The Loss of Purposeful Work in History

In his 1986 work Foolishness to the Greeks, Lesslie Newbigin speaks of the difference in the worldview from the person living in the middle ages versus someone who lives in our modern world. Newbigin makes the case for how the worldview of the average person living in the West today is quite different from the person living in medieval times. He says this:

"The medieval Christian, taught by the Bible, saw as the end to which all history moves, the second coming of Christ, the judgment of the living and the dead, and the holy city in which all that is pure and true in the pubic and private life of the nations is gathered up in eternal perfection. This vision of the end is, of course, part and parcel of the teleological view of creation and history, which has the will and purpose of God as its center. The eighteenth century transferred the holy city from another world to this. No longer would it be a gift of God from heaven; it would be the final triumph of science and skill of the enlightened peoples of the earth. The eighteenth century witnessed the birth of the doctrine of progress, a doctrine that was to rule- with fateful consequences- well into the twentieth century. The emancipation of the human spirit from pressure of dogma, tradition, and superstition, and the purposeful exercise of the newly liberated powers of human reason would lead to such a growing understanding and a growing mastery that all the evils that enslave men and women would be conquered," p. 28.

Newbigin's point is that the eighteenth century Enlightenment began as an optimistic vision of life on earth, a vision that was believed attainable without God, religion or dogma. Of course, as those who are essentially "religious" in nature, even embracing a worldview without God and the transcendent, nonetheless humanity placed its hope in the "doctrine of human progress": in a word, human reason was affirmed to be a messiah of sorts, holding forth the promise of liberation, happiness and the emancipation of the human spirit.

Unfortunately, one of the devastating consequences of worshipping the "doctrine of progress" was that "efficiency" in human work became the purpose for which man worked. The teleological view of creation and history, in other words, a vision of life as serving the larger cosmic purpose of a God and a story that might impart even the smallest action and expression of work dignity and significance was removed from our vista of understanding human work, activity and engagement. Efficiency became the goal and lost was the actual dignity and worth accorded to work according to a Biblical world and life view. Listen further to Newbigin's analysis here:

"The work of the traditional craftsman that spanned the whole process from raw material to finished product is analyzed into its smallest parts and then broken up into separate operations, each given over to a different workman. By this division of labor, it is possible to increase enormously the quantity of finished articles produced, but the individual worker no longer shares directly in the vision of the final product that governs the whole process. His work is assimilated more and more into the repetitive action of a machine rather than to the purposeful work of the craftsman, whose operations are all governed by a vision of the end. Craftsmanship is replaced by labor, and human work is assimilated into the pattern of the Newtonian universe, from which teleology is banished. The individual worker, for example, does not know whether his product is going to make a family car or a fighter plane," p. 29.

Newbigin's reference to a "Newtonian universe" speaks of the "achievement" of the Enlightenment scientists, especially Isaac Newton, who began to redefine the nature of ultimate reality by describing the "real world" as one built on natural laws of cause and effect. In essence, the sense of a purpose behind the universe that had governed medieval thought was now viewed as dispensable and unnecessary in describing the nature of ultimate reality. As Newbigin says, "Teleology (the understanding of purpose) had no place in physics and astronomy. All the movements of tangible bodies and changes in the visible world could be explained without reference to purpose and in terms of efficient cause," p. 24.

From this Enlightenment worldview flowed the basic dichotomy between "public truth" and "private values," the basic idea that if we want to speak about ultimate reality and "raw facts" about the universe, we can do so with the laws of nature, i.e. that of cause and effect; however, if we want to speak of things like faith, purpose, values and moral meaning, we must reserve such things to the individual private life where one is free to dabble in such ideas insofar as they are not proclaimed as "public and universal truth."

So perhaps the great challenge before the Church today is how Christians today integrate our vision of the world with a truly Biblical vision of the purpose for which we were created and for which we work. The Church has all-to-often acquiesced to this faulty Enlightenment ideal of separating "public fact" from "private values" by teaching an escapist theology that we ought remove ourselves from meaningful participation in "worldly engagement and activities"; we have shirked our responsibility by agreeing with the Enlightenment worldview saying to the world, "you keep to yourself and we the church will keep to ourselves." Yet is this faithfulness when Jesus asked us to be salt and light? As Richard Lovelace states, while we have "stayed away from the world" avoiding a kind of "destructive enculturation," nonetheless, we have participated in another kind of enculturation, as devastating, what we might call a "protective enculturation."

Nonetheless, the opportunity exists for the Church to once again teach a new world and life view (which is really an old world and life view) both for Herself as well as before the world of the God who is there and not silent, to use Schaeffer's terms. We must be thoughtful and intentional in engaging the world within the range of creational activities that are ours to take up, including activities in the world of public affairs, of politics, economics, art and culture to name a few, rather than simply shouting "repent and believe" without love or meaningful engagement in worldly affairs (like a bunch of clanging symbols). It is our task to participate in the redemptive work of Christ by bringing back to the public arena a vision of engagement in these various spheres with the hope of reunion between "telos" and public meaning. But we must also be careful to place our hope in the Lord and Redeemer of Creation as well (Col. 1:19.20), rather than in the hope of human progress and work in and of itself, lest we repeat the errors of the Enlightenment experiment all over again. It's a tricky tension we embrace, ... yet this is our call to take up as the Faithful.

Updates on Summerlins in Haiti

Gene will be posting updates this week on the Grace Chapel Haiti FB Page.

Summerlins off to Haiti

Please pray for Gene, Terri, Caitlin and Micah Summerlin as they are off to Haiti for this week to serve alongside and see their son and brother Trey who is in Mireabalais for the summer. Gene is Grace Chapel's Haiti Ministries Coordinator. Last Month, Deb Knight and Tim Scheel joined a medical group from Yale medical school. Our next big trip planned is for this November- currently we have 25 commitments for the trip.

Only Partially Disenculturated

"The evangelical stream, however, was only partially disenculturated, ... At its highest point it aimed to transcend the diversity of cultic practices to establish an ideal spiritual unity of Christians across denominations and cultures. But it was still largely wedded to the Puritan version of the training-code morality, which caught on in Pietist circles also. As the understanding of grace declined in revivalism, evangelicalism erected a stronger shell of protective enculturation to guard it from the world. Not only did it cling to the Puritan taboos, but in the nineteenth century it added more: wine and tobacco, both of which had been consumed by both Reformers and Puritans. The early Temperance movement was motivated by social compassion for victims of distilled liquor during the stresses of the Industrial Revolution, and it really called for temperance. When moderation seemed too difficult a spiritual disciple and too slow a remedy, the revivalists of the 1820s and 30s moved on to redefine temperance as abstinence, to the horror of Charles Hodge, who protested that the replacement of Communion wine with grape juice was an insult to Jesus and to biblical ethics.

A few decades later, coffee and tea were added to the taboo list by revivalist Charles Finney. It is significant that Finney's understanding of justification and sanctification were essentially severed from any doctrine of union with Christ; in effect he taught justification by sanctification and not by faith, and sanctification by will power more than by grace. As succeeding generations of revivalist leaders had less and less grasp of the dynamics of spiritual life, the drift toward training codes and protective enculturation became stronger and stronger.

Worldliness, for the Puritan, had meant 'excessive love for the wealth, affluence and pride of the world.' For the late nineteenth-century evangelical, however, it increasingly came to mean the presence of certain visible habits of behavior which marked the nonevangelical off as nonkosher. At the same time, an insidious process of cultural fusion was going on in which Christianity was gradually identified with Americanism, patriotism and the preservation of the status quo.

By the 1930s the average American Fundamentalist was not, at least, a proponent of theocracy, but he did have a way of confusing America, the Republican Party and the capitalist system with the kingdom of God. He did not practice circumcision, but he did assume that only those who had gone through a certain form of conversion experience was 'born again' and that the salvation of these persons was either unquestionably sure or else maintained by works of personal morality. Sanctification was not a subject he was used to hearing about- at least, not in terms of Pauline doctrine- but he had an extensive behavioral code by which to distinguish dedicated Christians from liberals, the unsaved and the backslidden. He felt that black people, including black Christians, were all right in their place (and that included a separate place of worship), but he was ready to focus all hidden fears and pooled hatreds of his heart on those who did not stay in their place, and also on Communists, Jews and sometimes even Democrats. If sufficiently well-trained, he could recognize the fact that theological liberals were Sadduccees, but very rarely could he see the point of the liberal contention that he himself was a Pharisee.

By this point, it becomes somewhat hard to discern whether the enculturation of Evangelicalism was protective or destructive, ..." (Dynamics, pp. 194-95). 

Disenculturation and Signs of Protestant Health

"In the seventeenth century, English and American Puritans gradually began to adopt the leavening strategy of the New Testament and began to pray for spiritual awakening to reshape the church and the culture by internal transformation instead of external imposition. Many Puritans and Pietists began to seek to transcend theological and denominational differences to form a union of Protestants on the basis of a common recognition of godliness in one another. The most radical of these leaders, Count Zinzendorf, consciously limited his concern in missions and ecumenism to the core of biblical teaching in the New Testament which deals with spiritual renewal and insisted that political unification or cultural homogenization of the church was useless and unnecessary. Zinzendorf discouraged legalism and fostered Christian freedom..." (Dynamics, pp. 193-94).

Destructive and Protective Enculturations

Richard Lovelace writes that the church must "fully appropriate the life and redemptive benefits of Jesus Christ" (Dynamics, p. 191), because if it doesn't it will fall into one of two damaging forms of enculturation. By the way, enculturation can be defined as the process of adopting the characteristics and norms of another culture. On the one hand, if the church isn't experiencing a renewed understanding of the life and redemptive benefits of Christ, it will absorb elements of its host culture that it should judge as unholy (destructive enculturation). On the other hand, if the church isn't being renewed in the Gospel of Christ, another dangerous alternative sometimes comes about: the church works so hard to separate itself from the broader culture that it "re-creates" the rigidity of the Old Testament's emphasis on the geographical and ethnic separation of God's people from the rest of the world (protective enculturation).

A few thoughts on the protective enculturation of the OT: the separateness of Israel from the rest of the world served an important purpose in the history of redemption: 1) to teach us that God's people were to be set apart and distinct from the surrounding peoples and nations but also 2) to show us that God's people needed a work of conversion and renewal that would run deep into the interior of God's people, for hearts to be set apart for God ultimately (consider Peter's words to those "scattered" throughout Asia Minor- 1Pet. 2:9- the issue isn't one of locale, but one of hearts being "called out" of darkness and into light). In a word, we learn in the OT that while the people could be taken out of the world, the worldliness could not be taken out of the people; a greater work of renewal and redemption was needed. So in Matt. 1:21, the child to be named Jesus is described as One who will "save his people from their sins," a salvation actually reaching to the defective layers of the heart (Jer. 17:9) to renew it and make one fit to ascend the Lord's holy hill (Psa. 24:3).

Lovelace reviews the ways sixteenth century Protestants were simply being enculturated in a destructive manner by the unholy aspects of fallen culture and losing their distinctiveness altogether. As a result, reform movements of the sixteenth century "such as Puritanism and Pietism, sought to develop a Protestant style of piety by tinkering with monastic spirituality and adapting it to a Reformational theological base. This inevitably sent them back to the ascetic ideals of the early church fathers, which they did not entirely rethink. And so the Puritans, shuddering a little at Luther's 'freedom of the Christian man' which they feared would lead to licentiousness and dead orthodoxy, reintroduced the training-code morality which forbade the theater, the dance, cosmetics and novel clothing style, and added to the older list of taboos on the use of playing cards, religious graphic art, the employment of musical instruments in worship, the celebration of Christmas and other indifferent things. Abandoning the Reformers' use of Sunday as a day of rest, recreation and reflection on the works of God, they turned the Sabbath into a day of strenuous holy work with recreation tabooed. They rigorously abandoned holy days like Christmas and Easter but introduced in their place fifty-two new fast days per year" (Dynamics, p. 193).

Truncating and Reducing

From his classic 1979 work Dynamics of Spiritual Life, Richard Lovelace gets us to think about the problems with mainline churches who have too readily accommodated the fallen value systems of secular humanism as well as those with evangelical churches that have tended to react so strongly to such "negative" cultural movements that "orthodoxy" has sought to be preserved in "fairy-tale kingdoms" rather than the world that God made and calls us to live in.

Lovelace goes a step further and criticizes the tendency for some evangelicals to simply dismiss the substantial pursuit of doctrine by emphasizing purely Christian experience and the life of the Spirit, forgetting that sometimes the Spirit empowers the intellectual engagements of God's people as a key method to cutting holes into the darkness; yet, at the same, time there are still other evangelicals who emphasize the importance of biblical doctrine utilizing "biblical building blocks" to the point of neglecting the Spirit's role to effectively guide the Christian life.

I think what Lovelace gets at here is that among all expressions of Christianity as well as particular tendencies within the evangelical world (of which I am a member), the human heart tends to truncate and reduce Biblical truth, i.e. the Gospel's truth. Why do we do this? Well, I think simply because to do so makes life manageable rather than too big for us. Yet, doesn't the God of Scripture call us to live lives of dependence rather than independence, to get us to worship our way through life rather than manage it?

Consider the following Lovelace quotes. They are quite good:

"In the present century (20th century) the theological power centers of many larger churches have become so intimidated and mesmerized by ... humanism that from time to time they have been reduced to echoing its social moralism. Other leaders who have longed to remain faithful to historic orthodoxy have sought to isolate the realm of faith from the realm of scientifically verifiable history in order to make it invulnerable to the critical erosion of the biblical base and the shifting cosmologies of secular systems. In doing so, however, they have found themselves rulers over a kind of fairy-tale kingdom of meaning beyond history in which the world is not strongly motivated to join them," p. 182.

"Some Evangelicals have been genuinely obscurantist, addicted to experience and dismissing doctrine and any informed use of the mind as irrelevant to spiritual maturity. In our quest for the fullness of the Spirit, we have sometimes forgotten that a Spirit-filled intelligence is one of the powerful weapons for pulling down satanic strongholds. On the other hand, we have often assumed that the theological task was simply a matter of digging out biblical building blocks and building up logically from them by the exercise of our own inherent brain power, forgetting that only the Holy Spirit can effectively guide us in wielding the sword of the Spirit.

Recapturing the biblical sanity of the professing church is an immense task. So is the projection of a sane theology in a way which will arrest the intellectual decline of our culture. We are not about to achieve these goals without a very close dependence on the Holy Spirit. But if we do attack the task of theological integration with the Spirit's guidance, we are going to succeed. The Spirit will enter into the sanctuary of our minds in fullness and power, and we will lift from the church and Western culture some of the fog blanket of intellectual darkness which has been oppressing us since the late nineteenth century," pp. 183-84.

A Father and Husband's Love

As John Ames confronts his death, he writes in his memoir to his 7-year-old son,

"I can tell you this, that if I'd married some rosy dame and she had given me ten children and they had each given me ten grandchildren, I'd leave them all, on Christmas Eve, on the coldest night of the world, and walk a thousand miles just for the sight of your face, your mother's face. And if I never found you, my comfort would be in that hope, my lonely and singular hope, which could not exist in the whole of Creation except in my heart and in the heart of the Lord. That is just a way of saying I could never thank God sufficiently for the splendor He has hidden from the world- your mother excepted, of course- and revealed to me in your sweetly ordinary face."

From Gilead, p. 237

Moral Commitment Preceding Belief

It's funny because I'm always a bit startled when I run into someone who references something from my blog; after all, I've been writing on it a lot as of late really for my own sake, to help process and integrate my learning into my life and subsequently ministry. Of course, I'm always glad when someone benefits from the writing; oh the mercy and kindness of God, but my natural assumption (whether accurate or inaccurate) is that not so many people read it but that it's me, Jesus and a few interested persons involved.

All that to say, I give away something that, in theory, could lead one to justify not showing up for tomorrow's worship service at Grace Chapel :-(. I do something here I haven't done before (at least not that I can recall having done), but I "give away" the sermon I plan to preach tomorrow.  These ideas have been so poignant and impactful on me as of late, especially under the tutelage and guidance of Steven Garber that I must write about them, even if one day early. The format is one I send to our musicians and office people during the week so bulletins can be prepared, music themes developed, etc. Blessings to you my friends, whether few or many, and come by tomorrow, especially if you were planning on it anyways :-):


Series: Gospel of John
Text: John 19:1-16a
Title: The World That Is Really There
Quote: “... and so I would like now to introduce a more culturally neutral term for that economy that I have been calling the Kingdom of God. Sometimes, in thinking about it, I have called it the Great Economy, which is the name I am going to make do with here...”  -Wendell Berry

Themes: moral commitment precedes belief. Because we are people who see first and foremost with our hearts, we imagine the world as we would like it to be and then live out of that vision of life; our moral commitments precede what we believe about life, God, the world, etc. Pilate was a classic case of someone who was ultimately committed to the retaining of his own power, status and position and so, despite the little voice inside telling him that he had no basis for a charge and no reason to put Jesus to death, nonetheless, he crowded out that voice that stirred fear and anxiety within and lived according to his highest moral commitment, that a world with him remaining in power was the best world to be conceived.

The Jewish peoples did essentially the same thing, needing Jesus dead, despite the fact that they too had no basis for the claim of blasphemy (especially since Jesus spoke the truth about himself at every point). In crying out for his crucifixion, the Jewish leaders end up shouting “we have no King but Caesar!” Here we see those accusing and seeking death for a purported blasphemer, ... blaspheming. Why the obvious inconsistency? Because moral commitment precedes belief. Remember Caiaphas who said in John 11:50 that it is better for one man to die than for an entire nation to perish? The Jewish people saw the preservation of their religion, political power and semi-self-rule to be more important than submitting to One who was promised long ago to bring the actual reign of God; they were committed to such a world, ... so lived in it.

But what happens when the pangs of conscience begin to press in on us or our lives are exposed to be something less than what they purport to be? What happens when the hypocrisy within is revealed and we are found to embrace a vision of the world that doesn’t account for how the world really works and how human flourishing actually best takes place? We all stand in a historical moment of our own, like Pilate, perhaps in ways less poignant and significant, but poignant and significant in their own rights nonetheless. And when the Greater Economy (Berry’s way of describing the Kingdom of God, the world that is really there, the deepest of all realities) calls to account the lesser economies/worlds that we have created for ourselves, ... will our commitments and beliefs make sense of the world?

So in our historical moment we stand with a choice: 1) will we continue to crowd out the inner voice that reminds us we belong to a Greater Reality all around us as this is the world God made? or instead 2) will we humble ourselves, live in repentance and receive the eyes to see and the ears to hear that Voice that means to bring consistency, integration and wholeness to our lives?

Meaningful Ministry

In a class I am leading at Grace Chapel called "Faith and Vocation," I was asked to define the term "ministry." Put more simply, what is "meaningful ministry"? 

I’d like for us to think about 2Cor. 5:17-19 for a little while, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.” Of course, most of us from evangelical backgrounds have used these verses narrowly to say this means that whenever we talk to people about Jesus, i.e. evangelize, then we are “doing ministry.” Yet, if we pause for a second and look at some of the salient features of these verses, we might understand that our redemption is taking place in the context of a larger hope, that of the ultimate restoration of all things.

So:

1. The “ministry” we have received is the message of forgiveness, that when we give our lives to Christ, we become a “new creation” in Christ.
2. However, the larger Scriptural context here must not be lost on us.  What does it mean to become a “new creation”? It means that we share in the larger hope of the new heavens and the new earth (Isa. 65:17; 66:22, Rev. 21:1). The redemption of our souls stands in solidarity with a much larger restoration project involving all of creation (read Romans 8:19-21 closely).
3. Finally, think further with me about Colossians 1:16-20 that makes clear in no uncertain terms that the achievement of the Cross involves the "reconciliation of all things whether things on earth or things in heaven...”  In this 2Cor. 5 passage, we must think of human beings within the larger narrative of the “world” that is being reconciled to Christ.

So the “ministry of reconciliation,” and thus meaningful ministry means participation in making things beautiful once again, whether sharing the Gospel with a friend who needs the restoring power of Jesus or whether preparing tasty barbecue with your neighbors on the 4th of July, mowing the lawn, going to work. All these activities are rightfully defined as "meaningful ministry": indeed, this is the “ministry of reconciliation” entrusted to us. 

"For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen." -Rom. 11:36

Food and Theology, Thoughts by John Perkins

John Perkins discusses some of his thoughts on food and God. Perkins is a member of South City Church in St. Louis led by Jay Simmons. Jay is one of the cohort members walking through the Doctor of Ministry program with me.

Of Salt and Light from The Other Journal on Vimeo.

A Conversation in Deed, by Matthew B. Crawford

(Mike Hsu lovin' life)

I like to fix motorcycles more than I like to wire houses (Matthew Crawford is an electrician as well as a motorcycle mechanic). Both practices have internal goods that engage my attention, but fixing bikes is more meaningful because not only the fixing but also the riding of motorcycles answers to certain intuitions I have about human excellence. People who ride motorcycles have gotten something right, and I want to put myself in the service of it, this thing that we do, this kingly sport that is like war made beautiful.

My job of making motorcycles run right is subservient to the higher good that is achieved when one of my customers leans hard through a corner on the Blue Ridge Parkway, to the point of deliberately dragging his well-armored knee on the inside. This moment of faith, daring, and skill casts a sanctifying light over my work. I try to get his steering head bearings as light and silky as they can be without free play, and his swing arm bushings good and tight, because I want him to fell his tires truly. Only then can he make the road fully his own. If I am riding twenty yards behind him, I want to hear the confidence he has in the chassis I have tuned, expressed by the way he rolls on the throttle, brashly, through the exit of a turn. He is likely to pull away from me; I may find him waiting for me at Cumberland Gap without a verdict that lighter fork oil is called for, to get less damping in the front end.

I try to be a good motorcycle mechanic. This effort connects me to others, in particular to those who exemplify good motorcycling, because it is they who can best judge how well I have realized the functional goods I am aiming at. I wouldn't even know what those goods are if I didn't spend time with people who ride at a much higher level than I, and are therefore more discerning of what is good in a motorcycle. So my work situates me in a particular community. The narrow mechanical things I concern myself with are inscribed within a larger circle of meaning; they are the service of an activity that we recognize as part of a life well lived. The common recognition, which needn't be spoken, is the basis for a friendship that orients by concrete images of excellence.

My point, finally, isn't to recommend motorcycling in particular, nor to idealize the life of a mechanic. It is rather to suggest that if we follow the traces of our own actions to their source, they intimate some understanding of the good life. This understanding may be hard to articulate; bringing it more fully into view is the task of moral inquiry. Such inquiry may be helped along by practical activities in company with others, a sort of conversation in deed. In this conversation lies the potential of work to bring some measure of coherence to our lives.

Shop Class as Soulcraft, pp. 196,197

Shop Class as Soulcraft

I just finished a very interesting book called Shop Class as Soulcraft. Matthew Crawford has a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago and serves as a fellow at the Institute for Advance Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. However, Crawford spends most of his time operating an independent motorcycle repair shop called Shockoe Moto in Richmond, VA.

Crawford's basic claim is that at some point the "useful arts," i.e. manual work, became demoted to a "place" below that of intellectual thought, that "thinking" became elevated above "doing." One consequence of this way of thinking is that Shop Class has been cut from school curricula and shown to be less important than other disciplines. Another consequence is that for a very long time now, it has been thought that an academic degree is more important than a technical degree. So many of our young people have had it drilled into their heads, "you must go to college to be successful." Still we find that many college graduates now find themselves with a specialized degree in computer science, for example, but also can only find work for $8/hr. at places like Best Buy. On the other hand, because of a vacuum of those who are now able to serve as quality and skilled manual laborers, i.e. plumbers, mechanics and electricians, means that individuals in such trades are able to command $80/hr. or even more as their services have become highly sought after, as a result of this push away from the "useful arts." Of course Crawford's point isn't to elevate manual service above that of "white collar" work, rather to make a case for why the application of knowledge ought to be joined to the knowledge itself and why manual trades provide opportunities for intellectually-challenging and integrated work, the potential for stimulating thought and usefulness to our fellow humans as well. As Crawford says on p. 32, "My purpose in this book is to elaborate the potential for human flourishing in the manual trades- their rich cognitive challenges and psychic nourishment...."

It's definitely a book worth reading. In my next post, though this is rather self-serving I admit, I will share some regarding what Crawford says about the goodness of the "kingly sport" of motorcycle riding.

Jayber's Nunc Dimittis... Forgiveness

... and for the first time I saw him apart from my contempt for him. I saw him clear-eyed.

I saw us both as if from a great distance off in time: two small, craving, suffering creatures, soon to be gone. Troy was a beaten man and knew it, and was trying not to know it. You could see it in his eyes. Now at last he was about to inherit a farm that he had worn out, that he had so encumbered with debt that he could not keep it, that I knew would now be dragged into the suck of speculation and development to be subdivided under some such name as Paradise Estates. This was Troy's last play in what he had sometimes liked to call "the game of farming." What did he have left? Another cut of timber, maybe, if he could wait another hundred or two hundred years.

So there he was, a man who had been given everything and did not know it, who had lost it all and now knew it, and who was boasting and grinning only to pretend for a few hours longer that he did not know it. He was an exhausted man on the way back, not to the nothing that he had when he started out, but to the nothing that everything had been created from- and so, I pray, to mercy.

And there I was, a man losing what I was never given, a man yet rich with love, a man whose knees were weakening against gravity, who needed to go somewhere and lie down. I stood facing that man I had hated for forty years, and I did not hate him. If he had acknowledged then what he finally would not be able to avoid acknowledging, I would have hugged him. If I could have done it, I would have liked to pick him up like a child and carry him to some place of safety and calm.

The time would come (and this was my deliverance, my Nunc Dimittis) when I would be, in the small ways that were possible, his friend. It was a friend, finally that he would need. I would listen to him and talk to him, ignoring his self-pity and his lapses into grandeur and meanness, giving him a good welcome and a pat on the shoulder, because I wanted to. For finally he was redeemed, in my eyes,...

Jayber Crow, pp. 360-61

A Keen Insight into the Human Heart

Troy became a fierce partisan of the army and the government's war policy. The war protestors had started making a stir, and the talk in my shop (Jayber is the Port William town barber) ran pretty much against them (the setting is around the time of the Vietnam War). Troy hated them. As his way was, he loved hearing himself saying bad things about them.

One Saturday evening, while Troy was waiting his turn in the chair, the subject was started and Troy said- it was about the third thing said- "They ought to round up every one of them son of bitches and put them right in front of the damned communists, and then whoever killed who, it would be all to the good."

There was a little pause after that. Nobody wanted to try and top it....

It was hard to do, but I quit cutting hair and looked at Troy. I said, "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you."

Troy jerked his head up and widened his eyes at me. "Where did you get that crap?"

I said, "Jesus Christ."

And Troy said, "Oh."

It would have been a great moment in the history of Christianity, except that I did not love Troy.

Jayber Crow, p. 287

Saved Liberals?

One of the questions that has persistently pecked at me these last few years is whether those from mainline traditions that have tended to reject the infallibility of the Bible and at least tolerated a rejection of doctrines involving the supernatural, i.e. the virgin birth, miracles of Jesus and resurrection to name a few, might in fact be "saved"?

Well, if I start with the premise that: 1) God saves and that 2) even the rather undeveloped faith of a child is the necessary prerequisite for entrance into the Kingdom God (as Jesus said), then I must conclude that it is certainly possible, right? Well, ... hold on a second.

J. Gresham Machen, Reformed giant and Presbyterian father of the faith wrote in his classic 1946 work, Christianity and Liberalism, that theological liberalism embraces a belief structure that is outside the pale of historical orthodoxy and therefore essentially "nonChristian." So this all confuses the matter somewhat doesn't it? After all, didn't the Apostle Paul himself say that if Christ isn't raised, then our faith is in vain? What if someone doesn't believe that Jesus has indeed been raised? Is their faith therefore in vain? Or what if someone believes it's OK to believe that Jesus hasn't indeed been raised but that he himself believes it? Is that person saved? Maybe that individual is in serious error but still saved? Can people in serious error be saved? I think I'm in serious error much of the time but that God in His graciousness reveals to me these things on His timetable (see the prayer of David in Psalm 139:23,24). Yes, but one can only be in serious error on some things, not the core doctrines though, right (as if in our finitude somehow we believe ourselves to have actually grasped these core doctrines in the present)? Also, what if someone isn't outwardly hostile or seeking to deceive others but simply has a particular question in his mind regarding whether Jesus was indeed raised? Might this guy not necessarily be a false teacher or even in serious error but simply a bit confused? Is he saved? And remember, people grappling in these places still use the Bible and "Jesus language" speaking perhaps of how the story of the resurrection inspires faith, despite not necessarily being historical as far as we can tell (so the argument goes).

So which is it? Saved or not saved?

Well, Richard Lovelace has helped me in his classic 1979 work Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal. In his work Lovelace challenges both the traditional evangelical as well as the traditional liberal and he does so by looking for particular marks of renewal that have always accompanied the authentic work of God in the lives of true believers as well as in the world. The role of sanctification in the life of the believer and Church is the evaluation tool Lovelace uses. Lovelace speaks of being theonomous which simply means being "controlled by God." Lovelace says both Evangelicals as well as non-Evangelicals can exhibit patterns of "dead conformity or angry resistance." What these patterns reveal is the absence of the authentic work of God's Spirit in both cases:

"Thus some Evangelicals are encased in a Spiritless orthodoxy while resisting conviction of their social apathy, and some non-Evangelicals are engaged in Spiritless expressions of social activism while avoiding the sanctification of their minds in theonomous perception of biblical truth" (p. 112).

What Lovelace is getting at here is one can have right belief and doctrine, yet still be missing the authentic work of the Spirit who convicts us deeply of our sin and need for Christ (Rom. 7:14-16, 22-23). Yet others can have right practice and concern but still be missing the authentic work of God who renews the heart and mind ultimately so that the work of concern flows from within the renewed heart of concern. Lovelace continues to write:

"For the Evangelical a breakthrough into theonomous perception of the flesh would involve a Spirit-illuminated insight into the biblical grounding and divine reality of orthodox doctrines previously received only by tradition and advocated out of party spirit. There would also be a humbled recognition that many non-Evangelical thrusts against social injustice and Pharisaism are not meaningless heresy but a prophetic expression of the mind of God" (p. 113)

Wow! Lovelace points out that right belief, without the "control" of the Holy Spirit who brings about God-centered concerns, is a deficient faith. Also, he pushes evangelical people to see the goodness of much work that comes from the hands of non-Evangelical people, goodness that involves a "prophetic expression of the mind of God." But Lovelace doesn't end there rather continues to extend the critique to "non-evangelicals" as well:

"For the non-Evangelical a theonomous perception of the flesh would involve a quickened awareness of the extent to which the theory and motivation behind many initiatives of the social gospel have been graceless echoes of the self-righteous and guilt-motivated concerns of secular humanism, a regrounding of social compassion in God-centered concern for Christ's redemptive mission and an awakening of the fact that the Evangelical call for consistently biblical thinking is also a prophetic voice of God to the church" (p. 113).

Lovelace is preaching repentance to both the Evangelicals and Liberals, ... wow! He concludes this section by saying:

"If a widespread mutual movement toward sanctification in these two sectors would occur, the result would be an immense release of spiritual power within Western Christianity and the recovery of the stature and initiative lost by the church in the division of its forces in the late nineteenth century" (p. 113).

So Lovelace has a concern for both the mainline and the evangelical church and reserves a place within his paradigm to see both brought renewal and strength, to participate in the Missio Dei. He evaluates both "movements" by simply looking at the fruit of a theonomous (God-controlled, Spirit-led) corporate and individual life in the Church. Lovelace also says that if this happens, ... an "immense release of spiritual power within Western Christianity and recovery of the stature and initiative lost by the church..." happens as well: what a humongous hope!

Walthill and Darius

I just returned last night from Walthill where we have a small team of Grace Chapel people serving on the Omaha reservation for the week. Normally I spend the week with the team, but because of my recent travels away from Lincoln and away from my family, I decided to cut the week in half and came back to Lincoln last night. My dear wife Tanya brought up our three kids (Mia, Isaac and Calvin) for the day yesterday (Walthill is only about 2 hours to the north of Lincoln; however, it is always good to remember that you are traveling to another sovereign nation whenever you go to the rez).

In the first picture is my 6-year-old son Calvin in the orange, 7-year-old Isaac in the black and a 9-year-old native boy named Sonny (with the baseball cap). Tanya is in the background. In the second picture, the three boys as well as our 9-year-old daughter Mia, in preparation for painting, are helping to scrape old paint off of the home of a native named Mike Wolfe.

The highlight of the week for me was spending three days on the rez with our 13-year-old foster son Darius Geiser (not pictured). We've been in Darius' life since he was one. Darius helped with the little kids at Vacation Bible School, played basketball for three days with some of the older Omaha boys, helped with painting and even went to Pender with me (12 miles to the west of Walthill) to help Tanya's Great Uncle Leroy and Aunt Joyce (both in their 80s) with computer problems. On Tuesday night, Darius fixed the computer problems at Leroy and Joyce's, got filled with some deer stroganoff and then was able to watch his much loved Miami Heat in the NBA finals (despite their having lost game 4); we had fun together in Pender. I was so proud of Darius at every point during our time together.

Emmanuel Habimana Speaking Initiative

Hi Friends,

Below is an e-mail from Natalia Ledford who is a young woman at the University of Nebraska and who is doing a project with National Geographic. The young man documented in Natalia’s work is Emmanuel Habimana who came to Grace Chapel one morning; later I was able to have some follow-up time with him, including a two-hour coffee where I brought along our 13-year-old foster son Darius. Darius and I were quite impacted and Darius commented afterwards, “I never thought of my life as being blessed until now” (Darius has had a very hard life in his own right).

Emmanuel is a Tutsi and was 9-years-old in 1994 when the Hutu extremists of Rwanda killed nearly 70% (almost a million people) of the Tutsi population in barely three months. As Natalia says in her documentary trailer above, it was the “the most efficient genocide the world has ever seen.” Emmanuel lost both his parents and a number of his siblings in the mass killings. All the while, he hid and shook in the fields nearby wondering when it was going to be “his turn” and what it was going to feel like to be killed. Emmanuel is a remarkable young man in many ways (now 26-years-old) committed to a vision of a world that increases in peace, hope and reconciliation.

I’m hopeful that Emmanuel can return to Lincoln and perhaps there can be involvement among the Grace Chapel community to host or help in ways that could be helpful to Natalia and crew. Also, for those outside of Lincoln, if you know of groups that might be interested in hearing from Emmanuel, please contact Natalia or Education for the World at the contact emails below:

From: Natalia Ledford
Date: Wed, 25 May 2011 16:57:30 -0400 
Subject: FW: Emmanuel Habimana speaking initiative 

Hi everyone, 

I wanted to send out a notification about a new initiative that may take place this fall. National Geographic as well as a handful of universities/human rights groups have expressed interest in having Emmanuel Habimana return to the U.S. to speak about co directing The Children Who Lived, a documentary work-in-progress sponsored by National Geographic, and to continue giving speeches about his experiences surviving the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda. At this point I am basically just circulating information about it and have Bcc'd all of you on here as individuals who came to mind as people who may have interest in this idea, or would know of people to forward it on to. 

Here is a video compilation of some speeches about his story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKdM-poIwvk&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

The goal right now is to see how many groups would be interested in extending an invitation for him to speak, and should he get enough, to move forward in organizing a return trip. You may pass on my email to anyone interested in learning more, as well as the email for Education for the World, the University of Nebraska student organization that will help organize his speaking events should he return: education4theworld@gmail.com. Thanks so much.

Sincerely,

Natalia Ledford

My Right Foot

Some people are said to have two left feet. I suppose that means that maybe they can't dance or are clumsy or maybe it means something I haven't yet figured out.

I can't dance. I have a clumsy heart and myopic vision of life so much of the time. There is so much I haven't yet figured out. However, I do know this: I have a right foot,... but it's not on my body, at least not literally. So you have two left feet Mike? No, I have one left foot AND a right foot that is integral to my walking through life,... but resides at a different address in Lincoln. What? You're not making any sense. I know. I don't much of the time... but keep reading. 

My right foot is my good friend for whom I have given endless thanks in my prayers this morning: Dr. Brad Riddle who is a trained counselor here in Lincoln, but for a long time before that he was an Assemblies of God pastor and continues to be ordained and licensed as an AG pastor. Brad and I have a friendship that began through a local pastors' prayer group a number of years ago when he was in the pastorate and our friendship continues to deepen and grow.

Now, what some of you may find odd is that I am a "noncharismatic" PCA pastor whose doctrinal standard the Westminster Confession of Faith comes right out and says in chapter 1 that "the former ways" of God revealing himself (through his prophets and writers of Scripture) have now "ceased." In fact, I remember a story that was told a number of years ago at a PCA church-planting conference by Joseph "Skip" Ryan (someone I admire a lot by the way): when Skip was younger, he told his mentor Dr. Kennedy Smartt (one of the founding fathers of the PCA) that he had met a few people who might be interested in helping him plant a church (long before the rigorous tools and blessings of personality inventories and church-planting assessment centers had been established in the PCA). Well, Dr. Smartt had one question for Skip, "son, are there any 'charismats' in your group?" Skip responded, "no Dr. Smartt, there are not." Dr. Smartt responded by saying, "Well, then, go to it boy!"

So PCA folks have always tended to an uneasy relationship with charismatic folks, to say the least (and probably vice versa as I would imagine). Yet, God in His infinite mercy and grace has given to me a trusted friend and co-laborer in the Kingdom: Brad. Brad is my right foot. I think you'll get what I am clumsily saying as I quote some from Richard Lovelace and his classic 1979 work, Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal:

"The interrelationship between reformation of doctrine and structures and spiritual revitalization in the church is important and complex. While these two factors can at times occur separately, they are alternate moves like the footsteps of a walking man. Reformation grows out of awakened spiritual interest, and spiritual renewal seldom persists long without continuing reformation. This suggests that God has chosen to bless his church with the fulness of the Holy Spirit on the condition of its moving towards certain vital norms of health and witness" (Lovelace, p. 52).

"We need a 'unified field theory' which conserves and consolidates all the values in the different groups and parties while avoiding their errors and imbalances, which enables the pentecostal and nonpentecostal to affirm one another as Spirit-filled Christians with valid but differing spiritual gifts and which unites socially concerned Christians with those burdened for the destinies of individuals on a common basis in the redemptive work of Christ" (Lovelace, pp. 58-59).

Brad is my good friend who sometimes visits us on Sunday mornings, almost always with his dear wife Judy. Brad always "endures and receives" from my long-winded sermons, often about the vital importance of a Calvinistic understanding of the Scriptures- this is much of what he receives from me. So if this is my "gift" to Brad, what do I receive from him? Well, "mainly" wisdom and encouragement in the Lord. I give him doctrine; he gives me wisdom- not exactly a fair trade, huh? Following my sermons, there's almost always the e-mail a day or two later along these lines, "good job pastor, was truly blessed, thanks for the time of worship, etc." And then whenever I am with him, Brad usually opens a story of the Bible in a way I had not thought about but needed greatly in that moment. 

I'm pretty sure my right foot slows down to keep pace with the clumsy left foot, but as they move together in harmony, there seems to open the marvelous hope of a pathway to genuine reformation, renewal and revival in the church and world.

Memorial Day Meditation, by Steven Garber

"A daddy and his daughter"

A daddy and his daughter, on Memorial Day—I awaken this morning remembering. The son and the grandson of men who served in the first wars of the 20th-century, now my son is in the Army of the 21st-century, deployed for a year to the Sinai Peninsula. A captain and a veterinarian, his work is to make sure that the food the troops eat is healthy; he has a master’s in public health too. And his baby daughter is here in Washington, just today moving out of their Capitol Hill condominium with her mommy. On Saturday she will make her first flight, joining her daddy in the Middle East for a couple of weeks—and then he will come back in July, be here for a month, and then the three of them will move to Sicily, for another tour but all together finally. So I sigh for them, am glad for them, and am proud of him.

The Vision of Wendell Berry, by Sean Lucas

http://seanmichaellucas.blogspot.com/2006/09/post-200-creator-creation-community.html

Makoto Fujimura: The function of art

"The church needs the arts, not so there will be opportunities for more artists in the churches, but for the sake of the gospel."  -Makoto Fujimura

http://faithandleadership.com/qa/makoto-fujimura-the-function-art?page=0,0

Back from St. Louis

I turned forty last Sunday and then left for St. Louis for my D.Min. co-hort meeting the next morning on Monday May 23rd to return to Lincoln yesterday on Friday May 27th. There were six D.Min. students, two instructors and multiple conversation partners we participated with throughout the week.

The students were Warren Mayer who is an I.T. guy who works at the journalism department at the University of Missouri; Jay Simmons who is a pastor of a downtown church in St. Louis called South City Church; Richard Vise who has been on staff with Reformed University Ministries at the University of Auburn for over ten years; Cristano DeSousa who is a Navy Chaplain; Don Johnson who is a pastor of Hanna City Presbyterian Church in rural Illinois, just outside Peoria (also not the 80s icon you probably are thinking about at this point) and, finally, yours truly.

Our instructors were Steven Garber of the Washington Institute and Donald Guthrie of Covenant Seminary, the institution from which I am pursuing my degree.

Some of our conversation partners, often over skype and teleconference calling, were: Tom Nelson of Christ Community Church in Kansas City; Michael Williams of Covenant Seminary, author of Far as the Curse is Found; Amy Sherman, author, who works for a think tank called Center on Faith in Communities; Sean Lucas who is pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Hattiesburg, Mississsippi; Ryan Laughlin of Covenant Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, partner with the Fellows Program that seeks to give college graduates a nine-month internship helping them to integrate faith and vocation; and a few others as well.

Basically we spent five days from 9am-5pm in conversation with one other, our instructors and our conversation partners; the reading we did served as material through which we interacted.

I'm going to try and articulate something that words may not be able to capture: perhaps only the imagination, perhaps your intuition as you read and as I try to explain.

If you have been a Christian for a long-time now (I've been one for over 21 years), I have a question. Have you ever walked through a moment when you felt like you were converted again, that you really hadn't understood the Gospel or the Holy Scriptures until that point (despite the fact that there is much that you HAD understood to that point about the love of God, the Gospel of Christ, Jesus and the Bible)? Have you ever walked through that moment understanding that God had "held" you for a very long time (in my case for the last 21 years tracing back to my conversion, ... from the vantage point of eternity, from "before the creation of the world"- Eph. 1:4), ... but that perhaps you were still unable to "see" a huge part of the Christian faith to that point in your life?

I walked through that moment as I walked into my 40s last week.

What do you know about John Newton? Perhaps that he penned the famous and much-loved hymn Amazing Grace? that he was a friend of William Wilberforce who worked hard for the abolition of slavery in Great Britain? that he was a slave owner converted to Christ? Steven Garber shared that from the best of his research, that it took Newton nearly 25 years following his conversion to Christ to come to the deep conviction that slavery was wrong. I wonder what that moment of "conversion" was like for Newton.... oh the patience and mercy of God.

Steven Garber asks this basic question in his book The Fabric of Faithfulness, what will give you a moral vision for life that is large enough to make sense of life? What does it mean to live as a responsible participant in a universe that God made? Garber uses the language that we live in a covenantal cosmos, one that God made with all sorts of opportunities and freedoms to participate in a way that acknowledges that God is God and that we are not. Think with me on the original instruction given to our first parents; they were free to eat of any tree in the Garden, save one and the reason they could not partake in that one tree was simple: because God is God and we are not. The mercy and grace of God was such that they could participate in any and every tree otherwise; however, they chose to shrug off the responsibility to live faithfully to what they knew to be true and everything descended into chaos and brokenness from that point forward. The early church father St. Augustine said that in Christ we are once again able not to sin, so the question that is before each of us as those who bear the image of God and especially for those who are now in Christ is this: what are you going to do with what you know? In the world that God made, how will you live responsibly towards Him, towards your neighbor and towards His creation?

Steven Garber talks about the crabs in Chesapeake Bay "crying out" after generations of overfishing. Now, there are certain days when crab-catching is not allowed, and those in other places like Denver, Co., who once upon a time could have crab anytime all the time, assuming willingness to pay the fair market value, now no longer can do so as the crabs have "cried out." You see, the wisdom that comes from the Great Economy (that which Wendell Berry calls the "Kingdom of God," the deepest of all realities, the world that really is there) now calls the "Lesser Economy" of the fishing industry in the Bay to account; this is how the world that God made... works.

I turned forty this last week- in some ways, I've passed the "formative years" Garber speaks of in his book as I am 18 years removed from the University years; however, in many other ways I'm like John Newton only now beginning to see a comprehensive vision of the moral fabric of my life and heart that is integrally connected to the warp and woof of the universe; and, not only am I so aware of how I am connected to the brokenness of it all, but I also hold forth the hope that as I await the restoration of all things, I very well might be a part of what is right about the coming of the Great Economy too- are you kidding me? I've cried a lot this week thinking about the size of that hope. Who I am in my heart matters- it matters to my wife, my children, my church, my community- it matters to the world and above all it matters to the One who made all things in the first place to matter.

No more pulling life apart and putting parts of it into little boxes friends. No more. Oh Lord have mercy on us. Have mercy.

Done... for Now

My reading list completed, roughly 80 pages of journal notes, ... as I like to say, now I sit around "popping bon bons and drinking cokes" :-). Actually, I travel to St. Louis in a couple of weeks and spend a week getting introduced to the various doctoral program participants, expectations of the program, what I will be doing from May until January 2012 when our co-hort gathers again; in SL, I will get a better sense of what we will be doing next with all this reading- life is often an adventure, isn't it? Oh, ... some have requested to see my reading list I have been working through, so here it is:

Berry, Wendell. That Distant Land. New York: Counterpoint, 2005.

Carson, D.A. Christ & Culture Revisted.  Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008.

Cosden, Darrell. The Heavenly Good of Earthly Work. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006.

Garber, Steven. The Fabric of Faithfulness. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007.

Hall, Douglas John. Imaging God: Dominion as Stewardship. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Scott, 2004.

Volf, Miroslav. Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1991.

Wright, Christopher. The Mission of God’s People. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010.

Placher, William. Callings: 20 Centuries of Christian Wisdom About Vocation. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005.

Smith, James K.A. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009.

Thanks for those who have followed the Bloggy Blog so far- prayers are appreciated. If I come up with something to say from now until late May, I'll let you know. Otherwise, let me sign off (for a little while) with one of my favorite quotes from Al Wolters in his book Creation Regained: "God doesn't create junk and He doesn't junk what He creates."

The Missional Challenge, Wright p. 286

... the challenge remains of peoples as yet unreached by any form of gospel message, of languages with no portion of the Bible in them yet, of millions of oral communicators who need to hear the Word in a form that does not rely on the written Word, of peoples whose only exposure to the Christian message has come along with horrendous violence done to them by nations they have been told are "Christian", or with a lurid immorality they cannot help but associate with the same Western cultures.

The missional challenge of reaching the ends of the earth with the gospel, so that the whole earth may be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God, faces us still with all its diversity and complexity. The evangelization of the world, in the fullest sense of both the words in that phrase, remains as urgent a priority for the church as it was when Jesus laid it as a mandate on his disciples before his ascension.

The earth, of course, is a globe that has no "ends". From a missional perspective, the "ends of the earth" are as likely to be found in your own street as far across the sea. The missional task of the church, in ... sending, going and supporting- is as necessary for local as for international mission.

The Great Commission Beyond Evangelism, Wright p. 284

The version of the Great Commission at the end of Matthew's gospel tends to have pride of place. It has certainly functioned as a driving text in the modern missionary movement. Unfortunately it has not always been read for all its content.

In another of those sad dichotomies,... the Great Commission has sometimes been portrayed exclusively as evangelistic mandate to go and preach the gospel everywhere, when actually the single and central imperative verb in the text is "make disciples". Now of course, making disciples requires evangelism, and the first added instruction, or step in the process of making disciples is "baptizing them". Baptism presupposes the preaching of the gospel and a response to it of repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. But the second added instruction- the Great Commission Line Three, as we might call it- is "teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you". And such teaching is of the essence of discipling. 

Basically, the New Testament was written by disciples, for disciples, to make disciples. Yet our emphasis has often been on getting decisions, claiming converts, making Christians. Actually the word Christian occurs three times in the New Testament, whereas the word "disciple" occurs 269 times. 

The Great Commission, along with all the practice of the New Testament church, tells us there is mission beyond evangelism....

We should not treat the Great Commission as a ticking clock, just waiting for the last people group to "hear" the gospel before the Lord is, as it were, permitted to return. That kind of thinking has transformed it into a "job to complete", "an unfinished task". But with its command to disciples to make disciples, it is a self-replicating mandate that will never "complete"- not in the sense that we can never reach all the nations (we can and we should), but in the sense that the making of disciples, and the rediscipling of those who have formerly been evangelized, are tasks that go on through multiple lives and generations.

Cosmic Dimensions of the Gospel, Wright p. 273

We have tended to separate the individual from the cosmic and corporate dimensions of the gospel, and then we tend to prioritize the first. That is, we put individual salvation and personal evangelism at the centre of all our efforts (and, of course, personal evangelism is an essential part of our commitment). But Paul's order of the gospel message in Ephesians and Colossians 1:15-26 is creation (all things in heaven and earth), created by Christ, sustain by Christ and redeemed by Christ); then, church (with Christ as head); then individual Gentile believers- "and you also".

All of this, says Paul, has been "reconciled through the blood of Christ shed on the cross". So we are not saved out of creation, but as a part of creation that God has redeemed through Christ. The church is not just a container for souls until they get to heaven, but the living demonstration of the unity that is God's intention for the whole creation.

The bad result of breaking up this "whole" is that Christians who are evangelized by truncated versions of the biblical gospel have little interest in the world, the public square, God's plan for society and the nations, and even less understanding of God's intention for creation itself. The scale of our mission efforts, therefore, is in danger of being a lot smaller than the scope of the mission of God.

Creation Care and Justice, Wright p. 270

We must exercise justice, because environmental action is a form of defending the weak against the strong, the defenceless against the powerful, the violated against the attacker, the voiceless against the stridency of the greedy. These too are features of the character of God as expressed in his exercise of justice. Psalm 145 includes God's provision for all his creatures in its definition of his righteousness as well as his love (Ps. 145:13-17). In fact, it places God's care for creation in precise parallel with his liberating and vindicating acts of justice for his people- thus bringing the creational and redemptive traditions of the Old Testament together in beautiful harmony.

So it is not surprising, then, that when the Old Testament comes to define the marks of the righteous person, it does not stop at a practical concern for poor and needy humans (though that is, of course, the dominant note). It is true that "the righteous care about justice for the poor" (Prov. 29:7). But the sage also makes the warmhearted observation that the "righteous care for the needs of their animals" (12:10). Biblical mission is as holistic as biblical righteousness.

Creation Care and Obedience, Wright p. 269

"Love the Lord your God" is the first and greatest commandment. Now in human experience, to love someone means that you care for what belongs to them. To trash someone else's property is incompatible with any claim to love that other person.... how emphatically the Bible affirms that the earth is God's property, and more specifically, that it belongs to Christ, who made it, redeemed it and is heir to it. To take good care of the earth, for Christ's sake, is surely a fundamental dimension of the calling on all God's people to love him. It seems inexplicable to me that there are some Christians who claim to love and worship God, to be disciples of Jesus, and yet have no concern for the earth that bears his stamp of ownership. They do not care about the abuse of the earth and indeed, by their wasteful and overconsumptive lifestyles, they contribute to it.

Redeemed Work

"Do you see your work as nothing more than a necessary evil, or only as the context for evangelistic opportunity? Or do you see it as a means of glorifying God through participating in his purposes for creation and therefore having intrinsic value? How do you relate what you do in your daily work to the Bible's teaching about human responsibility in creation and society" (The Mission of God's People, p. 224)?