Just read an interesting article by David Brooks over at the NY Times blog regarding Obama’s infrastructure and economic stimulus plan.
It actually made me question ministry and church planting a little bit. I wonder if planting new churches and congregations is the old “new” thing that has replaced creatively reflecting on how the gospel affects and transforms a particular community or urban context? Here’s an excerpt (read the whole thing here)”
Great thoughts by Timmy Brister over at Provocations and Paintings on Obama’s win and what it means for American evangelicals. Read the whole thing here. Here’s a quote:
On the other hand, I can’t help but think that the Obama presidency will help Christians who happen to be American to open our eyes to our syncretistic views of American Christianity. While the fundamentalist impulse is to retreat into the ghetto, pull out the dispensationalism charts, and check the rapture ready index as a morning devotional, perhaps for the first time Christians will no longer seek to Christianize America but speak prophetically and live missionally in our growingly secular world. Our greatest need is not to fight the battle against the culture but to fight against the battle against unbelief. It is safe to live as functional atheists when we’ve got God in our constitution, on our coins, in the White House, but when the props are removed from us, how shall we then live?
Traditional Faithfulness or Contemporary Relevance. Which is better for the church?
This is an interesting question. It is also a false dichotomy. It assumes that worship cannot be both. I argue that it in fact should be both. I argue this because we are in danger of the sin of self-righteous elitism if we pit one over against the other.
Worship that is pleasing to God is worship that is rooted and growing out of the church’s historic and catholic roots, yet situated in its present contemporary context and sensible in the culture the church finds herself. Below I highlight eight presuppositions – eight principles – that provide a foundation for the process of designing a liturgical worship service in a 21st century expression of the church.
1. Liturgical does not mean Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, Presbyterian, or any other formal denominationally set form of corporate worship. Its broader than any of these individually.
2. Liturgical does not mean “Traditional”. It incorporates traditional elements, but cannot be defined or explained simply by referring to traditional aspects of corporate worship. Every element was at some point contemporary – so to stick too closely to any one tradition is it succumb to traditionalism, not biblical faithfulness in a cultural context.
3. Liturgical does not mean any one certain “style” of music and lyrics. This can actually be sin on either side of the spectrum. If we opt for only “old words” to “old tunes”, or the converse, “new words” to “new tunes”, we practice idolatry in the form of cultural elitism. There is much validity to critique of much contemporary music – especially that which passes for contemporary worship songs of praise; but the answer is not to go to “old lyrics/tunes” exclusively, but to labor to find, perhaps even write, new songs that convey the same ancient truth the church has historically sung.
4. Liturgical means, “work of the people” (literal translation). This means that liturgical worship is best explained and described as God’s people responding to God’s initiation. For some there is close connection to “covenant renewal” occurring every week within corporate worship. At the least, liturgical worship is a corporate re-enactment and engagement with the drama of redemption, incorporating the dual movements of God’s initiation and provision and His people’s response and praise.
5. Liturgical worship is rooted in history and connected in catholicity. When we say “history”, we need to include the history conveyed in the Bible as well as church history. The church stands in a line that extends all the way back to Adam in the garden. The people of God have existed since this time and have carried on through to today. So we look across this spectrum, not just at any one distinct point. It also branches out to include all the saints – those who profess and live under Christ’s lordship – spread out over the world and across time. There may be particular expressions, but the church is a universal body, which incorporates with in it all the biblically based, God-honoring, Christ-centered, Spirit-empowered churches of the world.
6. Liturgical worship includes the 21st century church. This links back to the premise that it is more than “traditionalism”, but it needs to be emphasized more clearly. To say that the church is rooted in history is not the same thing as saying that the church only looks backwards in history for its credible expressions. The church exists along a continuum of history of which its current setting and cultural context is a part. We therefore need to labor to learn from the historical applications of worship and incorporate them into our current setting.
7. Liturgical worship does not mean “technology free”. To say that one prefers worship that is void of technological impediments is to assume that the church has preferred to avoid technological advances. If that were the case, what’s the point in forgoing an overhead projector screen for the use of paper bulletins, pamphlets or even hymnals – all of which are products of the technological advances of the 16th century printing press? By making hard claims that we don’t need certain technologies, yet adopting others, is a misnomer, and needs to be carefully articulated as to what it is we are aiming to accomplish and why. The church has always used technology, and therefore, we shouldn’t be hesitant to use the technology available to us, as long as it best serves the purposes of our corporate worship together.
8. Liturgical worship is corporate worship that takes the shape of gospel re-enactment. This means that the basic structure of the corporate worship service is one of God’s call to worship, man’s dilemma of sin and God’s assurance of deliverance and pardon, God speaks to man through the grace of His word, and man’s response to God’s gracious initiation. To say it another way, corporate worship should follow the drama of redemption – Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation.
Scott Knight is blogging over at the Resurgence site, and dedicating his blog posts to the concept of biblical masculinity. In his first post, he talks about the sin of King David and then goes in to challenge men who have abandoned their responsibility in fulfilling God’s mission. I’ll give you his concluding quote, but you should go check it out and subscribe to it if this is your thing.
The Purpose
Harry Reeder, III writes as a seasoned pastor, who has both planted new churches and re-vitalized established churches. This passion has led to his ministry Embers to a Flame, with annual conferences and ongoing consultation services. This book, The Leadership Dynamic is birthed out of Reeder’s conviction that the church’s mission is best served and not complete until we reclaim the position of being a leadership manufacturing plant – a place that defines, develops and then deploys leaders out into the world.
For Harry, this is more than abstraction, it is also the answer to the question of what he would do in ministry differently if he were to go do it all over again – develop leaders out of a biblical model and framework, rather than the usual models of business, or more specifically “contemporary capitalism” with an emphasis on pragmatism and consumption of wealth, rather than the creation of it in order to do good (”traditional capitalism”). Harry writes “The church must escape the swamp of greed-driven leadership prevalent in contemporary corporate America and ascend the high ground of gospel-driven leadership described in God’s Word,” (15).
The Highlights
Harry Reeder does a very good job outlining the current state of the church and its leadership crisis. He likens our situation today to dealing with the “cultural steroids” the church has for years injected into its various leadership programs, paradigms and structures. He writes:
“In fear of rejection and with an incessant need for popular affirmation [the church today has] injected the church with cultural steroids to make it ‘relevant and acceptable,’ hoping that somehow the result will be that people will then ‘accept’ Jesus and the church will become bigger and stronger and therefore more influential,” (25).
The danger is that just as in athletics, steroids only produce an “immediate embellishment[s] of size and acclaim] (25), while paving the way for eventual disease and death. Harry is not denying the need for effectively communicating to the culture around us; just the infusion of worldly principles governing the church and the church’s leadership development over those that Scripture teaches. “Eventually, thoughtless accommodation to the world becomes capitulation to the world – and our witness for the Lord is rendered useless,” (29). And Harry rails just as hard against the opposite danger of traditionalism as he does this cultural accommodation.
But he writes from a hopeful perspective, that “The Christian church must become a leadership factory and distribution center for the world, and by the grace of God, it can – if we return to both the biblical definition of leadership and the biblical method of producing leaders for the church and the world,” (15).
The rest of the book launches from this point and explains what Reeder calls “3 D Leadership” – what it means to define leadership the way Jesus does, develop them according to Scriptures model, and then deploy them into the world to further the church’s mission – to glorify God and bring His creation into joyful submission to Him. Each chapter expounds these three main points, with helpful lists of principles, insightful applications and general traps to be aware of and avoid.
The Good
This book is clear and compelling. It makes a strong case for the kairos (appointed time) moment the church finds itself in, and offers sensible and Scriptural applications for this season. As well, reading (and listening to) Harry’s thoughts is an engaging, challenging and thought provoking experience. Plus, he tells great stories.
The Bad
I honestly could not think of anything to critique in this book. For a contemporary book on leadership and the church, The Leadership Dynamic excels at laying out the current need and Biblical paradigm for addressing that need appropriately.
The Audience
This book is for anyone who feels compelled to lead in any setting as a Christian.Whether you are a Senior Pastor, or CEO; a freshman in college or a community group leader, I suggest you get this book, read, apply and refer to it often.
My Take Away & Recommendation
Read and apply this book both personally and corporately in your immediate leadership context. It will be worth your time and Christ’s church will be better served for it.
FYI – Be looking for a future post with an interview I was able to conduct with Dr. Reeder coming up here sometime in the next couple of weeks. [If you haven’t already subscribed to my feed, now would be a good time!]
I recently read an insightful post on what it means to preach “being missional” over at In the Time of Postmoderns I Was a Puritan. Here’s an excerpt:
He goes on to provide a brief but helpful list of several areas where we can dig in to what it means to be missional. Read the whole post here.
Interesting post here regarding contemporary trends of “urban inversion” as opposed to suburban sprawl. Here’s a brief quote:
We’ve been discussing some pretty interesting things in my class, God’s World Mission. One of the most profound is it evaluate the elitist mindset we can have as Western Christians that think “missions” happens when some Anglo-Christian folk waltz into a foreign community, begin to tell people about Jesus and claim that that is when God started working in said area.
It seems that the same could be said for N. American Church Planters at times. Now, as a whole I think that most missionaries, church planters and agencies that support them all, have very good intentions; we want to see people come to know Jesus Christ in real and transforming ways. But often times our methods and attitudes can be tainted more with elitism, than with humility and true, practical, Biblical theology. So, as a would-be church planter, its good to get some perspective check on these matters.
This thought comes from Ben over History in the Making:
“‘It just didn’t work out’ is a bad excuse by cultivators when God’s whole purpose for the plant was to tenderize a community. Likewise, when harvesters make headlines without acknowledging the yeeears of cultivating work that went-on before them in their cities… they strip God of credit.”
We neglect the reality that every corner of this world is His, and He has been working – sometimes ambiguously, sometimes quite clearly – much longer at redeeming His world and the people’s within it than we ever have.
So when it goes well with a church plant, and they are growing and engaging their community and the culture at large – lets praise God! And when it doesn’t seem to panning out, only a handful of people give their lives to the Lord, even though the pastors and leaders are sharing the gospel and teaching it faithfully – lets praise God for that too, that His word will not return void (ultimately, at least) and that He has begun a good work in that part of the world, that someday will be reaped. After all, “from Him, and to Him and through Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever!” (Romans 11:36)
Thoughts, anyone? Agree? Disagree? Too naive? What do you think: How would you define success: as missionaries, as church planters, as commissioned members of Christ in extending the kingdom of God?
[Caveat and Disclaimer: This is not a post about the shortcomings of any particular agency, group, or even socio-political group of Christians (i.e. Western). This is about the presupositions that often times go unchecked, even amongst the most strategic, thoughtful and well intentioned people and groups. I for one am a big fan of many such agencies, like MTW, MNA, Acts 29, Redeemer Church Planting Network, the Sovereign Grace and 9Marks folks, etc., etc.. So, don’t hear what I’m not saying! Thanks for letting me clarify.]
From The Resurgence site for the upcoming Acts 29 Text and Context Conference. Stephen Murray (Of Daylight blog fame) is going to have quite a good time at this (Aren’t you Stephen?)
Matt Chandler offers some great thoughts on the task and nature of preacher, and how to discern our “call” to preach in some pretty insightful ways.
Check it out here.
One of my professor’s here at Covenant Seminary has said of some other well known and highly influential theologian that he so admires him simply because he (well known theologian who will remain nameless) is able to articulate something that he (CTS Professor) intuitively and exegetically knows, just so much more clearly and concisely.
I think R. Scott Clark might be my guy for that.
Here’s his second post on 3 Adjectives describing church planting and its need today. I blogged about the first one here.
Check out these quotes below, but read the whole thing here.
Here’s what I mean by strategic: we need to have a godly and wise plan for advancing the kingdom in our area through the planting of churches and that plan should involve the training of pastors, elders, and laity.
Amen!
I believe that one reason why our churches are sometimes lackadaisical about church planting is that it is regarded as but one instrument among many for advancing the kingdom. The thinking seems to be that “Well, we have churches for our families and children, we have Christian schools for our children and others who might attend, and we support other agencies to do kingdom work.” The problem with this paradigm is that, as important as they are, Jesus did not institute Christian schools or the other agencies on which we rely to do “kingdom work.”
Preach preacher!!
Our older, larger, wealthier, more established churches need to strategically recruit, teach, and send out laity to local church planting projects and in, in this way, incrementally plant churches in the great metro areas of North America.
I love that Scott took it where he did. I’ve heard some churches talk in terms of “tithing” their people to local church planting works. I love it! Double Amen brother!!
Intersection 