Chan begins by lamenting our disconnect from the power of the Spirit. He considers the cause to be our comfort. Chan admits:

I also know that God works uniquely in various places and times, and I do think this explains part of the difference between here and there. However, I also believe that the Spirit is more obviously active in places where people are desperate for Him, humbled before Him, and not distracted by their pursuit of wealth or comforts (like we are). The light of the American church is flickering and nearly extinguished, having largely sold out to the kingdoms and values of this world.

He challenges the church to consider its reliance on the power of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps much of what exists in the modern church is human endeavor. Chan states:

The church becomes irrelevant when it becomes purely a human creation. We are not all we were made to be when everything in our lives and churches can be explained apart from the work and presence of the Spirit of God.

May we, as a church, pursue God’s Spirit in all we do. May our work be more concentrated on following the Spirit and less concerned with building a grand institution. Chan yearns for Spirit level work in his life.

I can probably “pull off’ a fairly adequate church on my own . . . But who wants or needs that? I don’t want my life to be explainable without the Holy Spirit. I want people to look at my life and know that I couldn’t be doing this by my own power. I want to live in such a way that I am desperate for Him to come through. That if He doesn’t come through, I am screwed. (I probably shouldn’t write that word here, but it’s how I truly feel about this.)

May what happens at First Baptist not be in our own power. May what God does through us be unexplainable! May the Spirit of God empower us like never before.

The Church Between Gospel & Culture

The first book is a collection of essays by leading thinkers of the church’s relationship with culture.

We live in tension relating to culture. We (the church) must learn to live in culture in a manner of relating to culture; yet we must also strive to keep the gospel free from cultural entrapments.

If there is too little identification with the culture, the church becomes a subcultural ghetto. If it assumes too much of the culture’s perspectives and values, it domesticates and tames the gospel. The latter has become the major problem for the churches of North America. p. xvi

These essays challenge the church to carefully critique the culture, discerning how to bring the gospel into it. We need to assess our culture with a careful eye.

If the churches of North America are to engage in a missionary encounter with our culture, it will require them to learn skills enabling them to engage in the task of carefully exegeting the cultural context. p. 56

These authors assert that too often, the church has uncritically adopted culture and watered down the gospel. Therefore, the church needs to discern the gospel. This requires us to carefully consider what parts of the gospel are tied to culture. We must then learn to live out the gospel as a community. This may require us to reconsider ways that we currently function as a church. We discern this only through the power of the Spirit.

In this posture – standing on both the culture side and the gospel side – we must seek our identity. The crisis of the moment pushes us to it. The missionary essence of the church assumes it of us. The Spirit of Christ lead us there. p. 297

Finally, the essays point us toward living in this discernment. I especially appreciate the clarification of how the pastor serves. Alan Roxburgh describes the pastor as apostle, poet, and prophet.

The pastor/apostle is one who forms congregations into mission groups shaped by encounters with the gospel in the culture, structuring the congregations shape into forms that lead people outward into a missionary encounter. p. 328

As poet, the pastor articulates the experience of the church.

Poets are the articulators of experience. They image and symbolize the unarticulated experiences of the community, identifying and expressing the soul of the people (functioning as the dancer in worship who interprets the experience). The poet is listener and an observer, sensing the experience of the body and giving that experience a voice. p. 330

He further explains this dynamic.

In such a discourse the poet/pastor brings to voice their story so that there occurs a “Yes! This is who we are! This is who we meet when we touch the fear and confusion about being God’s people in this culture!” The pastor weaves together the people’s voices so that the story of who they are and what they actually experience is articulated, called forth, and owned. p. 330

The pastor also serves as prophet, communicating the Word of God to challenge the people to the new places that God is calling them.

I found this read encouraging, in the sense that we are heading in the right direction. It was also challenging, affirming that we have much to do in becoming the church that God intends for us to be.

The Great Giveaway

The second book is written by a Northern Seminary professor, David Fitch (Dr. Fitch is my professor for this course).

Dr. Fitch asserts that the modern church has given away its true essence.

The thesis of this book is that evangelicalism has “given away” being the church in North America. Simply put, evangelical churches have forfeited the practices that constitute being the church either (a) by portioning them off to various concerns exterior to the church or (b) by compromising them so badly that they are no longer recognizable as being functions of the church. p. 13

He asserts that we have fallen into the traps of culture, evaluating church in terms of size, efficiency, and business effectiveness. He proposes faithfulness over effectiveness, quality over quantity.

The goal is not bigness. The goal is to inflame the inner workings of the body. This success rejects naïve goals of modernists management for largeness and efficiency that overlook the substance of what goes on that makes the church his body. p. 43

He examines the way we view evangelism, leadership, worship, preaching, justice, spiritual formation, and moral education. His ideas are thought provoking and would provide fantastic discussion. Fitch envisions a church “practicing the practices”, living out the sort of community recorded in Acts, and moving away from the cultural models of success and bigness.

I will not detail the entire book, but would welcome discussion around either of these books. I hope you all have a fantastic weekend.

What would be involved in a missionary encounter between the gospel and this whole way of perceiving, thinking, and living that we call “modern Western culture”? p. 1

He describes Western culture as needing missionaries as much, if not more than other cultures. A missionary seeks to learn about culture so that he can effectively bring the gospel to that culture. Newbigin suggests that this is the task of the modern church.

He describes the greatest challenge of Western culture as a division between public and private life. We have compartmentalized church into the private sphere, giving it permission to take place apart from the rest of culture. In many of our minds, we think of church as what we do on Sunday mornings. The rest of life, in our thinking, has very little to do with church. Church is an important addition to our life, but often has very little to do with what goes on in the office, or at home, or in the gym. Newbigin challenges us to break free from this mindset.

[The Church] must accept in every nation the responsibility of placing all public life– political, economic, and cultural– in the light of its gospel. p. 123

Our task is to become a missionary people to in our culture.

We begin to bring together what our culture had divided– the private and the public. Only thus will the church fulfill its proper missionary role… it is important that all its lay members be prepared and equipped to think out the relationship of their faith to their secular work. Here is where the real missionary encounter takes place. p. 143

Let’s continue our conversation about how we can learn to function in this manner. Newbigin wrote this book in 1986.