Tag Archives: Missions

Relief efforts and Christian priorities

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There’s something else that concerns me about our rush to send relief to disaster areas. I’m wondering if we aren’t focusing a bit on the wrong things.

Again, I know that I’m running the risk of sounding calloused and uncaring. I recognize the need to reach out to hurting people. But I’m wondering if the materialism of the culture we are living in hasn’t made it easier for us to focus on physical things than spiritual ones.

Look at the society around us. Have you noticed that spirituality has nothing to do with wanting to help out with disasters? I’m not saying that makes it bad; I’m saying that it’s not something uniquely Christian.

But didn’t Jesus say to help the hurting? Of course he did. But never at the expense of our mission to the world. The unique thing that we have to offer is the good news of Jesus Christ. We’ve got to hang on to that, even as the world drives us to focus on physical things (good and bad). We are called to focus on the unseen, not the seen, on the eternal, not the temporal.

I’ve often wished that we could somehow see the pictures of the spiritually starving, with bloated souls longing for nourishment. I’ve wanted to be able to show the earthquake of sin, the hurricane of wrongdoing that devastates family after family. In a materialistic society, we are moved by physical suffering and economic loss. We understand lack of food and water. Everyone is touched by these things, not just Christians. It’s part of survival, the “herd instinct” that makes someone dive into a swollen river to try and save a stranger.

We need some priorities. We need holistic programs that serve body and soul. We need to be willing to stick to longterm efforts, rather than jumping from emergency to emergency. If we feed and heal and house and clothe, yet don’t lead people to Christ, are we really doing them good in the long run? In the LONG run?

In 21st-century America, it’s easy to raise money for relief projects. Christians, non-Christians, everyone wants to give to help. At some point we need to ask ourselves, should the church look just like the world in this? Do we not have something more to offer, something more important?

If not, we should probably shut our doors.

Evangelism in a changing world

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1138315_73143291With the great discussion on the last offering in the Kitchen, I want to continue a bit with the topic. Here are my concerns: as our society moves into postmodernism, evangelism is becoming an embarrassment. Evangelism, to some degree, involves saying, “My way is right, and your way is wrong.” Evangelism needs some absolutism, a conviction that Jesus is the way, the only way to God. Those sorts of concepts don’t fit well with a postmodern mindset that emphasizes tolerance and respect for the views of others.

In the same way, missions have also fallen in disfavor. Aren’t they merely a sign of cultural superiority, of “the ugly American”? With cultural sensitivity, won’t we come to see that the beliefs of other people also have validity? Why do we have to impose our worldview on others? The concept of “spreading Christianity” is extremely offensive in the 21st century.

In such a situation, it’s easier to focus merely on service. Not service as a part of evangelism; that’s been the norm for decades (at least; I’ll only vouch for my adult life, but in reading about great men of the past, I’m convinced that it’s been around much, much longer). What’s typically offered today is no different than what the Red Cross or UNICEF would be doing. That’s a broad generalization, one that I’d love to be wrong about. Maybe my limited experience has led me to a mistaken view of what’s going on.

Still, I’m worried about the future of the church. (Well, the church in my country, anyway; I see a lot more evangelism going on in other countries) We need to bring back the concept of taking good news to the world. I want to spend some time next week talking about what that good news looks like, but for now, I want to emphasize: we’re losing something valuable. We need to wake up and see that, or it could be gone forever. We need to teach our young people about the gospel and what it has to say to a broken world.

As the old saying goes, the church is always one generation away from extinction.

Putting the mission back into our trips

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flagsAs I’ve written before, I’m disturbed by the trend in our churches to take our members on service trips and call them mission trips. They aren’t. If we lose the meaning of the word “mission,” we will have lost something of value within our church.

At least one congregation here in town is doing something about it. They’ve decided that every one of their members that goes on a mission trip sponsored by their church must go through a course in evangelism. If you are going on a mission trip, you need to know how to teach someone about Jesus. Not just build houses. Tell people about Jesus while you are building houses.

I think that’s a good way to begin to counteract this trend. For a trip to be a mission trip, it needs to have an evangelistic purpose. Or call it a service trip. But if it’s a mission trip, let the participants be prepared to do mission work.

Elders: How long must we wait?

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2886243391_de8448f30fIn many mission areas, there is a severe lack of congregations with elders. I’ve spent most of my time in Latin America, so I can speak most knowledgeably about that area. What I’ve observed are churches that have existed for decades, yet aren’t even close to having elders leading their congregation. Besides some doctrinal issues, like the one I discussed yesterday, there are some practical causes to this:

  • Churches from the States have given financial support to preachers overseas. That’s a situation full of potential for problems, from the difficulties in determining the level of support to the impracticality of overseeing a worker long distance. But one of the biggest problems is the creation of preacher-dominated churches. With no sense of accountability to the local church, no motivation to surrender control of congregational affairs, and a model of preachers doing elders’ jobs, the preacher can continue to say, “This congregation just isn’t ready.”  
  • We’ve established preacher training schools around the world. Where are the elder training schools? What are we communicating to our brethren by emphasizing ministers rather than shepherds?
  • When teaching about elders, we’ve focused on the qualifications of elders and taught little about what elders actually do. Steve Ridgell, my supervisor at Herald of Truth, did eldership training in Africa last summer. The leaders commented, “We’ve never been taught any of this. All we ever heard was who could be an elder, not what they were supposed to do.”

We’ve historically taught that our churches were lead by the pastors, the elders of the church. In practice, we’ve too often followed a preacher-led model. Especially in our mission efforts. In the New Testament, elders were named very soon after the establishment of each congregation; we’ll know that we have a healthy model when we see the same thing today.

Elders: Children that believe

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eldersAs churches in mission areas move toward naming elders there is typically one big stumbling block. 1 Timothy 3 says that an elders children should “obey him with all respect.” Titus however says that his children must “believe” or be “faithful.” We’ve traditionally interpreted that to mean that an elder’s children must be Christians. This, frankly, is much more difficult in a mission situation. Most of the men that you are going to consider as elders have adult children. A lot of times, they aren’t converted when their parents are.

Some scholars, like Carroll Osburn in our brotherhood, feel that the faithful or believing children in Titus are like the obedient children in 1 Timothy 3. If this expression refers to them being Christians, it’s a rather unusual way to express it.

If we consider what was seen in the last post, it may very well be that there was something special in the situation in Crete that called for “believing children” (like what we see in Titus 1:12-13). Paul didn’t ask the same of the church in Ephesus, and that was a church that had been around for decades. If it were about children being Christians, wouldn’t it make sense that would be asked of the Ephesian church? I’m convinced that elders need to have raised a family that respects him and lives according to the values he taught them. But I’m not sure that we haven’t created an unnecessary stumbling block to the naming of elders.

In the Bible, elders were named within months of the planting of congregations. We have many churches around the world that have gone years without naming elders. Something is wrong with this picture. I think part of it is our misapplication of this phrase from Titus.