DanSheffield

Ralph Winter passes on

I first read something by Dr. Ralph Winter back in the early 80s while doing a missionary orientation program with WEC. Dr. Winter was a speaker at the Lausanne congress on world evangelism in 1974. It was there that he put the idea of "unreached people groups" on the map. Among many other noteworthy accomplishments, he was a key player in developing the adult learning course: Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, a key motivational resource for Christian mission around the world, as well as developing the first Theological Education by Extension (TEE) program in the 1960s, as a missionary in Guatemala.

I met him face to face at a conference in 1986; he was holed up in a corner playing with this little black keyboard thing -- none of us had ever seen a laptop back then, but Winter, the genius engineer was ahead of the crowd again.

Winter passed away May 20, 2009. At a memorial service on June 28, John Piper, neo-Calvinist advocate, had this to say:

I thanked God that Dr. Winter’s relentless pressing of the global application of the gospel and his tireless emphasis on the biblical and global reality of unreached peoples (not just fields), helped me know and love the enormity and centrality of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

He explained why such a missions focus would have this effect. I find this insight historically true and needed today. He wrote in 1995 in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research,

One of the most important functions of the missionary movement is to continually rescue the faith itself from becoming lost through institutional and cultural evolution and absorption.... That process of trying to make our faith understandable cross-culturally has in many different but vital ways pumped back into the home church a constantly renewed sense of what is, and what is not the [gospel]...

Unless we become as serious about rediscovering the true faith in contrast to the assumptions of our own culture, we will trumpet an uncertain sound wherever else we go. (Vol. 19., No. 2, April, 1995, p. 60)

In other words, the constant effort to spread the gospel—especially across cultures—is crucial to preserving the gospel. This is true for more reasons than we realize. I would say it is true at the global level, the denominational level, the local church level, and the individual level.

Where a person or a group is not spreading the gospel, they are losing their grasp on what it actually is.

is the 'world' or the 'church' my parish?

Twenty years ago, as a young missionary, I came to recognize that I had no experience of leading a congregation, of being a pastor. That was a problem, why? because I was being asked to train pastors in Egypt, and then South Africa. I asked a veteran pastor in South Africa to point me to a useful book on the nature of the pastoral task. He pointed me to Kennon Callahan, the author of Twelve Keys to an Effective Church. Well, the book I read, at the time, was Callahan's newest book, Effective Church Leadership (1990). The book starts with this sentence:

The day of the professional minister is over. The day of the missionary pastor has come.

I knew I had found the right resource!

Callahan had other good stuff:

It is one thing to say, "the world is my parish." It is another thing to say, "the church is my parish." The former is decisive on a mission field. The latter works only in a churched culture.

The church is called to mission for the integrity of mission, not for the sake of church growth. We are called to share the kingdom, not to grow churches. The fundamental category for this time is mission, not church.

No longer does the minister train the laity, who, in turn, do the mission in the world. No longer does the pastor serve inside the church and the laity serve outside in the world. In our time, a new understanding of the nature of leadership needs to be grown forward. We need a foundational understanding that the focus of leadership will be in the world, not in the church.

within a few months I was serving in my first church as a pastor, and a few years later planting a church. Callahan's approach, articulated long before "missional" became vogue [but at the same time that Newbigin's materials appeared], shaped my understanding of the church leadership task.

So here I am re-reading it before using it as a core, required text for a course I will be teaching at Tyndale in August.

a jesus manifesto

Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola have collaborated on what they are calling "A Jesus Manifesto: a Magna Carta for restoring the supremacy of Jesus Christ"

It's kind of rambly and could be a marketing ploy to get people to read their new books, but they also have some very good thoughts...

7. Jesus Christ was not a social activist nor a moral philosopher. To pitch him that way is to drain his glory and dilute his excellence. Justice apart from Christ is a dead thing. The only battering ram that can storm the gates of hell is not the cry of Justice, but the name of Jesus. Jesus Christ is the embodiment of Justice, Peace, Holiness, Righteousness. He is the sum of all spiritual things, the “strange attractor” of the cosmos. When Jesus becomes an abstraction, faith loses its reproductive power. Jesus did not come to make bad people good. He came to make dead people live.

read the whole manifesto here.

leading without relevance

some thots on leadership from Henri Nouwen's In the Name of Jesus

I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self...

Feeling irrelevant is a much more general experience than we might think when we look at our seemingly self-confident society. Medical technology and the tragic increase in abortions may radically diminish the number of mentally handicapped people in our society, but it is already becoming apparent that more and more people are suffering from profound moral and spiritual handicaps without having any idea of where to look for healing.

It is here that the need for a new Christian leadership becomes clear. The leaders of the future will be those who dare to claim their irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation that allows them to enter into deep solidarity with the anguish underlying all the glitter of success, and to bring the light of Jesus there.

my balcony oasis

for some strange reason my wife said 'the balcony is yours, decorate as you like' -- so I took her up on it. Here it is, to date. still a couple more items to come. [five stories up, looking west over our Strathcona neighbourhood in downtown Hamilton; a.m. photos]

a reflection from French scientist, Blaise Pascal...

The year of grace 1654,

Monday, 23 November, feast of St. Clement,

FIRE.

GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob
not of the philosophers and of the learned.
Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.

GOD of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
Your GOD will be my God.
Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD.
He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Grandeur of the human soul.
Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
I have departed from him:
They have forsaken me, the fount of living water.
My God, will you leave me?
Let me not be separated from him forever.
This is eternal life, that they know you, the one true God, and the one that you sent, Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
I left him; I fled him, renounced, crucified.
Let me never be separated from him.
He is only kept securely by the ways taught in the Gospel:
Renunciation, total and sweet.
Complete submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.
Eternally in joy for a day's exercise on the earth.
May I not forget your words. Amen.

christians in a pluralistic society

Stanford University prof Rene Girard was interviewed about Christian faith in a PC world.
here's a Girard bibliography

What about Christians in a pluralistic society?
RG: Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, the life," and he told his disciples to go out into the world and make disciples. If we give that up, are we still Christian? The idea that if we respect other religions more than our own and act only according to political correctness, peace will break out all over the world is fantasy and delusion. Christians should certainly enjoy the freedom to spread their faith as much as the other religions. Is Christianity really so powerful that it should be forbidden to spread its ideas, whereas other religions should be allowed that same right?

so you are advocating freedom of religious expression...
RG: of course, I think the Christians who do not want to share their faith do not really believe. The fear of religious tyranny is an anachronism, a false issue which puts political correctness ahead of truth. I believe there is a truth, and the only way of telling it is by connecting with people...

As your faith grows, the more you empty yourself of rivalry and self-aggrandizement and the more you feel impelled to communicate to others, with others, the truth you have experienced. This belongs to the essence of Christianity. The idea of silencing Christianity in the name of Christian humility is a Christian idea gone mad...

reminiscent of Polanyi and Newbigin

living ordinary life with intentionality

Living ordinary life with gospel intentionality means …

• buying from local shops.
• frequenting a local coffee shop or pub.
• playing for a local sports team.
• always tipping generously in local restaurants.
• being the kind of neighbour everyone wants to have as a neighbour.
• volunteering at a local charity shop along with a couple of others from church.
• doing ordinary things, together.
• opening your home to, and sharing your food with others.
• walking the same route to work at the same time or catching the same train each day.
• we do EVERYTHING for the sake of the gospel!

a little reflection I picked up from Tim Chester's blog

OT theology of mission

this morning I was listening to a podcast by Dr. Daniel Block on God's missional call in the Mosaic tradition. Dan Block was my Old Testament professor back at Providence College in the early eighties (He's now at Wheaton College; and has written several major commentaries). In the podcast he reminded us that his wife's uncle was Dr. George Peters, author of A Biblical Theology of Missions, an early 'evangelical' text on this subject. I had to read this text for a course in 1982. Shortly thereafter I came across Walter Kaiser's work Mission in the Old Testament. All this early OT reflection developed a profound sense in me that mission (going out with a message) was just the way God was/is from the very beginning.

Block, Peters, and Kaiser also gave a clear outline of the difference between the centripetal (toward the centre) and centrifugal (away from the centre) forces at work in the Old and New Testaments [Peters uses this language explicitly]. In the OT the temple was the focus of Israel's attention -- that's where God resided with them. Other nations could "come and see" God at work there; I Kings 8:41-43 (centripetal).

Israel, however, missed the meaning of the key Mosaic text, Ex 19:5-6, 'although the whole earth is mine you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.' The holy, obedient nation was to be a kingdom of mediators -- between God and all the other nations -- the outward vision. But the ethnocentricity of Israel (viewing God through their own lenses), kept their eyes focused on what God could do "for them", and prevented the outworking of God's intent.

So Jesus comes along and suggests that God's intent was that now, through the church (ekklesia), the multi-dimensional wisdom of God will be made known to all... God at the centre, thrusting us out (centrifugal); "as the Father sent me, so I am sending you."

the challenge, of course, is that the force required to change from centripetal to centrifugal keeps many churches focused on the OT, attractional, 'come and see' model.

a blessing for a missional community

My brother David is part of an other-oriented gathering of Jesus followers in Cobourg, ON. He liked the Newbigin summary and wrote this blessing for their community.

Community Blessing May 17, 2009
(nod to Leslie Newbigin’s 6 characteristics of a community living the good news)

may we be a community of praise
turning our hearts toward
the things that are higher
the things that are more beautiful
giving thanks to their creator

may we be a community of truth
openly
honestly
in all ways
inhabiting a way of life
that runs counter to
the dark corners of deceit and half-truth

may we be a community that is deeply involved
in the concerns of its neighbourhood
hands on
where the good news is experienced
as it flows
into good actions

may we be a community
where we, just regular people,
without regard to our identity or background,
by embodying love and hope and faith,
can be Jesus to those around us
and gather regularly
to remind ourselves of that

may we be a community that
cultivates relationships
of faithfulness and responsibility
toward one another
as we grow
toward our true humanity

may we be a community of hope
being both
eager and patient,
acting and waiting,
even in the most hopeless circumstances