Bandits No More

June 14, 2010

Avoiding the Sausage Factory

Filed under: Discipleship,Leadership,Salvation — rheyduck @ 8:17 pm

I like sausage. While I don’t like every kind of sausage I’ve ever tried, I like many of them. From what I’ve heard though, if I want to continue eating sausage I ought to avoid sausage factories. If I visited a sausage factory I’d see what goes into it – all the parts of the animal that people in our culture won’t buy any other way.

Paul addresses most of his epistles to “saints.” The saints in Rome, the saints in Corinth, the saints in Thessalonica, are the recipients of these letters. We think “saint” and “really holy, righteous person” comes to mind. Then we start reading these letters and we discern from Paul’s comments that these folks were not what we’d call “really holy, righteous people.” Yes, they had come to follow Jesus. Yes, they were church members and church leaders. But they didn’t get everything right. A fair number of them still looked like sinners.

We know the message of Jesus was holiness and righteousness. But we make some mistakes when we hear that message and try to instantiate it in our churches.

First, we sometimes thing that Jesus is telling us that being holy and righteous is the way to get in. That’s why I have people in my churches who ask, “Preacher, am I good enough to get in yet?” The answer is always, “No, but it doesn’t make any difference.” It’s not goodness that gets us in, it’s Jesus.

Second,  we expect that righteousness and holiness from others. If we’re insiders of the church, assuming our own righteousness and holiness, we might exclude folks who just aren’t as good as we are. If we’re outsiders contemplating coming in, we might shy away or give up when we discover that the insiders (the folks who are already there) are a bunch of hypocrites, proclaimers of a righteousness and holiness they fail to embody.

An easy response would be to say that righteousness and holiness are completely irrelevant. Since we are saved entirely by Jesus, what we do doesn’t matter. Since what we do doesn’t matter we can do whatever we want. Problem is, that doesn’t look like Jesus (or the rest of the NT) either.

I have a few suggestions as we seek to protect people from the “sausage factory” of the church.

First. we need to be forthright about our sin. Sin is not just a matter of imperfection (we’re only human), not just a small thing. Sin is big enough that it brought Jesus into the world and to the cross. Our sin is never to be easily dismissed or excused.

Second, complete forgiveness is available through Jesus. We confess, he forgives. We repent, we find deliverance.

Third, as we experience the mercy of God found in Jesus, we learn to live lives of gratitude. We let our expression of gratitude crowd out our experience of sinfulness (I’m just a horrible worm, worthy of nothing but hell) and our status of saint (I’m holy and righteous) so that the people around us get the sense that what we are is due to Jesus.

Fourth, we don’t present the church as a utopia – a place for perfect people. There’s a sense in which the common image is true: church is like a hospital. A hospital is a place for healing of the sick; a church is a place of healing for sinners. No sick folk, no hospital; no sinners, no church.

Fifth, it’s usually wise to avoid the particulars when talking to the church as a whole. It’s not usually effective in our setting to shame people into repentance. More often that strategy repels people. So we admit upfront that we are sinners, that we are a place for healing and forgiveness, but observe a sort of spiritual HIPAA when in public.

Sixth, sometimes we have to deal with particulars. We have troublesome church members. We have sin addicts sometimes in prominent positions in the church. This is the heart of the sausage factory. In at least some cases it it is the job of the leader (or leaders) to just bear with people. We seek their deliverance form sin, their healing from its effects. But we don’t advertise the sin or what we’re doing about it.

What do you think? Have you found effective ways to handle the “sausage factory” like aspects of the discipleship process?

November 23, 2009

Wright on Justification – 8

Filed under: Justification,N.T. Wright,Paul,Salvation — rheyduck @ 4:55 pm

Notes on N.T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision, Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2009.

Chapter 7 – Romans

The biggest failure of traditional (“Old Perspective”) readings of Romans is the failure to include key portions of the letter in the argument. When read traditionally, the parts of Romans 2 that talk about the role of works, chapter 4 on Abraham, and especially chapter 9-11 are awkward appendages, perhaps seen as illustrative material at best.

Addressing Romans as a whole, Wright begins by clarifying that Romans 1:16-17 is a statement about the effect of the Gospel, not a sample of the content of the Gospel. The Gospel, for Wright, is about Jesus, about what God has done through him. The people who experience this work, broadly taken as “salvation,” are those who believe, whether Jew or Gentile.

The most controversial part (for Reformationally minded theologians) of Wright’s account of justification comes in his exegesis of Romans. He refuses to ignore that pesky section in Romans 2 that speaks of the “doers of the law being justified.” Wright insists that justification has two moments – a present moment where our status as part of the people of God is entirely based on faith in the Messiah and a future moment where we will have to give account to God. The present verdict (“Justified!) anticipated the final verdict. Against the logic of Medieval Catholicism, carried over into Protestantism, this is not the logic of merit, of earning. Wright says “it is the logic of love.” (p. 188) The Spirit is the key player here. Wright says,

The pastoral theology which comes from reflecting on the work of the Spirit is the glorious paradox that the more the Spirit is at work the more the human will is stirred up to think things through, to make free decisions, to develop chosen and hard-won habits of life, and to put to death the sinful, and often apparently not freely chosen, habits of death… [Paul's form of synergism is] a matter of being released from slavery precisely into responsibility, into being able at last to choose, to exercise moral muscle, knowing both that one is doing it oneself and that the Spirit is at work within, that God himself is doing that which I am doing. (p. 189)

Paul’s discussion of the failures of the Jews in Romans 3 is not simply to point out that they, like the Gentiles are sinners. Rather, his aim is to show specifically that they have failed in their mission. Missing this is a form of de-Judaizing Paul, a common track in theology.

Even more than his willingness to include Romans 2 in his discussion of Paul’s doctrine of justification, Wright’s treatment of Romans 4 stands out. As I observed above, traditional views of Romans tend to see Paul’s discussion of Abraham in Romans for as a mere illustration. That approach marginalizes Paul’s use of Genesis 15 and the place of justification in that text. Abraham’s concern in that text is not that he is a sinner in need of salvation. His perceived problem is that God has promised to bless him by giving him a family – and here he is, getting to be an old guy, and he hasn’t had a single child. How can God possible solve this problem? Justification in Genesis 15 – and hence in Romans 4 – is about family. How is God going to get a family? Who can count as being part of this family? Do you have to be part of the blood line of Abraham to make it in? Paul, on Wright’s reading, emphatically emphasizes that family membership, counting as part of the people of God – i.e., receiving the status of “justified” – is by faith, not by physical inheritance. Through salvation coming to the Gentiles, through their faith in Christ, God’s promise to Abraham would finally be fulfilled.

Much of the confusion in current teaching on justification stems from a continued assumption that justification has to do with merit. While Medieval Catholicism spoke of the merit of the individual, traditional Reformation theology turned to the merit of Jesus. “We all know,” they seemed to say, “that salvation comes from being good enough. The problem is no one was good enough. So God sent Jesus, and Jesus was good enough. Through his obedience, i.e., his being good enough, he amassed enough merit for us. By faith in him, his merit is transferred to our account, enabling us to be accounted ‘righteous,’ i.e., ‘justified.’” Wright rejects, rightly, I believe, this whole train of thought. Legalism, or moralism, whatever, the form, is not God’s way.

Chapter 8 – Conclusion

A nice quote to end things: On the positive side – “Scripture forms a massive and powerful story whose climax is the coming into the world of the unique Son of the one true Creator God, and, above all, his death for sins and his bodily resurrection from the dead.” And on the negative side – “Any attempt to give an account of a doctrine which screens out the call of Israel, the gift of the Spirit and/or the redemption of all creation is doomed to be less than fully biblical.” (p. 250)

November 18, 2009

Wright on Justification – 7

Filed under: Justification,N.T. Wright,Paul,Salvation — rheyduck @ 8:35 pm

Some notes on N.T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision, Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2009.

Chapter 6 – Interlude: Philippians, Corinthians, Ephesians

A key issue in Philippians: the connection between the status of God’s people (as God’s people) and the life that flows out of that status. Looking at the role of the Law in this, Wright says,

The keeping of the Law was not a way of earning anything, of gaining a status before God; the status was already given in birth, ethnic roots, circumcision and the ancestral possession of Torah. All that Torah obedience then does – it’s a big “all,” but it is all – is to consolidate, to express what is already given, to inhabit appropriately the suit of clothes (‘righteousness’) that one has already inherited. (p. 145)

Looking at 1 Corinthians 1:30, Wright summarizes what Paul says of Jesus:

  1. Jesus is the incarnation of God’s wisdom. His way of wisdom is vastly different from the way of the world.

  2. “He has become ‘righteousness,’ that is God has vindicated him… Those who are ‘in Christ’ share this status.” (p. 157)

  3. In becoming ‘sanctification’ Jesus has defeated sin and its power.

  4. He has become “redemption for us because “in him God has accomplished the great new exodus, the crossing of the Red Sea of death.” (p. 157)

In 2 Corinthians, Wright’s focus is on 5:21. He works mightily to make sure that verse, so often used as the foundation of a doctrine of “imputed righteousness,” is read in it’s context, in this case, of Paul’s apostolic apologia. Examining the structure of the the verses that immediately precede it, he notes how repetitive that structure is. In each case there is a statement of the work of Christ followed by a statement of ministry that flows from it. Read this way, the phrase commonly taken to refer to the imputation of righteousness, “so that in him we might become the righteousness of God,” is paraphrased by Wright as “in the Messiah, we might embody God’s faithfulness, God’s covenant faithfulness, God’s action in reconciling the world to himself.”

He argues that this reading makes much better since of the verb “become” than does the traditional reading. If this passage were trying to make the traditional point about imputation it one would expect it to use a different kind of verb to express our relationship with righteousness: we might gain it, or receive it, or even be covered by it. But become it? Traditional imputation teaching doesn’t say anything about us becoming the righteousness of God (unless it takes the force of become to be equivalent to one of those other verbs). Finally, and importantly, Wright also observes the importance of Isaiah 49 to Paul’s argument here.

Wright’s treatment of Ephesians – which he regards as Pauline – and its treatment of justification, can be stated very briefly. Ephesians 2, perhaps more clearly than any other text, lays out the individual and social dimensions of salvation (using that larger term rather than the narrower “justification”).

November 17, 2009

Wright on Justification – 6

Filed under: Bible,Books,Justification,N.T. Wright,Paul,Salvation — rheyduck @ 2:07 pm

Some notes on N.T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision, Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2009.

Chapter 5 – Galatians

Like other authors, Paul cannot ever say everything that needs to be said all at once.

Justification in Galatians means “to be reckoned by God to be a true member of his family, and hence with the right to share table fellowship.” (p. 116) The “works of the law” in Galatians are not referring to morality, but to the elements of the law that divided Jews from Gentiles and marked them off as a separate people. Rather than being marked off by the law, the people of God now are marked off by faith, by trusting in Jesus the Messiah.

What, according to Wright’s reading of Galatians, was the purpose of the law? He says,

The law was given to keep ethnic Israel, so to speak, on track. But it could never be the means by which the ultimate promised family was demarcated, partly because it kept the two intended parts of the family separate, and partly because if merely served to demonstrate, by the fact that it was impossible to keep it perfectly, that Jews, like the rest of the human race, were sinful. The Messiah’s death deals with… this double problem. (p. 118)

In much of contemporary Christianity, the perceived problem Jesus came to address was the fact that I – and everyone else – am a hell-bound sinner in need of salvation so I can spend eternity with God. Wright sees Paul in Galatians identifying the problem differently. The problem Paul sees is defined in terms of Abraham, Israel, and God’s covenant – and the appearance that God’s way of working (the law) wasn’t working to achieve God’s desired ends. For Paul, therefore, the Messiah comes “So that we (presumably Jews who believe in Jesus) might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” (p, 124) God’s original plan, laid out in the promise to Abraham in Genesis 12 (1. I will bless you; 2. All nations on earth will be blessed through you) is still in effect. The problem was Israel almost always settled for the first part of the promise and cared nothing for the second part. They liked being the Chosen People, but forgot that they were Chosen specifically to be God’s agents of blessing to the rest of the world. The Messiah came to fulfill that unfulfilled (and apparently unfulfillable) mission. Through this way of looking at things, doctrines we separate – soteriology and ecclesiology – are held tightly together. This point is absolutely essential for understanding Wright’s take on justification.

November 16, 2009

Wright on Justification – 5

Filed under: John Piper,Justification,N.T. Wright,Salvation — rheyduck @ 2:07 pm

Notes on N.T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision, Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2009.

Chapter 4: Justification: Definitions and Puzzles

Wright notes the importance of Alister McGrath’s historical work on the doctrine of justification. With McGrath he notes that we need to avoid the common mistake of thinking talk of justification can substitute for the talk of salvation. The latter concept is much larger and includes the former.

We are easily led astray by confusion of the shifts in usage over time of di,kaioj and its cognate forms over time and through various languages. “Righteousness,” “justice” and “justify” do not mean the same thing and cannot simply be interchanged with each other. He proceeds to consider the lawcourt setting of righteousness in Hebrew thinking. In that context the term “denotes the status that someone has when the court has found in their favor… It does not denote, within that all-important lawcourt context, ‘the moral character they are then assumed to have,’ or ‘the moral behavior they have demonstrated which has earned them the verdict.’” (p. 90) Wright’s reasoning, then, is very different from that drawn from Augustine (and found in traditional Catholicism) working from a medical metaphor, of justification as transformation of character.

Wright critiques Piper’s marginalization of Israel for its consequent marginalization of Abraham in Paul’s writing. For the tradition represented by Piper, Abraham in Romans and Galatians is purely an illustration of the life of faith. Because of Wright’s emphasis on the ongoing covenantal work of God in history, through Abraham, through Israel, Paul’s use of Abraham is much more than an illustration. It is precisely through Abraham that God seeks to bring righteousness to the whole world.

When Wright speaks of “Covenant,” he’s including four interlocking aspects:

  1. “The way in which Israelites in the OT, and Jews in the second-temple period, understood themselves as the people of the Creator God, and… thought of the purposes of this God as stretching beyond them and out into the wider world.” (p. 95)

  2. The centrality of God’s call of and covenant with Abraham (particularly in Gen. 15 & 17), and the covenantal language of Deut. 27-30.

  3. The conviction in the second-temple era that they were part of the same divine story line as what they read in the OT.

  4. Paul’s thinking about the coming of Jesus the Messiah as a fulfillment of the covenant and a continuation of the OT storyline.

When he speaks of “Eschatology,” he is thinking of these dimensions:

  1. Paul believed God’s work was teleological, working toward the redemption of God’s people and all of creation.

  2. The point that differentiated Paul, the Jew, from other Jews of his age was his conviction that the covenant had climaxed in Jesus the Messiah, inaugurating the Kingdom.

  3. Though the Kingdom had been inaugurated, it was not yet fully established.

He offers a really brief summary of his important points: (p. 101)

  • “Eschatology: the new world had been inaugurated!”

  • “Covenant: God’s promises to Abraham had been fulfilled!”

  • “Lawcourt: Jesus had been vindicated – and so all those who belonged to Jesus were vindicated as well!”

Through the text Wright insists that doctrines that are too often held apart – Ecclesiology, Soteriology, Eschatology, Christology – must be help tightly together. Turning to the last of these, he makes seven points.

First, he clarifies his use of typical terms used in Christology: Jesus, Christ, Son of God, Lord.

Second, he talks about the meaning of Messiahship.

He turns third to the work of the Messiah. For Paul, the job of the Messiah, performed by Jesus, was “to offer to God the ‘obedience’ which Israel should have offered but did not.” (p. 104) This is what Paul means when he speaks of the “faithfulness of Christ.”

Fourth, in his death, the Messiah stands in for the people, taking their death for them, defeating sin.

Fifth, and this is greatly expanded in Wright’s Resurrection of the Son of God and, more popularly, in Surprised by Hope, Jesus’ resurrection is the beginning of the new creation.

Sixth, the gift of the Holy Spirit is an essential element of this new creation and our experience of it and life in it.

Finally, Jesus, as Messiah and resurrected Lord, will be the judge on the last day.

November 15, 2009

Notes on Wright – Justification – 4

Filed under: John Piper,Justification,N.T. Wright,Salvation — rheyduck @ 8:20 pm

Notes on N.T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision, Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2009

Chapter 3 – First Century Judaism: Covenant, Law, and Lawcourt

Getting to heaven when they died was not the major concern of first century Judaism. Rather, they were concerned with the fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel. It was common for Jews of the time to understand themselves to still be in a time of exile. This concern and solutions to is found expression in a variety of what we might call Judaisms. (It’s important to recognize, he says, that Judaism was not just one thing at that time.) Daniel 9, with its outline of God’s promised salvation, was prominent in several strains. In v. 7, the Lord’s righteousness is referenced – God’s righteousness in sending judgment on Israel, and God’s hoped for righteousness in bringing them redemption. The notion that God’s righteousness is primarily God’s faithfulness to his covenant is central to Wright’s whole argument in the book.

Piper, in contrast, proclaims that God’s righteousness “is God’s concern for God’s own glory.” (p. 64) Wright offers five reasons for rejecting this definition.

  1. Piper ignores most of the scholarship on the righteousness of God. He does praise Piper for not going the direction of much popular talk of emphasizing righteousness as a relational term
  2. Piper’s argument centers on the imputation of righteousness to the believer. If God’s righteousness is “God’s concern for God’s own glory,” it is hard to imagine the logic of this being imputed to believers.

  3. Since he treats Israel as at most illustrative, he misses key parts of Romans.

  4. Piper’s treatment of the lawcourt imagery doesn’t work well. Status is what is in view here. “When the judge in the lawcourt justifies someone, he does not give that person his own particular ‘righteousness.’ He creates the status the vindicated defendant now possesses, by an act of declaration.” (p. 69)

  5. The whole biblical story is not only about more than me and my salvation, it is more than simply about God’s reputation. It is, rather, a story about God’s great love and loving actions on the behalf of all of creation. Responding directly to Piper he says, “God’s concern for God’s glory is precisely rescued from the appearance of divine narcissism because God, not least God as Trinity, is always giving out, pouring out, lavishing generous love on undeserving people, undeserving Israel and an undeserving world.” (p. 70f)

November 14, 2009

Wright on Justification – 3

Filed under: Books,Justification,N.T. Wright,Salvation — rheyduck @ 4:58 pm

Notes on N.T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision, Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2009

Chapter 2

Wright lays out the basic rules he works from:

  • Let the various writings interpret each other.

  • He sees the battles over the authenticity of some of the Pauline epistles as being warped by the theological conviction that a particular reading of Romans (and secondarily, Galatians) is the “Real Paul,” providing us with criteria to exclude other works, most importantly Ephesians and Colossians, as non-Pauline. Wright, who often wonders how things might have been different had the modern church started from Ephesians rather than Romans, find a coherent teaching through the whole traditional corpus.

  • Scripture and the Christian tradition must be brought together, with creativity and close attention.

  • Following Thiselton, he claims “we need to understand doctrines, their statement, development, confutation, restatement and so on, within the multiple social, cultural, political, and of course ecclesial and theological settings of their time.” (p. 45)

  • Exegesis of Pauline texts, not a Procrustean effort to make the text fit our tradition or desires, is the essential starting point.

  • Work from the Greek text. Wright believes that anyone who relies on the NIV to understand Paul, will, because of that translation’s errors and idiosyncrasies, surely fail to get Paul.

November 13, 2009

Wright on Justification – 2

Filed under: Leadership,N.T. Wright,Salvation — rheyduck @ 5:19 pm

Notes on N.T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision, Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2009

Chapter 1

The dominance of a particular reading of justification within the reformed tradition has tended to shape the understanding of theologically concerned protestants the past couple of centuries to such a degree that it seems as obvious as the fact that the sun goes around the earth. Just step outside. Look up. Watch the sun move (but don’t stare at it, lest you go blind). Geocentrism is perfectly obvious. Yet dead wrong. Wright says, “The theological equivalent of supposing that the sun goes round the earth is the belief that the whole of Christian truth is all about me and my salvation.” (p.23) He claims, to the contrary, that “God made humans for a purpose: not simply for themselves, not simply so that they could be in relationship with him, but so that through them, as his image-bearers, he could bring his wise, glad, fruitful order to the world… God is rescuing us from the shipwreck of the world, not so that we can sit back and put our feet up in his company, but so that we can be part of his plan to remake the world. We are in orbit around God and his purposes, not the other way around.” (p.23-4)

Wright also uses the image of a jigsaw puzzle, accusing much study of Paul in recent generations of leaving out several important pieces. Cut out the Israel, Eschatology, Holy Spirit and History pieces of the puzzle, and theology – in this case, the doctrine of justification – will look very different.

November 12, 2009

Wright on Justification – 1

Filed under: Books,John Piper,Justification,N.T. Wright,Salvation — rheyduck @ 4:50 pm

In this and future posts I will be sharing my notes on N.T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision, Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2009. If you haven’t read it yet,  it’s well worth your time.

In light of the talk in some segments of current American Christianity about the “plan of salvation,” I find Wright’s subtitle ironic, and exactly to the point. Usually “plan of salvation” refers to the explicit steps an individual needs to take to get saved, which in this context is the equivalent of getting eternal fire insurance. Wright holds the OT and the NT much closer together, seeing “God’s plan of salvation” as stretching from Abraham, through Israel and the church, to the current day. God’s objective is not merely to rescue individual sinners (more, not less!) from hell, but to rescue all of broken creation, damaged, marred and corrupted as it is by Adam’s sin.

This particular volume is a response to John Piper’s The Future of Justification: A Response to N.T. Wright. Wright’s account of justification has been seen by the hard-core Reformed as insufficiently biblical (by which, according to Wright’s account of their account, they mean insufficiently in line with the tradition of reading the bible on justification stemming from Luther and moving onward). Wright, along with many others associated with the so-called New Perspective on Paul, believe the starting point to understanding Paul is neither Augustine vs. the Pelagians nor Luther vs. Medieval Catholicism. Instead, Paul must be read as thoroughly immersed in the OT. To the extent that we miss Paul’s close reasoning about Jesus from the OT (his Bible), we will fail to understand his teaching on justification (and just about everything else).

Wright identifies four themes, marginalized by Piper and the narrow version of the reformed tradition he represents, that come together in Paul’s teaching on justification.

  1. Jesus is the Messiah of Israel. Jesus’ Messiahship cannot be understood apart from the call and story of Israel.

  2. Based in the story of Israel, Paul’s approach to justification is thoroughly covenantal. Justification in Paul follows more or less directly from God’s covenant with Abraham.

  3. Justification is lawcourt language. It has to do with the verdict God the judge pronounces. It has nothing to do with moral performance – either positive (Jesus) or negative (ours).

  4. Justification in Paul is mixed up in eschatology. There are two movements, present and future (or final) in justification.

March 5, 2009

Discipleship Goals #5

Filed under: Evangelism,Five Practices,Ministry,Salvation — rheyduck @ 9:56 pm

Evangelism, the apparent traditional equivalent of what we now call “Radical Hospitality” closes out this series on the characteristics we try to build into the lives of disciples in our work of disciple making. This equation may be my least favorite item in our current lingo. It blurs the distinction between two important aspects of our life together as Christians. This blurring may not be so serious since “evangelism” itself has become blurred over the past century or so. Because of these blurrings and the resulting confusion (and conflict), I’d prefer to talk here about our work of helping people who are not followers of Jesus become followers of Jesus.

In ideal circumstances (sticking to the bible), becoming a follower of Jesus would happen at roughly the same time as becoming a part of the institution known as church. We lack those ideal circumstances today. Talking about “Radical Hospitality” seems to lend itself to the latter (becoming a part of the church) more than to the former (becoming a follower of Jesus). While having greeters,  clean restrooms, plenty of parking, a tidy nursery, and plenty of signage are signs of hospitality and can be conducive to people sticking around long enough to hear the gospel and become followers of Jesus, they have no necessary connection to this goal. In other words, if all we have is a friendly, well directed, clean church (maybe even with coffee and donuts), we can fail to win a single person to Christ.

In another area of blurring, we can engage in “social action” all day long, every day of the year, and never win a single person to Christ. Jesus clearly calls us to live out his Kingdom reality. He clearly calls us to give food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty, to visit the infirm and imprisoned, and to heal the sick. But if we never call people to repentance and faith in Jesus, we’re missing something essential.

We aim to produce disciples who through their daily living demonstrate the reality and goodness of God in such a way that  people will ask questions. These disciples when then boldly open their mouths and tell of Jesus and how to put faith in him.

  1. Disciples share a conviction that they have a central role in evangelism. Since many of us in the mainline church are mortally afraid to speak to others – unless the subject is anything but Jesus – we really wish God would just do the work without us. God almost never does the work without us. People will not come to faith in Jesus unless we obey God and go to them.
  2. Disciples have a passion to reach those who don’t know Jesus. Some of the people we connect with Jesus will be our friends and relatives. Others will begin as total strangers. Jesus’ passionate love for us brought him into the world – a world that usually wanted nothing to do with him, a world that, in the end, killed him. As followers of Jesus, we have that same passionate love for people. We’re not content to see them missing out on the life Jesus offers. While there are arguments for universalism – the notion that all will be saved regardless of their desire to be saved, their faith (or lack thereof), or anything else – we realize that when we act as if universalism is true we are not betting our lives (we’re already followers of Jesus, after all) but the lives of others. Universalism could be wrong.
  3. Disciples understand evangelism as the work of the church, not merely (or even primarily) of individuals. When we think of helping others become followers of Jesus we think of people like Billy Graham. We know we’re not Billy Graham. We then dismiss the possibility that we might have a role in the process. We aim to make disciples who recognize not only their essential role in the process, but also that no one can do the work alone. Because people are different and have different life stories, they will come to faith in different contexts. We need the whole body working together, demonstrating the grace and mercy of Jesus together, so that people might believe.
  4. Disciples want there to be ample opportunity for pre-Christians to see for themselves the power of Christ in our lives: transformed lives, healings (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual), quality of relationships, etc., so that when they hear the Gospel they can understand it in terms of what they’ve seen. Words are essential for people coming to faith in Christ. Words alone, however, are almost never enough. As we let God live in us and through us (individually and corporately), people see for themselves what God is like and what God has done. Our words are merely the captions for those pictures.
  5. Disciples want the church to be aware of the needs of the community God has set us in, and have a desire to glorify God by meeting those needs.  Christianity gets part of the credit/blame for what we call modern individualism. Jesus calls us each to respond individually to him. But all of us are embedded in some community, usually a set of overlapping and interlocking communities. As messengers of the Good News, we seek to demonstrate God’s reality not only to individuals but to our communities: to families, neighborhoods, cities, towns, tribes and nations. One way we do that is by allowing God to meet their needs through us.
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