Faithful Witness

An excerpt from my newest book Community Based Discipleship: Discipleship has normally been thought of as an exclusively Christian word that is used to define what devout believers are expected to believe and do. This approach to discipleship has done a lot of good for millions and millions of people over the long centuries of Church history, but we should not assume that faithfully following one’s inherited or preferred version of Christianity is always the functional equivalent of being a disciple of Jesus. If we are not careful, our discipleship can be inappropriately molded by a longstanding Christian environment that has reduced discipleship from a transformative relationship with God in the person of Jesus into a manageable lifestyle that everyone understands and follows. We must also begin to wrestle with the jarringly counter-intuitive fact that people around the corner and around the world understand and use the words Christian or Christianity to convey a wide variet...

This is the first blog entry from my new book Community-Based Discipleship. I will begin with an excerpt from the Introduction in which I briefly relate how I assessed using the word discipleship to describe how I had grown to understand my relationship with Jesus Christ and his with me. “As the ideas within this book germinated in my mind and began to take some sort of shape as themes and chapters, I found that I needed to think about the utility of the word discipleship to describe the way in which I had begun to conceive of learning from Jesus. As many Christians know, discipleship is a very loaded term. Much of my early experience of discipleship was at the feet of church leaders who weaponized it into the WMD of their own version of fundamentalist Christianity. It was an approach to discipleship that tended toward anti-intellectualism and a philosophy of leadership that created (or attracted) narcissistic demagogues who espoused a Pharisaical interpretation of holiness and p...

Last of the Mohicans starring Daniel Day Lewis is one of my favorite movies. It is an epic tale of romance, desperate danger and hopeful courage. It also has a good soundtrack. It works for me on just about every level. It is also a fantastic story about cross cultural mission There is war on the forntier. Britain and France are fighting for control of North America. Native American tribes are taking sides in the conflict. Britain is demanding that the colonists from Great Britain muster militias to serve alongside the British regular army. Tumult and murder are everywhere. A veritable whirlwind of chaos and violence is howling through everyone's life. A Mohican man and his two sons, one of them a white man raised by his Mohican family, rescue 2 daughters of a British colonel and their British escort from certain death. The Mohicans finally promise to take them to the local British fort. On the way, they stop at a colonists friend's  homestead and discover that they are all...

I have just read John’s prophecies to the 7 churches which were in various cities in Turkey during the first century. These were city wide churches and probably included more than 1 congregation. The prophecy to each church was clearly connected to the city where the church was located which means that these churches were incarnated into the larger world around them rather than being extracted from the culture. These prophecies were to be given to the angels of these churches. Angels in this case probably means messenger sent by the churches to see John. So, a delegation arrives on Patmos where John is exiled, and in response to what they say, John hears from God what he is to give to the messengers who then relay that to the churches they represent. The first thing Jesus reveals to John is a powerful visual image of his reign as Lord and King of these churches. John is summoned into the presence of the King and hears his decrees about each church. It is clear why Jesus remin...

One night, several years ago, when we lived in Belleville, I woke up at 3 am. I was wide awake, so I got out of bed so I wouldn’t disturb Melanie. I went downstairs and read Leviticus. By the way, Leviticus is not the protagonist in To Kill a Mockingbird. It is the third book of the Pentateuch in the Bible; 3 am, reading Leviticus. Draw your own conclusions from that. It quickly became clear that God had an agenda. As I read the descriptions of law and sacrifice and atonement, the Holy Spirit revealed the fulfillment of all of this by Jesus. “Read this”, God said, “as if it has been fulfilled.”  But the Holy Spirit did not stop there. Jesus did this through the power of the Holy Spirit, and that same Spirit dwells in me, empowering me to receive the life of Christ within me. This means that Leviticus is fulfilled by me because Jesus is in me. This means I am righteous. But the Holy Spirit didn’t stop there. The Spirit reveals this about Jesus to people all over the world. ...

This post is from my friend, Frank Daugherity. I liked it so much I posted it here. It is serious ( you know me, Mr. Happy Go Lucky! ) and important. I hope it speaks to you. If you want to explore this further, see more of Franks writing about mission and missions at http://daugherity.com/frankly. Has it come to a contest between "missions" and “missionality” in our churches today? What has happened to "missions" (traditional cross-cultural evangelistic and church-planting ministry) since the "missional" emphasis has really began to gain traction? Is it dying out? I was a cross-cultural missionary for 21 years (8 in Japan, 13 in greater NYC among Japanese expats), and contemporaneously a missions pastor in a large church in northern NJ for 8 years, so I know the older traditional picture pretty well. My oversight responsibilities included liaison with 66 missionary families. When I was asked to give my perspective on what's going on now...

This is part of a piece written by Tim Keller, a pastor in New York City whom I learn from. I have cut out part of his larger article, but all of it is really good. I'll send it to you if you want to read it.  The Need for a 'Missional' Church by TIM KELLER June 2001. In the West for nearly 1,000 years, the relationship of (Anglo-European) Christian churches to the broader culture was a relationship known as "Christendom." The institutions of society "Christianized" people, and stigmatized non-Christian belief and behavior. Though people were "Christianized" by the culture, they were not regenerated or converted with the Gospel. The church's job was then to challenge persons into a vital, living relation with Christ. The decline of Christendom has accelerated greatly since the end of WWII. The British missionary Lesslie Newbigin went to India around 1950. There he was involved with a church living 'in mission' in a very...

I never claimed to be normal; you just wrongly assumed that I was. It’s true. I obsess over things sometimes, usually about things involving world mission. Last year, for example, I put my entire life, marriage and the welfare of my children on hold and redrew a world map according to macro language and culture rather than the current and much to be commended micro approach to people groups. I created new nations like Afrabia, and Dravidia. Iran and Afghanistan became Persia. and Latin America became Hispana. It was a blast. My current obsession has been reading through Operation World and creating my Mission Top 10 . These are nations which need   apostolic missionary work the most and are the most open to receive it, sort of balancing need and opportunity. My list is subjective of course; yours may look different.Some countries with huge needs and real opportunity did not make the list. So, here is my Mission Top 10 . Japan is the largest unreached nation on earth. I...

This is Easter week, and multitudes of people will fill churches all over America in order to worship the dead and resurrected Christ. It appears that the Christian Church in America is alive and well. It has millions of members, and is well funded and well led. For example, there are hundreds of mega churches that have congregations that number over 2000. There are also tens of thousands of other more typical churches scattered all over the country and well known and faithful colleges and seminaries continue to graduate large numbers of highly qualified and sincere men and women every year to staff all of them.   Different kinds of churches are growing all over the country. Charismatic and Pentecostal churches continue to proliferate at a steady pace leading the way in church growth. There has also been an unexpected and significant revival of Reformed theology in many, many churches. The Christian movement is thriving. Things are good. There have always been co...

I have always known, although with incomplete interpretation and, therefore, inconsistent application, that I must take all of the time necessary to abide in that unique space that is consecrated to my experience of the presence of the Lord. This is not a daily devotion or an organized time of prayer and Bible reading. That supports and empowers the other, but I am referring to something more or beyond that. This space of abiding is mostly of God’s choosing. It is my part to recognize his invitation and meet him. It is a space not a place or a time. It is the space within and around me when I am surrounded by God. The invitation may come on a rainy Saturday morning in my car, sitting in a park. It may come while I walk down a busy city street or a crowded mall. It may come during a worship service. It may come in times of seclusion brought on by sickness or recovery. This holy space is about abiding in Christ; he is in me and I am in him. He speaks to me and convicts me of s...

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 ...