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Question, “Is the church keeping us from fulfilling the great commission that’s found in Matthew 28:18-20 18Jesus came to them and said I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth! 19Go to the people of all nations and make them my disciples. Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, 20and teach them to do everything I have told you. I will be with you always, even until the end of the world. (CEV) Look at the first few words of verse nineteen carefully, “go to the people…” Now this does not say wait for the people to come to you, while you sit inside your pretty church – but rather it says to go to them. Meaning we are to get off the padded chairs/pews that we sit on and go to them.
I love to read church signs, for the simple fact that they make me laugh most of the time and for no other reason. I have been a Christian now for twenty seven years and I have never once visited a church because of what a church sign has said, whether it talked about a revival or whatever. And I bet for the most part not many others have either.
So what makes us think someone who is not a Christian is going to step inside our church because of a sign or because our church has a pretty curb appeal? I have been around and part of a church my whole life and walking up inside of a new church I visit for the first time scares me to death. In addition, let’s be truthful, most of us are pretty bad ambassadors for Christ, once we are inside the confines of the church building. We fail miserably at really making someone feel welcomed. We rather see the same person, asking them the same questions that we asked them the last time we saw them in church – instead of talking to someone new. But you say that’s the reason why we have greeters in the parking lots and at the doors for, to welcome the visitors. Come on who are we fooling that doesn’t really make someone feel like your church is a church they could feel a part of. Everyone expects to see a greeter at the door, they say hi and shake your hand, but that doesn’t make you feel like you belong.
No the great commission states that we go to where the people are at, in your towns and communities. I know that’s a bit weird for most Christians, to be with or hang with sinners, but think about it we have the Holy Spirit with us to empower us for such a task and yet we still get nervous. So you know a non-believer has got to be scared to walk up in a church building. I believe that is why many churches are dieing. We can’t understand why in the world people are not attracted to our theatrical performances and our grand light show. Our churches our intimidating to many first time visitors no matter how people friendly we may think our church is.
That is why we have to go to them. Missional is a word that has been around for a while and within the past few years has caught favor with many Christ followers. To be missional means we must see ourselves as a missionary wherever we are currently at. It doesn’t have to be overseas; you are a missionary right in your hometown. It is realizing that the lost are not going to come to us, but rather we have to go to the lost.
Most of the churches that are growing in America today have a missional mindset. These churches are biblically sound and don’t mind getting out there in the culture. They are the types of churches that don’t see today’s culture as something to run from, but rather they engage today’s culture – wanting to put Christ in the center of today’s culture as much as possible. The reason so many churches are falling at this is that they see culture and church on opposite ends of the spectrum that these two worlds are polarizing to each other. That is simply not true. Take a look all through out the New Testament and where do you find Jesus? Not in the synagogues, but in the towns and villages with the people. Jesus engaged his culture. He went to the people. So the question that has to be asked is are we going to the people or do we expect the people to come to us?
Many churches see this word missional as offensive, because they have seen what they have done in the past work, but what they fail to realize is what worked ten or twenty years ago will not work for today’s culture. Many have allowed the traditions of the church to blind them in their thinking that there is only one way to do church and that is the way they are currently doing it. Why is it that we allow change in just about every area in our life, but the church? Twenty years ago, hardly anybody had a cell phone, now everyone has got them even grandma’s. The way we communicate has changed and we adapted. So why can’t the church adapt the times as well, as long as we don’t change the content of scripture. Does it really matter how we deliver it?
As I said early being missional is not new, Jesus was missional. I think what scares most people is the fact that we have to change the whole way we have been approaching church for most of our lives. It is getting out of our comfort zones and it’s exploring unknown territory. Being the creatures of habit that we are we don’t like this. Being missional makes us rely more on the Holy Spirit and it forces us to form new relationships, something many of us have forgotten how to do.
Also being missional is a lifestyle change, because you are trying to look at the world through the eyes of Christ. Missional living is making your life about establishing relationships that are meaningful, always looking for new ways to engage culture so that you might have a opportunity to share Christ with someone. Living a missional lifestyle is about being part of a community that cares for the needs of others before your own. This lifestyle is very contrary to the world’s lifestyle; because of this very few will take this style of living. When you live the missional lifestyle people begin to look at you differently and you realize what it is like to truly be just a strange of this world only passing through for a short time.
Starting to live like this myself, I see things differently now. , because I have realized there is much more to life than what just makes me happy. With each day that passes, I feel like it is lost forever, that I will never get that day back to make a difference in someone else’s life. Making a difference for Christ! I feel like God has given me a new zeal for life like my life now has a purpose and that for me is very fulfilling!
Have you ever thought to yourself, man if I could only change the way that person views life. I think that person is so off base in their beliefs. I just wish they could see what I see. But if you stop and think about it what makes us right – how are we so sure that we are right and someone else is wrong?
James Sire the author of “The universe next door” gives one of the best definitions of what exactly is a worldview. “A worldview is a set of presuppositions, (assumptions which may be true, partially true, or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic make-up of the world.”
Until just a few years ago I was under the false pretense that if you did not view life exactly the way I did you were wrong in your thinking. A lot of this had to do with being immature I know, but I also believe a lot had to do with my lack of understanding of God’s worldview in the Bible. I, like many people, just took for granted that what people told me was pretty much the truth, especially if it were a pastor. But what if they made a mistake, what if they were miss guided by someone?
Most people’s worldview is not something that they have thought out and wrestled with on their own, rather it is something they have accumulated over the years. Our view of the world is shaped by our parents, the culture in which we live , our religious traditions or lack of, the type of education we received, the media, and much more. All these things influence our thinking and how we view the world and our place in it and the sad thing is we don’t even realize that these things influence us. I heard it stated like this once, “ we learn more than we create; we accept more than we reject. So concisely we do not formulate our on worldviews, we simply regurgitate what we have already been taught.
This to me is very sad, because if this is true then very few people are able to rise above their cultural prejudices, or the cultural norms of society. We may like to believe that we are free thinkers independent of the influences around us, but were not. If you think about it, it is quite frightening how many incorrect assumptions we have adopted as our own. For many they are quite contented not to dig deeper or try to think more independently. We like to believe that our worldview is correct. And if we are challenged with another person’s worldview that does not line up with ours we usually get defensive about it. Instead of taking the time and ask questions and wrestle with their answers we throw condemnation their way.
Just recently though, I started welcoming other peoples worldview not as my own, but to better understand people who hold different views of the world, so that I can engage them in intelligent dialogue. I also started going to the scriptures to see if what they are telling me lines up with scripture. As well, I am seeing if what I believe is lining up with the scriptures. I find myself letting go of those once sacred cows, I once held so tightly to. I am now asking God to make my worldview more like his, more open and not so closed-minded.
Lord, I pray that my way of viewing the world (in all that entails, my beliefs, my views on other dominations, the way I treat others, and so on) would be more like yours.
I was reminded the other day that Jesus was accused of being “a friend of sinners”. That was supposed to be an insult to Christ. But it turns out to be a great source of hope to all of us. We all know we are full of sin and fall short of God’s glory, but God is gracious. God in His grace allowed Jesus to hang out with unrespectable people. So I am just thinking here out loud, if our congregations are full of respectable people – then could it be said that we have not truly grasped the radical grace of God. Just a thought, any comments.
My two sons are getting excited about the opportunity to go “trick or treating”. They are talking about what they want to go as. Nathan wants to be a good guy off of Star Wars and Nole wants to go as a bad guy off of Star Wars.
Yes my wife and I allow or kid’s to beat on total stranger’s doors to beg for candy.
Some people I know will not allow their kids to “trick or treat”. Instead they let them dress up as Bible characters and go to a “Harvest Festival” or “Trunks of Treat” at their local church.
I see no harm in either of these.
To each his own.
What do you guys think?
Did you get to go “trick or treating” as a kid?
Do you let your kids go “trick or treating”?
What does your family do on Halloween?
Love him or hate him, Mark Driscoll is reaching people for Christ. Although many think he is too harsh with is language and controversial preaching. I say, “No he’s right on track.” I myself listen to his podcast quite regularly. He is speaking out on topics that most pastors do not want to talk about whether out of fear of making people mad, losing members, or they are just plane cowards.
Pastors find themselves in a very strange place now days in the church world. In that nobody wants to hear about God getting angry at the sin in their lives. Rather what ten things can we do in our lives to have “our best life now.” What pastors have to realize (and I am one of them) is that preaching the gospel is not easy or pretty at times. We are supposed to tell the congregation what the consequences of sin are. We are to tell the people what God likes and dislikes in their lives and most importantly it is to be Christ centered. Since when did preaching the gospel ever become about succeeding in life, making everyone like you, gaining wealth, and so on?
I think what stumps most evangelicals concerning Mark Driscoll and others like him is we find it hard to believe that someone can be relevant in today’s culture and at the same time be biblically conservative. I think why this stumps so many is because we ourselves want to be just like that: being relevant to the ever changing world to reach them, while still holding on to our conservative biblical truths.
Instead of letting these two topics stump us we need to be asking ourselves, is there anything here that I can learn from? I don’t think Mark Driscoll is being culturally relevant just to be cool, but rather he is trying to answer the tuff questions that the cultural is asking – that other pastors don’t want to touch. Like sex & sexuality, alcohol, what it means to be a real godly man or godly woman and so on.
A lot of what Mark Driscoll is preaching is nothing new. Just a few generations before us we see men preaching hard against sin. Sadly, many pastor have gotten scared to look at someone in the eyes and tell them what they are doing is wrong and that it will send them to hell. They would rather tell their people what God could do for them. Over the next month, see how many times your pastor preaches a salvation message, it just might shock you. Shouldn’t we hear the salvation message preached every time a sermon is delivered, I say yes we should! For what other reason do we do church if it is not to bring in other lost people into God’s flock and to constantly remind the righteous what Christ did for us on the cross.
Sadly many churches need to wake up and listen to a culture that is crying out in search of truth. We need to realize that many of our programs and fuzzy warm sermons are not answering the questions that the culture is asking. The church would be better off if it could just let go of some of it’s “sacred cows” and get back to giving biblical truths to tough questions.
Next the church needs to move outside of its comfort zone if it has any hope in reaching today’s culture. We have become to “churchy” for our own sake. We have hidden in the four walls of the church for so long that we have disconnected from culture so much that we forgotten to go out and actually be the church. So we have become an elitist club that gets embarrassed when the culture asks us questions dealing with sex and the like.
This may or may not come as a shock to many of you, but the Bible has plenty to say on hard topics like sex. It also answers the hardest question of them all, what must a person do to be saved. So question to the church is, it willing to do what it takes to answer the culture in a way that is culturally relevant but also biblically conservative?
On a rare occasion I will stumble across a movie that shakes me to my core. I saw such a movie just last night, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”. It was not the silly notion that a person could be born old and then actually grow younger throughout their lifespan. Rather it was the intimate viewing of a person’s life, the changes one goes through. It was as though I was seeing a reflection of my own life displayed on the silver screen.
Although the movie was nearly three hours long I could have watched it again, if it were not already late into the night and 4:30 in the morning comes early. I love the fact that we got to see each part of Benjamin’s life. To tell you the truth I almost felt ashamed of myself, as if I was prying into every nook and cranny of his life. As the onlooker we saw his adventures that he embarked on, the women of his life, the one true love that he always longed for, and we got to see the ordinary everyday things in life that help define who we are.
I love the scene where Daisy, Benjamin’s one true love comes back to New Orleans from New York to see him and they are at a gazebo, and Benjamin says, “even the opportunities we do not take change and alter our lives forever”. That statement is so true as I look back at all the opportunities in my own life that I did not take a chance on. Some were good ones and some were bad ones. But what would have happened if I took just one of them, would I be where I am today or would life have taken a totally different direction? It is almost too scary to think about that the everyday decisions I make can change the outcome of my life forever.
I also like the idea that the movie portrayed the fact that the people in our life can make a huge impact on us, more so than we probably realize. There’s a theme throughout the movie of being unsettled and restless in life. Wanting adventure and going anywhere and doing anything to find it, but no matter how hard we search for this adventure – we always find ourselves wanting to go back home to get re-centered. This is true for me anyway.
I think the reason why I like this movie so much is because I see a lot of myself in Benjamin. One being that he is a dreamer and the other he is a romantic at heart. I just hope that as I get close to the end of my life I will look back and think that I loved well, that I raised my kids well, that I made the best of my opportunities, that I got to live life a little dangerously and recklessly, and finally that I made the most out of the life that I was given.
I cannot afford one, especially now that my wife and I are one the Dave Ramsey budget. Although I am a tech geek when it comes to electronics, I don’t think I buy one even if I wasn’t on a budget. Why you may ask? Because it cost way too much for me personally to justify it as a Christian. I know a lot of Christians have one and I am not saying they are wrong for owning one. If I made more money and was able to give more freely with my money to those in need, then I would very seriously think about getting one.
Especially now in light of the country’s economic state we find ourselves in, I don’t see how buying a sleek-do-all phone that lets me text and listen to music all at the same time is a worthy purchase. The media and the marketing world have conned us into thinking that these gadgets are a necessity rather than a luxury. If you think about it we made out just fine fifteen, twenty years ago without all that a mobile phone can do now days.
As Christian’s, we should be a little leery about the iPhone and it’s rival the blackberry (know by many as the crackberry) anyway. The Bible talks a great deal about coveting and for some it’s the seduction that draws many of us to want a phone like that in the first place. Because we think it will make our life easier or we see someone else have it and we don’t yet, we purchase the lie so that we will be happier, more available, and more informed. Then once the newness wears off, Apple comes out with a newer version to draw us back into their web.
Then there’s this theme that runs throughout the Bible that says live simply and rely on the Lord. One of the reasons why I think we are called to live simply is so that we can give more to those who are in need. But how can I give if I just laid down $300 for a phone?
I am however a product of my culture. I have a lot of useless crap laying around my house that I bought on a whim. And for the record I think the iPhone is the coolest gadget ever made. So often I find myself not buying the latest and greatest gadget only because I have a thin wallet and not because of my convictions.
For a lot of us Christians who have the lack of funds to buy into the seductive marketing of the iPhone, we might need to ask ourselves – I’m I happy with life? Is a mobile phone really going to make me that much happier with whom I am and how I live my life? Will I really want to hear a chime go off in my pocket letting me know I have an email from my boss? Am I really going to be that much closer to my friends if I can access Facebook anytime I want? Do I need to be a slave to technology? And ultimately is the iPhone going to make me a better person, a person more like Jesus?
My day for the most part begins like everyone else. A very loud alarm clock screaming in my ear that it is time to get up awakens me. Then once I am up and moving around I get into my truck and head to the gym. On my way to the gym I listen to the radio to see what the days weather looks like. Then I hop on a treadmill trying to make myself feel better about eating that big bowl of ice cream I had the night before and I catch myself humming to the song that they have playing over the speakers at the gym. Then it’s back into my truck with the radio on heading back to my house to take a shower and grab some breakfast. While I am eating my breakfast I can hear in the background my son’s cartoons playing on the living room’s TV. Then I’m once again in my truck this time listening to a podcast as I make my way to the office. Where I am bombarded with emails and phone calls throughout the day.
I take a break at lunch to clear my head sometimes I eat with a friend and just chat about the weekend or I’ll pick something up at Subway and head back to my office where I shut the door and listen to another podcast. Then believe it or not I hope back into my truck, to go home for the day, listening to the radio while talking to my wife on the phone.
Once I’m home I watch a little bit of TV talk to my wife and kids and then go to bed, ready to do it all over again the next morning. But something seems very odd as I lay there in my bed, I don’t hear any noise and it kind of bothers me at times. I have grown use to hear some type of noise all the time.
One night last week in particular it hit me, I had not had one moment of silence all day in who knows how long. As I lay there in bed I was convinced that I was addicted to noise. That I had to have something on all the time, white noise if you will to drown out the silence in my life. The silence that I should be giving to God, for the opportunities to hear from Him.
Would Jesus, if He lived in today’s culture, be listing to his iPod all the time, checking his emails on His “crackberry” every few minutes? Would He have left His phone on while He preformed miracles, to catch needless phone calls? If I were truthful with myself I’d have to say “No, He would not.” Jesus made time for silence in His life, so much so that He would stop preaching and healing the multitudes to seek the silence.
The silence was a place for Jesus to seek out from God what was His true purpose here on earth. If you think about it, we have it all backwards. We try to cram as much as possible into a day as we can. Thinking that it will make us more productive in the end, but in reality we produce very little when it is all said and done. While Jesus, on the other hand, spent a considerable amount of time being silent before the Father to receive from Him, I’m sure he had accomplished more in His three years of ministry than what we can do in a life time.
The Bible talks quite a bit on waiting in silence for the Lord like:
- 1 Kings 19:11-13 (hearing from God)
- Lamentations 3:25-28 (waiting patiently)
- Habakkuk 2:20 (worshiping God)
- Psalm 46:10 (knowing God)
- Luke 5:16 (praying effectively)
Since God convicted me of all the noise in my life I am going to try starting this week to have at least one full day of meaningful silence. Now I know that I can’t stop talking to my wife, kids, or boss, but I can turn off the radio, put down the iPod, and turn off the TV to be silent before the Lord.
It is my prayer for those that are reading this that are guilty of being addicted to noise that you join with me in one day a week of silence before the Lord so that you might hear from Him as well.
Can anyone remember the 80’s? Yes there were big hair bands, skating rings, mall hair, & no Internet. How did we ever live? These were the days when people actually communicated with people face to face. It never crossed our minds that we would want to call someone while we where driving, but in hindsight they were such archaic days. We were all bound by landlines and worst of all we were deprived of the play by play, minute by minute action or lack there of, of seeing our friends lives on Facebook.
The invention of the Internet started us on the fast track to getting information fast, whenever we want it; all we have to do is click on Wikipedia. We’ve become addicted to knowing large amounts of useless information, just because we can.
I ashamed to ask this question, because I know I am just as guilty as the next person. How self-absorbed have we become? We have our Facebook account, our I-phones, blogs, personal ringtones, our own video on YouTube, and the list goes on and on and on. We can be a superstar in the world of screens, in fact it seems like our world is made of nothing but screens.
Don’t get me wrong I love all these great technologies. I’m just thinking out loud here, that we are changing the way we see ourselves: as a twitter, AIM, text-messaging, HTML bodies, and if we don’t like something about ourselves all we have to do is cut, paste, copy, or delete ourselves into who we want to be. Then just post it on e-harmony.
We’ve become obsessed with community driven “status”. The communication we have become so passionate about is what we are doing right now whither it’s interesting or not. We no longer want to communicate to learn from others or hear about a persons unique experiences, instead it’s about how they are feeling and what type of coffee they are going to get once they get to Starbucks.
Have are lives become that important that everyone in the world needs to know about it? Or is it that we have become so isolated from one another that we desperately long to have meaningful relationships – that we will just take a cheap (or not so cheap) substitute relationship with a screen.
This generation that we find our self in seems empty and lonely at times. We long to get into some of the action, love, and adventure we see in the movies, television shows, and video games. The media tells us life is an adventure and only a few people that are pretty enough, lucky enough, or rich enough get to experience this type of life. But that’s just not true we all can experience a life like this all we have to do is turn off the screen and actually do life! We need a life that is filled with meaning and purpose.
Our generation has become exhausted by consumerism and sadly it is all we know. There are some people in this generation though that see this and are getting out there to be different. They are tired of just taking from our culture and wanting to give something back no matter how small it may be.
These wonderful technologies such as blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and the rest – suddenly give us platforms to say something meaningful, life changing even and people are listening. Millions of people listening to what we have to say, we have a chance to actually make a difference in peoples lives. Let’s not just use these outlets for the norm mind numbing crap that so many are already putting out there. Let’s stop trying to feel important, validated, and interesting, because let’s face it do your friends really care that you are watching Survivor, while typing on your hip trendy pink MacBook.
Life was meant to live and I don’t know about you but looking at a screen all the time is not really living to me. Instead let’s get out there in the world and experience what God has made for us and maybe along the way we might find a worthy cause to be a voice for – an injustice’s that we want to take a stand against. Wouldn’t that be crazy to actually do what God has created us to do!
Whatever happened to the punch that the word sin once had? Just the very mention of the word “sin” in the 19th century and earlier struck fear in the hearts of most people. Now today the word “sin” has lost its fear. We live in a culture that has made the word almost playful. We see the media use the word “sinful” as something that is naughty, but nice. We find ourselves saying, ‘I know I shouldn’t really, but it will be fun, and I’m sure it won’t hurt anyone’. Somehow in our twisted minds we have incorporated the word sin, with the word heavenly – two words in my opinion that are polar opposites. People make statements like ‘it is heavenly sinful.’ Please tell me how something can be heavenly and sinful at the same time. Given the sheer negativity the word had in the past it should not be surprising that people want to take the sting out of the word and make it a little more user friendly.
I believe we should be more like our ancestors at how we view sin. Sin describes a pattern of life that is simply destructive. Sin destroys people’s happiness, friends, and families – there’s nothing heavenly in that. Sin is destructive. We need to see sin not just as breaking the rules, but rather as something that kills and devours everything in it’s path. Life would have been a little easier if God made the things that were good for us beautiful and the things that were bad for us ugly, unfortunately He did not. Augustine said it well when he talked about his youth when he was a thief, ” It was foul, and I loved it”. Sin has a seductive way about it for some strange and twisted reason; the devil really knows how to push our buttons.
So how do we begin thinking about sin? One traditional way that dates back several hundred years is to categorize it into types of sin. They all knew that there is no sin greater than the other, but they were also shrewd enough to realize they needed to know their enemy. So the idea of the ’seven deadly sins’ was born as a way of remembering some of the chief ways in which this deadly pattern of behavior can manifested itself. Then by the end of the middle ages it became a normal way of organizing sin – a useful classification of misconduct.
History shows us that every generation has a way of making sin unique for them. Graham Tomlin in his book The Seven Deadly Sins And How To Overcome Them, states it well; “at a glance through the traditional list of the seven deadly sins raises an obvious issue for anyone with any sense of contemporary life and morals: these are not the ones we would identify as the chief causes of evil in our world. If anything, our culture tends to admire these qualities, not avoid them. Lust is a sign of a healthy sexual appetite, pride a perfectly valid pleasure in our own achievements, and greed an essential motor for the economy.” What Tomlin said is sad, but very true our world says that a lot of what is bad is really good for us and should be strived for in life. Even many Christians have bought into this way of thinking hook, line, and sinker.
As is stated earlier, these seven are by no means the only sins we need to worry about, nor are they more severe than any other sin. It is just that these sins seem to come up quite a bit more and the culture that we live in has told us that some of them we should strive for and as for the others they are not all that bad. Here are the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ in no particular order pride, anger, gluttony, lust, greed, envy, and sloth.
Now my aim for all this is not to package a neat little list of heavy sins that we need to avoid. For that would just be useless and a stupid approach of ‘keeping the rules’. Rather my aim is to have these ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ as a reminder for us to build a better quality of life that enables us to weed out bad habits and build up good ones. In other words living a life that is pleasing to our Lord.
