students, Bethany Allen, said it this way.
Leonard Allen's daughter was a genius young
woman, wrote an incredible paper.
She made the analogy that for her, going to
church, she used to think of going to church
like belonging to a health club.
You are more likely to stay fit if you belong
to a health club, but it wasn't really necessary.
She said, I felt the same way about going to church.
I felt like you were more likely to remain a
strong Christian or have a relationship
with God if you went to church, but it really
wasn't necessary. Why?
Because it's just between me and God.
The primary frame of reference for
understanding life is the interior relationship
of an individual
with God.
Now think about what Wade Hodges did last
night, if you were there last night.
He paints these pictures of salvation, of
swords being beaten into plowshares and everyone
sitting under their own vine and their own fig.
And he's saying, this is a report from the future.
And the resurrected Jesus comes to us and says,
the future is real.
The call of salvation is to live now because
the Lord has declared that these pictures
are true.
That's a different deal.
So there, the backdrop is not the life of an
individual, but God's ultimate purposes
for the sake of all of creation.
You see the difference?
Yes, no, we'll get there, I know, it's fuzzy,
it's hard, but this is precisely the shift
that we're talking about when we use the word
missional related to the word church.
What is a missional church?
It's not just a church that sends out more
missionaries or does more personal evangelism.
That's how we talk about personal evangelism.
What if the church doesn't just exist to serve
the eternal aspiration of its members, but
rather the church serves the ultimate purposes
of God for all of creation?
The fullness of time.
What if the purpose of the church is to be the
community that serves as a sign and foretaste
that the future proclaimed by Jesus Christ is
real and is invading the present?
What if that were the purpose of the church?
To be a community that lived such a distinct
way together in the world that they functioned
as a sign and foretaste for the future that's coming.
Then the individual's life matters only in
relationship to the salvation of God that
would be revealed in the fullness of time.
I'm going to brag on my son for a minute.
He's here today.
He took my undergrad evangelism class.
His second paper, The Meaning of Salvation,
took as its theme, Salvation Belongs to Our God.
We think of salvation as our private possession
which we get to cash in, but what if we thought
of salvation as God's possession that He
invites us to participate in?
That's a big shift.
That's the missional shift.
Sometimes we hear missional, and we hear the
missional shift, place where that's what kind
of attractional churches are, missional
churches, people sent.
But more and more I like to make the difference
this way, that instead of seeing the church
as a support group for individuals who are
saved, we see the church as a sign and foretaste
of the coming future of God.
The church serves the ultimate purposes of God
for all time.
So I want to underscore this a bit.
I'm doing good.
I want to underscore this a bit.
When we use the word mission, let's do a little
thought exercise here.
When you hear the word mission, I know I've
already poisoned it for you, but when you
hear the word mission, what are the things that
come to mind?
A trip?
So somebody else maybe too?
Foreign country?
A challenge?
Tortilla chips.
Now tell me that, Mark.
Oh, mission tortillas, the brand.
I live in Minnesota now.
I also think about where they got the word from.
The mission, I don't know how else to really
describe it, but it's sort of the Jesuits
that set up the shop.
They call them the missions.
The place where you would go for anything and
everything spiritual.
Yeah, Aaron?
I think of risk. Purpose.
Yeah, so we've got some good words related, but
it's usually something that happens externally.
We're sending people.
Sometimes they're a special class of Christian, right?
Service that some people do on behalf of the
rest sometimes, right?
Now I want you to think ultimate purposes of God.
When you hear that, what do you think of?
What's this thing going to look like when it's done?
What do you think of when you, do you think of
that much?
That's part of our problem, isn't it?
We don't think of it much.
What's it going to look like when it's done? Yeah?
This week, it would be hard not to say justice. Justice.
Change lives.
Transformation of people and groups into the
image of God. Yeah.
What about the earth?
A new heaven and a new earth.
And what about human community?
What about rich and poor?
What about slave and free?
What about ethnic?
I mean, you know, if you read Paul, the
evidence that the righteousness of God has been revealed
is that there's this community that doesn't
know human distinctions like Jew and Gentile.
It's evidence that Jesus is a second Adam, the
progenitor of a whole new creation, a
brand new human race.
And that as that goes, so goes the rest of creation.
Romans 8, all creation is groaning,
anticipating the revealing of the children of God.
For creation was subjected to futility, not of
its own will, but by the will of the one
who subjected it in hope that creation itself
will be set free from its bondage to decay
and experience the glorious liberty of the
children of God.
It's massive, it's massive.
So when you start describing mission that way,
now suddenly it's not okay to have the
most segregated hour in American life be the
worship hour.
How can the ultimate purposes of God be seen in that?
It's not okay for us to treat the earth however
we want to treat it, or as simply an extension
of our own needs and desires as consumers.
It's immoral to do that, because we're after
the ultimate purposes of God for all of creation.
And that's what I mean by missional church.
Missional church doesn't just mean being more
engaged with the culture, although it needs
to mean that in some sense.
But to me it means two more primary things.
Number one, that we know what day we belong to,
the future day of God's great salvation.
Missional church has a profound eschatology, a
sense that we belong to a day greater than
this day.
And number two, it has a profound sense that
the Holy Spirit is moving and working in its
midst creating a new kind of human community.
That to me is missional, will result in missional.
So if the church serves then the interest of
God's future, and not the needs of individuals,
not primarily, here's the great thing though.
When you belong to God's future, you find that
your life is more fulfilled than any
plan you could make for it, right?
And let me talk about forgiveness of sins here.
I don't know if I want to go this way, yeah I
do, I'm going to go there real quick.
Why don't we go to forgiveness of sins, Mark?
Thank you.
Gosh, why didn't I think of that?
We can talk about this via email if you need me
to explain it further.
I'm just going to make a declaration here, I'm
not going to prove it to you today.
And you won't believe me, so it's okay.
But the death of Jesus is not a prerequisite
for God to forgive.
It is in God's very nature to forgive.
And this idea that what happened in the death
of Jesus was the wrath of God was satisfied
is a very recent notion in Christian thought.
Very recent.
But forgiveness of sins is necessary for God's
purposes to be accomplished in the earth. Why?
Because this experiment went awry because
humans decided to be self-identified, self-possessed,
self-defining, self-absorbed rather than God-trusting.
And guilt and shame related to our sin is
another form of self-absorption.
In the proclamation of the kingdom of God, a
new future breaking in had to come with
the announcement of God's forgiveness of sins
so that we could be freed from preoccupation
with our own status before God and released for
the service and benefit of others.
This makes sense?
Now the death of Jesus is absolutely necessary
for our salvation, but salvation is more than
forgiveness of sins.
Our salvation comes as we participate in the
life that God has offered us through Jesus Christ.
And it has all kinds of benefits, including the
forgiveness of sins.
All right, but you can't ask me any questions
about that.
So what if the church then exists not as a
support group for individual Christians, not
primarily to punch our get-out-of-jail-free
cards, but as an alternative community that
lives together as a sign and foretaste of God's
future and present reign?
What if that was our ecclesiology?
Then how would we view evangelism?
Now I want to give you an analogy.
It's weak, it's imperfect, as all analogies
are, but maybe it'll kind of get us down the
road a little bit.
And then I'm going to let Tracy and Ben say
some things, so Tracy, be ready.
Sometimes you'll walk into the campus center
here, and there'll be all kinds of vendors
in there selling things to students or trying
to get them to join things or buy products
or sign up for this or sign up for that.
So I want you to imagine walking through the
campus center on those days, and you come
across a bank who's there selling identity
theft protection.
How do they get you to stop?
Well they've got to convince you that you're at
risk, right?
You could have your identity stolen, and
somebody could spend $3,000 at Toys R Us on
you, right?
Ruin your credit, make your life miserable.
And if you've ever tried to dig yourself out of
an identity theft hole, I haven't, but
I know people who have, it's virtually impossible.
I'm convinced.
I'll buy the identity.
What do I have to do?
Now that I know that I'm at risk, and I
sufficiently have a sense of the gravity of
that risk,
what do I have to do?
Well, I have to sign an agreement, you know?
And maybe there's a fee involved that will be
taken out of automatic draft on my banking
account, so I have to sign over those.
There's a little transaction involved.
But the transaction kind of happens outside of me.
You know what I'm saying?
I mean, I don't know that the transaction occurs.
I mean, it's not like I feel goosebumps or
something every time it happens every month,
you know?
Every time an automatic draft hits, I don't
feel like Wesley that my heart was strangely
warmed every time it happens, but I see it on
my bank statement at the end of the month.
So I know it's there.
Other than that, my life pretty much goes on as usual.
I mean, that's kind of the point.
Once you get your status taken care of, then
life kind of goes on as usual, right?
Now let me give you another booth near this one.
It's Wilderness Trek, okay?
And the Wilderness Trek people have these
pictures at their booth.
That's what stops me, right?
I see these pictures of these streams,
mountains, snow, wildlife.
And I'm from Abilene.
I've never seen these things before.
I didn't know such a world existed.
You mean there are lakes without stumps
standing up in the middle of them?
There's water that's clear and blue?
I say, yes, it's an alternative world, but
we've been there.
It exists.
We've seen it.
I want to go.
Well, wait a minute.
You can't remain the same and go, because this
is a demanding life.
To get to this world is going to require some
things of you.
You're going to have to travel light.
You can't take everything along with you.
You're going to have to learn a new lifestyle.
You're going to have to learn the priorities of
water, shelter, food.
You're going to have to learn how to tie knots.
You're going to have to learn how to carry
everything on your back, carry the weight
on your hips.
There are skills that you're going to have to learn.
You're going to have to get in shape.
You can't eat Cheetos and play video games and
be ready for this world.
And you're going to have to do it together,
because there's peril involved in this way
of life.
You can't do it on your own.
But if you do, your life will never be the same.
And even when you come back to Abilene, you'll
see everything in your life differently.
And there will be ways that you live as a
wilderness trekker, even in your dorm.
Two very different things, right?
What I want to suggest is that a lot of times,
our functional view of the church results
in a way of doing evangelism that is fairly
similar to selling identity theft protection.
But a shift to a missional ecclesiology would
have us inviting people to the grand adventure
of their lives that serves the beautiful
pictures of God's future, a way of life not available
to you any other way that requires new skills,
new habits, new disciplines in a community.
Okay, so that's the broad strokes.
What do you think, Tracy?
Well, I'm going to ask a couple of questions,
and then we'll make a couple of comments.
What if it is a reconceived idea of salvation?
And I think what I'm hearing is that there is
perhaps in the past a way that we've thought
of salvation as a single point.
I was lost, and now I'm saved.
Is what you're suggesting is that this change
also includes a reconception of salvation
as continuous, as overlapping, and as maybe
more than just that very single point in time.
Yeah, exactly.
Let's use some biblical language first, and
then let's get a few historical notes here.
How does Paul talk about salvation?
I think if you ask Paul the question, when were
you saved, he'd get kind of a furrowed brow.
What do you mean?
I was saved when Jesus died on the cross, I
think he might say.
That day at Calvary, I was saved.
But I think he'd be more likely to say, as he
does several places, I am being saved.
For the word of the cross is foolishness to
those who are perishing, but to those of us
who are being saved, it is the power of God.
Or 1 Corinthians 15, this is the message that
we received, in which we stand, through which
we are being saved.
Now again, Western Christianity, from Augustine
on, Augustine's a great guy, we're going to
beat up on him a little bit today, but I would
hang out with him.
He's one of the most brilliant thinkers in the
history of Christianity, saved the church
in many ways, but it was Augustine who kind of
pushed us in a controversy with the Donatists
and controversy with the Pelagians to think of
salvation as a private status and separate
justification from sanctification.
And Luther used the same kind of language.
But the Eastern church didn't go that way.
They've always thought of salvation as a process.
They call it theosis, becoming God-like over time.
So yes, it would require that we see it as a process.
Okay, then I have a couple of reactions, just
briefly, that as a historian, as I listen
to this, and as I sat in Mark's class and was
challenged by this, part of what I see
as a difficulty in wrapping our minds around
something that's changing is that it requires
us to question once again what our identity is
loyal to.
And especially as Americans, where do we
separate, you used the words, the individualism and
customer orientation?
So the culture does become very sometimes
overlapping with what we're trying to do
in our congregations.
And so I think part of the challenge that I'm
listening to and I'm responding to is
if I start to think about salvation or
redemption in a different sort of way, what is
that going
to do to what I've built up as an identity in
my really comfortable world?
And so that's one thing that I would offer there.
The other thing that I want to just mention
then is the words that you used about redemption
of all creation, again, in a 19th, 20th century
Western mind, it's not there.
It's very anthropological.
It is about me, back to that individualism.
And I think that's very challenging to consider
that it asks us to relook where we are in
social position as well as in position with creation.
You know, I feel as if for the most part we can
sit and have these conversations and most
people can kind of nod their heads and say this
is something I want to buy into.
But the problem and one of the most significant
shifts where the rubber meets the road is
when you realize that the end products that
we've become used to and familiar with, that
we like, might not be the same anymore.
You know, that all of the baptisms we've been
having and our churches getting bigger, that's
a pretty clear sign of God is at work, God is
doing things, and that's true.
But what would happen if kind of participating
in the life of God in this way means you bring
in some really uncomfortable people?
So there's those that leave, so you actually
get smaller for a season instead of getting bigger.
That I wonder if we're all able to do this,
yes, this is great, but the problem is when
the end product is a little bit different and
makes us uncomfortable.
You also mentioned, and I like this because I'm
a preacher, well I don't like it because
I'm a preacher, but you said the preacher is secondary.
I like it because it creates a sense of ownership.
This is ours, and no longer is it just this
person who does it and we can either buy it
or not buy it, but we're kind of in this thing together.
But I think the biggest issue is we're just
going to have to readjust what we see as,
or what we've come to know and love as the only
marker for the salvation of God being
worked out in the world.
Both of you are hitting on something that I
experience every semester when I teach.
It's usually the brightest students in class
hate me until about the last week of class.
Some of you liked me, so that obviously marks
you as not the brightest students in the class.
But I've had students sit with their arms
folded like this the entire semester.
And a couple of them have come to me and
apologized at the end of the semester and said,
I'm sorry
that I was so resistant and negative in class,
but I figured it out, I'm angry.
Why am I just now hearing about this?
Why am I, I've spent my entire life in the
church, I'm an honor student here at ACU.
I've had four semesters of general Bible and
I'm a Bible major and this is now the first
time I'm hearing about this, which is to me
tied to the realization that we have a very
well fully articulated reality that we live in.
It's like the matrix.
It's been pulled down over our eyes.
It's not just what we see, it's what we see with.
And I've given you the little blue pill
sometimes or whatever color the pill was.
What color was the pill?
Somebody will know. Red.
I've given you the red pill and about halfway
through the semester you realize this is going
to be really messy.
I might lose members.
This isn't going to be the easiest thing in the
world to completely reconceptualize who
I've been and what I've been up to.
And here's another realization based upon what
you guys said.
I run into people all the time who are
converted through Jewel Miller film strips and
who were
converted away from a particular church to the
Church of Christ and it was a true conversion
for them, profound change in their life and a
sense of connection with Jesus.
And I don't want to undo all that.
I don't want to say that's invalid because the
practices of the church are always larger
than our understandings of what we're doing.
You read the Bible and you know that salvation
is more than just a private transaction between
me and God.
Somewhere in your gut you know.
And that's what I'm hoping to capitalize on
here is that you've already been experiencing
more fully what you articulate as your view of
salvation or ecclesiology or gospel or whatever.
But it is a huge imaginative shift.
Huge imaginative shift.
Because, to give an example, a friend who was
in an interview process with a large church
that built even a larger building, hoping they
would grow into it.
And during his interview process there's two
conversations that he kept hearing.
One is, we want to be a missional church.
We want to jump into this with both feet.
But the other was the concern of, we have a
rather hefty mortgage.
And so, if we're missional, more people will
come, we'll be able to pay it off.
My friend said, I think, a pretty profound statement.
They lived in a community that had a very large
meth problem.
And also some well-known prostitutes.
And he says, I tend to think that if we do jump
with both feet into the mission of God
in this community, that we'll probably have
more meth addicts than we will white middle
class people.
That we might end up with some prostitutes.
That we might end up with people who can't give
more than $5 a month to help
us pay our mortgage.
And so there needs to be, which one do we want
to do?
I don't know how it's worked out.
I want to tag along on that, because you said
the word conversation, and I think this bears
on what you're saying.
Part of, to me, the difficulty of this is in
the new imagination, it's no longer a one-sided
conversation which isn't a conversation at all.
Because it's not just the invitation to come
and let us change you into what we want you
to be, because this is the model that we have,
but it's an invitation to ourselves in conversation
to listen and maybe be changed.
And I do wonder what the response is, come into
our church, let us change you, but are
we willing to be changed, which we can be,
because the spirit of God rests in all.
So the image of God can be seen in there, but
are we willing to expand the conversation
and have a real conversation?
Yeah, because it is fairly incoherent to tell
everyone, you're created in the image of God,
but everything about you has to change.
And there's nothing good about you, and you
need to listen to us.
It doesn't seem to match up.
This is an advantage to moving the word gospel
from some theory of the atonement, you know,
how exactly the death of Jesus atones for our
sins, to attaching the word gospel to
something like Jesus did, the kingdom of God.
Jesus came proclaiming the good news of God,
time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is near,
repent and believe the gospel, the good news.
If we're proclaiming that in Jesus Christ
there's been a turn of the ages, and His reign
is now His future reign, is now visible and
present while still coming, then there are
people who still experience the reign of God
even though they don't necessarily belong
to it.
Does this make sense?
If we define church in relationship to the
ultimate purposes of God, and those are bigger
than just individual concerns about status,
then we start looking around and we realize
that there are people other than ourselves
serving the ultimate interests of God in the
world, and sometimes better than we do, right?
Even if they don't belong to the reign of God,
even if they haven't pledged allegiance
to the reign of God, even if they haven't given
the entirety and totality of their life
to the reign of God, they still serve the reign
of God and therefore might have wisdom
about that that we could learn from.
So again, the need for conversation at that point.
Not only that, but we hope that through the
influence of the church, the in-breaking and
the moving of God's spirit, that people
experience the benefits of the reign of God
whether they
belong to the reign of God, and they might have
a sense of what God should be up to if
He's up to anything at all in the world.
I've been trying to get a DMIN student to do a
project where they go door to door.
You know, Rick Warren did this and Bill Hybels
did this.
Before they planted their churches, they went
door to door.
The question they asked, though, was this
question, what kind of church would you attend?
So that the individual is the most important
part of that question.
What kind of church would you attend?
I want the question to be, go door to door and
say, we've lost our way.
Somewhere we left behind our sense of what God
is doing in the world.
Would you have any ideas about that?
Would you have a notion of what God would be up
to in this neighborhood?
If you believed in God, now you're going to get
some, you know, bad stuff, you know.
More convenience stores, I think there ought to
be more convenience.
You know, you'll get some stupid stuff, but you
would if you interviewed your members.
Am I right?
You know, that reminds me of the passage about
the going out and the shaking off your shoes.
Find out where God's at work.
And when you're welcomed in, go to work.
And when you're not, there's another place.
So that's...
That's good.
Well, let's bring you guys in for a few minutes
before we take a break.
What are you hearing?
What's the most encouraging thing you hear?
What's the most challenging thing you're
hearing to this point? Aaron?
Well, I was raising my hand before you added
that caveat.
That's all right.
I'm trying to make it fit.
You know, kind of mixing with what I was
hearing Tracy say that we live in this
intensely consumeristic culture.
You know, we're...
That's how we thought of our salvation, the transaction.
Of course, to me, it can cause a lot of tension
in churches and maybe even anger in churches
when you start pressing this idea that God's
reign is falling on those who haven't paid
for it.
Because if I buy a car, I don't mind people
looking at it, but I'm not going to let them
get in it.
It's my car.
I don't want...
My purchase and my work and my good deeds, does
that make sense?
So, it strikes me that making that shift could
probably be liberating for what I think is
a kind of a consumeristic disease in America,
but it doesn't seem like that's going to come easy.
Maybe naming that for what it is, is good.
Maybe implicitly enacting it is better.
What do you...
You guys want to... Yeah.
We talk too much anyways.
Go ahead, Mark.
You go first.
Well, toward the end of our time today, my
theory on this is that
I can't educate you into a new imagination in
your church.
It's not going to be enough for you just to
hear what we say today.
And it will be painful in some ways.
And some of the painful work that I do with my
students is deconstructing what they have, right?
But I think there are ways to invite people
into constructive practices that will allow
this new imagination to develop without having
to deconstruct everything that they're taking
with them.
So instead of seeing change within a
congregation, if we liked the move from, you
know, the identity
theft to wilderness trip, we like that kind of
move in general, that move's not going
to happen primarily because we give them better information.
It's going to happen primarily because we call
them into practices that invite new experiences
into their life.
But it has to be more than just that, too.
Then we have to ask them to intentionally
reflect and name what they're experiencing.
You have to do both to get new imagination.
And the good thing about that is that you can
do a lot of that without the deconstructive work.
But we're getting a little ahead of ourselves
at that point.
You know, I find it ironic kind of going along
with the almost total depravity anthropology
that we can't do anything, God does everything,
but in our view of salvation in that it's
only within the walls of the church that God
works, that's a pretty big control issue.
We're able to hold on to it, and that this kind
of expanded view of salvation is a discipline
in trusting God.
It's actually releasing control more than I
think we want to at times, and to say, God,
you're the one who created the earth, you're
the one that we believe moves in the earth,
and so we're going to, let's do it, yeah.
We've got a hand here.
Oh, sorry.
I think he was first.
Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know if I am in the
wrong place here.
Am I here and the time is fulfilled, the
kingdom is new?
So, what is the kingdom of God, anyway?
You were talking a lot about salvation and a
lot of things, but I didn't hear something
about what is the kingdom of God, that is one
point, and the other one is, I am one
of those who say, I am missing something here.
I grew up Evangelical my entire life, my
father's become Christian at 18, 49 years, Evangelical,
but at this point, I say, we are missing
something here, I am missing something here,
I'm not
exactly what it is, because when I go to the
gospel, I read things, I say, come on, what
was Christ saying to the people over there in
the field and the mountain?
Turn the other cheek, right?
Go the extra mile, yeah.
What I see and other different things in the
world, absolutely different, my church, absolutely
If your friend has something, have a need, you
need to do it, you don't need to ask why
you don't have, why you don't be a good steward.
Let's make a point to be a good steward with you.
No, no, no, no, you have something given.
And that's for return, you know, that blows me
up, like you say, so, I don't know, and
the last point is this for me, is I think my
mistake and a lot of mistakes that I see
is we use pictures in order to have a vision,
we have pictures not from the war of God,
we have pictures from everyone, from the good
companies, from the good empires, from everything,
but not from the Bible.
And we come and say, okay, the church is the
family of God, and we see the family in America,
we say, oh, we don't want to be that family,
no, not me, so what am I missing here?
One thing that may or may not connect that I
thought about was just the word repentance,
but as a people, perhaps what we've been
missing is repentance.
And I can look at myself and say that.
So I'm not sure I can answer your question, and
I'm struggling with this, because I ask
the same sort of questions, is that maybe it's
just a call.
Let me talk about the kingdom of God a little
bit, briefly, like we could do a semester
on the kingdom of God, right?
But when I say kingdom of God, I like to talk
about the reign of God, the rule of God.
It's not government in the sense of offices and
structures and things like that, but it's
God's rule, and it's already established in the
future, it exists.
Like the Micah text said last night, you know,
swords into plowshares, everyone has their
vine and fig, God has declared that it is so.
That's the reign of God, His shalom, His good
ordering of all of creation, and in the future,
it has been accomplished, it's done.
But through Jesus, that reign has come close to
us, and by the power of the Spirit, we
are able to live in it now.
Not completely, not fully, but now.
So, but I like your idea of pictures, too, this
is connected, right?
You know, show me somebody who's got the Sermon
on the Mount nailed, you know, who's already
living it, who's got that thing mastered, right?
But this is, these are pictures of the reign of
God, and we're supposed to live, not as
if we think these are impractical, impossible
things, but we're supposed to live because
God has declared it so, you know?
This is our chance to partake in the future of
God, okay?
Now, I don't know if I need to say this, but if
I do, I will, that the church and the kingdom
are not the same thing.
They're not.
And we have a history in church as a Christ of
saying that they are, but they're not.
Because the kingdom of God is His eternal
reign, and the church goes out of business
at some point, right?
And the church, because it serves the reign of
God, is always situating itself in time.
It's always saying, we belong right here, right
now, to these people, and this time,
because we're limited in time and space, we can
never fully represent all of the reign
of God, okay?
So what is the church in relation to the reign
of God?
It is a sign, and it is a foretaste.
You know what a sign does?
It points to something bigger.
The church is always saying, don't look at us,
we're looking at this.
Don't look at us, we're looking at this.
And what does a foretaste do?
My wife, Nancy, and I, one time on our
anniversary, we went to a movie, we were on our
way to
dinner, it was a little early, we had dinner
reservations, so we're walking through the
mall because I'm a romantic, if I'm nothing
else, and on our anniversary, I'm walking
my wife through a mall.
Pause for laughter.
I don't care, this is my last day of
lectureship, what do I care if you think I'm funny?
I don't care.
What do you think I'm funny?
But you are romantic.
But I am a romantic, I do want you to think that.
And we pass one of those demon-possessed
pretzel things, and there's an imp of Satan standing
with samples outside the pretzel place, and I
smell that cooked bread, and I taste, just
a little taste, one of those things.
And even though I hadn't been hungry up until
that moment, now I can't wait to get to dinner, right?
And my students are dying because they've heard
this story a hundred times.
But now I can't wait to get to dinner.
That's what the church is, it's that foretaste,
that appetizer that says, that day exists,
it's real, we're experiencing it, not fully,
but we're the foretaste of that.
Here's the hardest thing about this whole deal.
With the old way of viewing church and
evangelism, you can bring in a crusade, you can bring
in people to do it for you, right?
Life goes on as usual, you just have to make
room in the pews for a few extra people.
But if you view salvation as participating in
an alternative way of life, then you've
got to convince everybody at church to start
living differently, right?
You've got to have people whose lives actually
look like they believe that swords are being
beaten into plowshares.
You've got to convince people that it doesn't
matter now what the color of your skin is
or what language you speak, that you're
actually living that way, as if that is true.
To me, that's the biggest fly in the ointment
here, is it raises the ante on the ethical
moral life of the church, right?
One of the things you asked is, what's the
scariest thing that you've heard?
And so, I just have a couple of stories, vignettes.
So, we tried some of that in youth ministry.
Church is small.
Just a handful of kids, soon had two of our own
kids and 20 kids from the neighborhood,
and the influence of this far outweighed the
influence of this, and we felt drowning overcome.
And so, didn't really know what to do other
than escape somehow.
And so, we had a need for attention, a needy
person in our congregation, and we're trying
to talk about that amongst church leaders, and
a woman who's been a Christian 40 years
and the wife of a, not to be specifically
mentioned, a church leader, says something
like, well, she's just really a needy person,
and I can't deal with that, so just going
to have to do a little bit here and then get
away, because otherwise, we'll be consumed.
And it's that whole, have to educate, my
response is, well, don't we exist for people
who are needy?
Yeah, but I can't do that.
I've had two conversations this week with
ministers who, in fact, one of them used the
matrix analogy, you convinced me to swallow the
pill, but I'm thinking that steak dinner
in the, you know, sounds pretty good right now.
I'm thinking a suburban church that can just
grow because we're collecting the wave of
new people moving into our neighborhood who
don't have very many deep social problems,
they're fairly adapted to our way of life already.
That's starting to sound pretty good to me,
which is telling me that I've got a fairly
significant amount of missional fatigue.
Well, and it's hard when you're a small church
with few resources, and you feel like if the
people that you rely on for, I mean, by means
of those resources decide, yeah, then everything
is gone.
At least as you know it, then and there.
Yeah, Mark.
I don't know.
I guess I'm sort of wrestling, and maybe I'd
even challenge the idea that the main point
now is to convince all of our research goers
and thinkers that what they've bought into
is not enough, and now we have to create a new
set of expectations, because they expected
something, you know, whatever X factor was for
Christian life is now not what we're telling
them Christian life is, it's now Y factor, when
so many outside of the church already
has such a deep notion of the kingdom, whether
or not they realize they're in it or not.
So I'm wondering, maybe some people are called
to sort of convince the already Christians,
but how many, I just wonder, how many more
people are out there who get this, who see
X factor is not enough, but Y factor, whatever
that is, that kingdom mentality, to sort of
be with the people who understand and already
are practicing the kingdom of God, whether
they are Christians or not, how could they live
with that?
Yeah, I think that's a great comment, Mark.
We'll certainly hit on that.
I will add a little bit to this, and maybe to
respond to the brother here, when Jesus
was among his disciples and people of the 1st
century, he said the kingdom of God
is here among you.
The church was not established then.
The kingdom of the Lord was there, and it's
still today.
Like Mark, where he extended the church, it's
not necessarily, I mean, we may put together,
but it's not, it's part of the kingdom.
As individual, it's part of the salvation.
Because, let's say, two young people, or old
people, doesn't matter, like each other,
and they decide to get married.
They might live sexual life prior to that, but
they are not married.
When they are married, then they are couple.
And as long they are living together, they are married.
When they are not living anymore together,
either they are separated or divorced, sooner
or later.
All the same, it's salvation to me, and I guess
to every one of us.
It's an individual thing.
Nobody can install something into me if I don't participate.
So, it's part of my choice, my decision.
It's offered salvation, but I have to accept it.
And as well, it's not one time that Tracy kind
of reflected on your explanation.
It's not once received, forever it's game. No.
You have to do your part in order to maintain,
like that husband or that wife has to maintain
a marital obligation, otherwise it's separation.
So, to say what Ben said, how to reach out to
the world.
We are more or less, majority of you are born
to Christian families, predominantly probably
to the Church of Christ because you are in such
institutions that others are maybe welcomed
as being in minority.
But let's say I am coming from Roman
Catholicism, where I went through Christening
when I was
not aware of, when I went through communion
when I was not aware of, when I went through
confirmation when I received bike, that was
more important to me than Bishop crossing
with oil my forehead.
I remember only bike, and I don't remember
other factors.
And I have Godfather as a result of that.
But what I am saying, when I decided, and I was
in the seminary for three years, monk,
and a waltz like this one, didn't see the
world, and yet managed to have girlfriend meanwhile.
You don't have to tell us everything, I don't
want you to feel pressured.
And what I told to my priest, hey, I am
confused about all of this.
He said, you went through all sacraments.
I said, those sacraments don't mean to me
anymore anything, because it's not personal salvation.
It's not something that I have experienced in
the world.
It's something that was just thrown into my life.
And when it's becoming salvation, then when we decide.
Now, what Ben said, how to handle with that
prostitute, and how to accept her in my fellowship.
What's the rest of you going to say if I am
with one of them walking on the aisle?
Hey, what are you doing there with that one
that we have seen the other night there with
five men?
This is what our problem is.
And what you said, I'm sorry, I forgot your name.
How to reach out to these children?
We have a majority of you, as I said, born into
Christian families, and how dramatically
you were expected to be baptized by 12, 15, or 18.
If it was over 18, already parents were
concerned, along with the elders, and
preachers, and
youth minister, and everybody else.
But how to accept these kids, or how to reach
them out who are not in such fellowship?
I'm confused that we are looking for identity
of the church today.
Why do I need evangelical world to be equal to them?
Why they shouldn't make some steps that we believe?
Let me make a couple of distinctions, then
we're going to take a break.
When I talk about individualism, I'm not
talking about personal.
I'm talking about private.
Your salvation is necessarily personal.
It should affect your life.
But it's not private.
It's not something that happens just between
you and God.
I can't be saved apart from Tracy and Ben, nor
apart, nor can I be saved apart from the
call of God upon my life to those prostitutes
and other people that we're talking about.
Because to be saved means that I'm being
precisely called out of my self-centeredness
into the
lives of others, that I don't truly know who I
am as a creature in the image of God apart
from my relatedness to other people.
So the church isn't just a place where I get
supported as an individual or a place that
kind of supports my status as a saved Christian
or encourages me to live a good life.
The church is the very necessary environment
for me to learn how to live God's new way
among others.
It's not support to my salvation.
It's essential to my salvation.
Now, we do want to talk about evangelism, not
just church today.
And we're talking a lot about the nature of the
kingdom and the nature of the church in
relationship to that.
It's important because my premise is that in
evangelism you're acting out decisions
that you've already made about the nature of
salvation, about the nature of the church.
Evangelism is just the script that these other
definitions give you, you know, your behavior
related to other decisions that have already
been made.
And I want to go back and mess with those a
little bit so that you'll act differently
when you do evangelism because very few of us
have a lot of testimonies about how successful
we're being right now in the ways that
historically we've approached evangelism.
And there are reasons for that.
There are cultural reasons for that.
Whether they once worked or not is irrelevant
to me at this point.
I think they probably did once work at a
certain kind of level, but we're past that place,
at least in North American culture, where the
ways that we've thought about evangelism
are going to work anymore, at least in any kind
of significant way.
So let's take a break, and when we come back,
Tracy and Ben will have some presentation
for us, and then we'll continue the big room conversation.
Let's take 10 minutes, so let's be back here at 3:30.