Colby and I just finished a really thought-provoking book that Christar had us read. It’s called Sabbath Keeping, by Lynne Baab, and it talks about setting aside a day or part of a day to observe the sabbath. The author learned to keep the sabbath when she and her family lived for an extended time in Iran and Israel where all activity stopped in each household for the entire day. They began to see the importance and blessings of the sabbath and this book flowed out of that. I had never considered the concept of the sabbath before, always thinking of it as an Old Testament command that wasn’t suited for today. That and I just never had the time to take a whole day for rest.  This book convicted me that not only was it needed for me to take time to rest in this extended way, but also it was good and part of what God wants me to do.  I decided to start right away because I knew that if I can’t make the time now, I will never be able to.  It has been difficult at times to set work aside because there is always the feeling of “I should be getting more done”.  To be honest, as the author talks about, one of the biggest gifts of the sabbath is that of grace.  To not have to be productive for one day and that be perfectly fine.  To come to realize that God’s love for me is based upon Himself rather than anything I could do.  I think a key concept of the sabbath, aside from the rest aspect, is to realign ourselves (minds and hearts) with God and His perspectives He wants us to have.  I look forward to many more sabbaths, and I hope this has encouraged you to take time for your own.

The following is part two of the article I wrote for the BFC’s Fellowship News.

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In part I of this article, we talked about how the church in North America finds itself in a new cultural context. Traditional ways of incarnating the gospel in our culture are becoming increasingly less effective. So what are some of the changes in approach that we can make in order to reconnect with our society?

Relationships Outside the Walls

People in our society are more concerned with interpersonal relationships, and it is through those long-term intimate relationships that the gospel will impact people’s lives and transform them into disciples of Jesus Christ. Often our church programs are organized around getting people into our church so we can present the gospel to them. In our time, a more helpful approach would be to find ways to get our people out of our churches and into the community.

Does that mean that we cancel all our services and tell everyone to go join the Rotary and the PTA? Maybe not, but we need to get beyond the idea that church health is simply determined by the number of people that attend, the growth of the church’s attendance, the church’s budget, or the number of programs and outreaches the church executes. What really counts is having a fellowship of people who are continually deepening their relationships with God, developing relationships with the lost, and engaging them in a meaningful and effectual way.

A Missional Approach at Home & Overseas

Another implication of a missional approach to ministry is something I already alluded to – a dissolving of the distinctions between concepts like overseas missions, home missions, local outreach, and even church community. As I mentioned earlier, we are all part of God’s mission to restore his relationship with humanity and ultimately to bring glory to himself and therefore all that we do should be considered the advancement of that mission.

Cross-cultural ministry is a vital task and we must begin to see the cross-cultural workers we send overseas as integral parts of our church’s ministry, but we also must view our church’s ministry as integrally missional. Everything we do should be about reaching out into our communities and building the kingdom of God. We must realize that any distinctions that have been created are artificial and should only be allowed where they are helpful and eliminated where they are not. Certainly there will be facets of ministry that are directed toward specific areas or parts of the world, but our mission and thus our activities should be the same.

The Essentials of the Gospel

The BFC is already considering the practical implications of such a shift as we look at future church planting possibilities in Mexico. If this endeavor is successful, it will force us to deal with cross-cultural issues, not only in our dealings with those in our urban contexts and in those of our international workers, but also within our own denomination. As we begin to encounter cultural differences we will be forced to examine which of our practices and understandings of Scripture are influenced by our own cultural biases. As we engage in this examination, we should adhere to the principle of “majoring on the majors and minoring on the minors.”

This is one of the principles that cross-cultural missionaries in countries strongly dominated by other religions have been forced to practice for a long time. When you live in a village that has only ten Christians in it, individual views on issues that are not essential to the gospel are subsumed in the common goal of reaching those around them for the cause of Christ. When the people around you have no knowledge of the true and living God and the salvation provided through the death of his son, dialogue on those things and promotion of them serves to unite over and above denominational or theological distinctives. As we face secularism in our society, we must be prepared to accept the same reality.

A New Paradigm

In summary, I believe it is only through the rebirth of our church paradigm and the adoption of these principles – cultural engagement, relational outreach, missional orientation, and Christian unity – that we can truly be effective in allowing the gospel to impact our culture. This will certainly prove to be disconcerting as we move away from methodologies and conceptualizations that have sustained our ministries for the last hundred years and more, but unless a change like this is embraced, I believe that Christianity will become increasingly marginalized in a secular culture and our once Christian nation will become a pagan nation rivaling those we have sent cross-cultural missionaries to for the last two centuries.

The following is the first part of an article I wrote for the BFC’s Fellowship News. I thought some of you would be interested to read it.

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For years the protestant church has successfully sent out cross-cultural workers to places all over the world. They have left the comfort of living among a Christianized society in order to take the gospel to those who have never heard. They have (albeit sometimes more appropriately than others) contextualized the gospel message to address the questions and needs of the host culture in which they were ministering, have produced many dedicated followers of Christ, and have begun many new churches. In order to do this effectively, they had to shed some of their western baggage and discover creative and appropriate ways to personify the gospel message.

Christianity in a New Context

Whether we like it or not – and whether we realize it or not – we as twenty-first century American Christians are beginning to find ourselves in their shoes. What happened in the twenty years before us in Europe is slowly but surely happening in our society. We are progressively discovering that we no longer live in a traditional Christian culture with traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs. While it is true there are still Christian influences in society at large, Christianity no longer holds the position of dominance that it once did in the life of the average American.

As this trend has progressed, conservative evangelicals have found themselves increasingly frustrated by its effects. It has been increasingly difficult to find success in ministry endeavors, our attempts at outreach seem to be producing less fruit, and we lament what seems to be increasing secularism both in our society and in our own young people. The most frustrating thing to us is that we don’t understand why these ministry models no longer work. As far as we can tell, we continue to be faithful to methods of reaching people that the Spirit has used in our churches for many years.

The World on Our Doorstep

What we fail to realize is that the attitudes and actions of people in our society have both been caused by and are due to fundamental shifts in American’s beliefs about religion, knowledge, morality, and spirituality. Unfortunately, the ways many evangelical churches do ministry and even the ways we understand and talk about the gospel have not adapted to reflect this change.

One illustration of this is the terms and categories we continue to use in reference to cross cultural ministry. In the past, because of the marked differences that existed between the pagan “foreign fields” that our cross-cultural workers served on, and our modernized, industrialized, and Christianized societies, we termed those that ministered to them as missionaries and sent them out as pioneering workers. They were in a class separate both from our clergy and our laity. However, as the world continues to come to our doorstep, there is no longer such a thing as a “foreign field”. Additionally, the increasing secularization of our society means that more and more, we are encountering many of the same challenges that “missionaries” faced as they tried to live and share the gospel in pagan cultures.

Carrying Out God’s Mission

While these distinctions may have been helpful in the past, they are not inherent and should be reconsidered. We are all (or at least all should be) missionaries in the sense that we are all active participants in God’s mission to restore his relationship with humanity and bring glory to himself. As such, seeing some as church laity and others as sent out missionaries is not a helpful designation. However, this shift to a missional approach is not simply semantic. It has bearing on how we do ministry and how our churches operate. When a person begins cross-cultural ministry, one of their most immediate concerns is understanding the language and the culture of the people they are trying to reach.

We in the United States need to be doing the same. In order to effectively reach the secular culture that surrounds us, we need to understand what drives them. This requires understanding culture’s signposts – observing what our culture views as entertainment, the activities they participate (or don’t participate) in, and things on which they choose to spend their money. But more than just knowing what they are, we must actively engage those areas. We must be involved enough with them to understand the desires, concerns, and longings that they reveal. We must then be able to intelligently critique them and respond to the needs they portray.

This ability is even more critical for those in the pews than those in the pulpits. Those who are in what has traditionally been understood as lay roles, now have the greatest opportunity for ministry as they interact daily with those outside the faith.

So what does it look like to incarnate the message of the gospel into today’s American culture? If the methods we are using seem to be losing effectiveness, what can they be replaced with? In one sense, in order to reach our society we may need to take some of the paradigms we have operated out of for centuries and turn them on their heads. In part II, we will consider some practical implications to changing the way we incarnate the gospel in our society

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Part II is due to be published in October and I will post it to the blog at that time.