On Speaking the Truth In Love – Elephant Room 2 Edition

It seems that Christians will always be in conflict.  We are at war with the world, the flesh and the Devil.  Often we even have conflict within the church.

Recently there was a conference of conversations called “The Elephant Room” where the host invited TD Jakes to participate.  Though Jakes calls himself a Christian, the fact that he rejects the doctrine of the Trinity and affirms a prosperity gospel would separate him from what we normally think of as orthodox Christianity.

As this controversy gained momentum in cyber-space I was pleasantly surprised to note the loving tone being used by may of the writers.  I found this post by Voddie Baucham to be especially helpful.  Voddie found himself in the middle of this situation by turning down an invitation to participate in “The Elephant Room 2″ conference, but by initially accepting an invitation to speak at a men’s conference at the same church.  Listen in to hear how Voddie explains the situation, his reaction and the Truth of the Gospel.

As I look ahead, I think two things are very important.  First, I believe T.D. Jakes is wrong on the doctrine of the Trinity, and wrong on the gospel.  I am also involved directly in a matter (the ER2 controversy) that has brought discussion of those facts to light.  Consequently, my mandate to “hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it” (Titus 1:9) obligates me to be on record in the matter.  I have done that.

Second, the racial overtones of this matter have gotten out of hand (see here, for example), and must be addressed.  The ER2 controversy is now pitting black evangelicals against white evangelicals, and against each other with T.D. Jakes as the centerpiece.  This is an opportunity to pull back the curtain on the awkward racial dynamic in evangelical circles.  Race is a convenient ‘dodge’ for those with weak arguments, and an inconvenient truth for those who harbor prejudice.  Beyond that, it is an absolutely confusing subject for myriad evangelicals who simply love Christ, love his church, and want desperately not to offend their brothers and sisters in the Lord by using “black” when they should have used “African American,” or vice versa!

The irony is that this issue is most pronounced when heterodoxy is in play.  For example, when a white evangelical disagrees with a solid, Reformed, black pastor on a technical theological issue, there is rarely a charge of racism.  However, let that black brother be part of a heterodox or heretical group (i.e., Oneness Pentecostalism, Word of Faith, Black Liberation Theology, etc.), and suddenly the white brother who makes the argument against him faces charges of racism!  Why?  Partly because of… RACISM!

You see, some of this boils down to what has sometimes been called, “the soft bigotry of lowered expectations.”  Asking black people to adopt orthodox theology (when Lord knows they don’t have access to the same schools, books, opportunities, and, in the minds of some… lack sufficient intelligence) is asking them to negate their blackness.  While, on the other hand, the solid, Reformed, well-educated black pastor is NOT REALLY BLACK.  Therefore, he’s fair game.  Irony of Ironies… that is racist!  And that’s what has to be dragged out of the shadows.

I’m not angry with James MacDonald.  He’s my brother, and I love him.  We disagree.  We both understand that.  Ironically, that’s what The Elephant Room is supposedly all about.  Brothers should be able to disagree with one another and still be brothers.  There’s just one problem:  Embracing Jakes while rejecting others because we question his history of modalism and Word of Faith teaching… that’s the real “Elephant in the Room”?

You can read the full article here: http://www.gracefamilybaptist.net/voddie-baucham-ministries/blog/elephant-room-2012-01/

Why People (not just young people) Are Leaving the Church

Over the holidays many of us will reconnect with friends and family that the church has “lost.”  Live out the Gospel, ask good questions, give real grace and LISTEN!

Six Reasons to Join a Growth Group

Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life and pastor of Saddleback Community Church, writes …

1. A small group moves me out of self-centered isolation. It’s the classroom for learning how to get along in God’s family. It’s a lab for practicing unselfish, sympathetic love. You learn to care about others and share the experiences of others: “If one part of the body suffers, all the other parts suffer with it. Or if one part of our body is honored, all the other parts share its honor” (1 Cor. 12:26 NCV). Only in regular contact with ordinary, imperfect believers can we learn real fellowship and experience the connection God intends for us to have (Eph. 4:16, Rom. 12:4–5, Col. 2:19, 1 Cor. 12:25).

REAL fellowship is being as committed to each other as we are to Jesus Christ: “Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers” (1 John 3:16). This is the kind of sacrificial love God expects you to show other believers—loving them in the same way Jesus loves you.

2. A small group helps me develop spiritual muscle. You’ll never grow to maturity just by attending worship services and being a passive spectator. One of the main tools of spiritual growth is participation in a small group, where your spiritual muscles get a regular workout. The “As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love” (Eph. 4:16.)

Over fifty times in the New Testament either the phrase “one another” or “each other” is used. We‘re commanded to love each other, pray for each other, encourage each other, admonish each other, greet each other, serve each other, teach each other, accept each other, honor each other, bear each other’s burdens, forgive each other, submit to each other, be devoted to each other, and many other mutual tasks! These are your “family responsibilities” if you claim to be a part of God’s family. Who are you doing these with?

Isolation breeds self-deception. It’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking we’re mature if there is no one to challenge us. Real maturity shows up in relationships. We need more than the Bible in order to grow; we need other believers. When others share what God is teaching them, I learn and grow too!

3. A small group confirms my identity as a genuine believer. I can’t claim to be following Christ if I’m not committed to any specific group of disciples. Jesus said, “Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples” (John 13:35 NLT). When we come together in love as a small group from different backgrounds, ethnicities, and social status, it’s a witness to the world (Galatians 3:28, John 17:21). You’re not the Body of Christ on your own. You need others to express that. Together, not separated, we are his Body (1 Cor. 12:27).

4. A small group is the best way to share my God-given mission in the world. When Jesus walked the earth, even he had a small group! Today the church is Christ’s Body on earth. We’re not just to love each other; we’re to take that love together to the rest of the world. We’re his hands, his feet, his eyes, and his heart. He works through us in the world “He creates each of us to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing” (Eph 2:10 Msg).

5. A small group will help keep me from spiritually backsliding. None of us are immune to temptation. Given the right situation, you and I are capable of any sin. God knows this, so he has assigned us as individuals the responsibility of keeping each other on track. The Bible says, “Encourage one another daily … so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness” (Heb 3:13).

“Mind your own business” is NOT a Christian idea when it comes to helping each other! We’re commanded to be involved in each other’s lives. If you know someone who is wavering spiritually right now, it’s your responsibility to go after them and bring them back into the fellowship. “If you know people who have wandered off from God’s truth, don’t write them off. Go after them. Get them back” (James 5:19 Msg).

Related to this is the benefit that being connected to a small group provides the spiritual protection of godly leaders. God gives shepherd leaders such as me, the responsibility to guard, protect, defend, and care for the spiritual welfare of his flock (Acts 20:28–29; 1 Peter 5:1–4; Hebrews 13:7, 17.). “Their work is to watch over your souls, and they know they are accountable to God” (Heb 13:17 NLT).

If you’re detached from the Saddleback Body of believers, I’m not responsible for you. If you are unplugged from the life of the Body and isolated from the fellowship of God’s family, Satan knows you’ll be defenseless and powerless against his tactics.

6. The Body of Christ needs me! You have a background and experiences that other people can learn from and draw strength from! God has a unique role for you to play in his family. This is called your “ministry,” and God has gifted you for this assignment. “A spiritual gift is given to each of us as a means of helping the entire church” (1 Cor. 12:7). Your small group is the place God designed for you to discover, develop, and use your spiritual gifts and talents.

(View the full article here.)

Old and Young … We Need Each Other (Part 2)

…the continuing health of the young people, as well as the revitalization of the Middle-American church, is dependent on the establishment of a liaison between older and younger Christians.  The young converts are new blood intended to quicken the body of older Christians, and the latter, despite their partial enculturation, have much to offer in stability and tradition which can prevent the youth culture from going cultic and insular.  If new waves of converts do not receive sound instruction in the theology of the Christian life, in ten years they will be just as dormant and derailed as their elders.  (Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life, p.204)

Old and Young … We Need Each Other (Part 1)

[Graduate student Kevin Beiler] has found that all trees in dry interior Douglas-fir forests are interconnected, with the largest, oldest trees serving as hubs, much like the hub of a spoked wheel, where younger trees establish within the mycorrhizal network of the old trees. Through careful experimentation, recent graduate Francois Teste determined that survival of these establishing trees was greatly enhanced when they were linked into the network of the old trees. Through the use of stable isotope tracers, he and Amanda Schoonmaker [. . .] found that increased survival was associated with belowground transfer of carbon, nitrogen and water from the old trees. [HT: Andrew Sullivan]

“Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.” (Jer. 6:16)

“He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.” (Ps. 1:3)

Mission Requires Discipleship

One of my fears during CGS’s Renewal Process is that we will become so focused on external marketing and outreach that we’ll forget about how important discipleship is.  I honestly believe that outreach helps catalyze discipleship … but I’m also aware that many churches completely neglect discipleship.  That’s not a risk I’m willing to take – it’s not fair to the people who make up this church, and it’s even counter-productive to our goals to reach beyond our four walls.

As Mike Breen, co-author of “Building a Discipleship Culture” wrote:

It’s time we start being brutally honest about the missional movement that has emerged in the last 10-15 years: Chances are better than not it’s going to fail.

That may seem cynical, but I’m being realistic. There is a reason so many movements in the Western church have failed in the past century: They are a car without an engine. A missional church or a missional community or a missional small group is the new car that everyone is talking about right now, but no matter how beautiful or shiny the vehicle, without an engine, it won’t go anywhere.

So what is the engine of the church? Discipleship. I’ve said it many times: If you make disciples, you will always get the church. But if you try to build the church, you will rarely get disciples.

If you’re good at making disciples, you’ll get more leaders than you’ll know what to do with. If you make disciples like Jesus made them, you’ll see people come to faith who didn’t know Him. If you disciple people well, you will always get the missional thing. Always.

…God did not design us to do Kingdom mission outside of the scope of intentional, biblical discipleship and if we don’t see that, we’re fooling ourselves. Mission is under the umbrella of discipleship as it is one of the many things that Jesus taught his disciples to do well. But it wasn’t done in a vacuum outside of knowing God and being shaped by that relationship, where a constant refinement of their character was happening alongside of their continued skill development (which included mission).

The truth about discipleship is that it’s never hip and it’s never in style…it’s the call to come and die; a “long obedience in the same direction.” While the “missional” conversation is imbued with the energy and vitality that comes with kingdom work, it seems to be missing some of the hallmark reality that those of us who have lived it over time have come to expect: Mission is messy. It’s humbling. There’s often no glory in it. It’s for the long haul. And it’s completely unsustainable without discipleship.

This is the crux of it: The reason the missional movement may fail is because most people/communities in the Western church are pretty bad at making disciples. Without a plan for making disciples (and a plan that works), any missional thing you launch will be completely unsustainable. Think about it this way: Sending people out to do mission is to send them out to a war zone. Discipleship is not only the boot camp to train them for the front lines, but the hospital when they get wounded and the off-duty time they need to rest and recuperate. When we don’t disciple people the way Jesus and the New Testament talked about, we are sending them out without armor, weapons or training. This is mass carnage waiting to happen. How can we be surprised that people burn out, quit and never want to return to the missional life (or the church)? How can we not expect people will feel used and abused?

Here are some questions I have leaders I’m working with ask regularly:

• Am I a disciple?
• Do I know how to disciple people who can then disciple people who then disciple people, etc? (i.e. does my discipleship plan work?)’
•  Does our discipleship plan naturally lead all disciples to become missionaries? (not just the elite, Delta-seal missional ninjas)

Meat, Milk and Starving Christians

“One of the greatest critiques of the American Church today is that it’s malnourished.” – Steven Furtick

I completely agree with that critique of the church … and as a preacher that’s sobering.  What I found more helpful than the guilt, was Furtick’s “deeper diagnosis” of the problem.  In most churches, the problem isn’t the preaching on Sundays.  Chances are that people around our nation (pastors included!) are starving to death because of what they do for the other 6 1/2 days of the week.

Furtick writes:

Most American Christians aren’t malnourished because of what they’re getting fed on Sunday. They’re malnourished because they don’t feed themselves Monday through Saturday.

So you had filet mignon on Sunday … good for you. Have fun starving yourself the rest of the week and letting your pastor read the Bible so you don’t have to.

So you had some milk on Sunday and learned 37 ways to ________. Have fun having 37 new ways to not obey God during the coming week.

The crisis facing the church today isn’t what people are getting fed on Sundays. It’s what they’re not feeding themselves the rest of the days. Who really cares whether you consume meat or milk on Sunday if it’s the only meal you have all week?

I’m not saying this to get pastors and churches off the hook. It is the shepherd’s job to feed the sheep (John 21). And feed them well based on their needs and faith development. But it’s also the sheep’s job to eat:

Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.  – Hebrews 5:13-14

Here’s the point. Churches: we have a responsibility. We should serve up the Word, hot and fresh, every single Sunday. As church leaders, it is our job to create and sustain processes and systems that responsibly enable people to grow in their faith after receiving Christ.

People in our churches: you also have a responsibility. If you refuse to study the Word, apply it, pray some during the week, join a small group and dig deeper with others, there’s not much we can do to help you. Your malnourishment won’t be cured by anything we give you on Sunday.

So are you an infant and need milk? Drink it for now, but the only way you will mature and be ready for meat is by training yourself. Constantly. Do you want meat? From these verses, it seems like meat is doing the milk. On your own. Constantly.

Not getting it served to you once a week.

External Habits of a Christian

From the Screwtape Letters (which is, if you haven’t read it, imagined letters from a seasoned demon to his young nephew on how to frustrate faith and turn people from Jesus):

I am almost glad to hear that he is still a churchgoer and a communicant.  I know there are dangers in this; but anything is better than that he should realise the break he has made with the first months of his Christian life.  As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same as it was six weeks [or two years] ago.  And while he thinks that, we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognised sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy, feeling that he hasn’t been doing very well lately.

This dim uneasiness needs careful handling.  If it gets too strong it may wake him up and spoil the whole game.  On the other hand, if you suppress it entirely — which, by the by, the Enemy will probably not allow you to do — we lose an element in the situation which can be turned to good account.  If such a feeling is allowed to live, but not allowed to become irresistible and flower into real repentance, it has one invaluable tendency.  It increases the patient’s reluctance to think about the Enemy. All humans at nearly all times have some such reluctance; but when thinking of Him involves facing and intensifying a whole vague cloud of half-conscious guilt, this reluctance is increased tenfold.  They hate every idea that suggests Him, just as men in financial embarrassment hate the very sight of a pass-book.  In this state your patient will not omit, but he will increasingly dislike, his religious duties.

As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo, you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. …  You can make him do nothing at all for long periods of time.  You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room.  All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at least he may say, ‘I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.’

The Christians describe the Enemy as one ‘without whom Nothing is strong.’  And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness.  But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy.  It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick.

Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. (HT: THINK BLOG)

What Legacy Are You Leaving?

We are created in the image of God.  That means (in part) that we are able to shape the world around us.  As God created the world and continues to create hope and faith in the world, we are able to impact people.  We are called to leave a legacy.

Jon Walker writes:

God designed you so your life can have meaning beyond your days here on earth. God places a longing for eternal significance into each human heart, but many of us try to fill that longing by working hard to leave something of ourselves behind.

God didn’t place that longing there so we would be driven to accumulate great wealth or build great memorials; he gave it to us so we would be drawn to him, developing an intimacy with our only hope for lasting, eternal significance.

God uses the longing in you toward building a spiritual legacy with the days you have left on earth. Even if you’re a brand new believer, or if you’re the first person in your family to become a believer, you already have a deep and rich spiritual heritage in Jesus, who was the first in a long legacy of those who will be raised from the dead.

This heritage is a trust of God’s great truths that you must guard carefully and intentionally pass on to others. If you fail to guard the truths, the legacy may become polluted with false ideas about God, and if you fail to pass the truths on to others, your godly heritage may stop with you.

God has entrusted you with his good news, and he trusts you to intentionally pass it on to others who, in turn, will pass on the same teachings to others, and on and on.

Leaders Aren’t Responsible for Church Growth, but for Church Health

Continuing to talk about how leaders influence the life of the church.  Yesterday we looked at #1 “Leaders Aren’t Responsible For Your Spiritual Growth”

Today we’ll think about Principle #2 Leaders Aren’t Responsible for Church Growth, but for Church Health.

Since we spend so much time focusing on the church’s commitment to the mission of Jesus, it is easy to think that all pastors are interested in is church growth.  I’ve heard dozens of pastors criticized for being “all about numbers” and for “just wanting a big church” when they encourage people to do personal evangelism and to invite others to church.

The truth is that while most leaders love it when their church growth, they also know that a personal commitment to evangelism is indispensable for any individual’s spiritual growth.

Church leaders and pastors can’t make you share your faith … and even if they could, they can’t make the church grow.  What they are called to do is to keep the church healthy.

There are lots of ways to define a “healthy church,” but here are a few that come immediately to mind:

• A healthy church is unselfish, knowing that the goal is not to make “us” happy but to glorify God and fulfill His mission.
• A healthy church has people who are generous with their time, talents and treasure.
• A healthy church is marked by radical honesty and real grace.
• A healthy church is governed by the Bible.
• A healthy church listens to people’s concerns but still leads boldly in the direction of the Gospel Mission.
• A healthy church worships with passion with music and words anyone off the street can understand.
• A healthy church equips every follower of Jesus to do their part in serving Him.
• A healthy church has people who are broken, yet manage to love each other and forgive each other through the bumps and bruises of life.

How else would you describe a “healthy church”?