Faithful Witness

This post of faithful witness is a summary of a piece that Ralph Winter, a missionary and then mission philosopher of the 20th century, wrote about the two New Testament discipleship structures that undergird and carry out God’s mission. The first structure is a local church. The second is a team that comes into existence to do unique things that churches are not able-willing-designed to do. I agree with Winter’s thesis and feel he has much to say regarding ministry within our increasingly post Christendom western world as well as to more classical mission contexts such as church planting within unreached people groups. I have copied and pasted his summary to try to capture the main points. The entire piece is superb and well worth your time. The Two Structures of God’s Redemptive Mission by Ralph Winter is available on line The Two Structures of God’s Redemptive Mission by Ralph Winter It is the thesis of this article that… there will still be two basic kinds of structur...

When I hear people eloquently and passionately expressing their points of view about various things that, until the last few years, had never really captured my imagination before, I wonder where I have been and what have I missed. These include seemingly burning issues like neo-calvinism, open theism, emergent-emerging-missional-attractional churches, the cultural and/ or Biblical basis of complementarianism verses egalitarianism, the Christian approach to homosexuality, social justice; the list seems to go on and on and there are people passionately advocating for churches to wake up to each. I am in favor of the prophetic words of warning that God sometimes gives us. I want to heed them and obey them once they become clear, deconstructing what God wants to change, recalibrating our witness and contextualizing our ministries so that the gospel is clear to people who live in our time. However, I am not in favor of creating a ministry philosophy that is based on blame. I have nev...

Jesus defines success for us. He does not redefine success, he defines it. When we say that Jesus redefines something, we are defaulting to a man centered world rather than a God centered world. God defines things; we are the ones who redefine them and we usually do so very poorly. Jesus defines success as faithful participation in reproducing his Kingdom inside churches and communities. We live in a winner take all world. According to this value system, the one with the biggest pile wins and everybody else loses. In the Kingdom of God, the one with the most is not automatically the most successful in the eyes of the King. Why? Because Jesus taught us that all of our personal assets, the totality of who we are and what we can do, and the opportunity to enjoy and reproduce those assets are a gift from God, so bragging about who has the most converts or the biggest church or who has sold the most books is not only vain but nonsensical. Even worse, it is the value system of the w...

Success is important to us Americans isn’t it? It captures our minds and beats in our hearts. Success is the context of our culture; it is the essence of being and doing American. If a person is known to be successful, he or she strides through life with that unique American swagger. If the opposite is apparently true, we enviously limp along behind the swaggering crowd in bitterness and sadness. Obviously, we believe in our right to pursue success, and we will nearly kill ourselves to become successful. We may even insist that the ones we love make significant sacrifices for us as we pursue our success. I mean, who wants to sadly limp through the mall? Malls are built with the American swagger in mind. So are mega churches. Jesus does not think like this. Jesus teaches us that faithfulness is the measure of success and participation is the measure of faithfulness. In the part of the Bible written by the disciple of Jesus named Matthew, Jesus teaches us about life from his ...

I know it sounds pretty corny, but I think it takes hard core disciples to be faithful and fruitful on the hard core missional frontier. What I'm saying is that in order for a faithful witness to be truly faithful, it must be incarnated within the lives of hard core disciples who intentionally live in contact with the hard core of unbelieving communities, cultures, people groups, cities or even families. What is hard core discipleship? It is a philosophy of life that is based on integration; a way of life that seeks to be fully integrated with the Lordship of Christ. Hard core disciples are people who believe that there is no such thing as part of my life being sacred or religious and another part being secular or cultural. There is simply one way of life that is integrated with the authority of Jesus. It is very important for hard core disciples to know how to focus their lives. Frankly, it is not a good idea for them to be told thast faithfulness is attending church, giving finan...

Can you imagine Jesus telling his disciples to get a divorce or abandon their children so they can can follow him?   Can you imagine your pastor preaching a sermon like that in an attempt to convince lukewarm Christians to surrender their lives to Jesus?   Of course not; that would immediately qualify Christianity as a cult wouldn’t it?   Every Christian understands that Jesus would never affirm that Christian conversion or discipleship implies abandoning your spouse and children, destroying your family, to follow him.   Why, then, do we Christians sometimes expect non-Christians to risk destroying their family to convert to Christianity or serve Christ faithfully?   Usually, we quote this scripture from Matthew 10: 34 “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law — 36 a...

" You too were included in Christ." This small phrase was written by an old man to a group of young people who were whole hearted yet recent believers in Jesus. The old man had lived through times of disorienting religious and cultural change. These changes had made it possible for someone like him to connect to this group of new believers. He eventually accepted the changes and was transformed by them, becoming a master of his time whose teaching became the basis of mentoring the new generation. Old men almost never talk like this. The sincere faith of these new believers meant that they were no longer outsiders to the Jesus movement because faith in Jesus is what created and sustained it, but they were very different than just about everybody else who was already inside the new Church. The older more established churches within the movement weren't quite sure what to make of these newcomers. The insiders stood back from them, watching, waiting, judging. As a ...

I have been involved in a church all of my life. Some of the best experiences in my life have been in church. Yep, you guessed it, some of the worst have too. To be honest, most of my experiences in church have been neither great nor awful, they have simply been a part of the fabric of my life, a part of the way of life that is normal to my family, part of my identity. Because faithful people in church had clearly taught me the gospel and had transmitted the mandate to spread the gospel, I came to see the powerful truth that the peoples of the earth needed to be transformed by the gospel. The gospel became my way of life, and sharing it became my passion. In 1985, the centrality of the gospel carried me out to India where I unexpectedly discovered something very unsettling about people and churches and the gospel. I had to allow for the possibility that if the gospel did not spread beyond the churches, it would never spread to the entire world. In the last 26 years of trying to ...

"The Word became flesh and lived in our neighborhood." This is John 1:14 in the Bible translation called The Message. The more common translation is " The Word became flesh and lived among us." This is what is called The Incarnation of Christ. God became a human being, a man who was a carpenter, and lived with us and like us. He was God so he was morally perfect, which means he never did anything wrong. In that way he was not like us! If God wanted to be incarnated in the world, he could have been born in the Temple, raised by the Pharisees and when he was old enough, made ministry forays into the community and then returned to his Temple. But he didn't do that. He lived in the neighborhood. Why? This next bit is really shocking. God did not want to reinforce the religious establishment of the day. He wanted to be accessible to normal people. This is why he became like us and lived in our neighborhood, or the neighborhood of his time. I think he wo...

I am always sobered when I remember the actual meaning of the Greek word that underlies the word we translate as witness. The word in Greek, the language of the New Testament, is marturion, from which we get the English word "martyr." This puts an entirely different spin on being a faithful witness doesn't it, a sort of faithful unto death feel. I want to be a faithful witness. Of course I do not mean that I want to be a martyr, but I do want this truth about being faithful unto death to speak to me and shape me. I don't want to be intimidated. I have learned that a pushy sort of " turn or burn" witness usually does more harm than good, but sensitivity must never mutate into being intimidated by the mild tyranny against the gospel that exists all around us. Instead of intimidation, I want to be transparent, openly displaying what I learn about life from Jesus. That life is breathtakingly hopeful, inspiring and free. Whether my life speaks to one or ...

There is a time to throw yourself on God; to fore go the typical, obvious way that things are done and place your fate in the hands of God. I am not saying to stop taking your meds or cross traffic blindfolded; to do something foolish and presumptuous to test God. I am saying to back up your claims about God with deeds. Ezra did this. The people of Israel had lost everything that God had given them because they refused to take care of it. Nebuchadnezzar came in with his army and destroyed their civilization. The survivors were led away into exile. Jeremiah prophesied that their exile would last seventy years which it did. God restored the fortune of these exiles and stirred up the Persian King Cyrus to empower them to return to their land and rebuild the temple of God. He even gave back whatever was left of the national treasure that Nebuchadnezzar had stolen. Rebuilding the temple would prove to be the foundation upon which Israel as the center of Jewish civilization would r...