I’ve been traveling an abnormal amount the past couple of months speaking at churches in Boston, NYC, Chicago, etc, about the new church plant in San Francisco. All of this travel has offered me an opportunity to get to know a few “single-serving friends” (a reference from Fight Club) and this past weekends flight to San Diego was no different.
Enter Ted.
Before the plane even made it to the tarmac, Ted introduced himself and asked what my occupation was (the million dollar question where the answer would surely put an end to any ensuing conversation) to which I responded, “I’m a pastor”. Immediately Ted shifted in his seat a bit, almost uncomfortably, but then something changed in his demeanor and he turned to me and began to ask questions about our congregation in San Francisco and what exactly a church plant is/looks like. I answered his questions one at a time before he began an onslaught of questions from all sorts of different angles, “What is truth, what’s your stance on homosexuality, how can you trust the Bible, how do you understand the Trinity, what’s your training, why are there so many denominations if Truth is unified, isn’t seminary pointless, etc, etc, etc.” Let me say up front that I’ve never experienced such a wide-range of questions in such a short amount of time and it literally caught me off guard leaving me a little off kilter and discombobulated.
Ted asked permission to tell his story, and so I listened as he started with the line, “I have a lot of Christian friends who don’t consider me to be a Christian… I grew up in a Buddhist home before joining the church.” Ted continued his testimony all the while utilizing some of my answers to the onslaught of questions he asked earlier to make his points and solidify the position of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (read: Mormonism). For the majority of our flight (1 hour, 8 minutes) I was being evangelized by a Mormon and had no clue. Ted, presented himself as a person seeking understanding and answers to some of life’s hardest questions before spinning on a dime and presenting Mormon Doctrine and belief, asking me to read the introduction of the Book of Mormon and following the instructions to believe in the One True Church.
Ted, was more than likely in his mid to late 40′s, over twenty-five years removed from his Missionary Journey as a 19 year old and yet still sought opportunities as a missionary to share his faith. I must say, that I was very impressed with his boldness, with his willingness to engage with me on a 9:50p flight to San Diego and his friendliness.
I realized, in retrospect, the formula that the Mormon Church uses for evangelism:
Upset the equilibrium of your opponent by questioning their belief system as a seeker of truth. By raising questions to which they are unable to answer provide you with a platform down the road to speak your truth into the situation, thus pointing them in a new direction
Share your personal story and point out the inconsistencies and questions of your previous way of thinking by inserting your “opponents” thoughts into the mix as well. This will give you common ground and begin to create agreement.
Point to the Book of Mormon an ask the listener (no longer an “opponent”) to read the Introduction on their own time and follow the instructions, praying for guidance and a “burning in the bosom.”
Hope the person doesn’t ask any questions outside of your presentation because you’re not really prepared to go “off-script”
This presentation is wildly effective, hence the growth being experienced by the Mormon Church, however taking the conversation off-script reveals a great lack of depth behind the scenes.
I look at my conversation with Ted and I wonder why the church isn’t more effective in presenting the Gospel, in pointing towards the Kingdom of God and specifically Jesus… especially if we truly believe it is the hope of the world! How did we lose our way in this? What has been the greatest source of our undoing in this respect? Have we lost our boldness? Do we no longer rely on the Spirit? Or are we simply just unprepared?
Ted taught me a great deal about the importance of story and how we as the Church miss the boat on pointing towards Jesus and the Kingdom of God…
“The Church is the hope of the world.” These are the words Bill Hybels has been preaching at Leadership Summits and Conferences, printing in books and writing in articles for many years, but my question is not whether it’s true but if it’s actually being lived out by the church.
On Tuesday morning (1.20.09), Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States under the banner of hope and a promise of change. Obama’s rise from obscurity was nothing short of remarkable, but he achieved this by tapping into the hunger and desperation the country (and the world) was seeking: Hope. Obama’s message was tailored throughout the campaign, and even now in his first few days of office, specifically around the idea of hope which has laid dormant in the hearts and minds of Americans. Ultimately Obama did a tremendous job of exegeting our culture and this masterful understanding not only won him the election but elevated him as the symbol of hope in this country and around the world.
What happened to the church being the hope of the world?
Perhaps a statistic can help us with the big picture. In a recent survey conducted by Lifeway Research, 72% of respondents said the church is “full of hypocrites.” It’s no secret that the public image of the church has taken a major hit, but how did we get to this point?
During the election season, much of the church stood vocally opposed to the election of Barack Obama and his message of hope, sealing the image of the church as destroyers of hope. Despite where you stood in the election, the church’s response to Barack Obama was neither gracious, loving, and least of all hopeful. Perhaps the most startling example was from Focus on the Family in a letter written by Dr. James Dobson entitled Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America [pdf] which declared that the hope Obama would bring is nothing short of the destruction of the Christian faith and unraveling the fabric of American life. In the eyes of the public, the church stood diametrically opposed to hope. This was perhaps the final nail in the proverbial coffin.
For far too long the church has engaged in “hell-fire and brimstone” tactics and strategies that have veered more on the hope-less rather than bringing hope and promise to a world starved for a message of hope. The church’s role is to fill the void with a new hope, however we haven’t and instead of filling it we’ve left a gaping expanse. Barack Obama simply filled the void left by the church.
The church hasn’t done the hard work of listening, of trying to understand what the country is clamoring for (hope-which is exactly what the gospel offers when presented as good news instead of “hell-fire and brimstone”). We haven’t changed our approach to express the hope of the Kingdom of God and as a result Obama has become the symbol of hope reserved for the church because of Jesus. (Never more was this more clear than on Tuesday.) Now we’re left in a position we should have never been in the first place.
It’s time for the church to listen to and learn from Obama, to understand how he speaks to the country and the way in which he communicates a new hope for a new age. It’s time or us not to hitch our train to him, but to ride his coattails and prepare the way of hope by using his language and his rhetoric in ways that communicate the gospel. We can learn from his exegesis of the culture in such a way that eventually we will be able to take up the mantle of hope in the public square once again. Let me be clear: This is not about systematically embracing his political viewpoints and promoting his public policy. This is about learning how he communicates hope to the culture, something we have obviously forgotten how to do.
Remember, in four to eight years Obama, like Bush, will fade into history. Unless the church is there and prepared to pick up the ball of hope and run with it, we’ll have missed our opportunity once again to be the symbol of hope as the bride of Christ. And instead, to the rest of the world, hopelessness will be the banner by which we operate.
Tim Keller writes a striking statement in his book The Reason for God (p.152), “If there is no God, argues Nietzsche, Sarte, and others, there can be no good reason to be kind, to be loving, or to work for peace” (emphasis mine). This is an all-or-nothing statement, that if proven true, radically changes the landscape of atheistic perspective. Every time someone, Christian or not, performs an unloving, unkind, or un-peaceable act we promote an atheistic perspective to the world. Simply put, this is how you can be an evangelist for atheism.
The flip side to this statement pre-supposes that love, peace and kindness are the sole-possession of theism, particularly a Christ-centered Theism as in Keller’s case. That last statement alone makes this idea hard to swallow if you focus on the outward fruit of many who call themselves Christian in our global village.
This makes me wonder, has the church really become a place of “Evangelical Atheists”? Obviously that’s a strong statement, and immediately I’m forced to backtrack and say that there are many congregations and many Christ-followers throughout the United States and around the world who would not fit into this category, however I think it’s safe to assume the majority of our society believes the stereotype of Christianity as judgmental, fear-mongering, war-mongering, right-wing extremists. How did we get to this point? Certainly it didn’t happen overnight?
Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote this back in 1919 in his essay The Sense of God’s Reality, “Atheism is not our greatest danger, but a shadowy sense of God’s reality. We do not disbelieve that God exists, but we often lack a penetrating and convincing consciousness that we are dealing with him and he with us.” Is the problem outlined by Fosdick after the turn of the 20th century the same at the turn of the 21st century, or perhaps magnified to a greater extent?
What I find interesting about Fosdick’s statement is how it presents itself in the prayers of the Christian. It seems without fail, whether in distress or painful circumstances at dinner or in small group we throw in the line “God be with us” or at the beginning of our worship services the prayer is heard “We welcome you here Lord.” I wonder how ridiculous those statements seem to an omni-present God who is already there, already comforting, already working and moving. I believe what this shows us more than anything is how right Fosdick was, that we live in the greatest danger of all: a shadowy sense of God’s reality… we don’t experience a perpetual presence of God’s reality.
Has the church lost its voice, its power because of our own atheism, our own practice of the absence of God? Have we, as Jesus stated of the Ephesians, “Forsaken our first love”?
Mark Driscoll’s sermons are mostly too racy to post on GodTube, the evangelical Christian “family friendly” video-posting Web site. With titles like “Biblical Oral Sex” and “Pleasuring Your Spouse,” his clips do not stand a chance against the site’s content filters. No matter: YouTube is where Driscoll, the pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, would rather be. Unsuspecting sinners who type in popular keywords may suddenly find themselves face to face with a husky-voiced preacher in a black skateboarder’s jacket and skull T-shirt. An “Under 17 Requires Adult Permission” warning flashes before the video cuts to evening services at Mars Hill, where an anonymous audience member has just text-messaged a question to the screen onstage: “Pastor Mark, is masturbation a valid form of birth control?”
Driscoll doesn’t miss a beat: “I had one guy quote Ecclesiastes 9:10, which says, ‘Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.’ ” [Read on...]
Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
N.T. Wright
Harper Collins—Religion | Theology – Eschatology | Church Life
295 Pages
“Surprised By Hope is this generations Mere Christianity,” commented a fellow pastor here in the city of San Francisco. There has been a great deal of attention paid in the media to this work from a spot on Nightline and The Colbert Report to an article in TIME Magazine and an insightful interview by Brian Lowery in Preaching Today (among many others). Each article and interview seems to deal more with his conclusions rather than the framework by which he works to arrive at those conclusions (a good third to half of the book creates the framework through which his conclusions are derived.)
Wright concludes from his extensive New Testament research that our understanding of the afterlife is incomplete and because we fall short in our understanding we’ve constructed an after-life that is completely foreign to the understanding of the New Testament and early Christians. Instead of living out eternity in heaven (according to Colbert it entails getting a harp, drinking a mint julep and asking Ronald Reagan questions) singing songs to God all day while sitting on clouds, heaven is a mere step in the process before life after life after death occurs when the new heaven and the new earth are merged into one as described at the end of Revelation.
Therefore, the Christian response is to work towards new creation not sitting back to wait for the end of the world to occur. Perhaps what is most intriguing about this position is Wright alludes to and at several points calls out the fact that many Christians, including those in the United States are contributing more to the destruction of the world instead of new creation. We participate in this destruction with how we treat the environment (pollution, nuclear proliferation, destruction of rain forests and other environmental concerns) as well as how we treat others through economic slavery (the insurmountable debt we place upon third world countries, trade regulations, etc) and a slew of other ways. None of these hep to bring about new creation, but instead play into the systematic injustice of the worlds ruling structure.
Perhaps the most important thing to recognize about this book is the underlying thesis that your eschatological position truly does determine how you act and respond in the world. If you live as if “Left Behind” and the Rapture are to occur (Wright does a great job of de-bunking pop-theologies interpretation of 1 Thessalonians 4) then there is no reason to give a rip about anything on this planet, from poverty and economics to war and violence and the only point become “saving souls” in a very gnostic understanding so that our spirit can enjoy life in the spiritual realm.
This is hands down the best book I have ever read. The call to action integrated with the amazing framework created by Wright for you to enjoy in Part 1 is a veritable playground for the mind.
I’ve never seen the video of this story, but I’ve heard about it time and again. There’s a priceless, beautiful truth that resounds as the beauty of Jesus’ Kingdom is revealed.
The Gospel is like a seed, and you have to sow it. When you sow the seed of the Gospel in Israel, a plant that can be called Jewish Christianity grows. When you sow it in Rome, a plant of Roman Christianity grows. You sow the Gospel in Great Britain and you get British Christianity. The seed of the Gospel is later brought to America, and a plant grows of American Christianity. Now, when missionaries come to our lands they brought not only the seed of the Gospel, but their own plant of Christianity, flower pot included! So, what we have to do is to break the flowerpot, take out the seed of the Gospel, sow it in our own cultural soil, and let our own version of Christianity grow.
–Dr. D.T. Niles of Sri Lanka
