Here’s a helpful thought: it is all too easy to accept your first impression of a matter as the truth about the matter. If you think a situation is a problem, then that is what you will see and you will go to work to fix the problem. Your implied goal is to return to normal and then carry on as you did before. In many cases, this is the appropriate way to handle a problem. However, there are cases where the attempt to fix something will prevent you from seeing the need to change or the opportunities that the so-called problem has opened up for you.

Some things to think about when confronting a problem are:

• By fixing this, am I just delaying the inevitable change I will someday have to make?
• If this problem could not possibly be fixed, how would I recover from the setback?
• What good is hidden in this problem?

The best thing to do when a problem arises is to reframe the situation from a problem to an opportunity. It’s a common truism that necessity is the mother of invention. A problem needing a solution can serve as the stimulus that drives us to creative new opportunities.

The problem we all face as I write this is the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated issues of vaccines and public health rules. This post from January 21, 2021 explores the gifts that God has given us in the current disruption.

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But what about those who opposed their reforms?

• What is it like to be on the resistant side of reform?
• More pointedly, what if we are the ones people want to reform?

An Evangelical Reformation?

Five hundred years ago today on October 31, 1517, Martin Luther launched a critique of the Catholic church. Might there be any other “Martin Luthers” making a similar critique of the Evangelical church today?

Any organization or movement inevitably calcifies from the “encrustations of time”¹ and periodically needs reform that reinvigorates it, calls it back to its roots, and helps it focus on the right things. Calls for reform can expose our blind spots, mission drift, and untested assumptions. The Evangelical church has had a run of several hundred years, and who’s to say we ourselves are not in need of reform? A healthy church needs to be open to that possibility if it wants to stay healthy.

Calls for reform should be examined, tested and, if valid, accepted. But even if not accepted as a whole, there could still be a part of the call to reform that points to opportunities for improvement. We shouldn’t dismiss our critics too quickly, because God could be using them to speak prophetically to us!

For example, calls for theological reform are perhaps the most difficult of all to handle well. We might just dismiss them out of hand, but then we would miss an opportunity to look for ways we could become a better church. For example, a call to reform our theology of gender identity could be rejected but still lead to an examination of:

• how well we understand issues of gender identity and the experience of people who question their identity or who have identified with a non-traditional gender identity,
• how we serve people who see things differently than we do but who still need God’s love and forgiveness just like us, and
• how we engage in dialogue with people who oppose our convictions.

Every call for reform gives us an opportunity to learn and become a better church.

The Reformation

Let’s take advantage of the 500th anniversary of the start of Luther’s reform movement to see what the Evangelical church can learn from how the Catholic church responded to Luther’s 95 Theses.

Martin Luther’s Reform

Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of All Saints’ Church (also known as the ‘Castle Church’) in Wittenberg, Germany.²

Nailing the theses to the door was not an act of defiance or protest, but was the accepted way that university professors announced topics they would like to debate. Martin Luther was a theology professor at the University of Wittenberg and he was not instigating a public uprising against the Catholic church, but a discussion about its problematic practices.

At this early stage of the Reformation, Luther’s goal was to reform the corrupt and abusive practices of the Catholic church at the time. He didn’t want to break with Rome. Had the Catholic church corrected the abuses and ended the corruption promptly, it is quite possible that Luther would have remained a Catholic. It was only over time that the break became inevitable.

Recently I took a course on the Reformation which was taught by a very scholarly and influential Benedictine monk. Surprisingly, he agreed with most of Luther’s theses! In his words, “The church really did need reform!”

The Catholic Church’s Response

So how did the Catholic church respond? Well,

• Luther sent his theses to the church hierarchy on October 31, 1517
• The Catholic church condemned his writings in 1518, declared him a heretic in 1520, and excommunicated him in 1521
• The church still had to deal with the growing dissent. After receiving the 95 Theses in 1517, the church took 28 years to create a process to respond to Luther’s objections and try to prevent a permanent breach. In 1545, it convened the Council of Trent for this task
• It took the Council 18 years to formulate its conclusions, closing in 1563
• The turnaround time for the church’s response was an amazing 46 years!

Luther died in 1546, just a year after the Council convened. The church’s delay meant that, even if he had been willing to participate in the Council, Luther died before it got to meaningful debate.

Lessons for Evangelicals

Engage Early

During the 28 years of apparent inactivity on the Catholic side, the Protestants were very active, developing their own theology and then dividing into multiple camps as they argued over various theological matters. By the time the Council convened, there was no single Protestant leader or group to dialogue with, and a Protestant ecclesiology had solidified which did not include the papacy. The situation had become way more complicated than at the beginning. As the saying goes, it was too late to shut the barn door because “the horse” was long gone!

• Some issues aren’t all that significant and will disappear on their own. But a call to reform on a significant issue is likely to gain traction and be sustained over time because the reformers are heavily invested in bringing about change. Either the pressure will continue to mount for you to reform, or they will take matters into their own hands and move ahead on their own. The world will not stop and wait for you to plan your response.

Be Aware of History

The Catholic church invited some leading Protestants to attend the Council and discuss their differences, even giving them an offer of ‘safe conduct.’ Very few came though, and then only for a short time, because just a century before, in 1415, Jan Hus had also protested the very same things that Luther was protesting, and even though he had been given ‘safe conduct’ to attend the Council of Constance to discuss his views, once at the Council he was tried and condemned, was scalped, and then burned at the stake! It’s no wonder that a ‘safe conduct’ didn’t mean much to the Protestants!

• We may have some history to apologize for. Be humble and get the dialogue off to a good start by acknowledging past actions that have made the situation worse today. It may take a while to build enough trust with the reformers to have a meaningful conversation with them.

Set Aside Fears

Part of the reason for the Catholics’ long delay in responding to the Protestants was that a response would require a church council, and popes had feared calling a council ever since the Council of Constance. In addition to condemning Hus, that was the council that decided church councils are superior to the Pope and could declare a pope to be heretical. Although this decision was overturned at the Council of Florence, popes were disinclined to call a council for fear it would get out of hand.

• Don’t let fear prevent engagement. Have faith that God is involved in your affairs and will support you through challenging times.

Be Humble

As I reported in an earlier post, when the Council of Trent discussed another of Luther’s theses (disagreement over the sacraments), a cardinal proposed that the communion cup be given to the laity as well as to the clergy, and it was acknowledged there really wasn’t a good argument against doing so. This change would have satisfied the Protestants, who felt lay people should receive both the bread and the wine. But the Council shot down the proposal only because it would mean admitting that the church had made a mistake in the past!³

• If we’ve made a mistake, admit it and do the right thing. Our goal isn’t to save face, it is to be faithful. Pride will stop honest dialogue and self-examination in their tracks. The only way forward requires humility.

Explore and Inquire

John O’Malley, author of Trent: What Happened at the Council, wrote that “Each side could not help playing according to its own rules and therefore making demands on the other that required it to surrender or severely compromise its identity.” This pretty much guaranteed there would be no reconciliation.

• Engage in a spirit of inquiry with the goal of exploring and discovering what is right together. If agreement isn’t possible, you can always end in disagreement if necessary and still have made some progress or improvement. But you won’t get even that far if you create barriers to engagement.

Be Intellectually Honest

O’Malley also noted that the Catholic theologians suffered from two systemic weaknesses:

1. The first was a penchant for proof-texting, lifting statements, and even ideas of the Protestant Reformers, out of context, the result of an undeveloped skill in textual analysis.
2. The second weakness was an underdeveloped sense of historical criticism, which resulted in the Council affirming apostolic origins for beliefs and practices where there were none, or where those origins were much less secure than the council intimated.

• Engage with intellectual honesty. Be sure to understand the other’s position completely, and to acknowledge weaknesses in your own position. For example, not every practice needs to be seen in the New Testament church to be valid. As I discussed in my book, The Church at Work, if that were the case there would be no room for the Holy Spirit to do anything new or for us to adapt to new circumstances that the early church didn’t have to deal with.

So, …

Calls for reform in the church should be taken as an opportunity for self-evaluation with the goal of becoming the best church possible. We don’t need to agree with everything others believe in order to learn something from them.

For example, here’s an article by a reporter for the United Church of Canada Observer magazine explaining what the United Church can learn from Evangelicals.

What could conservative Protestants learn from liberal Protestants? Perhaps they could help us think through how to do a better job speaking out on social justice issues. We do great with compassionate ministry, but tend to be uncomfortable with issues of systemic injustice.

The real equivalent to Martin Luther’s reform movement would be those within the Evangelical church who are now drawing apart from it as they critique their Evangelical beliefs and practices. One such group is the highly controversial “emerging church.” I am no expert on this brand of Christianity, but generally they call for a more inclusive Christianity, one that is more focused on service than doctrine, and one that emphasizes love and grace over truth and sin. Even if we disagree or have concerns with aspects of their theology, could we learn from them about being present with those outside our faith and engaging them where they are at?

A Vision for the Evangelical Church

A great vision for the Evangelical church is that it remain faithful to Christ and be both self-aware and self-correcting so that it is exemplary, healthy, and effective in mission. It would be open to critique from any source and use it to become a better church.

Since there is no centralized structure to the Evangelical church, it is up to ministry leaders to show community leadership and dialogue with other Evangelical leaders with whom they are in relationship.

Key Thought: Critics show us where there is room for improvement.

A Mighty Fortress is Our God

Here’s a bonus for you. Martin Luther wrote and composed many hymns, but the most famous of them all is A Mighty Fortress is Our God (“Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” in German). It captures Luther’s spirituality so well that the church in Wittenberg has it inscribed on its tower!

I recorded a 2 minute fughette based on the very memorable opening line, which you can listen to in the video below. Enjoy!

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Paul & the Art of Rhetoric

It turns out that Paul was a master of rhetoric, the art of persuasive speaking and writing. I’ve read somewhere that we have instruction manuals from Paul’s time period and that he follows them to a tee. He gets angry just when the manuals say to get angry. He appeals to his audience’s highest aspirations just when the manuals say he should. He appeals to example, to self-interest, to whatever the manuals say is needed, based on his purpose at the moment.

I always imagined Paul just sitting down to write and, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, pouring out his thoughts. When I learned at seminary how very carefully Paul constructed his letters, I was amazed at how sophisticated he was. He wrote with the Spirit’s inspiration, but he closely followed the best human advice of his day too. He was deliberate and careful, taking his letters quite seriously and investing the time and thought to do a good job.

Rhetoric & the Church Today

And that brings me to today and how we communicate to those outside the church. If we are communicating to the public hoping to persuade at least some to adopt our views, then we need to follow Paul’s example and invest just as heavily in our communications as he did with his.

Whether you are advocating for a new social policy, to change public opinion about your ministry’s cause, preaching a sermon, or even persuading donors to give, you need to craft your appeal to be so persuasive that people are convinced and adopt your position as their own. Good rhetoric is the tool you need. Without it, chances are high that you will not have an effective message.

• Purely emotional appeals may get short-term results, but their effect will quickly wear off and people will be sorry for the decisions they made while in an emotional state.
• Sloppy arguments won’t even get you that far. People will likely reject your message out of hand and your credibility will be damaged.

Fortunately, we have manuals to help us construct our messages just as Paul had. If we follow their advice, our positions won’t be easily shot down or discounted. Remember, “Because the Bible says so” may be persuasive to us, but it isn’t to anyone else. We need to make good arguments.

Good Arguments

I’ve just finished reading a book which will help you craft an effective case for your position. Good Arguments: Making Your Case in Writing and Public Speaking is an introduction to designing persuasive presentations using the art of rhetorical argument. In only 117 pages it covers everything from what makes a good argument to how to avoid logical fallacies. It shows how to effectively use analogies, reason, logic, belief, and fact. It contains many practical cautions and suggestions, such as being careful to define your terms, because so many words have different meanings to different audiences.

The book is co-written by an apologetics and theology professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and a professor of Christian education at Liberty University.

An argument, according to the authors, is definitely not a battle to be fought and won, but a message to be communicated. This is a healthy reminder for Christians who might be too focused on crushing the opposition. The goal of a good argument is “to persuade someone to adopt the new belief because they believe it, not because they were mesmerized by rhetorical skill.” That’s how we can get long term changes in attitudes and beliefs. And if we aren’t successful at persuading our audience to adopt our viewpoint, the fallback goal is that our position would at least be accepted as a reasonable option among many choices.

Good Arguments will do what the title says, help you craft good arguments that will persuade people to do what you want them to do because they really believe it is the right thing to do.

“The book has been provided courtesy of Graf-Martin Communications, Inc. Available now at your favourite bookseller.”

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Christianity and Modern Thought

Science, Reason, and Religion

Many people try to pit science against religion, as if only one can be true. This is a false dichotomy. The popular assumption of a conflict would only be true if they both claimed to explain the same thing, and this simply isn’t the case. Albert Einstein aptly summed up the complementarian relationship between science and religion as: Religion without science is blind. Science without religion is empty. Another way to phrase it would be that science answers the “What?” and religion answers the “Why?” Science explains how things work, and religion explains why things are. They are two very different topics that actually work quite well together.

The same logic can be applied to reason and religion. Most people believe that the Enlightenment was an age of reason that juxtaposed faith and reason, assuming again that only one could be true. However, all the early thinkers of the Enlightenment were sincere Christians who believed that reason was possible only because God exists and is orderly in his ways. It is because of God’s orderliness that we can study and increase our knowledge about how God’s world works.

Some people believe that the more we understand how things work, the less we need God. They see God as a black box to explain what we do not yet understand. But this is not true either. It is still God who sustains it all. In fact, Sir Isaac Newton, who originated the idea that there are Laws of Nature, believed that those laws proved God’s existence on the basis that if there is a law, then there must be a Law-Giver.

During much of the Enlightenment, reason and God went together quite well. In fact, John Locke (one of the heroes of the Enlightenment) wrote a book called The Reasonableness of Christianity in which he made the case that the Bible, taken literally, is entirely reasonable. However, the one downside to the work of the early Christian Enlightenment thinkers was that it had the effect of downgrading revelation as a source of knowledge.

What really turned modern thought anti-religious was when the French philosophers got involved. They were the first to pit reason against religion. The French philosophers were very anti-Catholic, and by extension, anti-Christian and anti-religion. They did their best to replace God with reason.

More than Reason

While many would like to depend upon reason alone as the infallible guide for acquiring knowledge, it turns out that reason alone is not up to the task.

• First, we don’t agree on what is reasonable! Reason can be quite ambiguous. For example, a later Enlightenment thinker, David Hume, believed it was common sense not to believe in God, while his contemporary, Thomas Reid, believed it was common sense to believe in God.
• Second, it also became clear that reason alone cannot explain everything because:
  • we also learn from experience
  • we allow passion, and not reason alone, to help us make decisions, such as who we will marry
  • we create understanding or meaning based on faith and trust
  • we use our imagination to create preferred futures that go well beyond what reason alone might reasonably project
• Finally, reason cannot tell you the ultimate truth of reality. It can’t prove God’s existence or character. This is because reason functions within what philosophy calls appearances, the physical world. But there is a world beyond appearances that we can only get to by faith. Faith, combined with personal experience of God and with understanding that comes from God’s self-revelation in Scripture, provides a reasonable belief in the existence of God.

And lest we think that those who promote reason as the only way to gain knowledge have successfully made the case against faith, remember that faith in reason alone is still faith!

Engaging the Opposition

There will always be people who don’t think alike. In fact, given our different experiences, education, personalities, and so forth, it is amazing that there are as many people as there are who do think alike! However, the reality is, there will always be people who do not see things as you do.

Rather than shunning or demonizing them as “those dastardly fiends,” get to know them. Talk with them and use the exchange to evaluate the goodness of your beliefs:

• If your arguments stand up to scrutiny, you will be better off and more confident about them.
• If your arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny, you may find there is a better way to defend your belief. Or you may discover you need to correct your belief. Sometimes we believe something without a lot of thought, or we misunderstood something or misinterpreted it.

Etymology Is No Help

When people discuss the Bible and want to drive a point home, they sometimes appeal to the etymology of the Greek or Hebrew word to get at the ‘real’ meaning. Unfortunately, this kind of word study has little, if any, value. A word’s etymology may be of historical interest, telling how the word came to exist, but the word itself means what it meant at the time it was written.

Bear in mind that it may take only a few years for a word to completely change its meaning. Here are some examples of words that have changed their meaning:

1. Wicked and bad now both mean good.
2. The word religion in 1602 meant piety, not a system of belief.
3. When William Wilberforce campaigned for the reformation of manners in the 1800s, he wasn’t campaigning for more politeness, because manners did not mean etiquette but a way of living. Child labour, animal abuse, terrible treatment of prisoners in jail, and so forth all showed how society wasn’t as genteel as the upper class imagined it to be. Its manners, its way of living, needed to change so that these situations would no longer exist.
4. The word careful as used in the King James Version means anxious or worried today. To be full of care is to be full of worry. The word awful used to mean full of reverential awe, and terrible used to mean awesome.

So when you want help with what a word means, check out what it meant at that time (and even, possibly, in that place, as it might have been a local colloquialism) and see what it meant to the writer.

Humanist Morality

Humanist morality is a non-religious morality. Even though we’d like everyone to have a Christian morality, it is vital that there be a non-religious morality or else there is no reason for non-religious people to be moral at all.

The favoured morality today is utilitarianism: Whatever gives the greatest number of people the greatest happiness is moral. This works well for most people, but it does not work well at all if you are part of the minority who gets pain instead of happiness. For example, it might make most people happy to have slaves do their tedious work, so a utilitarian law allowing people to own slaves would be moral. The owners are happy, but the slaves sure aren’t.

The kind of morality that causes a person to be a moral hero and to live sacrificially simply isn’t possible or rational in secular morality.

The one who tells the best story wins!

The strategy of post-modernists today is to out-narrate their opponents. That is, to tell a better story to persuade people and win their argument. It doesn’t matter if the story is true or false, it just matters that it works.

Objectivity

Christians believe that goodness is an objective property that is very real, and it should be loved. Love, truth, compassion, and wisdom are all part of beauty, and all reflect the character of God. The secular world is obsessed with ambiguity, turning things upside-down, and utility over beauty.

The professor (called a tutor at Oxford) says we are indeed in a culture war. Most people do not believe in objective moral truth. They have replaced moral truth with moral opinions. To win people over, Christians must address the issue of whether or not there is objective truth.

C.S. Lewis and the Christian Imagination

Longing for God

Lewis assumes that everyone experiences inconsolable longing for something more than this world. He calls this “desire” in Surprised By Joy.

My question is whether people today are reflective enough to even be aware of longing. With so many ‘needs’ created and so quickly fulfilled in our consumer society, do we get to the bigger, more existential type of longing that Lewis writes about? We probably do if we are languishing in poverty or oppression, but otherwise, maybe not. This has implications for how we evangelize.

Feeling or Experience?

Lewis was very bothered by the fact that a good writer telling a story like Narnia, one that evokes spiritual feelings, can lead people to an experience that is imaginative in nature and not an actual spiritual experience. Worship music can do the same. We get the feeling of being spiritual without actually being spiritual. Closeness and intimacy with God take time spent in Christian spiritual practices. Lewis believed that stories and music can be shortcuts to imitative (false) experiences of God rather than actual experiences of God.

The primary goal of stories and music, according to Lewis, is to show what the good, the virtuous, and the lovely look like. Stories are for moral formation, and this is what Lewis was doing with his fiction books. Modern stories, however, are all about moral ambiguity and dystopia. These stories are programming recent generations of children quite differently than the stories read by their parents. Authors of children’s stories have the power to shape children in their formative years. Both children and adults need stories that train them to make right decisions in real life.

Understanding Those Who Differ with Us

Many of the conflicts we have in our world today are actually the result of people having different understandings about things such as the environment. Lewis says that it helps to know what the purpose of that thing is, because what is good is what fulfills its purpose. So when it comes to the environment, should we chop down a large tree?

• If we think its purpose is to provide shade, we would say the good thing is no, don’t chop it down because the tree is fulfilling its purpose.
• But if we think the purpose of a large tree is to provide firewood for heating, then the good thing is to chop it down and use it.

The real conflict is not about cutting down the tree or not, but what is the reason why the tree exists. That’s what should be debated. The appropriate action (or inaction) would become clear once the purpose has been determined.

Human Progress

Secular people often think that society has progressed a long way since Christianity lost its dominance, They’ll say something like, “We don’t burn witches anymore.”

Lewis would say that yes, we have progressed, but not morally. We’ve progressed in our knowledge that witches cannot cast spells that cause a pregnant woman to lose her baby, for example. If we thought they could still cast spells that result in miscarriages, we’d treat them the same way as we did years ago. The proof is that while we don’t burn witches anymore, just look at how we treat terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.

Big Ideas

These last few posts have given you a taste of the topics covered in the four courses I took at Oxford University. They certainly provided me with a lot of food for thought, and I hope they’ve done the same for you.

The post At Oxford: Food for Thought appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

This Week

• The Church Always Needs Reform
• No Faith in Religion?

Next Week

• Christian Faith and Modern Thought: Are they incompatible?
• C.S. Lewis and the Christian Imagination.

Reformations

Since this is the 500th anniversary of Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg church door, the beginning of THE Reformation, the Summer School theme is Reformation: Reform and Renewal in Christian Life and Experience. There have been many reformations in the church over the millennia, and the question is, Are we in need of another reformation?

This is a timely question, and the opportunity to study up on how the church has historically dealt with upheavals of various types might be instructive for us today. How has the church decided what to hold fast to, and what is cultural and can change or adapt?

Monday was the first day of classes and I’ll just give some key ideas and impressions. Of course, these are provisional ideas because they will all be developed over the next four days.

The Church Always Needs Reform

Today we concentrated on the first three years of the Reformation: 1517-1520. All of the major issues that the Reformers had with the Catholic church were on the table by the end of this short period. Here are some interesting points from the lecture:

• Pope Francis said in a 2016 homily that there were two good things that came out of the Reformation:¹
  1. “With gratitude we acknowledge that the Reformation helped give greater centrality to sacred scripture in the (Catholic) Church’s life.”
  2. “With the concept “by grace alone”, he [Luther] reminds us that God always takes the initiative, prior to any human response.”
• The Catholic Church’s response to Luther was way too long-delayed to have any hope of healing the relationship with the Reformers. They waited 28 years before holding a council to address the issues, and then the Council of Trent took another 18 years to decide what the response should be! Forty-six years is a long time to formulate a response to a crisis! By then the horse was out of the barn and there was no returning. This made me think of the need for the church today to respond quickly to the issues of our times. If we don’t respond in good time, then the world will just pass us by. And when we do finally respond, it will be too late.
• The Roman Catholic church did make a surprising number of the corrections Luther had called for.
• Incidentally, it was from the time of the Reformation that the Catholic church became known as the Roman Catholic church, a far more accurate description of what it really is than just Catholic alone.

No Faith in Religion?

This course is promoting faith while critically assessing religion (the institutional structures of the church). It was heavily philosophical today, and I’ve never taken a philosophy course, so this is all heady stuff for me.

The whole lecture boiled down to a couple of key points:

1. Plato and his student Aristotle disagree with one another. The dichotomies between them have never been resolved, leaving everyone frustrated. Dominicans, such as Thomas Aquinas, follow one, and Augustinians, such as Martin Luther, follow the other. And that’s why Luther disagrees with Aquinas. The question is, Can we live with the tension between different philosophies without having to synthesize them?
2. I wondered why philosophy would be an issue at all when discussing theology. So I asked, “Given that the Bible is God’s self-revelation and that philosophy is humanity’s own thinking, why should questions about God and his nature be subject to the approval of human philosophy?” Some theologians reject Biblical-theological insights to God because they don’t fit within human philosophical concepts. The answer was that there are two ways that the Bible and philosophy interact, and to me these are extremely important because I think they explain the difference between Mainline (liberal) and  Evangelical (conservative) Protestants:
   • Philosophical Theology starts with theological reflection and then uses philosophical concepts as a servant to theology to help explain it. In essence, Biblical theology rules.
   • Theological philosophy does the opposite. Biblical theology is tested against philosophy and when the two are incompatible, philosophy rules.
   • As I read the four textbooks for this course, I had a major “Aha!” Conservative Protestants use Philosophical theology while liberal Protestants use Theological philosophy.
   • A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I wonder what a real philosopher would make of my little, but for me anyways, significant insight!
3. René Descartes messed everything up with his “Cogito, ergo sum” idea. Everything we experience in society today can be traced back to these three words. What “I think, therefore I am” means is that the only truth there is, is inside us. There is no objective truth ‘out there’. You can have your truth, and I’ll have mine, and they’re both equally valid even if they cannot both be objectively true! To me, Descartes’ thinking can have bizarre implications. Here’s an example: In the class, there was a projector on the table, and eighteen people in the classroom. How many projectors are there? This is not a joke! Descartes would say there are eighteen projectors because we all see the projector differently, each from our own perspective. The ‘imp’ in me thought, “Okay then, I’ll just get up and take my projector out of the room and leave the other seventeen projectors for them to use! Then we’ll see how many projectors there really are!” Fortunately, the wiser person in me did not say any of that out loud! But back to serious business. Subjectivism and individualism are the natural consequences of Descartes’ philosophy. The professor stated that we need to transcend Descartes, but that no thinker has yet toppled him. There needs to be a better way to think, he says, that draws us back into community. However, there is no quick fix to the way society thinks today. If Descartes is ever overcome, it will be a long time before society is transformed once again.

So there’s some food for thought for you. Hope you enjoy ruminating on it.

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The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
John 1:14 (NIV)

Previously, I wrote that the church needs to engage society well. Now it’s time to expand on that topic and consider how we can have an effective, faithful presence in an unfaithful society.

Jesus is our model, especially for how we should regard the people of that society. As one author noted, “He does not force us to love him against our will, nor does he love us because of anything we can do for him. He just loves us.”¹ That love undergirded everything Jesus did:

• Jesus moved from the perfect community of the Trinity to the imperfect community of humanity, taking the world as he found it and accepting the injustice he suffered.
• He spoke strong words of correction²  to those who either prevented or made it difficult for others to experience the life God desires us to have.
• At the same time, Jesus spoke words of love and compassion, as well as firm but gentle words of correction,³ to those who were victims of circumstance or of mistreatment, and those who committed personal sins (such as the adulterous woman of John 8).
• His preaching can be characterized as ‘invitational.’ He announced the in-breaking of the kingdom of God and invited his audiences to enter into it.⁴ He never coerced anyone, but called people to voluntarily live to a higher standard than the religious (and civil) laws required.
• He was never concerned about tainting himself by association, nor was he at all concerned about making himself unclean by touching the dead or the ill. Loving people and giving them a better life trumped all these concerns.

We can only accomplish our mission by getting close to those who need God the most. This is what faithful presence is all about.

Faithful Presence

As James Davison Hunter says so well, faithful presence means that within our spheres of influence we constructively challenge, undermine, and otherwise diminish oppression, injustice, enmity, and corruption and, in turn, encourage harmony, fruitfulness and abundance, wholeness, beauty, joy, security, and well-being. In To Change the World, Hunter says a faithful presence means you “Nurture the world where God has placed you.”

Nurturing our world means that we do what we can, however big or small that is, to make our part of the world a better place. Christians don’t need to be super smart, especially eloquent, or even particularly outgoing to change their part of the world. They can do it through direct action that they take or indirectly through influence. Even just a thought-provoking question or a quiet expression of an opinion can cause people to question their assumptions and gain a new perspective.

There are at least five ways we can have an effective, faithful presence in our society. Here they are.

Demonstrate God’s Love for All Humanity

First, faithful churches and Christians demonstrate God’s love for all humanity through acts of service. In this broken world few people have the life of shalom (health in every aspect of life) which God intended for us. Some go without food because the effects of the Fall have made parts of the world barren or only minimally productive. Many suffer because others take advantage of power or wealth. And some people become dependent on others because of disease or congenital mishaps.

Through acts of service, the church does what it can to correct or ameliorate these problems so that all people can experience as much shalom as possible.

• Churches can address the issues directly through their own programs, or they can address them indirectly through the many specialized Christian ministries which bring together knowledge, gifts, and skills from many local churches to address these issues. Local churches can have a mutually beneficial relationship with these agencies by using the principles and practices of good church-agency relationships which are documented in The Church at Work, a book available in the CCCC store.

About 200 Christian charities have adopted the Canadian Centre for Christian Charities’ Standards of Accountability and allow us to verify their compliance. They have earned our Seal of Accountability meaning you can confidently give generously to them. You can find a list of these charities at giveconfidently.ca.

• Individual Christians can do their part too. They can:
  • support the service programs of specialized ministries and/or their own church by donating or volunteering, or
  • they can do direct acts of service on their own initiative to people within their own sphere of influence as just a normal part of everyday life.

Christians are in every strata of society, so if all are engaged in serving the needs of those around them, we could be a tremendous force for good.

Proclaim Christ’s Gift of New Birth and Life

Second, faithful churches and Christians make evangelism not just a priority but a way of everyday life. The early church did have its full-time evangelists, but it did not professionalize evangelism. Ordinary Christians were powerful evangelists as well, as I’ve documented in other posts through the work of Michael Green and Rodney Stark.

Faithful churches and Christians must always be working to draw people to Jesus Christ, proclaiming the power of new birth and life which Christ makes possible.

Critique

Third, faithful churches and Christians risk being unpopular in order to be faithful, ready to say what is true even when people don’t want to hear it. If we love society, we will not hesitate to point out its blind spots for its own good. This is our prophetic role as society’s conscience.

For example, Timothy Keller says we must address society’s idols of personal happiness and self-actualization, which he links to consumerism, materialism, and greed, and consequently to injustices.⁵

Many Christians are ready to critique our society, but they don’t know how to do so in a way that will be effective. We need thoughtful critics, Christian think tanks and leading academics, to help us formulate positions and their supporting persuasive arguments.

Individual Christians can offer good critiques too, if they learn how to do it well. I attended an excellent one-day course put on by The OpEd Project, whose mission is to increase the range of voices and quality of ideas we hear in the world. The key points of the seminar can be found in their free “Resources” menu. People who want to speak out publicly will benefit by learning how to construct effective arguments using solid logic and good rhetoric (as is taught by The OpEd Project and others).

Affirm

Fourth, we need to affirm whatever we can in our society so that we are known for something positive. If we are willing to critique, we must also be willing to affirm.

Some people know God but aren’t doing much to serve their neighbours. Others are doing great acts of service to benefit their neighbours but don’t know God. Ideally, both would be true of everyone. But if not, doing good is still good in its own right and should be affirmed. And consider this, humanitarian secular people can, by doing good, unwittingly move society closer to God’s ideal. In some cases, God may even be using them to bring correction to the church. He certainly used ungodly kings and empires to bring correction to Israel.

To help us analyze culture and determine what to critique and what to affirm, William Webb wrote Slaves, Women and Homosexuals, which is about the hermeneutics of cultural analysis. He applies a hermeneutical model to those three issues as they are presented in the Bible to determine what is cultural and what is transcultural. The transcultural represents God’s ideal. If society is moving towards God’s ideal, we should support the move regardless of who is behind it.

Lead

Fifth, because of the church’s faithful presence over the centuries, it was able to lead society forward through its patronage of the arts, the establishment of schools, universities, and hospitals, and the many specialized ministries which care for the poor and needy.

How should the church provide leadership to society today? We need some imaginative and thoughtful people to get together for theological and missional reflection on this question. We need to consider God’s ideal human society, and develop some concrete proposals for what the church could do to help society move closer to God’s ideal. And then we need people who can make it happen.

Train for Presence

It’s been said that local churches should be known as servant communities which promote the common good, even though they do so from a counter-cultural perspective. Churches must, in Timothy Keller’s opinion, be an:

“alternate human society in which relationships are strong and deep — and in which sex and family, wealth and possessions, racial identity and power, are all used and practiced in godly and distinct ways. However, while the Christian church must be distinct, it must be set within, not separated from, its surroundings. Its neighbors must see it as a servant society, sacrificially pouring out its time and wealth for the common good of the city….The sacrificial service of a missional church will show the world, then, a “third way” between individualistic self-absorption that secularism can breed and the tribal self-righteousness that religion can breed.”⁶

Keller suggests that the church equip Christians to be missional in three primary ways.⁷ Here they are, with my comments:

1. As a verbal witness to the gospel in their web of relationships.
   • Training should include a good analysis of why people come to faith so they know better how to present the gospel. One great book that addresses this topic is I Once Was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught Us About Their Path to Jesus. The authors describe the factors that influence how people shift in their perspectives and become open to the gospel.
   • Churches should downplay what I call transactional evangelism (encounters with no context or potential for follow-up) and highlight relational evangelism within a person’s sphere of influence, where they know the person and can walk with them over time. We still need to be open to ‘God moments‘ and respond when opportunity presents itself, but if we have to prioritize our time either to creating transactional opportunities or to developing relational opportunities, my personal opinion is that the latter will be more effective. People will have time for relational evangelism if churches are more selective in what they ask members to volunteer for. They should evaluate their programs to see how effective they really are in terms of mission success. Decrease busyness and increase effectiveness!
2. As a person who loves their neighbours and does justice within their neighbourhood.
   • Churches should teach the biblical definition of justice so believers better understand what they might do to further justice. Justice has several meanings, including conformity to something (such as a mode of life or habits), to each according to his due, or proper recognition of someone’s rights. Justice is closely related to shalom, the original state of creation in which every person had their fair share of God’s resources and lived in perfect health and harmony.
   • Churches should also help their members see that even individuals can improve justice and build community with their neighbours. One inspiring book about individuals taking the initiative to build neighbourhood community is The Art of Neighboring: Small Steps to Building Genuine Relationships Right Outside Your Door which I’ve previously reviewed.
3. As people who can Integrate their faith with their work in order to engage culture through their vocations.
   • Christians should see their careers and work, no matter what they are, as a ministry in service of Jesus Christ. This gives work significant meaning, and the worker a richer perspective towards it.
   • They should be able to infuse their work with their faith and make their work an expression of their faith in action. One really good small group study on this topic is Christians in the Workplace. I’m sure there are many other resources.

Practice the Ideals in Church

Whatever ideals we present to society, we must make sure they are in place within our churches. Churches should be showcases for what God’s ideal society looks like. So practice within the church what we intend to preach outside the church.

May the Lord guide us as we live faithfully in the midst of people who are still far from him but who need to know him.

Key Thought: Christians are to sacrificially love people before they are lovable.

The Art of Neighboring book has been provided courtesy of Graf-Martin Communications, Inc. Available now at your favourite bookseller.

The post A Faithful Presence appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Good Deeds +

One of the things that stands out about the early church is how well known they were for their good deeds. Christians today are still performing lots of good deeds and contribute a lot to Canadian society. But doing good alone isn’t enough to accomplish our mission because it took more than that for the early church to grow and change society for the better. Some excerpts from previous posts describe what they did:

• Good Deeds: Emperor Julian complained that Christians made his government look bad: “[I]t is disgraceful that, when…the impious Galileans [Christians] support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us.”  They performed good deeds. (From Turning Points: Are We at One?)
• Evangelism: Church historian Michael Green found that, “The little man, the unknown ordinary man, the man who left no literary remains, was the prime agent in mission.”^{1 2} They were outstanding evangelists. (From 3.4% Is All It Took)
• Community: People were attracted to a new way of living in community as they saw the church meeting together daily, looking after one another’s needs, and enjoying their lives together in mutually meaningful relationships.³ The early Church built loving communities which cared deeply for their own members. (From And Everyone Liked Them)

These activities, which were the natural result of Christians living their faith, grew the church numerically and made it a driver of significant social change, ending infanticide and improving the welfare of women being two examples. (From The Church as a Change Agent )

So with that formula in mind, let’s look at good deeds, evangelism, and community and see how we can step up our game today.

Important Qualifications

1. This blog is entitled Christian Leadership Reflections and I need to stress the word Reflections. As I make various observations and suggestions in this post and in others to come, I offer them as the best thoughts I have to give to the church based on my reading and reflection. Many issues are complex and nuanced, so my posts are meant to stimulate deeper thinking on your part as a follower of this blog, and hopefully to inspire people who have thought a lot more on these topics than I have to run with the ideas and offer their proposals and guidance to the church. I will soon be adding a series called Voices to my blog which will consist of posts by leading Christian thinkers who are addressing the topics covered in my blog’s category labelled Community Leadership. This is the category I’ve used for the last year and a half for all my thoughts about the condition of the church today and my suggested strategies for the future.
2. I also offer my suggestions knowing that I do not perfectly model them yet. As I’m thinking about what needs to change in order for the church to be more successful today and in the future, I’m having to think about what changes need to occur in my own life. For example, what do costly good deeds (which I recommend below) look like for me? What do I know about creation care, pipelines, and the many stresses human behaviour places on our planet’s ecosystem, and my part in that? As I think and write, I am doing my best to find ways to implement in my life what I’ve been writing about so that I can say that I’m practising what I’m preaching. We are all moving forward together a step at a time as we reflect on what we the church need to be if we are to accomplish Christ’s purpose for his church.

Good Deeds

As a result of the overwhelming success of the early church in changing societal values, the ideas of human welfare, of compassion and mercy, and of social justice now permeate our society.

Doing good deeds with no strings attached was unheard of in Roman society because all relationships then were governed by the patronage system. The opposite of the patronage system is called disinterested benevolence, and that is what we have in today’s society. Disinterested benevolence is no longer a distinctly Christian activity because many secular people routinely perform good deeds with the same altruism as Christians. Doing good is just what caring people do. In addition, the modern welfare state is the fruit of our advocacy in previous centuries, and it has taken responsibility for many of the kinds of good deeds performed by the early church.

We can and should still do good deeds as we see opportunity, but if we present them as the definitive proof of the goodness of our faith, we won’t be persuasive. We should do good deeds because they are intrinsically good things to do, not because we are using them to fulfill an ulterior motive such as evangelism.

Here’s a thought to spark debate: Scott McKnight makes the case in Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church that doing good deeds isn’t kingdom work at all, but just what we are supposed to do as human beings.⁴

Costly Good Deeds

What got the early church noticed wasn’t its good deeds alone. It was the kind of good deeds they did. The early church attracted great attention because they did good deeds to help individuals even when doing them was costly to themselves. Helping an older person cross the street is a good deed, but not a very costly one. One of the costly good deeds the early church did was to rescue unwanted babies from the rivers where they had been tossed to die. They adopted them and raised them as their own children. Their willingness to make significant personal sacrifices to support their good deeds gave them a lot of moral authority.

Justice

Another way of doing good is at the group level, promoting justice for entire classes of people. Again, we should lead the way by doing this even when it is costly for ourselves to do so.

Most Evangelicals today are committed to justice as a critical part of God’s mission, but in Return to Justice: Six Movements That Reignited Our Contemporary Evangelical Conscience authors Rah and Vanderpol note that the justice issues we usually choose to engage with do not require much, if any, personal cost to us. The authors note that, “It is much harder to advocate for a cause that calls for personal repentance than one that only requires fighting a common enemy.”⁵ Repentance requires a true change in how you live. That can be costly.

For example, supporting efforts to end slavery and child labour in other parts of the world is in one way quite easy; we just do what we’re already really good at and make a charitable donation to support the cause. But if the church wants to be at the forefront in doing good, then we should do more than just give, and stop doing anything which actually supports the injustice which we’re trying to end. It’s counter-productive to donate to help end slavery and child labour when at the same time we buy goods which they produce. True repentance means we turn from a desire to get a good shopping deal for ourselves to a willingness to pay more for products that are made with fair labour.

Systemic Good

Western Evangelicals have been very good at responding to immediate needs. We see that people are hungry, and we send them food. But by focusing on individuals, Rah and Vanderpol say we miss the systemic injustices which caused their hunger in the first place. They write that “By framing poverty in such simplistic and sentimental terms, handouts may make it harder to see the complexities of poverty.”⁶

Christians should invest in learning more about those complexities so we can be smarter in terms of how we do good deeds. One great example of getting smarter about doing good is World Vision, which started out serving individuals needing help. It changed how it works as it learned more about poverty and the systems which support it. Their portrayals of the poor “moved from a focus on suffering and brokenness brought on by the fall to an emphasis on the image of God that is present in every human being.” They now see the poor in the light of the potential God has given them and that has changed how they help people.

Anyone wanting to develop a passion in their congregations for more than just handout programs will benefit from the Return to Justice book. It highlights six Christian movements/organizations which have reignited the Evangelical conscience in terms of justice issues. The book traces their development to show how they matured in their thinking and changed the way they work. In each case, they now deal with the systemic issues which keep people in tough circumstances.

We can likewise use what we have learned to better critique the social systems and structures which created the conditions in which poverty can exist. This may sound radical to some, but do we believe that God made a world with enough resources for everyone to live a decent life or don’t we? If people are in poverty in God’s world, something is broken and the church needs to act and contribute to fixing it!

Evangelism

The gospel message is about more than the afterlife, as important as that is. The ‘more’ part is actually the reason Christianity is growing so quickly in the Southern world today. People want redemption in this life.

Changed Life Now!

If everything we say to people when presenting the gospel concerns only life after death, then we miss the power of the gospel to change the way we live in this life. What attracted people to Christianity in the first few centuries wasn’t its other-worldliness but its prospect of a new, better, life in this world, right here, right now!

Salvation makes us right with God and has its eternal rewards, but it also enables us to fulfill the petition Jesus taught us to pray to his Father: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We must take the time that is left to us in this life to do God’s will among our families, friends, and workmates.

Meaning & Significance

The gospel also gives meaning to our lives and personal significance. Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks provides an interesting perspective on the role that religion can play in society, and although he makes it a common benefit of religion in general, what he’s describing is particularly apropos of the gospel of Jesus Christ. His point is that religion gives meaning to life:

We have secularized knowledge, power, and morality, with the result that life no longer has meaning. “Science tells us how but not why. Technology gives us power but cannot guide us as to how to use that power. The market gives us choices but leaves us uninstructed as to how to make those choices. The liberal democratic state gives us freedom to live as we choose, but on principle refuses to guide us as to how to choose…. Religion has returned because it is hard to live without meaning.” ⁷

While we should talk with individuals about their souls, evangelism includes the potential to speak prophetically to the public about the meaning and significance of our lives in the here and now. This is very much in line with the great Christian commentators of the past, such as C. S. Lewis.

A Way of Life

The early church was powerfully effective at evangelism because individual believers had had powerful encounters with God, and they knew with absolute certainty what God can do to change lives because he had changed theirs.

Every Christian should have such a direct, personal experience of God’s life-transforming power that they are impelled to passionately share the Good News of Jesus Christ and can speak to how their faith impacts the choices they regularly make. Head knowledge alone will not give people the drive and passion that the early church had. We should treat evangelism as a normal part of life based on our personal experience of God working in us.

Real Community

In a world of neighborly anonymity and (pseudo) cyber intimacy, the church has a crucial counter-cultural and prophetic role to play in restoring a sense of place…The church was and is the cohesive community in an atomized, fragmented world. Charlie Self ⁸

Our society is so hyped on personal autonomy that it has become fragmented into ever-smaller groups of people with an overall diminishing of community and relationship. Yet people show how much they long for both through the use of social media. We can offer more than transient likes and virtual friendships. Social media is great for staying in touch, but it is no replacement for real, face-to-face, in-person friendships. We offer life in meaningful, close association with other people. Let’s be sure they find what they are looking for in our churches.

Alternative Community

McKnight’s thesis in Kingdom Conspiracy is that the kingdom is not built through political activity but through creating an alternative community within the church which is fully engaged with the outside world. We can’t overstate the importance of the quality of life inside the local church to the effectiveness of the church’s public witness.

In Transforming Mission, David Bosch says we should make our churches into contrast societies, countercultures that show society what human society looks like free from the idols of race, wealth, sex, power, and individual autonomy. Individuals of all sorts, religious and atheist, Christian or not, can be moral giants doing incredibly good deeds. Where the Christian Gospel is unique is in producing a loving community. We can show Christlikeness individually, but it is just as important to show Christlikeness through our corporate life together. Timothy Keller⁹

People today rely on big government and institutions to do what families and communities used to do in the past. Perhaps things were easier when we all lived on farms and had multi-generational families living together, but even so, we should show how people, by being more connected with each other, could at least partially replace government and institutional programs with something more human.

The early church built an alternative community that cared for its own and featured relationships which crossed all kinds of boundaries: social, economic, racial, ethnic, etc.

In The System Has a Soul, Hunter Baker suggests a good place to start modelling a better community is to start with ourselves as individuals and:

• Stay committed to our spouses
• Care for our parents
• Work on sustaining a stable and peaceful household in which all members feel heard, cared for, and respected
• Get to know your neighbours and do favours for them
• Honour our commitments¹⁰

The Power of Modelling

Modelling the kingdom of God in our church communities as best we can could have a very powerful effect on outsiders. We may feel powerless in exile, but Rabbi Sacks is quite encouraging when he notes that even though Abraham did not seek to impose his views on others, his contemporaries sensed there was something special, something godly, about him.

• Milchizedek, king of Salem, saluted him with the words, “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth” (Gen 14:19).
• The Hittites said to him, “You are a prince of God among us” (Gen 23:6).

Abraham impressed his contemporaries by the way he lived. He didn’t force or even urge others to live his way. He was true to his faith while blessing others regardless of their faith.¹¹ We can do the same as a minority community in a host society.

Conclusion

We need to do good, and do it sacrificially. We must evangelize, and be sure to talk about both life in heaven and on earth. And we must ensure our church communities are truly caring communities.

Key Point: Doing good deeds is basic to being human. What the church really offers is a distinct, alternative society.

“The books, Kingdom Conspiracy and Return to Justice, have been provided courtesy of Graf-Martin Communications, Inc. Available now at your favourite bookseller.”

The post Stepping up Our Game appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

• its founder was executed,
• it originated in a backwater corner of the empire,
• its initial leadership was a riffraff of nobodies or people held in low esteem.

It is astonishing that Christianity overcame a mighty empire without resorting to violence or political pressure. Instead, it had a powerful idea that proved irresistibly attractive as Christians lived it out and others experienced its blessings. Personal conversions by personal choice from both paganism and atheism to Christianity changed the Empire peacefully from within.

The history of ancient Christianity’s growth appeals to us because it gives hope that such growth could happen again—maybe even today! The growth was fueled by ordinary believers who were highly effective at sharing their faith.

Folks, we can do this!

Sociologist Rodney Stark’s¹ statistical regression analysis on the growth of Christianity shows the enormous impact that ordinary believers had. Because Paul takes up so much of the New Testament, it’s easy to believe that he single-handedly caused the growth of our faith. But that’s not true. Stark’s analysis shows that Paul’s missionary work as an evangelist had no significant, independent effect on Christianity’s growth, while those of the Hellenistic and Diaspora lay communities had strong, significant, independent effects on the growth of our faith. This is not to disparage the work of Paul—far from it—but it does show the power of the laity when they take the Great Commission seriously!

Again, folks, we can do this!

Ancient Church Growth

According to Stark’s analysis, Christianity grew from about 1,000 adherents² in AD 40 to 52% of the Roman Empire’s population in AD 350. That’s impressive!

Stark has done extensive analysis of the growth patterns and correlated church growth with many other factors such as urban/rural locations, trading routes, pre-existing religious beliefs in the area, social-economic status of adherents and so on. While God works in the hearts of people hearing the gospel and calls them to himself, Stark shows how the evangelism of ordinary believers brought the faith to them so that it permeated Roman society.

What this means is that God did not have to do anything miraculous to grow the church. He worked through human agency, blessing his people as they lived Christian lives. The growth rate they achieved from AD 40 to 350 was 3.4% per year, every year, for 310 consecutive years. Is that possible today? Could we hope to match what the ancient church experienced?

Yes!

The same God who was at work among the ancient Christians is still at work among us today. And while Christianity overall is currently growing at 1.2% per year, we know that 3.4% is quite doable. In fact, global Pentecostalism grew by 5.4% per year, every year from 1970 to 2014 (the most recent year we have statistics for), proving that growth can be sustained over several decades when people are passionately committed to living out their faith just as those of the ancient church were.

Church Growth Today

Evidence shows that only the Evangelical section of the church is growing as a percentage of the Canadian population, so let’s focus on it as the source of Christianity’s future growth. There are two key numbers:

1. In Canada, Evangelicals are currently estimated to be 12% of the population (including the Evangelically aligned in the Roman Catholic and Mainline Protestant churches), which is about where the Christian population of the Roman Empire was at around 305.³ So it’s not like we’re starting back at square one today! That’s encouraging.
2. The Canadian population is expected to grow at 1% for the next several decades, which is the same growth rate the Roman Empire experienced between AD 14 and 168 (and presumably after as well), so we could see similar results in similar timeframes.

This is exciting information!! Considering what these two numbers are telling us, all we need to do to match the early church’s growth rate is to have every 29 Evangelicals bring one person to Christian faith every year, for the next 45 years. That’s not attracting someone from another branch of the Christian faith, or even from another church, to your church. That is every 29 Evangelicals bringing someone of no faith or a non-Christian faith to Christian faith every year.

That’s my vision for the church. Sustained incremental growth that exceeds the general population growth. Continuously. For the next 45 years at least, and preferably forever after until there’s no one left to convert. Forty-five years would get us to about half the population of Canada.

A Do-Over

I’m not suggesting that we want to reach 50% in order to gain political power or any other sort of power. In fact, if I had a chance for a do-over of the ancient church’s growth, I would want the church to reject to being made the state religion. When that happened, the church got off track. Having status as the official religion of Rome caused some people to convert to Christianity only to advance their careers, status, and wealth. Nominal converts started to fill some leadership roles. The weakening of true Christian faith within churches was the impetus for the Desert Fathers and Mothers to move out into the wildernesses in protest and to keep the faith pure.

State accommodation and support of religious activity in general is fine, but a state church or religion poses serious problems to the integrity of our faith and our churches.

Strategy for Growth

My intent isn’t for your church to set a goal to grow at 3.4% a year. You can if you want, but that statistic is really just an encouragement to engage in an activity which brings hugely significant results over time. It is also meant to spur you to look for evidence of fruitfulness from your congregational members. We shouldn’t settle for merely being busy with church programs and serving existing members. We can’t be satisfied with transfer growth. We must have a holy discontent if we aren’t seeing something like the Lord adding to our numbers every day.

If there’s no conversion growth in your church, that means your church is perfectly designed to not produce conversion growth! Something will have to change.

You might get some good ideas to stimulate church growth from the reasons Stark found for the ancient church’s success:

• Christianity offered the world monotheism stripped of ethnic encumbrances. Everyone could worship the One True God while remaining people of all nations. This is great news for a multi-ethnic country like Canada. Encourage and support ethnic and multi-ethnic ministries.
• Conversion, Stark says, is primarily about bringing one’s religious behaviour into alignment with that of one’s friends and relatives, not about encountering attractive doctrines. Ancient Christians evangelized using their social networks of family, friends, and business acquaintances. These broad networks allowed for crossing social boundaries, just like LinkedIn does when someone you know knows someone in a different social strata from yours. So pastors, get your congregation engaged in mission within their own social networks.
• Conversion is more about being attracted to a way of living than a set of beliefs. Therefore, Christians need to live distinctly Christian lives which give evidence to faith at work in daily life. They need to seriously reflect on how their faith should affect how they live and the choices they make. If faith doesn’t result in a distinctly Christian lifestyle, it isn’t as deeply held as it should be.
• Doctrine becomes much more important after conversion. The better a person understands God as knowing and caring about them as an individual, the more the person is inspired to a life of commitment, devotion, and service to God. Pastors, make it a goal that every member of your church will have a life-giving theological and spiritual vitality. This is the foundation for effective mission work. There is no place for people to stay with a shallow or casual faith in the Christian church.
• Stark refers to people having religious capital, which is the amount of time, effort, and emotion invested into a religious belief. People attempt to conserve their religious capital, and so it is more difficult to convert a person from one religion to another because of the cost of giving up their religious beliefs. The closer their beliefs are to Christian beliefs, the easier it is for them to convert. For example, the cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis (which flourished in the Empire from Julius Caesar’s time through to the fourth century AD) had concepts of resurrection and after-life which made its cult members more amenable to conversion to Christianity than members of other cults. They could lose the specifics of the Isis cult, while keeping their belief in the afterlife. The easiest conversions, though, are by those who have no religious beliefs. Stark says that today the people most likely to convert to Christianity are those who were raised in nonreligious homes. This is good news because in Canada we certainly have lots of these! The second easiest conversions are adherents of other monotheistic religions.

Okay, Let’s Go!

The church should be growing significantly if its adherents are acting on their faith and the Great Commission. If we’re not getting real conversions, from non-Christian belief to Christian belief, at a level above the population’s growth rate, then we need to ask ourselves “Why not?”

The ancient church was driven by passion to share their faith with unbelievers. They were willing to make significant personal sacrifices to demonstrate God’s love to a needy world. Let’s pick up the challenge they have left for us. I find this personally challenging, as you probably do too, but let’s trust God and take Christ’s mission for the church as our own personal mission!

Key Thought: Vibrant faith is expressed through evangelism

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Over the last century, many faculties of theology have been converted into faculties of religious studies. What does it matter? Well, it comes down to the place of religion in society. If we don’t have a place at public universities, then the study of theology becomes uniquely a responsibility of educational institutions within our religious world, publishing with publishers from within our sector who are ignored by the major book reviewers, and we lose one more point of contact with broader society as we talk just amongst ourselves.

Christian Intellectuals

My point is that John is an evangelical scholar, a Christian intellectual with credentials that are respected outside of our Christian culture, making him just the right person to speak to academia. He was able to muster a solid, intellectually sound argument speaking up on an issue that most of us are either unaware of or haven’t given much thought to, and even if we were aware and thoughtful, we would not be equipped to argue for our interests, and then even if we were so equipped, we still wouldn’t have the credibility to be heard by anyone. An evangelical scholar, particularly a sociologist or theologian, is what Alan Jacobs¹ refers to as a Watchman – a person who is in the vanguard of a group. They see things before we do because of the world they inhabit, the top-tier of culture formation.

Since culture change starts with the cultural elites (the true intellectuals who often are incomprehensible to the average person), it takes time for their ideas and agendas to be understood, translated, and further disseminated by people who can bridge the elite and popular worlds. By the time you and I see what is happening, it is too late to have much influence on the change. We are forced into a reactionary mode as opposed to a mode of proposal and discussion. Intellectual watchmen (let’s say watchers to include everyone) are best placed to see what is developing among the thinking of other elites and enter into discussion while ideas are still being shaped.

For example, although they were ultimately unsuccessful, during World War II we had a number of Christian intellectuals, the two most famous being C.S. Lewis in Britain and Reinhold Niebuhr in America, who debated with their secular counterparts as to the kind of society we should have after the war. They were “deeply concerned that even if the Allies won, it would be because of technological and economic, not moral and spiritual, superiority; and if technocrats were deemed responsible for winning the war, then those technocrats would control the postwar world.”²

And, of course, that’s exactly what happened. But at least we were present in the debate, well represented by intellectuals who made a case for a better world. We had a voice at the table. Without the Christian intellectuals, our perspective would not even have been voiced.

What Happened to Christian Intellectuals?

After the war, Christian scholars migrated to educational institutions within the Christian sphere rather than the public sphere, and the secular academic and philosophical fields were left without a strong Christian voice since the 1950s to provide an alternative perspective. There was no one of a different perspective to thoughtfully critique the world that was being designed on a level of debate that the secular world would understand and engage with.

Fortunately, in the last two decades there has been quite a resurgence in Christian scholarship, not least among Evangelicals. We still need more people who can speak the language of the academics and philosophers and who have the credentials that will be respected by a secular audience, but the current trend is encouraging.

It is to the church’s advantage to have a strong intellectual life. Throughout our history, from Paul and the early Church Fathers through the Reformers of the sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth century we have always had a strong intellectual life. It is only in the twentieth century that parts of the church lost their intellectual life.

It started as part of the pushback against the liberal Protestant church when Fundamentalists withdrew from higher education, which they saw as dangerous to faith. Then, against the dreams of the intellectuals who founded the Neo-Evangelical movement in the 1940s and who valued higher education, many parts of the Evangelical church also fell into the same suspicion of higher education. It’s hard to develop a new generation of scholars and evangelicals when higher education is discouraged.

The lack of influence the Evangelical church has on our world today is partly due to the dearth of Evangelical intellectuals through the second half of the twentieth century. The issue for us now is, how do we support the Christian scholars we do have? And how do we not only replace them as time progresses, but greatly increase their numbers?

Promoting the Church’s Intellectual Life

Here are some ideas for promoting the church’s intellectual life. You can add more in the comments below!

Promote Higher Education

Tomorrow’s intellectuals are among us today as our children and youth. Parents, pastors, and youth ministries need to encourage all children and youth to make the most of their God-given abilities. If they have the intellectual potential to do well with higher education, they should find community support. This means that:

• We need to train all of our church members, but particularly our younger members, to think very deeply about their faith. It must move from a basic understanding to a rock solid “I know what I believe and why.” This requires us to be comfortable with having our Christian peers and children wrestle through the issues. They need to be able to express doubts without being condemned. We shouldn’t leave them to struggle with faith privately. And they need more than facile, trite answers from us.
• Rather than being suspicious of higher education as a place where faith is lost, we can prepare students to function well in the secular world while maintaining a strong faith.
  • We can acquaint them with the views they will encounter and how Christians can respond appropriately and meaningfully.
  • Role models are always important for showing young people what their potential could be. There are lots of stories and small group video series on Christians in the workplace. A particularly good small group study is called just that, Christians in the Workplace, which includes interviews with Christians working in places of high influence.
  • We need to raise the significance of being called to secular work. Why should we celebrate someone going to bible college more than the one going to a secular college?
• It would be great to have current Christian scholars and intellectuals share their ideas about how to promote the education and careers of promising young adults.

Amplify the Voices of Our Intellectuals

Why not lend your audience to the scholars and other intellectuals who are relevant to them? For instance, when I come across a post from a deep thinker that is especially relevant to the future of the Evangelical church, I could promote the message to my audience. You could do the same with your audience. I will write a paragraph about why their post is important and link to their blog. (Aside from being a courtesy to the author by sending people to their blog, linking is far better than reposting because Google downgrades sites in its search results that merely duplicate content from other sites.)

You could also incorporate their ideas into your own posts and articles. Take a good idea as a jumping off point for your own post. Be sure to give credit to them and link to their books or blogs.

Invite them to speak at your conference, or write for your newsletter. If their ideas relate to your audience, there’s nothing better than inspiring your audience with really big, new ideas.

Support Their Institutions

People generally respond well to the urgent and the immediate.

• If there is a pressing need, we give.
• If there are immediate results, we give.

But the nature of intellectual life is that the returns are usually long term and very incremental. Patience is vital to success. You really need an expansive vision to see the importance of investing in high level thought leadership. It is too easy to overlook the need to fund ministries working in the intellectual part of our world.

In a previous post, I promoted both Cardus and Context TV as two organizations worthy of support for their work in culture formation. Trinity Western University’s proposed law school is another. It would be (I think) the first top-tier institution in Canada in terms of Hunter’s culture matrix, and for that and many reasons, TWU deserves our generous support.

In a Faith Today article, Gordon T Smith, president of Ambrose University, makes an outstanding case for “The Church + The Academy” partnership.

 Add Thought Leadership to Your Ministry

Individual ministries can support the work of Christian intellectuals by rising to the second tier of Hunter’s culture matrix: advocacy and public education. Take the ideas flowing out of the top-tier which relate to what your ministry does, add your own deep understanding and experience, and then package it to be readily understandable and practical to your supporters. You can raise the intellectual life of the church by educating your supporters about the deeper issues of your cause.

Inner city missions, for example, can discuss not just the compassionate work they do, but also the social and systemic conditions that cause people to need their services. International development agencies could address the complexities of giving aid while at the same time building sustainable communities in challenging national economies.

Final Thought

The heritage of the Evangelical wing of the church is very much in frontline ministries serving immediate needs. Think of the Wesleys, the Booths and others who went out to the people. We tend to value “on the ground” work and might think we don’t have time for the conceptual. But it is that very work, the conceptual, which fuels the life of a community, keeping it vibrant, creative, and able to deal with the issues of the day. Deep thinkers who are attuned to the Holy Spirit. Christian intellectual life deserves our full support.

Key Point: Societies, including the church, need intellectuals as the creative foundation for continued life and growth. 

The post The Intellectual Church appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

And yet a study of evangelicalism will show that one of our assumptions is that to change people is to change culture. We just need to change enough people. Our default strategy for culture change is evangelism, winning the world one-by-one, hoping that a tipping point will be reached where democracy reigns and our culture shifts to become what God designed it to be. The goal of this strategy is to change culture from the bottom-up.

Will Our Strategy Work?

James Davison Hunter, in his book To Change the World gives two examples which clearly show that shaping contemporary culture is not a democratic, bottom-up process. In Hunter’s words:

1. “Jews have never comprised more than 3.5 percent of the American population…Yet the contribution of the Jewish community to science, literature, art, music, letters, film, and architecture is both brilliant and unrivaled.”¹
2. “A similar story of influence can be told of the gay community. At most 3 percent of the American population, their influence has become enormous, again disproportionate to their size.”²

In contrast to these two communities, evangelicals make up about 12% of the Canadian population and 25% of the American population, but the two smaller groups have been able to effect much greater cultural change. Obviously the tools of democracy won’t make the changes we want to see.

How Culture Changes

Cultural Elites

Culture change is initiated by cultural elites. They are philosophers, academics, and high concept artists who have the intellectual capacity and the social capital to initiate and sustain cultural change. They use their platforms and networks to set their agenda in motion.

Initiating Cultural Change

Cultural elites think at the most abstract, theoretical, high-brow level. They are largely unknown to the general public because their audience isn’t the general public, but instead other cultural elites and people who can use their positions of power or influence to convert the output of the elites into something more accessible to the public.

Disseminating Cultural Change

The output from the cultural elites is then disseminated through people who can interpret it and pass it along to the leaders and opinion-setters in society. Professors spread the new ideas in universities and publish peer-reviewed articles in law journals. Advocates pick up the ideas and publicize them to politicians and the public. Writers create screenplays based on their ideas and movie producers bring them to the masses.

Implementing Cultural Change

Finally, the public experiences the new culture as it is realized. The theoretical becomes practical and we start living the new culture. The high brow becomes low brow and the rest of the creative arts and literature communities jump in producing their interpretations of the new culture. Abstract morality is given legs, for example, in terms of what we choose for our own lives, what we promote in the public school system, and the type of volunteer work we do for our communities. When all this is happening, we can say that culture has been changed.

The following chart summarizes the components of culture change.

Scaling

Changing culture is never a task for loners and it can’t be accomplished with just one or two tactics alone. Culture change demands a multi-pronged holistic approach. It needs the whole package described above, every element working together, to make real, lasting change. Advocacy alone, for example, isn’t enough because it is not supported by the intellectual, philosophical, and aesthetic components of enduring culture change.

The matrix of people and institutions working together which Hunter describes is a very powerful strategy called scaling. Cause-related secular organizations take scaling very seriously because it works!

In the face of such a concerted effort by elites from different sectors all coalesced around a common goal, one-off legal and political victories won through advocacy don’t mean very much. Those wins just aren’t sustainable against a holistic campaign by the cultural elites that seems to come at the general public from all sides.

Looking through history, Hunter finds that:

“At every point of challenge and change, we find a rich source of patronage that provided resources for intellectuals and educators who, in the context of dense networks, imagine, theorize and propagate an alternative culture. Often enough, alongside these elites are artists, poets, musicians, and the like who symbolize, narrate, and popularize this vision. New institutions are created that give form to that culture, enact it, and, in so doing, give tangible expression to it….They do not gain traction in the larger social world until they challenge, penetrate, and redefine the status structure at the center of cultural life. Invariably, as we have seen, this process results in conflict.”

Christians and the Elites

Christians are noticeably absent from the ranks of the cultural elite in contemporary society, unlike in the days of William Wilberforce and the “Clapham Sect,” when they themselves were among the cultural elites. Today’s cultural elites likely have no religious background at all and, as Eric Metaxas writes in his essay “Cultural Elites: The next unreached people group,” they are people who need to know Jesus.

We also don’t have much in the way of institutional or other support for abstract, theoretical, thought leadership.

• Evangelicals, for example, have lots of institutions, but they were created to fulfill our own needs, not to influence culture.
• What institutions we have are on the periphery of cultural production.
  • Our books, for example, aren’t reviewed by the major reviewers.
• Physically, Hunter notes that Christian institutions are not located in the cultural power-house cities of New York and Los Angeles, but in smaller cities away from the limelight. The situation is the same in Canada. Lorna Dueck’s show Context, is an exception, being located right in the CBC’s Broadcasting Centre on Front Street in downtown Toronto. Lorna is located literally in the very centre of cultural production, and her show presents a thoughtful Christian perspective on issues of the day that everyone is thinking about. Her ministry deserves our support!
• Our Christian cultural output (art, books, etc.) is for the popular market, not the conceptual or intellectual market.

Culture shaping at the abstract, theoretical, high-brow level currently just isn’t a priority for Christians, so it doesn’t look like the situation will get any better soon.

• Hunter found that, in 2004, four secular foundations alone provided over $200 million in grants to secular arts and culture. The largest Catholic and Evangelical foundations gave a total of $10 million.
• On top of that, one secular foundation alone gave $12 million for individuals (called ‘geniuses’) working in scholarship, invention, and social innovation. The Catholic and Evangelical foundations gave nothing to support our promising people.

The only Christian think-tank in Canada that I can readily think of is Cardus. They are doing a lot not only in thought leadership on big picture societal issues, but also in promoting the value of religion to the Canadian public. They also deserve our support!

Imago Arts Canada is another ministry worthy of support. It promotes Christian art, advocates for the arts, has addressed social issues, and promoted science/religion dialogue.

Solutions

So, what’s the way forward?

Theological

Jeremy Begbie writes in For The Beauty Of The Church that when the New Testament writers write about a vision for the future, they move from the future to the present. They start with what “God will finally do,” and then “dare to claim that this future can start now.” The Holy Spirit invites us to share in his work of re-creating the present in light of that future. This is what Jesus did when he announced the in-breaking of God’s kingdom. Right where he was, he lived life the way it should be lived.

Begbie notes five aspects of the future described in Revelation 21 which we should reflect on and see what we can do to introduce them into the present:

• The Spirit unites the unlike – there is a diversity of peoples and nations in heaven all united under God.
• The Spirit generates excess – God’s provision is more than enough to meet the needs of the nations.
• The Spirit inverts – the rewards of heaven are not based upon the way we earn rewards in this present life.
• The Spirit exposes the depths – sin is exposed for what it is, and the reality of suffering is acknowledged, and then tears are wiped away and replaced with joy.
• The Spirit recreates – the world is liberated from all that isn’t right.

Let these five observations about God’s future become a matter of prayer and reflection, and see where the Spirit guides you.

Faithful Presence

Hunter Baker, in The System Has a Soul, and James Davison Hunter in his book, both call for us to have a faithful presence in our society. Baker describes what that looks like, saying:

“A faithful presence involves offering critical resistance to those things that do not lead to human flourishing, and making an extended effort to retrieve social goods that have been lost or are in danger of being lost. But all of this should be done without any real effort to impose….Faithful presence means that we pursue, identify with, and labor toward the good of others.”

Again, make this a matter of prayer and reflection. How could you and your ministry have a faithful presence where God has planted you?

Engage & Join the Cultural Elites

If we want to join the cultural elite and contribute our own ideas to the mix, we need a three-pronged strategy:

1. First, we should treat the cultural elites as an identifiable people group who have not yet heard the Gospel, and engage them. They need Jesus as much as anyone.
2. Then we should get behind and help advance the careers of Christians who have the potential to be among the cultural elite. Mentoring and scholarships would be key components of this strategy.
3. Finally, we should build our institutional capacity in the fields of education, philosophy, and the arts to support our cultural elites.

This last point is brief, but it holds within it a huge, complex project similar in scale to the one developed by Billy Graham and his cohort in the 1940s. Have you a heart to do something similar today? What can you do to make it happen?

Key Thought: Christians need to build the full mix of cultural resources if we want to participate in the development of our culture.

The post How Culture Changes appeared first on CCCC Blogs.