Jesus heard them and answered, “People who are well do not need a doctor, but only those who are sick. I have not come to call respectable people, but outcasts.”

Mark 2:15-17, Good News Translation

One of their joint projects, which I know will greatly impact me and my ministry, is their theological journal, themelios. There are two articles in the most recent issue (Vol 33, Issue 3), which I can’t wait to read:

• The Gospel and the Poor by Tim Keller
• Shared Intentions? Reflections on Inspiration and Interpretation in Light of Scripture’s Dual Authorship by Jared M. Compton

Also interesting is their Christ on Campus Initiative, which produces apologetic articles for college students that are “intellectually rigorous, culturally relevant, persuasive in argument and faithful to historic, evangelical Christianity”.

But even more exciting than The Gospel Coalition is The Resurgence, which is primarily a blog, but also a network. From their website:

About the Resurgence

Resurgence is a movement that resources multiple generations to live for Jesus so that they can effectively reach their cities with the gospel by staying culturally accessible and Biblically faithful.

We are:

Resurgence means to rise again, or to surge back into vibrancy. We believe that the gospel of Jesus Christ must resurge in every generation to meet the needs of people and their continually changing cultures.

Missional means that we believe Jesus Christ is on a mission to seek and save people, change their lives, and transform their cultures. Because of this we believe that Christians, Christian organizations, and Christian churches exist to join Jesus on His mission by immersing themselves in whatever culture Jesus has placed them.

Theology means that we believe that personal and cultural transformation is only possible by meeting the living Jesus Christ of the Bible through His gospel. Because of this we believe that culturally accessible mission also requires biblically faithful theology.

Cooperative means that we believe a team of missional theologians working together as friends and peers, sharing ideas, and correcting errors is the best way for learning to occur. Because of this we are a network of various Christian leaders, ministries, churches, and networks seeking to work together in providing the most culturally effective and biblically faithful missional theology.

I haven’t thought through some of his points, but others hit home really strong:

I find it instructive that the New Testament writers themselves seldom, if ever, pack all of the aspects of the gospel equally in any one gospel address. When studying Paul’s gospel speeches in the book of Acts, it is striking how much is always left out

Instead of going into, say, one of the epistles and speaking of the gospel in terms of God, sin, Christ, and faith, I point out the story-arc of the Bible and speak of the gospel in terms of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. We once had the world we all wanted-a world of peace and justice, without death, disease, or conflict. But by turning from God we lost that world. Our sin unleashed forces of evil and destruction so that now “things fall apart” and everything is characterized by physical, social, and personal disintegration.

Yes! I discovered a few years ago how much more sense the gospel makes to my generation when you start with a thorough treatment of our race, as a whole, explicitly rejecting God and plunging our planet into death, disease and degeneration. Realizing that they were born into the rebel camp helps teens understand why God is their enemy from the start and it does so in a way that is more compelling to someone who doesn’t understand how much their “personal” sin is actually against their creator.

1. Sent: Living the Missional Nature of the Church by Ed Stetzer (should be nearly finished by the end of the year)
2. Do Hard Things by Alex & Brett Harris (good, but a little too social-justice oriented for me to be super-excited about it)
3. Holiness By Grace by Bryan Chapell (great theology, but so thickly written it was a bit of a chore to get through it)
4. Bauckham’s, JND Kelly’s & Hiebert’s detailed exegetical commentaries on 2 Peter (read a good chunk of each, I figured together they counted as 1 book)
5. Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis (ok, so it’s an easy, fun book — those count too!)
6. Scarlet by Stephen R. Lawhead (also fun, part of a Robin Hood trilogy)
7. The Lively Art of Writing (excellent book, recommended by Mrs. Jordan)

Of course, that doesn’t count the books I’ve started:

1. Robert Ballard’s Bismark: Germany’s Greatest Battleship Surrenders Her Secrets
2. Dune by Frank Herbert (one of the few fiction authors whose writing style I very much admire)
3. The Gospel & Personal Evangelism by Mark Dever (excellent so far, forward by C.J. Mahaney)
4. How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth by Gordon Fee & Douglas Stuart (I really like this book so far)
5. Shepherding a Child’s Heart by Ted Tripp
6. Age of Opportunity by Paul David Tripp (on parenting teens – wrote a promotional article for it in the TFC newsletter)

How about you? What have you been reading?

God doesn’t listen to sinners; he listens to people who respect Him and do what He wants. Since the beginning of the world, nobody’s ever heard of giving sight to somebody born blind. If this man weren’t from God, He wouldn’t be able to do a thing.

It’s a little trickier to understand the connections Jesus makes between working on the Sabbath and spiritual blindness/light:

He is blind so that God’s power might be seen at work in him. As long as it is day, we must keep on doing the work of Him who sent me; night is coming when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.

I confess I don’t get all of this. The reason he’s blind is so that the “works of God might be displayed in him” (ESV) or “God’s power might be seen at work in him” (GNT). So it looks like there might be some word-play between the man getting sight and God’s work being displayed/seen. As well as the correlation between this being done on the Sabbath and the idea that God wants to display His works.

But when Jesus says that “night is coming, when no one can work” – is He just using nightfall as an illustration that, just like when night comes and no one can work – in a similar way when He leaves the planet, He cannot work? And therefore He needs to be busy now, even on the Sabbath? Surely He’s not saying that there will come a time when literally no one can work – that would be stretching the illustration too far, right?

At any rate, it scares and enamors me just how controversial Jesus is among religious people like me. Like Adam said at the Quiz Meet, the religious establishment in this country – in many ways the modern-day Pharisees – are conservative Christians. We are the ones careful to play by the rules, careful to look good. We are so careful not to offend. We’re not usually concerned about whether we might lead others to sin (what Romans 14 is actually about), instead we’re concerned about whether we might offend them (two very different things).

But Jesus, not Him! He’s purposefully offending people left and right — but not for the sake of shock value. Rather, He’s driven by a passion for God’s glory. Like earlier in John, “passion for Your house consumes Me”. I love what Mark Driscoll says: “we need to call sinners to repent of their sin and we need to call religious people to repent of their religion.”

Man, I want to be more like Jesus and less like the Pharisees. The scene here in John 9 is so ripe with human depravity it’s chilling (and would make a good plot for a sci-fi messianic fiction like Dune or the Matrix): when “the One” finally does come, the religious communities who’ve been waiting for Him hate Him so much they excommunicate anyone who believes in Him.

God:

I will send my beloved Son, perhaps they will respect Him.

Us:

This is the heir. Let’s kill him and take the inheritance.

When I saw you for the first time
you were hanging with a thief
And I knew my hands were dirty,
and I dropped my gaze.
Then you said I was forgiven
and you welcomed me with laughter.
I was happy ever after.
I was counting the days
when you’d come back again.
we’ll be waiting for you
When you comin’ back again?
we’ll be ready for you
Maybe we’ll wake up when…
maybe we’ll wake up when
you come back again.

lies.
Let’s be blunt.
We’re a little unfaithful.
What do you want?

Are you still listening?
`Cause we’re obviously not
We’ve forgotten our first love
We have lost the plot.

And why are you still calling?
You forgave, we forgot.
We’re such experts at stalling
that we’ve lost the plot.
lost the plot

When you come back again
would you bring me something from the fridge?
Heard a rumor that the end is near
but I just got comfortable here.

I struggled for a long time on my own, trying to figure out where our theology and practice went wrong. But recently, I’ve been hugely encouraged by a whole bunch of theologically solid believers, pastors, churches and speakers who have been distressed by the very same thing – and, more importantly, has figured out the answer and have been living it. The movement as a whole is called the Missional movement and the group that best characterizes it is the Acts 29 Network, a loose association of theologically-solid, missionally-minded churches across the nation.

I’ve been taking TFC’s staff and student leadership team through an excellent bible study called Sent: Living the Missional Nature of the Church. So far, Session 2 (of 5) hit me the hardest. Here are the five paragraphs that I liked the most:

There is a better way. The better way is to stand for justice and to serve those in need – but never let anyone tell you that you can bring justice but you can’t bring Jesus. The better way is to lead the pack in meeting both physical and spiritual needs. The better way is to put aside our preferences in favor of the gospel message. The better way is to contextualize our message into our community, recognizing that the HOW of ministry is in many ways determined by the who, when and where of culture. To do that, we must actually be involved in our culture rather than opposing or running away from it. When we serve in the name of Jesus, we carry the message of reconciliation. And we are truly representing Jesus and His kingdom inside the context of our present culture.

Of course, it’s the “living among non-Christians” part that I think we have a big problem with. It seems we have developed an unhealthy fear of the culture around us. We are surrounded by cultural ideas that seem to threaten the very core of our beliefs – like lack of absolute truth, flexible morality, and situational ethics. But in response, we have retreated inside the walls of our churches to form holy huddles. We have decided that holiness is keeping ourselves separate from sinners and not sin. We have created Christian music, Christian basketball leagues, Christian schools and Christian breath mints so that we don’t have to rub elbows with people who might challenge our faith.

Sometimes that means not giving my opinion about everything, and always it means not getting in the way of the advance of His kingdom. As an ambassador of Christ, I don’t act on my own behalf; I act in the authority of the very Creator of the universe. Ambassadors don’t try to re-create a walled-in version of their home country in foreign land; they purposely spend a majority of their time choosing to live among others in an effort to represent their homeland. That means we have to get engaged in our community as ambassadors.

• Ambassadors remember the renewing work Jesus has done for them.
• Ambassadors find themselves living in – and engaging – this world, but not buying into the world’s systems.
• Ambassadors choose to find hope in the cross, and with the authority of Jesus, tell others about the reconciliation that’s available to them.
• Ambassadors have to get over their own fears, prejudices, hang-ups, and preferences so that they are willing to go wherever Christ calls them and do whatever He says to do.

It is this love – the same love that compelled Jesus to die willingly and without protest – that still compels us outward. As Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:14-15:
“Christ’s love compels us, since we have reached this conclusion: if One died for all, then all died. And He died for all so that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for the One who died for them and was raised.”

Minor Nitpicks about Sent:

It seems like Stetzer believes we have a dual mission: serving and saving. As he says on page 41: “Dr. Luke, in his Gospel narrative, saw this mission in terms of serving and saving. In Luke 4:18-19, a passage showing the inauguration of the ministry of Christ, Jesus claimed He was coming to bring good news to the poor. He was coming to heal the blind and bring freedom to captives and the oppressed. Jesus came to serve. And this is still a great part of our ministry of reconciliation.”

It seems to me that Jesus’ mission was “to seek and to save”, which are really two components of the same thing, rather than “to serve and to save”. I think the church has a single mission, to “make disciples”, which admittedly has two components, baptizing (implying evangelism) and teaching to obey Jesus’ commands, but it’s still one mission.

Serving (or I would call it Loving) is not a part of our mission, but rather a core part of our character as believers and Christ-followers. It should dramatically influence how we live and how we go about our mission, but it itself is not our mission or our end-game. Just like a teacher in a school may well show a great sense of humor or show genuine concern for students who are abused at home – and these things will aid him in his mission – his mission is still to teach. I’m not saying that we as individuals or corporately shouldn’t do things for people’s welfare, just as the school-teacher may startup a free breakfast program for kids or an after-school counseling program for abused kids – but the heart and intent of such programs must be to help the kids learn. Its critical for the school and the teacher to remember their mission. If the teacher or the school decides that counseling abused kids is more important than their learning and want to change missions, they need to leave the school context and start up an independent counseling program.

The same goes for the here-and-now element of the Kingdom of God. It is not a part of our mission to bring in the Kingdom of God, rather the kingdom-among-us should be a reflection of the character of Christ-followers and the character of a community of Christ-followers. Again, I’m not saying we shouldn’t think about and work on developing a genuine, devoted community, but I am saying that we shouldn’t get it confused with our mission, which is to make disciples of Jesus Christ.

How are these things changing my life and the life of my family?

It’s hard to know exactly how things will take shape, but I know that I must (and we all must) obey Him by being a light, shining in a secular community, once again. I can’t turn back the clock and enroll as a student at Whatcom Community College again, but perhaps I can be a light in a whatcom county amateur writers community or graphic design community or maybe even, somehow, in Whatcom Community College again.

I’m still open to doing semi-local missions to rural areas, like Immanuel Bible Church does to Albion or The Master’s College does to the inner city.

If we have teens who are genuinely thinking about long-term missions, I would do something like the TMC mission trip I led to Mexico City: take an extremely small team (2-4 teens), spend at least a month there, require a minimum of a year’s study of the destination language and work for (and alongside) long-term missionaries.

However, I believe that the single best preparation for long-term missions (and most neglected one) is learning how to be a missionary to America, which is already post-Christian and where a vibrant Christian witness has long-since vacated (or never been present in) many secular circles (meaning actual communities, usually based on a common interest). But more on that later.

Perhaps the most effective strategy would be to hold a “virtual mission trip”, much like TFC’s Night of the Persecuted Church last year, where we did a fairly enveloping reenactment of life as a Christian in muslim-controlled Ethiopia. Or perhaps something like a our church does for the forgotten country of Burkina Faso in Africa, raising money to send much-needed study Bibles and training to the pastors there.

Update: The Night of the Persecuted Church that focused on Ethiopia was actually two years ago. We will do another one this March, probably focused on what’s going on in India.

Update 2: I wrote more about the single best preparation for long-term missions, living missionally, in a follow-up post Lost the Plot.