Becoming Fully Human

The three most important questions that we as the people of God need to grapple with in our generation are: What is the Gospel? What does it mean to be the people of God? How do we as the people of God engage the world? These are the questions we must grapple with over the next 20 years. These are the question that many of us need to give our lives to answering. Not in an academic way, although that is important, but in the practical reality of living out our lives as the people of God both individually and communally.

What I want to do here is to get behind the first question: What is the Gospel? I am not going to tackle this question directly but seek to struggle with one of the questions behind the question which is: What is Salvation? The danger is that we seek to communicate the Gospel before we understand the nature of salvation offered in the Gospel.

One of my favourite episodes of the Simpsons is the one in which Lisa Simpson falls in love with her substitute teacher, Mr. Bergstrom. In this particular episode Lisa who is one of the most together little 9 year old kids you could ever meet in your life has a substitute or casual teacher called Mr. Bergstrom. Now Mr. Bergstrom is Jewish. He’s wise, sensitive, caring, compassionate, and intuitive. He is also quite masculine and clearly in control, while at the same time intuitive and feminine. He is the perfect man, the ultimate human being. He knows all, understands all, and is all anyone could ever wish for.

Now in case you had not worked it out, it’s just so obvious, Mr. Bergstrom is the Jesus character in this episode. Now lots of the comedy of the episode plays on the comparison of the Jesus figure, the perfect man, Mr. Bergstrom and Homer, who it’s fair to say is not the perfect man. He is a weak, fragile and incredibly dysfunctional human being who in this episode tries to be the perfect father and fails spectacularly.

After lots of hoohoos and haahaas and stuff about Homer and what a bad father he is, and how wonderful Mr.Bergstrom is, Lisa finally gets Marge and Homer to allow her to invite Mr.Bergstrom home for a meal. So she stands outside the classroom door, she rehearses her speech, she is very nervous because she is in the presence of someone holy when she is with Mr. Bergstrom. She bursts in through the door only to discover that there is no Mr. Bergstrom, rather her regular teacher has returned. In an incredible state of distress she runs out of the class room and round to the apartment of Mr. Bergstrom where she discovers that Mr. Bergstrom is on the next train out of Springfield.

So she races down to the Springfield Railway Station. She finally gets there and Mr. Bergstrom is on the train about to leave Springfield. She races up to him and she says, “What are you doing? Where are you going? You come into my life and you fill my life with meaning. When I play the saxophone you act as if it’s like music from angels. When I answer a question its like it’s the wisdom of the ancients. You come into my life and you make me feel like I am really somebody, that I am something. That I’m not just one of the billions of people that inhabit the earth. Why are you leaving me? How can I get on without you?”

Mr. Bergstrom looks down at Lisa and replies, “Lisa, Lisa, please this is the life of a substitute teacher. But I’ll tell you what, if you feel like you are a nobody or that life has no meaning and that you make no difference in this world. I want you to remember this.” And he takes out a notepad and a pen and he writes her a note. He tears it off, folds it up and hands it to Lisa as the train begins to move away and he out of her life. Lisa runs down the platform in utter despair, in complete distress. Finally as she pulls herself together as the train is disappearing out of sight – Mr. Bergstrom’s voice can be heard, “Lisa, read the note.” She unfolds the note and reads it. It says, “You are Lisa Simpson.”

Now that’s the easiest thing in the world to say. But I met a Jewish man once and he wrote me a note just like that. He said whenever you think you are a nobody or your life is not worth living. When you think you have blown it and there is no way back. When you think that your life makes no difference in this world — remember this, ”You are Les Henson.” And when you go into this world acting like you are not worth dying for, you call me a liar, says Jesus, because I figured that you were worth dying for.

As we face the issues of life, remember, Jesus loves us so much that he figures that we were worth dying for. He died to deal with our sin and our stuff ups. And his love for us, his grace and mercy towards us never runs out, it doesn’t have a “use by” date on it. He figures that in spite of the messes we create for ourselves that we were worth dying for. He has adopted us into his family and he is not about to foster us out. He desires that the family image, the creation image, the ‘Imago Dei’, the image of God be restored in our lives. So that we can be conformed to the image of Christ, that is part of our ultimate destination as the people of God.

In Gen. 1:27 we read that, “So God created humankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” God desires that we, the people of God, live out our identity in creation and in Christ in the reality of our everyday lives as those made in his image and as true and faithful followers of Jesus. This is our calling and responsibility. We have been bought with a price, therefore, we are to live accordingly. We are to live out the reality of being IMAGE BEARERS in the context of everyday life.

According to this, What is Salvation? Salvation is simply being restored to the image and likeness of God. Being restored to the image and likeness of God is what it means to be truly human. Often when we sin and do those things that deface the image of God within our lives we say, “Well, I’m only human.” No! That’s not being human. That’s being less than human. To be fully human is to live out our lives in the reality that we are create and made in the image of God. The image of God within us is indeed true humanity. Sin is the defacement of true humanity.

I have met many Christians who seem to think that to be a Christian is to escape from our humanity into some ridiculous form of super spirituality. They seem to have visions of God everyday of the week and twice on Sundays. They long to escape into the Netherworld of Heaven where we live disconnected from this earth. But that’s not Christianity! It is a form of Gnosticism. It is a form of escape.

Salvation involves becoming fully human. It also means that we above all people should be truly connected to this world and concerned about the redemption of creation itself. When God wanted to demonstrate the fullness of salvation he sent his son to earth as a human being to demonstrate what it really meant to be a human being made in the image and likeness of God.  Jesus was the true human being because he lived out his humanity without sin, in obedience to his Father.

While Jesus was not one of those Super-Spiritos, he was also not a wauzer. He was accused of being a glutton and a drunkard because he ate and drank with tax-collectors and sinners. He knew how to party and at the wedding in Canaan turned water into wine. Jesus lived life to the full, he was truly human.

As I said before we don’t sin because we are human. We sin because we are not human enough. Salvation, then means becoming fully human as Jesus was fully human. It involves the restoration of the image of God among those who have but a shadow of that image in their lives because of the destructiveness of sin. It means that individually and corporately that image is restored and we become a society that is fully human and a truly human society.

While this will only be a partial reality in this world, it will be the full and final reality when Jesus comes and his kingdom is fully consummated in the New Heaven and Earth. Therefore let’s seek to live our lives as those who are fully human as a sign of the coming kingdom of God in Jesus Christ.

THE CALF PATH

One day, through the primeval wood,
A calf walked home, as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail as all calves do.

Since then three hundred years have fled,
And, I infer, the calf is dead.
But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale.

The trail was taken up next day
By a lone dog that passed that way;
And then a wise bell-wether sheep
Pursued the trail o’er vale and steep,
And drew the flock behind him, too,
As good bell-wethers always do.
And from that day, o’er hill and glade,
Through those old woods a path was made.

And many men wound in and out,
And dodged, and turned, and bent about
And uttered words of righteous wrath
Because ’twas such a crooked path.’
But still they followed–donot laugh—
The first migrations of that calf,
And through this winding wood-way stalked,
Because he wobbled when he walked.

This forest path became a lane,
That bent, and turned, and turned again;
This crooked lane became a road,
“ere many a poor horse with his load
Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
And traveled some three miles in one.
And thus a century and a half
They trod the footsteps of that calf.

The years passed on in swiftness fleet,
The road became a village street;
And this, before men were aware,
A city s crowded thoroughfare;
And soon the central street was this
Of a renowned metropolis;
And men two centuries and a half
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.

Each day a hundred thousand rout
Followed the zigzag calf about;
And o’er his crooked journey went
The traffic of a continent.
A hundred thousand men were led
By one calf near three centuries dead.
They followed still his crooked way,
And lost one hundred years a day;
For thus such reverence is lent
To well-established precedent.

A moral lesson this might teach,
Were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind
Along the calf-paths of the mind,

And work away from sun to sun
To do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,

And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.
They keep the path a sacred groove,

Along which all their lives they move. y

But how the wise old wood-gods laugh,
Who saw the first primeval calf?
Ah! Many things this tale might teach—
But I am not ordained to preach.

—SAM WALTER FOSS

(In Frank Viola and George Barna, Pagan Christianity? Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices. (Barna, 2008. pp. xxxii-xxxiii).

Questions:

1. How often do we simple follow the well trod paths of life, church, belief and practice without ever stopping to think why we do things the way we do?

1. Are the church practices we follow biblical and meaningful in the world in which we now live?

1. Are our beliefs and practices simply the accumulation of ‘the traditions of men’, if so what damage do they do to our Christian walk and the life of the communities of faith to which we belong?

I have just started reading, Pagan Christianity and would be interested on your comments on these issues.

Monsoon Rains and Dry Ditches

In grappling with various issues related to mission I have discovered that key words are important in helping me understand the way God uses his people in the world he has called us to engage. Two such words that are used in the discipline of missiology are: ‘futurum’ and ‘adventus’. ‘Futurum’ is God working out his purposes in and through the everyday events of life, by which his work and reign is extended. It is mission that progresses through the means of the ordinary and the routine acts of mission personnel, local church members and organisational structures. ‘Adventus’ involves those times when God intervenes in history directly and dramatically (Ex. 3, Is.6 and Acts 2). It is mission that progresses through the extraordinary and unforeseen interventions of God. Ideally, mission should include both these aspects, God’s extraordinary work and the everyday instrumentality of human beings and their organisations.

Having observed mission organisations over the past thirty years, I have discovered that they tend to be orientated to one or the other of these two different ways of doing mission. On the one hand, there are those organisations that are orientated to ‘futurum’ mission. Such missions are incredibly good at the routine things like faithfully ministering, caring for mission personnel, developing short and long term plans, and financial accountability. However, they seem to get so caught up in the everyday running of mission activities that they sometimes loose that sense of expectation that God can and may intervene at any moment.

Then there are other mission organisations that are all ‘adventus’ and thus extremely disorganised. They continually fly by the seat of their pants. They don’t know what is going to happening tomorrow, never mind developing a five year plan. However, God seems to keep on turning up at the last moment rescuing and using them time and time again. Unfortunately, they tend to leave a trail of damage behind them and many of their missionaries eventually crash or burnout.

Stephen Neill, the historian of mission, illustrated the importance of ‘futurum’ and ‘adventus’ mission in a lecture given shortly before he died in 1984. In seeking to illustrate the importance of the interrelationship between Third-World churches and First-World missions he referred to the monsoon rains and the dry ditches of India. He suggests that when the monsoon rain comes, it comes with such power and force that it carries all before it, top soil and all. Unfortunately, much of the life giving water that the monsoon brings is lost because the water is neither channeled nor contained. Likewise, the Third-World churches have much power, energy and enthusiasm in their missional activity. However, much of this power and energy is dissipated and defused because they do not have the structures and organization to hold and retain those impacted by their ministry.

Neill went on to say that India is crisscrossed with thousands of dry ditches. These ditches lay latent during the dry season. You can walk in them and kick up the dust. However, each year before the monsoon rains come these dry ditches need to be cleaned and repaired. If the communities responsible for their sections of the ditches are lazy and fail to do this work then the life giving water that the monsoon rains bring will be dissipated and lost. The top soil will be washed away and the land will become increasingly unfruitful and arid. But if the ditches are regularly repaired then when the monsoon rains come the water is channelled, retained and used to bring life to the land and the surrounding community.

First-World missions are like the dry ditches at times they appear lifeless because they are over-concerned with structures and organisational procedures. However, when the dry ditches of the First-World humbly serve and facilitate the monsoon rains of the Third-World, then the power, energy and enthusiasm of their missional activity will no longer be dissipated and lost. Rather it is used to bring life and sustenance to communities in need of the life giving gospel of Jesus Christ.

In our mission activities may we learn to faithfully served God in the ordinary and routine activities that he has called us to do. Let us also be those who long for and anticipate the unexpected in-breaking activity of God who turns dry ditches into life giving channels.

A Dramatic Conversion

My wife Wapke and I spent 19 years working among the Momina people of the southern lowlands of West Papua and saw the vast majority of this animistic and stone-aged people come to faith in Jesus Christ. During that time clan after clan, in all but one of the 13 Momina villages, came to faith in a people movement of multi-individual conversion. Only one Momina person came to faith individually. It is the story of his conversion that I wish to share with you.

Prior to our first furlough in 1981, Maenee, a young man in his early twenties, was very receptive to us and the Christian faith. By the time we returned to Sumo early in 1982 he had taken Toomora as his second wife. The Dani evangelists had strongly advised against this practice and the local community was experiencing a lot of strife as they struggled with the issue. Lacking experience, I mishandled the situation and responded unwisely, out of concern that this might set a precedent and adversely affect the spread of the gospel. The result was that I alienated Maenee and he became very hostile to both the gospel and me.

Over the next four years, Maenee went from bad to worse. On many occasions Maenee’s first wife, Aikuretena, who was about twelve years old, came to the clinic suffering from serious burns because Maenee had become angry and held her into the open fire. On other occasions his other wife, Toomora, came with serious injuries after being severely beaten. Often he would walk round and round my house muttering my name and putting curses upon me.

Just a few weeks after the birth of his first child, a girl, to his older wife Toomora, he went off to the jungle with Toomora and the child. I knew that he was unhappy with Toomora for giving birth to a girl child and suspected that something might happen. About an hour later, still feeling uneasy, I went to the village and found it deserted. Apart from a few older children, most of the villagers had gone off to their gardens for the day. Later that afternoon, as people returned to the village, I saw Kotakenee and shared my concern. I asked him whether Maenee would return with the child. Kotakenee puckered his lips indicating a negative response. Three days later Maenee and his wife stole quietly into the village late in the evening without the child. Next morning when asked about the child, he replied that she had become sick and died, so he had buried her in the jungle. No one believed him but no one said anything; rather they avoided him.

When we returned from a medical furlough in 1985, I heard of how Maenee had severely beaten Toomora in a fit of rage and how she had died a few days later with blood coming out of her mouth. A few months later, Maenee picked a fight with a young man whom he badly cut with a knife. By the time I got to the village, Maenee was marching up and down threateningly with his bow and arrows. Having had enough of Maenee, several of the older men were about to take the matter into their own hands. Trying to calm things down, I walked up to Maenee and took away his bow and arrows and threw them onto the roof of a nearby house out of reach. I then proceeded to take him by the arm and march him to my house to remove him from this tense situation. On the way, he broke loose and attacked me, I tried to restrain him but he struggled free and ran off into the jungle.

After that, I did not see Maenee for about two years. During that time he was living at Makoo and causing the two Yali evangelists, who had moved there the year before, all kinds of trouble. However, from the time he left Sumo and over the next two years the church at Sumo prayed for Maenee that God would meet with him and deliver him from his evil ways. There was hardly a church gathering that he was not remembered in prayer. Then one day in early 1987, as he was walking alone in the jungle between Makoo and the Boru River, Maenee encountered Jesus in a vision. He fell upon his knees asking Jesus to forgive him and become his friend. He quickly returned to Makoo and told them of his experience and from that moment on he was a changed man. A few days later he returned to Sumo and shared his experience again. He asked the people to forgive him and we held a special service of thanksgiving, for everyone was so excited at what God had done in answering their prayers. Six months later the change in Maenee’s life had become so obvious that he entered the Momina Bible School and later returned to Makoo where he served the church faithfully for many years as a medical worker-evangelist.

God normally brings people to faith in ways that are congruent with the decision making processes existent with in their society. However, there are always exceptions and we need to be open to and expectant of God working in unforeseen ways that are above and beyond that which we can anticipate. While God takes culture seriously he is not confined to the cultural channels that he normally uses.

God in the Ordinary

Forty-Three years ago last May I came to faith in Christ. For me it was a pivotal moment when the whole direction of my life changed. Not necessarily dramatically but certainly significantly. My life would have been a very different life if I hadn’t come to faith in Christ. I certainly would not be here today or have done many of the things I’ve done. I am not even sure what kind of person I would be if I hadn’t come to faith. There were events that led up to my conversion. Some of these events were of great significance while others may have been less significant but certainly played a part in my journey to faith.

During the past forty-three years there have been some incredible highs and some pretty awful lows when the very fabric of my faith has been tested to the limit. But most of the journey has been very ordinary as it often is and probably should be, because faith takes place in the ordinariness of everyday life.

There isn’t one way of coming to faith or model of conversion. And the imposition of a particular model can be very damaging to individuals and the life of a Christian community. A few years ago I was teaching a group of Salvation Army Youth Leaders about models of conversion and dealing with what I call the ‘Gradual Incline Model’ which is fairly common with people brought up in a Christian family. Several of them began to cry because all their lives they had been taught that they needed a Pauline style conversion. For the first time someone had legitimized their experience of a continual grow and trust in Jesus Christ without and dramatic conversion experience.

The stories of people coming to faith and the journey of faith fascinate me. May be it’s because I haven’t quite grown up and I still love stories. But that’s a badge I am happy to wear because it’s a sad thing when we can longer be drawn in and be fascinated by stories of life and faith.

Yet I must confess that I am tired of the hype and the celebrity that often surround the telling of conversion stories in our churches today. Too often it’s the dramatic and at times the weird and wonderful that gets celebrated rather than the ordinary and the everyday. Not that anyone’s story is ordinary. Too often we end up putting people on pedestals from which it is so easy to fall.

One of the things I have really appreciated at Ranges Community Church over this past year is hearing the most extraordinary ordinary stories of faith from various members of this community. From people who often would not be asked to share their stories in larger churches. Sometimes it has been how they came to faith, at other times it has been about their overall life’s journey. Other occasions have been about what God has been doing in their life this past week. But it has been just wonderful how those stories have been used by God to draw us closer together and to create a safe and open community where we can be real and honest about where we are, what God is doing in our lives and about the crap we are dealing with. We have laughed together, cried together and prayed together as God has turned up in some extra-ordinary ways. And we must be thankful for that.

The Lord of The Rings is one of my favourite books which I have read 18 times. But the characters who really catch my attention are not the great ones, Gandalf, Aragon, Elron, etc. But the Hobitts, who in the story are so ordinary, and yet they do such extra-ordinary things and when they return home from their great adventure they are treated so matter-of-factly. There is something beautiful about that which is wonderful and real and incredibly down to earth.

One of the things that really annoyed me when I was working in West Papua was that when we went back to Scotland to our home church on furlough there were always some people who wanted to put us on a pedestal. They thought we were some wonderful spiritual superheroes for doing mission work. I always quite deliberately set them straight in the nicest possible way and made a point of kicking over the pedestal. The reality was that once people really got to know me they soon realized that there was no pedestal to kick over. Why do we always want to put people on pedestals? Why don’t we celebrate the ordinary? God works in the ordinary and not just the spectacular. Often it is the small things that change the course of our lives.

The conversion of C.S Lewis is fascinating. First, he is converted from Atheism to Theism, and later he is converted from Theism to Christianity. In coming to faith in Christ he spent a lot of time reading Chesterton and conversing with Tolkien and other great minds. But his conversion takes place in a very ordinary way. He was traveling from home to Whipsnade Zoo for a picnic, not thinking about anything particular along the way. Of this journey he says that when he set off he did not believe in Christ and when he arrived he did.

Now what can be more ordinary than that?

Transitioning to a Post-Everything Church

While attending a recent Consultation in Melbourne I should not have been surprised to discover so many people on the same page with respect to the need to develop post-everything missional communities. In interacting with Tabor students, over the past few years, I have found that many of them also recognise the need to establish such communities. Yet seeing the need and making the transition from the church as it is to a church that is meaningful in a post-everything world is difficult.

Perhaps the greatest difficulty we face is that deep down we are reluctant or scared to make this transition to a post-everything church, because we are not ready to let go of that with which we are so familiar. Therefore, we minimize the differences between the church as it is and what it needs to become in the age of post-everything. We think we can tweak a bit here and a bit there, thus move gradually towards our goal. The reality is that the post-everything world of the twenty-first century is more discontinuous with the modern world of the twentieth century than we often imagine. This new world needs a new church and tweaking the old church will never be sufficient. We must stop minimizing the differences and embrace a radical discontinuity in the way we understand and do church. William Easum writes:

We live in a time unlike any other time that any living person has known. It’s not merely that things are changing. Change itself has changed, thereby changing the rules by which we live. . . . Established churches are becoming increasingly ineffective because our past has not prepared us for ministry in the future.  The discontinuity we have experienced because of these quantum leaps is comparable to the experience of the residents of East Berlin when the Berlin Wall came down. Nothing in their past prepared them for life without the Wall. Very little in our past has prepared us for ministry in today’s world.[1]

If we are to embrace the new we must let go of the old that in itself is a painful business. It will involve a period of reassessment during which our core values are re-evaluated in the light of the new paradigm in which we live. We will need to come to a new understanding of the relationship between the gospel, the church and the world. This must be done because the changing world requires a new contextual understanding of these crucial relationships. Consequently we must ask: What is the gospel in this new post-everything world? We must ask this because while there is a sense in which the gospel never changes there is another sense in which it is always different because of the context in which it is communicated. Likewise, we must ask: What does it mean to be the people of God in a post-everything world? This is important because the church on the other-side of Christendom will of necessity look very different from the church that was central to the community in which it functioned. The church in a post-everything world is a church on the periphery of a world in which there is no centre. This calls for a very different way of being the people of God from what we have experienced so far. It means that we must become what we were always meant to be – a missional community and we must rediscover the missionary nature of the church. Finally, we must ask: How do we as the people of God relate to the world in which we live? This question is significant because too often we have been disconnected from the world out there. We have tended to live the greater part of our lives in our Christian ghettos with very little real engagement of the world beyond the walls of our churches. Too often we have been ‘of the world but not in the world’ rather than ‘in the world but not of the world’. Consequently we need to discover how to re-engage the world in which we live.

I would suggest that these questions need to be reflected upon, not in isolation from the post-everything world, but in the midst of post-everything people, in the pub or at the shopping mall, wherever they gather. Only then will we begin to get to grips with the meaning of the gospel, our role and function as the people of God, and our relationship to the world of post-everything people. Only then will we be ready to make that radical transition to a postmodern church.

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[1] Easum, William, Sacred Cows Make Gourmet Burgers (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995) 19, and 21-22.

Mission in a New and Changing World

In the sixties the Church in Australia became increasingly isolated and less relevant to mainstream Australian society. It began to move from the centre of society to the fringe, so that by the beginning of the twenty-first century it had become an insignificant sub-culture of the periphery of a pluralistic and multi-cultural society. The world we now live in has been changing at an alarming rate over the past thirty to forty years. Australian society, like the rest of the Western world, is moving through a transition period from modernity to post-modernity, involving an epochal change in the way people live, think and act.

This new world is a world of post-Christendom, post-denominationalism and post-institutionalism. In this new pluralistic world Christianity is no longer the main player on the block. The old denominational and organisational structures are crumbling because brand loyalty is a thing of the past in our consumer-orientated society. Institutions, particularly those of the church, are seen to belong to a style vacuum, since almost everyone is looking for freedom and autonomy in this increasingly anti-authoritarian world. As a result of this many fine Christian people are struggling to make the faith they profess meaningful to their everyday lives and relevant to those to whom they seek to witness.

The Church in Australia is facing a significant crisis. It is as the Church has always been, just one generation from extinction. At this present time the Pentecostal church is the fastest growing church in Australia. It is growing at a conversion rate of less than one person per year per congregation. The Anglicans, Uniting and Presbyterians are dying off at an alarming rate. Many Brethren Assemblies are seriously struggling. The larger churches are growing primarily at the expense of dying smaller churches. An escalating number of clergy are opting out of the ministry. And many Christians are either very discouraged or looking for the latest bandwagon to get their next fix of super-spirituality. So is there any hope for the Church in Australia in this post-Christendom and post-modern World?

The answer to that question is obviously extremely complex. The answer could well be: Yes. J.K. Chesterton once said, “Five times in the history of the Church, Christianity has gone to the dogs and every time it was the dog that died!” Or the answer could be: No. For a number of times in the history of the Church, a church or a group of churches have died off in a particular part of the world. I would suggest that the Church in Australia can and will survive, but only if it becomes what it was always meant to be. That is missionary in nature. As Emil Brunner once said, “The church exists by mission as a fire exists by burning.”

The Church in Australia, like the rest of the Western world, has operated for too long on the old Christendom model of mission which is mission by attraction. Neither the user-friendly approach of Willowcreek or the hype of Hillsong will stop the decline of an ailing Church for such approaches are neither radical enough nor sufficiently world engaging to meet the need the Church in Australia at this present time.

If the Church is to be meaningful in the new and changing world of the twenty-first century, it must become outwardly missional in its orientation. It must move-out into the world to befriend, engage and confront the world on its own ground not ours. It must become incarnational rather than program orientated. For too long our churches have substituted programs for relationships. This will involve becoming a community rather than merely being assemblies or congregations. We will need to remember that which we have so easily forgotten, that the missionary is the message and not simply the messenger.

This new and changing world we now live in demands new wineskins. It will not be good enough simply to pour the new wine of the gospel into the old wineskins. What is needed is not patched up wineskins, but the new wineskins of a radically contextualised gospel and church. We need to be open to the work of the Holy Spirit in creating new church and mission structures that can carry the life changing truth of the gospel into the new and changing world of twenty-first century Australia.

Reaching out will and must involve God’s people moving out of the safety and comfort of our Chirstian getto’s into the world in the same kind of way in which Jesus left the security of heaven and incarnated himself into the world of a fallen humanity. For Jesus the incarnation meant incarnation into Jewish culture. Through the incarnation, Jesus Christ became a first century Galilean Jew – “The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us” (Jn. 1:14). In Christ, God accepted the cultural limitations of a particular time and place. He adopted a Jewish lifestyle and Jewish customs within the context of a Jewish family. On the eve of the cross he commissioned his disciples saying, “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you” (Jn.20:21; cf 17:18). Jesus mission, as described in Luke 4:18-19, “was to liberate the impoverished, the imprisoned, the sightless, and the oppressed.” Consequently, the church as the body of Christ is called to incarnate fully into the life and culture of every segment of Australian society, proclaiming the gospel and meeting human need in whatever form it may occur.

To do this effectively, we must form small missional communities in the same way that Jesus established the missional community of the twelve. Jesus never intended us to engage in mission alone and in isolation from other members of his body. Such communities must enter and engage the many cultures and subcultures of Australian society in a culturally sensitive and relevant fashion in much the same way as missionaries entered pagan cultures in Africa or New Papua Guinea. They must lay aside the religious language of the church and learn the language of the people to whom they minister. They must adapt to the new culture and yet bring the transforming power of the gospel into contact with that culture. The aim must be to plant new believing communities that are culturally appropriate and not simply clones of the churches that we come from. Such communities may look and feel odd because they fit the new culture and not the old church culture with which we feel so comfortable, but that is to be expected.

In adventuring with God in this way we must above all commit ourselves as the people of God to the God who is eternal, unchanging and yet not taken by surprise at the emerging context in which we find ourselves at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Finally, we must trust God to lead and to guide us in the task of fashioning new wineskins suitable for the emerging post-Christendom, post-denominational and post-institutional society in which we now live.

No Strangers in the World

It was Donne, who said, “No man is an island.” And yet we live life at such a pace that people get squeezed out of our lives and although we don’t want to we do in fact often live a Robinson Crusoe kind of existence. Likewise, all of the time saving devices that we possess take up so much time that people can easily get left behind or pushed to the side in the process of living life. Even in church we can end up knowing lots of people very superficially without developing real, deep friendships.

Wapke (my wife) was telling me how her day was brightened up this week. She was shopping in Eastland when she saw a very tall Sudanese man with beautiful black shiny skin, who was wearing a tee-shirt with the slogan, “No strangers in the world.”

“No strangers in the world.” – For the believer there should be “no strangers in the world,” because we above all people recognize that all people, black or white, rich or poor, wise or foolish, young or old, male or female are made in ‘the image and likeness of God.’ And therefore must be treated with respect, dignity and love.

For the Christian there can be no racism or discrimination of any kind in our midst and we must stand against racism and discrimination in any and every form. Why? Because Christ has destroyed all the barriers, he has broken down the wall of hostility. While this may not be a reality for all people or peoples in the world. We as the people of God are called to live out that reality in this world today as a sign of the coming of the kingdom of God in Jesus Christ.

The Heretic Game

The church in the Western world, including Australia, has lived under the shadow of Christendom for so long that we find life difficult in this post-Christendom, post-modernist period. During the Christendom period we didn’t need to reach-out beyond the doors of the church because the people out there were either associated with the church or easily attracted to it. In those times even the ardent non-Christians had an elementary understanding of the Bible and the basics of the Christian faith. However, things are not what they were. Today in a world searching for spirituality the church is the last place people are looking for the answer to their spiritual needs. They are more likely to try the smorgasbord of new age spiritualities that is on show, no matter how far-out or wacky they may be, than to check out the church.

At this present time there is still a group of fringe people on the edge of the church community, who make seeker sensitive style approaches viable. However, the fringe dwellers are ever decreasing in number and before long we will be faced with the task of reaching the hardcore unchurched, something the church is not well equipped to do. The majority of our churches, if they have contemplated reaching out to the hardcore unchurched at all, and few have, are still thinking in terms of the aggressive, apologetic approaches that were all too familiar in the modern period. Alternatively they use the seeker sensitive approaches of Willow Creek, which at its heart still uses a modernist apologetic.

Before we even contemplate moving out to reach the hardcore unchurched generation, I believe that the church itself needs to go through a sea change in the way it handles the truth of the word of God. For far too long truth has been emphasised at the expense of relationship and practice. Believing the right doctrines has been stressed to the neglect of doing the right things and relating to others in the right way. A student of mine was running a Bible study a few years ago, half the group were Christians, while the other half were from well beyond the fringe of the church. In the end he had to close the group down because the Christians in the group found it totally unacceptable that the non-Christians in the group held such heretical and unchristian ideas. They simply could not cope with people who believed differently than themselves, even if they were open to learn and discover the truth of God’s word. In this case unthinking dogma became an obstacle to the communication of salvation in Jesus Christ. The reason why this group of otherwise Godly people had such difficulties relating to and interacting with the non-Christians in the Bible study group was that they had been brought up on what I call “The Heretic Game”.

“The Heretic Game” is a game that is commonly played in churches. It goes something like this. New Christians or those interested in learning more about the Christianity are invited along to a Bible study group. Usually after a few weeks of getting to know the group they start to feel at easy and begin to open up. It’s at this point that they usually make their fatal mistake – they start to think. They inevitably ask a question or make a statement on an issue that is held dear to those who know the game. They may question the deity of Christ or suggest that abortion is perfectly acceptable. The group then asks then to elaborate and as they do they crawl further and further out on a limb. When they are right out on a limb, the group begins to saw off the branch calling out “heretic” with great delight. At that point the unfortunate person who obviously doesn’t know the game has two choices, either they crawl back in giving their testimony, pledging never to contemplate to such heretic thoughts again, or they leave the group vowing never again to have anything to do with such dorks. Those who end up staying quickly learn the new game, never again do they attempt to think for that could be fatal, they simply allow themselves to be indoctrinated into the faith they have recently discovered.

The result of “the Heretic Game” is that many believers remain spiritually immature for most of their lives, they are unable to pass on their faith in a meaningful manner, and the faith they profess looks very unattractive to those on the outside. If we are to overcome “the Heretic Game” then we need to develop thinking, reflecting communities that are not afraid to ask the hard questions. Communities where there is freedom to grapple with and work through their issues and heresies without the threat of being denounced. In other words, we need to develop communities of trust that work out their faith in the context of real life, with a serious commitment to Bible study, reflection and a changing lifestyle as they are confronted afresh with the living word of God. Then and only then will we have something to offer a world without Christ.

At the Edge

In viewing the past with hindsight, we observe how it is often the unexpected, the unknown, the insignificant, the marginalized who lead the way towards the renewal of the church in times difficulty. Indeed, the very process of institutionalisation hinders the renewal of the church by stifling creativity and replacing charismatic and creative leaders with traditional leaders. Stability and maintenance replace growth, creativity and mission as the objectives. Furthermore, those who are already at the heart of one movement tend not to need to start another. In fact they are often reluctant to do so. The truth is that the renewal and expansion of the church most often begin at the edge of the Ecclesiastical structures of the day. What does this mean for the missional church today?