Creation? Junk? No Way. Go Berean!

This last Sunday we went to Berean, that little church of 5-6000 people down the road :-). It was a remarkable experience for a number of reasons. First of all, Ryan Dudney (a Grace Chapel guy) graduated from Berean's Christian Leadership College and along with three other graduates was honored during the worship service. The CLC is a challenging one-year program primarily designed to equip believers in the marketplace to think through questions about a biblical world and life view and to confidently engage the culture for Christ. Secondly, we saw about a zillion people we knew at Berean (who would have thunk it in a miniature city on Sundays five times the size of Tanya's grandparents' hometown of Pender, NE?). Thirdly, we had with us our ten-year old "former foster son" Darius who lived with us when he was three. Darius had a good buddy named Marquis who was five at the time and died of a rare blood disorder that year. The message series at Berean was on "heaven" and Marquis' family came on in a video clip to talk about Marquis dying and now being in heaven. Though separated by two children in our seating arrangement, I could hear my wife Tanya crying during the clip.

Fourthly and finally, I WAS WRONG! Hallelujah! Last week in my sermon, I made the comment that we would be hard-pressed to find in any corner of Lincoln an evangelical church proclaiming that in God's eyes the banker's job was as significant as the pastor's job or that for the Kingdom, the plumber's job was as important as the missionary's. I WAS WRONG! Hallelujah! Pastor Bryan Clark of Berean was preaching that our call as believers was to create a bit of heaven here on earth and that the things we do now, if done in the power of Christ and by His Spirit, in a mysterious way, would carry on into the New Heaven and Earth. I was SOOOOO encouraged to hear Pastor Clark seeing the goodness in God's material creation and the importance of "tending to the Garden" rather than seeking escape from it. This message coming out of Berean is even more remarkable in that the history of fundamentalism and a separatist attitude to the world runs right through the center of Berean churches (this is not said in a critical way, simply by way of observation and fact). While PCA churches have tended to this same separatist attitude, our history and the foundations of our theology have more readily lent themselves to thinking intentionally about engaging the culture in meaningful ways to redeem rather than scrap. Pastor Clark even quoted Romans 8:21! a key text to help us think through bringing renewal and redemption to the material world, i.e. creation! Man was I encouraged. Go Bryan and go Berean!

If you are wanting to think more intentionally about this idea of cultural engagement and worldview, please take a look at the challenging but worthwhile book, "Creation Regained : Biblical Basics of a Reformational Worldview," by Al Wolters. In the book, one of my favorite Wolters' quotes is, "God does not create junk and He does not junk what He creates."