The Sovereign God Does Involve You

The sovereignty of God is often misunderstood. Many are not involved in the Great Commission because they believe that if God wants to save the whole world He can do it without their help.

William Carey, the Father of Modern Missions, met with such response when, in a meeting of pastors in 1787, he raised the question of whether all Christians should spread the Gospel throughout the world.

An elderly pastor told him off, saying,"Young man, sit down; when God pleases to convert the heathen, He will do it without your aid and mine."

Many do not realise that the dominion of this world is given to Man. God, of course, can operate without us but since He has assigned this "first heaven" to us, He must involve us.

Even God could not save us by remaining as "God" in heaven. He had to become a Man to die on the cross for our sins. The wages of sin is death and only a righteous man can pay that price.

Man lost it and so Man must gain it back.

Today, the victory over the evil one has been won at the Calvary and we are now the occupying force.

We have to spread the Good News that the victory has been won and our people have no need to live under the slavery of the enemy.


We have to do the task of evangelism and not God..


Albert Kang

I Am Certain He Will Find You

Some 14 years ago, I stood watching my university students file into the classroom for our opening session in the theology of faith.

That was the day I first saw Tommy. He was combing his hair, which hung six inches below his shoulders. My quick judgment wrote him off as strange – very strange.

Tommy turned out to be my biggest challenge. He constantly objected to or smirked at the possibility of an unconditionally loving God. When he turned in his final exam at the end of the course, he asked in a slightly cynical tone, “Do you think I’ll ever find God?” “No,” I said emphatically. “Oh,” he responded. “I thought that was the product you were pushing.”

I let him get five steps from the door and then called out. “I don’t think you’ll ever find Him, but I am certain He will find you.” Tommy shrugged and left. I felt slightly disappointed that he had missed my clever line.

Later I heard that Tommy had graduated, and I was grateful for that. Then came a sad report: Tommy had terminal cancer.

Before I could search him out, he came to me. When he walked into my office, his body was badly wasted, and his long hair had fallen out because of chemotherapy. But his eyes were bright and his voice, for the first time, was firm.

“Tommy! I’ve thought about you so often. I heard you were very sick,” I blurted out.

“Oh, yes, very sick. I have cancer. It’s a matter of weeks.”

“Can you talk about it?” 

“Sure. What would you like to know?”

“What’s it like to be only 24 and know that you’re dying?”

“It could be worse,” he told me, “like being 50 and thinking that drinking booze, seducing women and making money are the real ‘biggies’ in life.”

Then he told me why he had come. 

“It was something you said to me on the last day of class. I asked if you thought I would ever find God, and you said no, which surprised me. Then you said, ‘But He will find you.’ I thought about that a lot, even though my search for God was hardly intense at that time.

But when the doctors removed a lump from my groin and told me that it was malignant, I got serious about locating God. And when the malignancy spread into my vital organs, I really began banging against the bronze doors of heaven. But nothing happened. Well, one day I woke up, and instead of my desperate attempts to get some kind of message, I just quit.

I decided I didn’t really care about God, an afterlife, or anything like that. I decided to spend what time I had left doing something more important. I thought about you and something else you had said: ‘The essential sadness is to go through life without loving. But it would be almost equally sad to leave this world without ever telling those you loved that you loved them.’ So I began with the hardest one: my dad.”

Tommy’s father had been reading the newspaper when his son approached him.

“Dad, I would like to talk with you.”

“Well, talk.”

“I mean, it’s really important.”

The newspaper came down three slow inches.

“What is it?”

“Dad, I love you. I just wanted you to know that.” 

Tommy smiled at me as he recounted the moment. “The newspaper fluttered to the floor. Then my father did two things I couldn’t remember him doing before. He cried and he hugged me. And we talked all night, even though he had to go to work the next morning.

“It was easier with my mother and little brother,” Tommy continued. “They cried with me, and we hugged one another, and shared the things we had been keeping secret for so long. Here I was, in the shadow of death, and I was just beginning to open up to all the people I had actually been close to.

“Then one day I turned around and God was there. He didn’t come to me when I pleaded with Him. Apparently He does things in His own way and at His own hour. The important thing is that you were right. He found me even after I stopped looking for Him.”

“Tommy,” I added, “could I ask you a favor? Would you come to my theology-of-faith course and tell my students what you told me?”

Though we scheduled a date, he never made it. Of course, his life was not really ended by his death, only changed. He made the great step from faith into vision. He found a life far more beautiful than the eye of humanity has ever seen or the mind ever imagined.

Before he died, we talked one last time. “I’m not going to make it to your class,” he said. “I know, Tommy.”

“Will you tell them for me? Will you . . . tell the whole world for me?”

“I will, Tommy. I’ll tell them.”

Mind the Gap

Mind the Gap

If you have ever been to London, you are familiar with the “tube,” London’s expansive underground transport system.  Once there, a constant refrain - over loudspeakers and on signs - is “Mind the Gap.”

The line is so ubiquitous, and so closely tied to London’s ethos, that the phrase has become one of the more popular for tourists to buy on t-shirts.

The “gap” to be “minded,” of course, is that which exists between the train and the platform so that you don’t get your foot caught between the two.  If you don’t mind the gap, your foot will fall through the crack.

So “mind” it.

There are, of course, many “gaps” to be mindful of.

For example, many are keenly aware of the gaps that exist in their life between income and expense, or calories ingested and calories burned.  The worst would have to be the gap between knowing and doing.  For no small reason has it been said that the longest journey anyone will ever take is the 18 inches between our head and our heart.

But often overlooked are the gaps plaguing the church.

Here are six to consider:

1.       The gap between evangelism and discipleship.  The biblical dynamic between evangelism and discipleship is, of course, anything but a dichotomy.  We are to engage in both.  But in practice, many churches put their energies in one or the other.  Even more troubling is how they pit one against the other, as if God made it an either-or.  (He didn’t).

2.       The gap between growth and assimilation.  Some call this the gap between growing larger and smaller at the same time. If not “minded,” the “back door”, as they say, is left wide open.  But it’s more than the “back door.”  If it’s all growth, there is little community.  But if there is an emphasis on community alone, then the church turns inward and growth becomes stagnant.

3.       The gap between cultural relevance and orthodoxy.  Let’s put this more simply:  this is the gap between being “in” the world and “of” it.  In truth, most seem to err on the side of being more “hip” than holy, contemporary than faithful, trendy than Trinitarian.  In other words, “relevance” tends to win.  It is as if the point is to win the world’s favor, as opposed to winning the world’s soul.  But on the other side are those who wield their claim to historic truth like a baseball bat, failing to see that while the message is timeless, the method of presenting it is not.  The balance is clear: connect with the mission field of our day while remaining steadfastly tied to the apostolic truths.

4.       The gap between our community as Christ-followers and our community with those outside of the faith.  This gap is relational, and speaks to the cloistered life of many faith communities from the world they claim they want to reach.  We live in Christian cliques, holy huddles, gospel ghettoes, and wonder why we aren’t reaching more people for Jesus.  But even more, our community as Christ followers is often divorced from the community of those we are most wanting to reach.  The point of being “salt” is that we are applied directly to those areas most in need of a preservative to stop the spread of decay. This is more than cultural – it is primarily relational.  No Christian should be separate from a non-Christian in need of the gospel.  If you are, you are not sufficiently “in” the world.

5.       The gap between the vision of community in the Scriptures and the reality of our day.  We’ve all heard the line that Sunday morning at 11 a.m. is the most segregated hour in our nation.  But I am increasingly convinced that the issue is less racial than it is socio-economic.  Regardless, whether a mix of black and white, rich or poor, young or old, the gap is that there isn’t often much of a mix.  Here is the dream of Jesus:  when you walk into a church on Sunday morning, you will see young and old, black and white, male and female, lost and found…all hoping for a glimpse of the truth, a taste of the eternal, a sense of the grace.

6.       The gap between vision and leadership.  Most leaders are visionaries, but not all visionaries are leaders.  I’ve never met a pastoral team yet that couldn’t tell me something of their vision.  The breakdown was between vision and practice, vision and reality, vision and execution.  Let me put the “gap” this way: if someone were to offer you $1 million dollars, but to receive it you had to be able to explain exactly where it would go, and why it would matter… would you get the money?

So…

…are you minding the gaps?

James Emery White

Editor’s Note

James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and the ranked adjunctive professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, which he also served as their fourth president.  His newly released book is The Church in an Age of Crisis: 25 New Realities Facing Christianity (Baker Press).  To enjoy a free subscription to the Church and Culture blog, log-on to www.churchandculture.org, where you can post your comments on this blog, view past blogs in our archive and read the latest church and culture news from around the world.  Follow Dr. White on twitter @JamesEmeryWhite.

What To Do When God Does Not Answer Your Prayer?

Today, I just want to share to you Pastor Bill Hybels' interesting experience after a baptism service in their church.

He writes: "I bumped into a woman in the stairwell who was crying. I thought this was a little odd, since the service was so joyful. I asked her if she was all right.

She said, 'No, I'm struggling.'

She said, 'My mom was baptized today. I prayed for her every day for almost 20 years. The reason I'm crying is because I came this close to giving up on her.

At the 5-year mark I said, "Who needs this? God isn't listening."

At the 10-year mark I said, "Why am I wasting my breath?"

At the 15-year mark I said, "This is absurd." At the 19-year mark

I said, "I'm just a fool." But I just kept trying, kept praying. Even with weak faith I kept praying.

Then she gave her life to Christ, and she was baptized today. I will never doubt the power of prayer again."

Sometimes when we pray and pray we feel like we are experiencing the law of diminished returns -- so we stop praying.

We correspondingly diminish our desires and dreams.

We stop believing that God cares and that he will act -- that he is indeed a God who wants us to ask. I hope that you will trust God's love and concern for you, and his ability as well.

I hope that you will continue to be persistent in prayer, no matter how discouraging the circumstances seem. 

Don and Dawn

What on Earth is a Missional Church?

The word, "missional" has been in circulation within the ecclesiastical world for at least thirty years. However, the meaning of this word has been so diversified that for years that I hardly even consider using it. The churches that I pastor or advise are known more as 'Attractional' churches rather then 'Missional' churches.

From August 26 to 27, 2010 I attended the Missional Church Conference organized by NECF at Wisma Eagles, FGT, KL. Dr. Paul Alexander, the Principal of Mattersey Hall, UK, was the keynote speaker with the Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Senator Datuk Seri Idris Jala as the guest speaker. The missionay theme was being expounded during those two days. There were workshops conducted by facilitators who were deemed to be missional in their ministry approach.

The term, "missional" is getting clearer to me... even as I now reflect on what I had learned during the conference. First and foremost, the missional theology is based upon the incarnating God who sent His Son to this world to save us. Thus a Missional Church is more than a sending church. It is a Sent Church and so it has to be distinguished from an Attractional Church. The latter has to do with attracting people to the church, making the church the focus of the mission. A missional approach makes the unsaved world as the focus.

Having said that, we must also note that a missional church is not to be confused with the emerging church. The emerging church movement seeks to contextualize its message to meet the needs of the postmodern world. Even though, the missional church does that, it is not a primary feature of its identity.

Neither is the missional church similar to Rick Warren's concept of the seeker-sensitive church. Warren's idea of church growth is still basically of the attractional model. There is nothing wrong with the attractional model but it is limited if it is the only evangelistic approach used by the church. The danger in a solely attractional approach is that the ministry depends very much on the clergy. Today, we can see that some churches are growing to a humongous size because of the attractive quality of their pastors and preachers. The personality-based church will easily fall apart once the 'star' is removed.

The missional church is also not a model merely advocating social justice. The pitfalls of the Liberation Theology of Latin America reveal the weakness of any extreme social movement. Engaging poverty and being the champion of the oppressed is only a portion of the missional approach. However, the part is not the whole and so this must never be confused with the full Gospel.

Mission is no longer a program of the Church but it is the Church itself. Based upon the understanding that we are the "Sent People", we do not just send a couple of missionaries to the mission fields but the whole church is being sent to the world. By having a paradigm shift in our missiology, our churches can be transformed into "incarnational" communities that model themselves after the incarnational mission of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The missional church goes to the world and does not expect the world to come to it. This is the distinction that makes the missional church different from the attractional church. However, being an attractional church pastor for many years and looking at many fast-growing attractional churches in Asia and around the world I do not believe that the attractional model has completely lost its effectiveness.

Instead of the 'either-or' approach, we should consider 'both-and' approach. The missional church can include the attractional approach too. This means that both laity and clergy are working hand-in-hand to reach out to the pre-Christian world. The missional-cum-attractional model is both a church-based mission and a believer-based mission. This means that the church provides the leadership, training and motivation for the believers to carry the mission of God to the Seven Mountains. Most believers do not go to the world by their own volition. They need leadership, direction and organization. The clergy provides these and monitor the development of every missional activity. This involves both Reaching Out and Going Out! Thus the Church does not only have a Mission but the Mission has the Church.

The next step for those of us who pastor attractional churches is to make the transition. The theology has to become practical.  It is a process that needs much prayers and planning. And that, I will definitely do - so as to bring the missional concept to the churches that I advise and help in pastoring.


Rev Albert Kang
Pastoral Advisor
High Praise Church