reflections on world mission, pt (ii)

Taught by Lindsay Brown at UCCF South Team Days, March 2009.

11 areas worthy of consideration as we think of global mission:

1. The growth of the church.
There is no parallel with the last 20 years, apart from the early church.  In 1989 there were 100 IFES movements, with 270,000 students; now there are over 150 movements, with half a million students involved.  Key factors:

• The break up of communism and opening up of countries.  The number of baptist churches in Russia has quadrupled.  Nepal 1954 The first church in Nepal started in 1954; by 1989 the number of churches had risen to 1000 with 800,000 believers!  Key factors in this have been imprisoning of pastors, rise of charismatic movement.  It’s God’s time for Nepal!  It’s the same in Algeria and Mauritania; in Tunisia there were 25 believers in 2000, and around 4-500 today.  An official government statement 3 months ago put the number of believers in China at 120 million; there are probably 80 million evangelicals in that country alone.
• Increasing number of non-western missionaries.
• Pockets of sensational growth which were previously very closed; but at the same time increasing restrictions.
• Emergence of hostile new atheism.  9/11 was a wake up call; religion wasn’t just wrong, it was evil.

reflections on world mission, pt (i)

Taught by Lindsay Brown at UCCF South Team Days, March 09.

Why Bother With Mission?
Some say, “it’s not for me”.  Michael Griffiths in his book ‘Cinderella With Amnesia’ says that engagement with global mission is the Cinderella of the Christian culture – it’s been forgotten about.  Why should I be bothered?

Firstly let’s give a definition of mission:

Mission = the proclamation and demonstration of the truth, wonder, and power of the gospel by word and deed.

So mission involves:

• proclamation and demonstration.

Like the two wings of a bird, like the two legs of scissors, are justice and justification.

- John Stott

• the truth of the gospel, ie the defensibility of it.  There is exhaustive/sufficient knowledge for salvation

• the wonder of the gospel: what keeps people going for 30 years is not just that the gospel is true, but that it is wonderful.  It is a subjective experience as well as cerebral.

Secondly, let’s tackle 3 common reasons, among students, not to engage with cross cultural mission.

word and image pt (ii)

Part 2 of 2.  Taught by Ann Brown, at UCCF South Team Days March 09.

In the Acts 17 account of Mars Hill, Paul gives us a brilliant example of how to engage with the surrounding culture:
- He was greatly distressed by it
- He studied their culture and uses a cultural cue v23 (possibly a classical sculpture) to begin his address
- He reinforces his argument by quoting from the Stoic philosopher Aratus, v28
- He demonstrates the inadequacy of the Athenians’ polytheistic worldview – focuses on the point of tension and highlights their inconsistency.

This is what Francis Schaeffer called “taking the roof off someone’s argument”.  Every non-Christian protects themselves from the reality of life and the gospel by building a roof over themselves.  It is helpful to very gently prise the roof off, by finding the inconsistencies.  Visual art & apologetics are a brilliant bridge builder in this.

4 different ways to use visual art as such a bridge builder:

word and image pt (i)

Part 1 of 2.  Taught by Ann Brown, at UCCF South Team Days March 09.

We are people of the Word, saved by an historical Saviour and called to verbally communicate the gospel; yet we live in an image-driven culture.  And there is a long-standing suspicion of the image in our protestant church.  What are the roots of this nervousness?  How should we engage ourselves with this culture?

1. What are the roots of this nervousness?

Post-Reformation, many churches were stripped bare of any imagery, and made completely bare.  As Protestants, we are heirs to this tradition, so we do well to examine it.  During the Reformation, waves of iconoclasm (burning of images) swept across Europe.  One of the first outbreaks was in Wittenberg, shortly after Luther nailed his theses to the door in 1517.  He, however, didn’t incite the violence; in fact, he tried to stop it.  But many people emptied the churches of the visuals of the old order, perceived as the idolatry of Roman Catholicism.

Images weren’t always despised in Christendom.  Augustine of Hippo and Pope Gregory in the 7th Century gave a role to images.

Images are useful for “the illiterate, who read in them what they cannot read in books”

- Gregory 600AD.

Compare this with our culture – people can read, but don’t like it!  They prefer the visual.

let the nations be glad

John Piper on Psalm 67.  Hear the sermon here

Main point in the text is found in the link between v1 and v2: the link between God blessing you, and you being a blessing to the nations:

May God be gracious to us and bless us

and make his face shine upon us,

so that your ways may be known on earth,

your salvation among all nations.

NIV drops the most important word – the conjunction: that.

One point to make from this: God blesses his people for the sake of the nations.

This picks up a thread all the way through the OT, stated in Genesis 12:1-3; the Psalmist takes a promise and turns it into a prayer.  That’s the way we ought to pray – then we can have confidence we’re praying in the will of God!

This point can be re-inforced by telling the story of Bethlehem Church over the past ten years to show how it is true.
A sub-point: if it is true – that God blesses his people for the sake of the nations – then it’s also true that God’s people will be blessed if they pray, long and plan to be a blessing to the unreached peoples.  We don’t earn the blessing of God by giving to mission, but we jump into the river of blessing that is flowing to the nations – and it’ll continue to flow whether we are a part of it or not.  We ought to jump in!

How we have jumped in – 10 ways in which God has blessed his people for the sake of the nations (fulfillments of connection between v1 and v2):

how to reach postmodern pluralists: (4) we must proclaim it

From ‘The Gagging of God’ by Don Carson (Apollos), Chapter 12: On Heralding the Gospel in a Pluralistic Culture.  

How do we present the gospel as we face the perils of postmodernism?

4.  We must proclaim this good news.

Is dialogue important?  Many advocate so.  What do we mean by dialogue?  Do we mean dialogue as two people talking together, in contrast to monologue?  If so, then it’s a great and crucial tool for the evangelist.  But often we mean by ‘dialogue’ that the conversation between a Christian and a non-Christian must be so even-handed and open-ended that the Christian does not have the ‘arrogant’ assumption that they have the ‘right’ answer, but instead assumes nothing and gives opposing opinons equal authority as Christian opinions.  “Certainly opposing voices should be accorded the same courtesy.  But if we insist that they be accorded the same authority, we are implicitly adopting philosophical pluralism, at the cost of affirming biblical Christianity.”

Another reason not to abandon proclamation is highlighted by Sue Brown, reflecting on years of working with university students around the world:

“If the image has replaced the word, music has replaced the book.  Young people watch and listen more than they read.  Music appeals primarily to the emotions and does precisely what Routley says, it carries words past the critical faculty into the affections where they may do either good or harm.  Music and the image, then, the two most potent influences on young people today, conspire to bypass the reasoning powers of the mind and to encourage thinking by association rather than analysis.  The relationship between this trend and the emotional orientation of modern young people is too complex a subject to enter into here, but it should give us pause for thought whenever we discern signs of spiritual shallowness (only let us be sure we are judging aright) among student Christians.” – Sue Brown, in ‘Worship: Adoration and Action’ (Grand Rapids).  

It is necessary to insist on gospel proclamation because “a necessary component in conversation and in Christian discipleship is the proper use of the mind.  Pastors committed to the ministry of the Word have often seen new converts become interested in reading, sometimes serious reading, for the first time in their lives.  God is worth thinking about.  God’s thoughts, insofar as he has disclosed them, can become our thoughts.  Evangelism that does not engage people at that level, whatever other levels are touched, is necessarily betraying something vital.”

how to reach postmodern pluralists (3): there must be content

From ‘The Gagging of God’ by Don Carson (Apollos), Chapter 12: On Heralding the Gospel in a Pluralistic Culture.  

How do we present the gospel as we face the perils of postmodernism?

3. We must herald, again and again, the rudiments of the historical gospel

(i) There must be content, and it must be the historical gospel

What is “the gospel”?  Not just a four or five point thing used in personal evangelism.  Biblically the phrase refers to ‘the comprehensive gospel’: the good news of God’s redemption and the coming of his kingdom through Christ, and all it entails for this life and the one to come.  This is the historical gospel, and all our preaching and teaching must revolve around the great central truths of this gospel.  “There is intellectual content in this heralded gospel, content that must be grasped, proclaimed and taught, grasped afresh, proclaimed afresh, in an ongoing cycle.”

 

At times Christianity has been too intellectual – too cerebral and dry – with it, which has caused reaction against “the modernist impact on confessing evangelicalism”, causing many vibrant movements to spring up with an emphasis on tongues, prophecies, strongly emotional corporate worship, and drama and dance.  These are helpful rebukes against “arid unreality”.  But sometimes the pendulum swings too far the other way; and sometimes “the enthusiasts are unwittingly becoming snookered by postmodernist ideology, exactly as their forebears were snookered by modernism”.  

how to reach postmodern pluralists (2): preach the whole Scriptures

From ‘The Gagging of God’ by Don Carson (Apollos), Chapter 12: On Heralding the Gospel in a Pluralistic Culture.  

How do we present the gospel as we face the perils of postmodernism?

2. Preach the whole Scriptures

 

In our evangelism we must start further back and nail down the turning points in redemptive history.

 

(i) The primacy of biblical theology

Many evangelistic tools take a systematic theological approach, eg asking the following questions: What is God like?  What is sin?  What is sin’s solution?  “There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this pattern, as long as most of the people to whom it is presented have already bought into the Judean-Christian heritage”, or have some knowledge of the creation-fall-redemption-glory pattern.  But if we present this pattern to someone who is biblically illiterate, or have been influenced by a form of New-Age, they may hear something completely different.  Take the classic line “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.”  This is comforting to hear, but consider the potential confusion: which God do you mean?   What does it mean for him to love me? Why is this a surprise – I’m lovable anyway, aren’t I?  What is this wonderful life – wonderful kids/sex/finance/fun – can I define the terms?

This is evident in communication with the postmodern, biblically illiterate, young generation.  This was the conversation of a Christian trying to communicate with an undergraduate who had come along to a Christian meeting out of mild curiosity to find out what Christianity is:

 

“I told him Jesus was the solution to his problem.  He wondered, ‘What problem?’  I told him Jesus could forgive his sins.  He wondered, ‘Why is that necessary?’  I told him he could escape the fear of death.  He told me that he never really thinks about death.  He wasn’t trying to be difficult.  He was one of the most sincere students I’ve ever met.”

how to reach postmodern pluralism (1): question its value

From ‘The Gagging of God’ by Don Carson (Apollos), Chapter 12: On Heralding the Gospel in a Pluralistic Culture.  

What form should a faithful and wise articulation of the exclusive gospel of Jesus Christ take, as it confronts postmodern perils?

 

1. Question its value.

 

Often it is helpful to critique the intellectual, moral, and existential bankruptcy of the age.

“The problems of privatisation, relativism, philosophical pluralism, scepticism, postmodernity, and ethical ‘openness’ largely control the mental thought processess of most university students, and of a substantial member of others.”

Unsurprising, because “the notion that one particular religious figure and one religious perspective can be universally valid, normative, and binding upon all peoples in all cultures is widely rejected today as arrogant and intellectually untenable in our pluralistic world.” – Netland.  

Recognised or not, acknowledged or not, there is a profound and bitter emptiness at the hearts of many Westerners.  They want to experience transcendence, escape isolation, know God, and experience relationships that are not just trivial and transient.  This means that, rather than shaping the gospel to meet individual emptiness, we must present it as a gracious message which connects fallen humans with their good Creator, and with others who have experienced that Lord’s goodness, then they’ll want to hear more.  Their bankruptcy must be lovingly exposed, and not just on an intellectual level.

reform your evangelism: understand the culture

From ‘The Radical Reformission’, by Mark Driscoll (Zondervan 2004). 

What is culture?

“The sum total ways of living developed by a group of human beings and handed on from generation to generation, that seeks to give shape and meaning to life, and that claims final loyalty.” (Lesslie Newbigin)

Most people are “as unaware of their cultural assumptions as they are of their bad breath” because it is so familiar to them.  So Christians must be particularly attentive to the culture they are trying to reach.  “Every culture can mediate the gospel if we expend the effort to determine how to work through that culture.  Our ultimate goal is to have people from every culture worshipping Jesus through their culture – the vision gloriously pictured in the book of Revelation.”