Rich Lusk recently gave a series of talks at Saint Mark Reformed Church (CREC) at their “2011 Living as the Church Conference”: Mission: It’s Meaning and Manifestation.  He provides an excellent introduction to Christian mission that is solidly biblical and practical.

Rich Lusk is the Pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, AL and has written numerous articles, chapters, and books

Rich Lusk has been a very useful servant of the Lord, both as a writer, speaker and pastor.  I have very much appreciated not only his careful scholarship, clear and useful writing style, but also his commitment to serving his church faithfully.

He has made available a good many of his writings on the Trinity Presbyterian Church Pastor’s Page, which I strongly endorse.

The four talks can be listened to individually at these links:

1)  Mission and the Home

2) Mission and the Marketplace

3) Mission and the Poor

4) Mission and the Gospel

Saint James the Elder by Rembrandt

Our Church provides a worship services for the residents of the McLoughlin Place, a Senior Assisted Living community in Oregon City. I had the opportunity this month to provide the devotional. We are going through the book of James.

“Being Doers of the Word”

“Therefore lay aside all filthiness and overflow of wickedness, and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does. ” (James 1:21–25, NKJV)

The book of James was written very soon after the Lord Jesus was crucified, resurrected and ascended to the right hand of the Father. It was a time of confusion, persecution and suffering for the early church. Soon after Stephen, the first Christian martyr, was murdered, the church began to be scattered throughout the Roman world. As they went, the Christians spread the gospel.

But their lives were very difficult. They were falsely accused in courts, they were cut off from their families and synagogues, they were unable often to provide for their needs, and they were likely not sure how to live in such conditions. James wrote this letter to help suffering Christians to learn how to live as mature people of God. The first thing he said is that their trials and sufferings, however unjust, would produce in them maturity. The Father sees all of their troubles and will reward His children with the crown of life – which He has promised to all who love Him. James goes on to say:

“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning. Of His own will He brought us forth by the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of His creatures. So then, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath; for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God. ” (James 1:17–20, NKJV)

How we respond to our trials and sufferings is very important. It is easy to get frustrated and even angry at people when things don’t go the way we want them to. James said that if we want to see the righteousness of God manifested in us and through us to other people – we will avoid wrath and anger. He made us new creations in Christ by the word of truth. And so we must receive the word of God to us and lay aside all sinfulness in our lives.

God calls each of us to be doers of the word – not just hearers of the word. We deceive ourselves if we think that God doesn’t care about how we live our lives. When the word of God comes to us, we should remember what it shows us about ourselves and how He wants us to live. If we are just hearers of the word, and not doers, we are like someone that looks in a mirror and immediately forgets what kind of person we are. Rather, God wants each of us, when we face various trials and troubles, to remember to do His will. If someone mistreats you, or disappoints you, or isn’t as loving as you would like them to be – don’t get angry and speak badly to them. Rather, be a person that is so transformed by the word of God, the perfect law of liberty, that you love them and minister grace to them. Ones religion is useless if we are unable to control our tongues – for we deceive ourselves if we think we can both love the Lord our God and also speak wickedly to others. For pure and undefiled religion is loving those around us (as the text says, “visiting orphans and widows in their trouble”) and keeping unspotted from the world. For those of you who live here, you may be a widow yourself. You may be troubled physically, emotionally or spiritually. God is calling on you, and all of us, to not focus on our own troubles and forget to be doers of the word and minister to the needs of others. May God so fill us with His Word that we are able to produce the righteous of God in connection with all those around us.

I received information from Dennis Tuuri about “Q”, a group founded by a fella named Gabe Lyons to “reintroduce Christians to what had seemed missing in recent decades from an American expression of Christian faithfulness; valuing both personal and cultural renewal, not one over the other.”

The Mission of Q:

“Q” educates church and cultural leaders on their role and opportunity to embody the Gospel in public life.

We believe that exposure to old and new ideas is the best way to stimulate imagination for ways the Gospel can be expressed within our cultural context.

Q has annual conferences in major cities throughout the United States to promote Christian Cultural Awareness and to encourage Christians to effectively serve in their cities. Q 2011 will be in Portland, Oregon. A promotional video, Getting the Portland Vibe, can be viewed on their website. According to these guys, “Portland is Jesus’ favorite city!”

By making this post I am not endorsing this organization or event. Rather, I’m hoping to stimulate conversation about what it means for us to minister to cities. These guys are interested in creatively engaging with the culture of our cities in non-threatening ways. This may, indeed, be something we need to learn. However, it may also be, as one person I know said of it, “It’s just good old fashioned social gospel liberalism in a new dress. Gasp!”

We need to be wise to understand our times and preach the gospel into the culture God has placed us AND we need to be sure that we are actually confronting and renewing the culture for Christ. A good question to always be asking in enterprises like this is: Who is converting who?

I plan to spend some time reading some of their blog posts, essays, watching some of the videos to not only learn what they are about, but also to see if they have any creative ideas that we should be considering. Not only so, I’m interested in some of their styles, methods and approaches to things.

Maybe you would care to comment on some of the content of the site?

This year at our annual Reformation Covenant Church Family Camp we have the privilege of having both James B. Jordan teaching us about worship music and Rich Bledsoe as our keynote speaker.  I will post some thoughts throughout the week about some of his comments.

06/14 Rich Bledsoe – #1

Rich Bledsoe

Two Great Enemies of the Christian faith are Islam and Euro-Socialism (which thankfully is collapsing in on itself). Rich considers his calling to be learning to speak the gospel into the Euro-Socialist contexts where it is manifested.

Rich referenced 1 Cor. 14:18 (&19):

“I thank my God I speak with tongues more than you all; yet in the church I would rather speak five words with my understanding, that I may teach others also, than ten thousand words in a tongue.”

The point he made is that Paul traveled from culture to culture throughout the Roman world and was able to speak with a tongue that could be understood – He was probably one of the most cosmopolitan man at that time, with experience crossing cultural barriers that was empowered by the Holy Spirit to accomplish the mission Jesus gave him. The tongues could very well have referred to actual spoken languages, which Paul spoke more than anyone by the Spirit. Rich Bledsoe indicated that, at least by implication, it could also refer to having the ability to  speak into a foreign or strange culture. It is the ability to understand the way people think sufficiently communicate meaningfully.

Not everyone can be like Paul, with the ability to move from one culture to another with equal ability to effectively present the gospel. But God does want all of us to cross boundaries and to speak into people’s lives (tongues) in ways that we are not necessarily used to. These boundaries or cultural and relational barriers can be as foreign as China, or as near as across the street. Piercing through the boundaries and barriers can  be as simple as developing relationships with people in a church across the street in another denomination, getting to know a public official or some foreign students or immigrants. As we come to successfully learn to speak the tongue of those on the other side of the boundary – we will see God’s Spirit stir up faith in them. And when that happens – all kinds of things can change, even riots can be started (as with Paul 13 times in the book of Acts).

In a provocative blog post, Anthony Bradley, raises penetrating questions that I wanted to pass on. He writes:

The secret to the PCA’s multi-year decline may be primarily external to a denomination that is losing its ability to connect and lead an American culture that is increasingly multi-ethnic and non-white, as many are now arguing. The internal issues of new generations, missional emphasis vs. traditionalists, and so on may, in fact, be more tangential to a larger external reality: the PCA primarily appeals to a dying demographic and is, therefore, being left behind by global Christianity. Is the PCA’s cultural captivity to white, Western culture (including Southern white culture) going to make it increasingly irrelevant to a global Christian world that is primarily African, Asian, and Latin American?

Unfortunately, his questions are directed to his denomination, the PCA – a focus I would like to expand to all of North American Protestant Christians. It would seem to me that we, at Reformation Covenant Church, and in our denomination, the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, and most of the churches in our land need to be asking themselves similar questions.

The Next Evangelicalism

Bradley uses Soong-Chan Rah’s book, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity as a basis for his comments, and to to answer this question, “Is the PCA being held hostage by white, Western (and Southern) cultural captivity?”

As the gospel goes out into the world over time – Christ, by His Spirit, transforms people, institutions, social structures and whole cultures in ways generally unanticipated by those preaching the Word. Christ confronts our biases, misapprehensions of the truth, prejudices and hard-heartedness as we clash with new problems and new opportunities.

While I like Bradley’s desire to sensitize us to the need to see the world differently than we often do, like so many other helpful missional/missions tends books, he tends to reduce the problem to a power struggle between the establishment and the disenfranchised, between the rich and poor, between white people and all the other races, between the West and East, etc. As if it’s possible, by sheer force of will, the reforming of minds and social structures, to just move into an age without such cultural divides in the church.

The Next Christendom

It seems to me that the problems raised by Bradley (and others) are not going to be solved by the benevolence of the leaders of the existing Christian social structures, and just stepping aside or placing non-white, non-western and non-traditional men into leadership in our churches and denominations. The real transformation that we all hope for will happen when these non-white, non-western and non-traditional men become recognized as such good leaders and so important to the life of Christ’s Body that we all desire them lead the Church into new and important directions. What the church needs to pray for is the day when God raises up men of such inspiration and influence that everyone looses all interest in an ecclesiastical affirmative action program.

Historically, the leadership of the Church passed from the Jerusalem Jewish-Christians to the more prominent leadership of Gentile Christians. God raised up, over time, more competent men from other cultures to succeed the initial Jewish leadership. It did not happen because the Gentiles sought to have the Jews relinquish leadership – It happened because God provided the Body of Christ with the men that were needed to move the church forward at that time in history.

For the same thing to happen in our time, it seems to me that what needs to happen is several things:

• We need to labor to have a more global perspective.
  • We need to learn progressively more about what God is doing in various parts of the world (there are many books and resources now available to help with this)
  • We need to meet and fellowship with international believers locally
  • We need to discover meaningful ways to provide help to Christians around the world
  • We need to discover who the prominent people God is using in various parts of the world and learn about what they are teaching and doing for the Lord. These may be the futures leaders God will give us.
• We need to be more prayerful, both privately and in corporate worship, about the world.
  • Pray for Christians in various parts of the world
  • Pray for persecuted Christians
  • Pray for Churches by city, nation, region and people groups
• We need to build relationships with people different than those we normally associate
  • Associate with, and learn to love and appreciate those of different races, classes and social standing
  • Associate with, and learn to love and appreciate those outside of our own narrow Christian traditions and circumstances
  • Work cooperatively with other local churches to produce more of a “city church” or “regional church” that is inclusive of various orthodox traditions, denominations and theological perspectives.
  • Be willing to learn from those who are bringing challenging insights to us, even if it is not done in the most edifying way, or with the best theological or philosophical reasoning.
    • Sometimes we just need to hear people, letting them speak freely, so that we can learn what their concerns are so that we can consider how to best minister and serve them.
    • We need to avoid, when we disagree with folks like Bradley and others, reacting badly (one person’s reaction to Bradley was: “Personally, I think the guy is a racist pig!  It’s reverse racism.” Not, in my opinion either humble or helpful!). This kind of reaction closes off further discussion and the sharing of ideas and visions, and actually perpetuates existing problems thoughtlessly and tragically.