“Every Christian is either a missionary or an impostor.”
~ Charles Spurgeon

In my previous post I mentioned every Christian’s responsibility to follow the mission of Jesus. Sadly, we’ve shifted our focus to the wrong things. We’ve lost the urgency of our calling quite a bit since the Edict of Milan passed in AD 313.

Since people had to be in church, Christians no longer felt the necessity to go out into the world and make disciples because, well, everyone’s here already. When this happened, the Christian life was no longer about restoring the world and reconciling it back to God (2 Corinthians 5.18-21); rather, it became about sin management and individual spiritual fulfillment. Discipleship was no longer about training to attack the “gates of hell”, but about becoming a person of high moral standards.

But if you look around, you’ll see that we no longer live in Christendom. Christianity is quickly becoming a fringe practice. I realize that to many, this comes as sad news. But I’m actually very optimistic about this. Why? Because it means that the Church is again given the opportunity to follow Jesus’ mission. We are reentering the pluralistic world with which Paul was so familiar. And in this world, our traditional methodology for leading people into the kingdom of God will rarely, if ever, produce any real fruit. Instead we’ve assimilated people into a church subculture, rather than unleashing them into the world’s culture with the mission of plowing a counterculture.

These are some examples of the practices of the Christian faith. Internally we devote ourselves to the teaching and study of the Bible. We gather in community to lift each other up, sharpen each other, and keep each other accountable before God. We also share meals together, comfort one another, share communion together, and practice hospitality. Externally we’re supposed to engage in the community, become a blessing to our cities (Jeremiah 29.4-7), and serve those in need (Matthew 25.31-40; Matthew 10.40-42; James 2.14-17).

In a modern church-centered life, the primary focus of the believer is on his internal life, resulting in questions such as, “How is your personal walk with God?” or, “How’s your church life?” Like I’d mentioned in my previous post, without a mission, the life of a Christian becomes about sin management and the self-actualization of one’s spiritual potential.

Here’s what happens in our traditional church discipleship model. When the believer follows this course, his effectiveness in the culture is diminished greatly. Why? Because he’s no longer a friend to the people he once associated with. He was pulled from the community and brought into the church culture, where he was nurtured and cared for and raised to look like the people who are inside this Christian bubble.

This model, when put into practice looks something like this: Bob has been in church for many years. He decides one day, after hearing a sermon on sharing the Gospel, to invite one of his coworkers to a Bible study at his house. After some time, Joe (Bob’s coworker) gives up his Wednesday night poker game and decides to attend the Bible study. Joe eventually gets saved and becomes heavily involved in the church life. He’s at every Bible study class, he hands out bulletins during Sunday services, and he even serves on the outreach committee that’s working on a big free carwash event that will be used to invite people in the community to start attending their church services.

A year later, the pastor preaches another sermon on sharing the Gospel, and Joe recalls his poker buddies. He hasn’t seen them in almost a year, but he decides to call one of them to invite him to church.

Basically, what has happened here is this: Bob has extracted Joe from his context by finding something attractive inside his church world and highlighting it for Joe (green arrow underneath the diagram). There’s been an attempt at pushing Joe into the culture, but because Joe hasn’t been properly discipled, it becomes extremely difficult to reenter his previous context. He soon finds that all his friends are Christians, and outside of family responsibilities, work, and church-related activities, he has almost nothing else to do.

Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad methodology, but is it really that effective? Is it the best method we can come up with?

What if we were to reverse the model?What if instead we were to move from “external” to “internal”? Here’s what I mean.

Matt and Steve are believers. On Mondays they hang out at a little pub a few blocks from their neighborhood. They meet there every Monday after work, hanging out with the regulars at the bar, being an encouragement to the men who are trying to numb whatever pain they’re experiencing. They’re comforters and companions to the patrons of the place.

On Thursdays both of their families have dinner at Steve’s house. After dinner, Matt leads the little group in taking communion.

On Fridays they go on a group date with their wives and one or two other couples. And on Sundays after the church service Matt, Steve, and their friend Todd get together to pray with each other, talk about what God is teaching each of them, and hold each other accountable to the mission of Jesus.

Now, at any point in their schedule, Matt and Steve could engage in mission. As they develop friendships at the pub, opportunities to talk about their faith with someone become more readily available. They could invite someone from that area of their life into their Thursday evenings. Or they could invite someone from their church to join them on Monday afternoons and teach him how to build friendships with people outside of church. But no matter where you look in their lives, you can draw a sense of restoration from their rhythms.

You see, the Christian life is about so much more than just staying morally pure or sitting still in a church pew or serving on a church committee. It’s about restoring and reconciling to God every aspect of life.

My girlfriend often talks about a holistic, restorative approach to interacting with creation. Discipleship should be no different. Life shouldn’t be dichotomous for a Christian—church life and “regular” life, or even spiritual life and physical life. No, everything is connected, and wherever you go, you’re a missionary.

Again, I’d like to know what you think. Am I completely off base? Do we really need to rework our thoughts about church/discipleship (as I’ve posited), or can our current/traditional methodology be tweaked slightly and updated?

Any global missionary will tell you that in order to effectively reach a new culture, you have to immerse yourself in that culture. You have to become friends with the people you encounter. You have to learn their language. You have to eat their food, wear their fashion, and adopt their pace of life. If you don’t do this, you won’t be an effective missionary.

The same applies to us here in America. Unfortunately, we live in the aftermath of Christendom, and there are still a great number of Christians who fail to recognize their responsibility to follow Jesus in his mission of restoration and reconciliation in the world.

Here’s a little history for you. In AD 306, Constantine I became the Emperor of Rome. He’s noted for being the first Roman emperor to have converted to Christianity. Until this point, there was widespread intolerance of Christianity throughout the empire (most notably under the reign of Nero, who earned the title “First Persecutor of the Christians” by the writers Tertullian, Lactantius, and Sulpicius Severus). Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, offering tolerance to Christians and religious freedom to all Roman citizens.

Despite the religious freedom that he offered, Constantine saw it as his duty to establish religious orthodoxy. He disliked the disputes that came about, so he gave the Church the authority to dictate proper religious practices.

Gone were the days of Paul, Peter, Timothy, and Apollos. The Gospel of Jesus no longer spread virally underneath a pluralistic society of philosophers and liberal thinkers. Christianity became the religion of the state, a tool in the hands of the government used to maintain religious order throughout the Roman Empire.

This is the model from which we have adopted our American church. The church closely mirrors the governmental system from which it was birthed. In Europe, the government was largely centralized around an emperor. Thus the Church centralized around a bishop or pope. In America, the government was dispersed among voting representatives, and so we have a church tradition that rests in congregationalism.

Now we have a culture that is largely governed by our consumeristic impulses. Do you see what this has done to the Church? We’re now adopting cool names, hip media presentation, convenient service structures, and sleek marketing and advertising.

To the outsider it looks like churches are competing to grab my attention. There’s an underlying assumption that we’re still in Christendom, and since we’re in Christendom, I have to attend a church. Which one will I choose? LifeChurch? They’ve got a great band. Buckhead Church? They’ve got a great band too, but they also have Andy Stanley, and he’s written a lot of books, which means they’re famous. Newspring Church? Their band is great, but they also play songs by Coldplay and Led Zeppelin, so that means they’re really cool. Liquid Church? They’ve also got a great band, and they were just on CNN for giving away $90K, so I guess that means they’re famous and generous.

Or will I just decide the whole church thing is not for me? I wouldn’t be alone. Only 40% of the American population ever sets foot in a church.

Guess what? We’re not in Christendom anymore, and nothing says it better than the 60% of Americans who never have—and probably never will—enter a church in their lifetimes.

Actually, no. It’s literally an Anime Jesus.

I thought that since Holy Week is starting tomorrow, it’d be nice to post a reminder of what Jesus came to earth for.

FYI: if cartoon blood and gore make you queasy, you might not want to watch.

We had an awesome conversation at lunch about incarnational/missional living and reaching our culture, and I thought I’d share a little bit of it with you.
Click here to listen.

The big question that was on everyone’s mind when the trailer came out last month was this: is Rob Bell a universalist? In my earlier post regarding the fallout from the release of his book trailer I said that I’d be waiting until after I’d read the book to weigh in on whether Bell is a universalist.

But I’ve decided to avoid answering that question altogether since many of the better versed and smarter leaders in my “camp” of Christianity have released better rebuttals than I could ever hope to form.

Kevin DeYoung wrote an extensive review of Love Wins, which you can download here.

Here’s DeYoung’s summary of Bell’s book:

“Hell is what we create for ourselves when we reject God’s love. Hell is both a present reality for those who resist God and a future reality for those who die unready for God’s love. Hell is what we make of heaven when we cannot accept the good news of God’s forgiveness and mercy. But hell is not forever. God will have his way. How can his good purposes fail? Every sinner will turn to God and realize he has already been reconciled to God, in this life or in the next. There will be no eternal conscious torment. God says no to injustice in the age to come, but he does not pour out wrath (we bring the temporary suffering upon ourselves), and he certainly does not punish for eternity. In the end, love wins.

“Bell correctly notes (many times) that God is love. He also observes that Jesus is Jewish, the resurrection is important, and the phrase ‘personal relationship with God’ is not in the Bible. He usually makes his argument by referencing Scripture. He is easy to read and obviously feels very deeply for those who have been wronged or seem to be on the outside looking in.”

Instead, I’ll try to find a practical response to all this since this book is now within the top 5 bestsellers on Amazon and is probably the topic of many spiritual discussions in offices, coffeeshops, bookstores, and pubs. And because of this, no doubt the concepts of heaven and hell are on many people’s radars as well.

When faced with questions of God’s goodness—”How can a good God send people to hell for eternity?”—it’s important to know that God doesn’t operate within our concepts of good and evil. Bell’s operating premise is that God is love and cannot act outside of love. But his assumption is that our understanding of love is also God’s understanding of love.

Yes, God is a God that rescues and liberates us from sin, death, and destruction, but it’s often easy for us to dismiss the fact that God is also a God of justice and perfection.

One example of Bell’s misuse of scriptural concepts is the way he handles the parable of the lost son from Luke 15. While he correctly takes the emphasis off the character we often refer to as the “prodigal son,” he makes an incorrect correlation between this parable and the realities of heaven and hell.

But perhaps my opinion on that matter should be reserved for another day.

Throughout his book Bell makes strong statements regarding the roots of Christianity and how our concepts of heaven and hell were formed fairly recently in the history of Christianity. But is it really possible that he’s stumbled on truths that thousands of pastors, teachers, and theologians have missed for centuries?

Jake Johnson, Media & Communications Pastor at Redemption Church had this to say about Love Wins:

“Could it really be that Rob Bell has rediscovered lost truths of Christianity, this man who claims so often not to be a theologian but rather an artist? Could it be that the vast majority of church fathers, theologians, and believers have been wrong all this time? Is Rob Bell, alone, saving the church from two millennia worth of wrong thinking? Does it even matter?

Or is it possible that this one man may be wrong and misguided? And that it matters a lot?

I’d opt for the latter.

It’s clear that Rob Bell is motivated by love for people. He has many moving stories about pain and sin in his book. He definitely has a pastor’s heart. He badly wants people to have hope and love Jesus. The problem is that he has let his version of love for people become more important and a ‘better story’ than the way in which love is actually displayed by God in the Bible. It is not love to tell someone they will eventually go to heaven when the Bible is clear that they may not. That is hatred in the end, even if unintended.”

Then what can we say when our friends, coworkers, and relatives ask us these questions about heaven and hell?

Perhaps we should simply tell them the truth—that God loves them and longs to spend eternity with them, but that our sin keeps us separated from him. That until we accept Christ’s gift of eternal life with him beginning in this life (for our choices here reverberate through eternity), we will forever be separated from God.

Only after we communicate this truth can we honestly say that love wins.

“Go into the culture and speak the language of the culture so that you can be a counterculture for the culture.”

I love this word. It speaks volumes of what followers of Jesus are supposed to be in this world. At my church we use this word practically every week. It’s in our DNA. But the word is often left undefined. What is a counterculture? What does it look like to plow one? Why do I have to be one? Am I plowing it already?

We sometimes talk about what that might look like in praxis; in fact, when talking about our lifestyles we often refer to that as counterculture. Sometimes we might say something like, “living out the gospel.”

Before I dive into what that looks like practically, I want to create an image of what that might look like philosophically.

If you’ve ever studied music, you’ve probably heard of counterpoint. Essentially, counterpoint is the relationship between two independent melodies that together create euphonic harmony. In a contrapuntal line, the once independent melodies become interdependent. One melody is completely distinct from the other melody, but when brought together they don’t clash. In fact, they create a beautiful harmonic line.

Counterculture works in a similar way. Culture may be moving in a certain direction, and a counterculture moves in a completely different direction, but this counterculture doesn’t attack the culture. It’s not an anticulture. To pull from my opening quote: we need to be “a counterculture for the culture.” In other words, we work for the good of the culture around us.

For many years modern evangelicals and fundamentalists have been caught up in a “culture war,” firmly believing that the culture was the enemy, and Christianity is responsible for making it right.

But if you look at the world around you, you’ll find endless possibilities for the gospel to infiltrate and come alongside this culture, creating a distinctly beautiful counterculture.

So what does this look like in praxis? Well, it’s different for every church. But look around you. You’ll soon discover the heartbeat of the culture you’ve been placed in.

What about for the individual? Perhaps that’s a little easier to answer. God requires certain things of his followers, but there’s one command he gives that encompasses all other commands.

Love.

“Love me. Love your fellow disciples. Love those around you who aren’t disciples. Love those who hate you for being a disciple.”

And what does that even look like? Perhaps it’s partnering with a local soup kitchen and helping to care for those facing poverty. Perhaps it’s taking that homeless person walking up and down your block everyday out to lunch. Perhaps it’s sitting next to that despondent guy at the bar in your local tavern and listening to his story.

Perhaps it’s choosing to not ogle the women at your office, to care more about your coworker’s wellbeing than your own, to deflect praise for a “knocked-out-of-the-park” project from yourself to your teammates, to value your community above your individuality.

And when someone asks, “Why do you live the way you live?” you can say,

“Because the God I serve stepped out of his comfort zone and said, ‘I love you’.”

Rob Bell’s upcoming book Love Wins is already on trial more than a month before it’s released.

On February 26, Justin Taylor denounced Bell in a post on his blog, and John Piper dismissed Bell in a post on Twitter.

Here’s the trailer for the book in question:

So where do I fall on this?

It’s no big secret to my friends and co-workers that I’m fascinated by Bell’s teaching techniques, his writing style, and his ability to captivate an audience through an artistically smart medium. He’s culturally savvy, yet not flashy or in-your-face like so many pastors and churches are becoming these days (arguing ad nauseam that in order to be hip and cool you’ve got to be loud and obnoxious. . . I love you, Perry Noble, but please, relax a little).

But now accusations are being thrown in light of the possibility that Bell might be a universalist.

This battle is nothing new. Bell has often fallen under fire from Neo-Calvinists like Mark Driscoll and Joshua Harris who follow in Piper’s footsteps and view Bell as a liberal compromiser (though perhaps not in the same way that a Fundy might call someone a “liberal compromiser”). Ever since Velvet Elvis was released, the Reformed camp has been searching for one opportunity after another to roast Bell.

And in response, Bell’s supporters and the hipster evangelicals hurl accusations at the side where Driscoll, Harris, Piper, and Taylor rest, calling them “smug, legalistic jerks who care nothing for loving people.”

Lines are drawn in the sand. The Neo-Calvinists attract intellectuals because of their systematic approach to studying scripture. They work hard to affirm the orthodox tenets of historic (whether traditional or non) evangelical theology. The hipster evangelicals attract artists and their ilk because of their narrative approach to theology.

The sides are angry with each other because one side appears to be spurning the Apostles’ Creed while the other side appears to be punching people in the face with it.

“Even worse, both sides often make the assertion they stand in for God, even as they both deny they do so. When statements like, ‘Either believe this or you aren’t an orthodox Christian’ or, ‘I think God is tired of iron clad,’ get thrown around, you know that both sides believe they are speaking for God.”

~Rev. Jonathan Weyer

I’m reminded of Christ’s parable “The Lost Son” from Luke 15.11-32. We often think of this as the story of a prodigal son, but in reality, it’s a story about two sons and their father’s transcendent love.

The younger son, like Bell and his hipster evangelical followers, dismissed his father’s love by spurning the home he’s built for his children (the “home” of theological orthodoxy). The older son (Piper and the Neo-Calvinists), while staying close to home, dismissed his father’s love by rejecting his embrace of the younger son.

I want to approach this debate in a different way. If you pinned me down and asked me what my beliefs are, I would affirm the truths set forth by Driscoll, Piper, and Taylor. But I can’t line up with them on this debate.

I think there’s more at play here than orthodoxy vs. liberalism. If it were simply about that, I’d fall on the side of orthodoxy in nearly every argument. But it’s not anymore.

It’s quickly becoming about how one side of evangelicalism treats the other side of evangelicalism with disdain. “You don’t love people like we do! You’re a bunch of jerks!”

Or “You don’t affirm the tenets set forth in the Nicene Creed. You’re preaching a false gospel!”

I’ll wait to talk about Bell until after Love Wins comes out. And afterwards I will continue to read his writings, listen to his sermons, and watch his Nooma videos regardless of whether he skews orthodox or universalist.

But I will do so as I always should have—with one or two grains of salt.

Why continue gleaning from his teachings? First, because he teaches from a fresh perspective on Jesus. He still preaches Christ, the Son of God. He still preaches Christ, crucified and resurrected, however off his interpretation of heaven and hell may (or may not, we’ll have to wait till the 29th to find out for sure) be. And second, because he remembers something that many Neo-Calvinists sometimes forget: part of being missional is being approachable.

Let me tell you a story. Like many stories, this one has a beginning. It began with a man whose love betrayed him. She turned her back on him and decided to prostitute herself. She settled for a broken, disgusting substitute for love instead of the true love of her lover.

The man couldn’t bear the thought of his love selling herself, so he devised a plan to win her back. He disguised himself and entered the brothel.

While disguised he began trying to win his love’s affection again. But she didn’t recognize him. She mistook him for someone crazy, and in a terrible turn of events, she murdered him.

Her own lover. Murdered.

And I can’t help but wonder if that’s what we do time and time again. Yet he still calls out to us.

“Do you remember me? I love you. Come back to me.”

And everyday we make choices that nail him to the cross again. We can’t recognize our Lover.

But every so often someone notices. Someone looks at this life and says, “This is not right.” He looks around himself and begins to notice a shadow forming. He looks up and sees a cross.

Dark. Cruel. Menacing.

And through the darkness he hears a voice whispering to him. You were supposed to die there. You were sentenced to that death. But someone decided to rescue you. Someone decided you were worth it. And he went there instead.

He went there instead.

What kind of love is this? A love that would make that kind of trade?

If my love spurned me, betrayed me, and walked away from me, selling herself to a disgusting imitation of love. . . could I take her place in the face of her execution?

Of my own accord, no. But because I know I’ve received that kind of love, I would be unable to do otherwise. I’d be compelled to love like my Lover has loved me.

But it’s only because of that love.

I’m not sure why this particular sermon came to mind recently, but I know that something about it really bothered me especially given what I’ve been learning about God as I try to draw closer to him.

It’s not because this preacher likened us to ants (because we pretty much are), but because he likened God’s relationship with us to our relationship with ants.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t really have much of a relationship with ants. I don’t necessarily hate them, but I find them to be pesky, invasive, and an overall nuisance. I wouldn’t really want a relationship with ants. The idea of becoming one of them is repulsive to me. Given the option, I wouldn’t even bother.

Yet God, in his incomprehensible love, has relentlessly sought after a relationship with us. He longed for us to be with him that he actually became one of us, died at our hands so that we wouldn’t have to, and came back to life so that we could be with him.

That kind of relationship just doesn’t exist between a human and an ant.

I knew nothing. Growing up in traditional fundamentalism kept so much hidden from me. And as much as I love my parents, they were ill-equipped to handle the whirlwind of two teenage boys in the house.

I mean, think about it. If you spurn everything in society, calling all of culture “taboo,” there are a lot of things that you and/or your children will come across that you’ll have no idea how to deal with.

Including something as important as sex.

If you look through the Bible, you’ll see just how important human sexuality is to God. Part of the Imago Dei is sex. I won’t go into all the correlations, but I alluded to them here. Unfortunately, the Church has shirked her responsibility to communicate it.

And by not owning the concept of sex, the Church has offered it up to the world’s system of handling things. As you can see, it’s pretty distorted.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not blaming the Church for my struggle with porn. But the Church needs to talk about these issues instead of brushing them under the rug, or worse yet, calling these issues out and pouring judgment on those who struggle with them.

It’s not easy for me to talk about this. It’s something I battle everyday.

I wouldn’t be much of a man if I didn’t deal with with it. But it’s just that I hate this fight, and I often wish it would just go away.

So there I was, a scared preteen boy trying to figure this world out on my own. What began as curiosity soon became fascination. And from fascination it grew into a full-blown addiction.

And I was never really honest with myself either. I always heard that people who were addicted to something lost the ability to function normally, and since I was able to go to school, study, play basketball, sing in choirs, and do all the same things “normal” people were doing, I wasn’t really addicted.

So I continued down this road. For years I fought this battle, never talking to anyone about it. I was too scared. I knew it was wrong; I knew something had to change. But I also knew that if I said anything, I’d be in trouble.

So I walked this walk alone.

Let me pause my story for a bit. If you’re battling porn like I, find a friend and talk through it. You already know that it’ll ruin you, but everything you’ve tried has failed. Trust me, you will continue to repeat your failure until you open up and talk to someone about it.

It’s not easy. These battles never are. But doing it alone makes the fight far more difficult than it needs to be.

I mentioned in part 1 of this story the author Anne Jackson. Her story has been a source of hope and encouragement to me over the last few years. If I thought I had reason to be afraid of the fallout from my admission of an addiction to porn, hers had the potential to be completely devastating.

But it resonated with me because, even though she and I are nothing alike, we have similar stories.

Check hers out below.