A powerful narrative of redemption

The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey Into Christian Faith by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a wonderful book that explores so much: conversion, repentance, adoption, family and church life, and living by faith.

Carl Trueman did a really nice review of it here.

View all my reviews

Evangelism and discipleship in oral cultures

John Piper wonders about the implications of his contention that Christians are “weakened” by preaching that “leav[es] the people unable to see for themselves how these points are the meaning of God in the texts.”

Does this inference (this huge therefore) imply that preliterate people, who hear biblical preaching, but cannot read, are thereby weakened?

Not necessarily. One of the strategies that missionaries are using today is teaching evangelists and pastors in preliterate cultures to memorize hundreds of Bible stories verbatim (which they can do much better than we can). When this kind of “text” becomes the basis of an exposition, we have in principle the same situation as when I preach, while sharing a written text with my people.

Whether the preliterate people will be weakened will depend, as in literate cultures, on whether the expositors show the hearers where their points come from. Do they come from the recitings of the Holy Book (the “text”), or from the preacher’s ideas?

Oral strategies in missions today raise significant questions, and wonderful possibilities. But, while we wait for the hard-working Bible translators to do their crucial work, these strategies need not weaken the new disciples by focusing authority on the preachers. Authority is finally in God, and in his written word. Verbatim memorization and recitation of that word enable preliterate preachers to root their message in the very word of God.

The links in the last paragraph are interesting. The first is Piper’s consideration of some issues of the gospel in pre- and post-literate cultures, and the second a Lausanne document on oral learners. The Lausanne page contains a link to this 2006 Christianity Today article by Dawn Herzog Jewell discussing the same issue. Here’s a section from the article:

Reaching the oral majority for Christ requires communicating in forms familiar to oral cultures, such as stories, proverbs, drama, songs, chants, and poetry.

The Lausanne paper tells the testimony of an Indian Hindu, a pastor named Dinanath, who came to Christ in 1995 through the work of a cross-cultural missionary. When Pastor Dinanath returned to his village in 1998 following two years of Bible college, he began preaching in the way he’d been taught. But few villagers showed any interest, leaving him discouraged and confused.

The next year, Pastor Dinanath attended a seminar on storytelling methods. He realized that a lecture style and printed books couldn’t reach his people, so he changed his preaching. He began telling Bible stories and singing gospel songs put to traditional music.

By 2004, his village church had multiplied into 75 churches with 1,350 baptized members. “This is the next wave in missions,” Willis says, “like a Gutenberg II.”

A former senior vice president for the IMB, Willis saw the door for cross-agency collaboration open in 1995 at the AD2000 and Beyond Movement’s Korea gathering. It was there that he publicly repented for the Southern Baptists’ pride in believing they could reach the world by themselves. Later, at the Amsterdam 2000 conference, a group of nine mission leaders including Willis formed an informal organization, Table 71, to begin talking about ways to work together. In February 2005, ION was formed.

Willis is quick to cite the gifts of agencies involved in ION: “Wycliffe brings the integrity of Bible translation, the IMB contributes church planting and Bible storying methodology, Campus Crusade brings its global media expertise in the Jesus film and its work on college campuses, YWAM brings its training and recruiting gifts, Trans World Radio has the ability to put stories on radio, and so on.”

That’s not to say that the agencies agree on everything. Although Wycliffe actively participates in ION, it remains committed to literacy training and Scripture translation for the world’s minority language groups. Freddy Boswell, Wycliffe International’s vice president for Scripture promotion, hesitates to throw his full support behind the orality movement. “There’s an emotional rush to meet oral needs. It’s something new and exciting to say, ‘Hey, can we do something to reach 70 percent of the world’s population?’ ” he says. “But let’s not forget literacy and translation.”

An invitation to life in Christ

I thought that Doug Wilson’s “Christmas Eve Invitation” was a really good presentation of the gospel message.

Evangelism and social involvement

Justin Taylor posted some good resources here by Tony Payne and Tim Chester.

This essay, by both Payne and Chester, pointed out a key difference between evangelism and social action:

Second, social involvement at its best is about harnessing the resources within a community. It is about empowering a community through their participation. The alternative is a paternalistic approach which is short-term, creating dependency in its beneficiaries. In good development, an understanding of the problem and its solutions come from within a community. In contrast, the message of the gospel is that we are powerless and cannot participate in our salvation. Both an understanding of the problem and the solution must come from outside the community. This outside message does not come from western technology, money, expertise, still less from free market capitalism. It comes from heaven. This is one reason for the emphasis in John’s Gospel that Jesus is ‘from heaven’.

The essay also came to a good conclusion:

If we see social involvement as an expression of Christian godliness, in response to the character of God, the reign of God and the grace of God—which we suggested in Part I is the best way to think about it—then the relationship between evangelism and social involvement is not so fraught or so complicated.

Jesus sends us out into the world to ‘make disciples’. With this in mind, the two key questions are:

1. How do we make disciples? We make disciples through the prayerful proclamation of the gospel of Christ, in dependence on the Holy Spirit to make the message effective.
2. What does it mean to be a disciple? We teach disciples to obey all that Christ has commanded, including the command to live in kindness, generosity, love and active concern for those around us.

Relating to the world around us

Kevin DeYoung offers a review and critique of David Platt’s Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream, and includes a response by Platt.  Their interchange explores the motivations and manifestations of Christian responsibility to the poor.

Evangelistic churches have evangelistic people

Kevin DeYoung linked to this article by Thom Rainer of Lifeway Christian Resources.  Rainer believes that the best evangelistic method for churches is to have people who share the gospel.  Here are the characteristics of effective evangelists, according to Rainer (DeYoung quotes this list in his post too):

1. They are people of prayer. They realize that only God can convict and convert, and they are totally dependent upon Him in prayer. Most of the highly evangelistic Christians spend at least an hour in prayer each day.

2. They have a theology that compels them to evangelize. They believe in the urgency of the gospel message. They believe that Christ is the only way of salvation. They believe that anyone without Christ is doomed for a literal hell.

3. They are people who spend time in the Word. The more time they spend in the Bible, the more likely they are to see the lostness of humanity and the love of God in Christ to save those who are lost.

4. They are compassionate people. Their hearts break for those who don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. They have learned to love the world by becoming more like Christ who has the greatest love for the world.

5. They love the communities where God has placed them. They are immersed in the culture because they desire for the light of Christ to shine through them in their communities.

6. They are intentional about evangelism. They pray for opportunities to share the gospel. They look for those opportunities. And they see many so-called casual encounters as appointments set by God.

7. They are accountable to someone for their evangelistic activities. They know that many good activities can replace Great Commission activities if they are not careful. Good can replace the best. So they make certain that someone holds them accountable each week, either formally or informally, for their evangelistic efforts.

This is an area of great weakness for me.  Rainer’s list is a good way to see where I need to be stronger.

A good week in Kankakee

I live and work in Kankakee, Illinois, about 60 miles south of Chicago.  It’s a small city of about 25,000 with a mini-metropolitan area (two other towns, Bradley and Bourbonnais, that seem analogous to suburbs).  When my fiancée Bethany and I get married in May, we intend to live intentionally a poor neighborhood, engage in both evangelism and service to our neighbors, and participate with (not dominate) our neighbors in changing the neighborhood for the better.  I realize that this may sound abstract, but for a more systematic explanation of what we are talking about, you can see the Christian Community Development Association website.

When Bethany and I were on the Justice Journey this past summer, which took white and black Christians from the Chicago area to significant spots in the history of the civil rights movement, we felt encouraged to pursue this course of action.  We actually got to talk to the “founding father” of the Christian Community Development Association, John Perkins.  Perkins is an old-time gospel preacher who also has done a lot of thinking and working on community development.  When we told him our idea, he immediately warmed to it, telling us we needed to get a three-bedroom house with a large living room so that we can host our neighbors and other guests for Bible studies and other things.  He also said we should put down a concrete slab for a basketball hoop for children in the neighborhood, and that when choosing a place to live we might want to look for a place near the unspoken boundary that can separate the black and white communities.  We were thrilled that he was taking us seriously!

Well, this week, by God’s grace, we started to take some concrete steps to help the vision turn into reality.  We looked at some houses and found one on which we may well make an offer.  It’s definitely near a socioeconomic boundary in Kankakee.  We’ll see what happens in the coming weeks.

We also started to make some great connections with other Christians, even before we looked inside any of the houses.  At the recommendation of someone from our home church, Christ Church of Oak Brook, we connected with the Kankakee-area Youth for Christ office.  When we told the staff about our plans to relocate to a struggling neighborhood in Kankakee, they were really interested and excited.  It was great to see how God used us to encourage them and them to encourage us.  We met the staff person who runs the YFC outreach to Kankakee youth and also found out more about the “City Life Center” in East Kankakee that I had seen before.  It turns out that YFC is really thinking about urban ministry and bought the City Life Center so that kids from the toughest parts of Kankakee would have a place to go after school.  They also wanted us to meet the assistant staff person for Kankakee outreach, who also leads a church that meets in the City Life Center.  When Bethany and I left, we agreed that the meeting couldn’t have gone any better.

The next day, we were able to meet with both of the outreach staff for Kankakee at the City Life Center.  We were so impressed and encouraged by both of them.  In fact, we think that we might have found our church home when we move!  The YFC assistant director/church pastor seemed to be a really kind, smart, spiritually mature guy, and he was thrilled that we were interested in coming to the church.  He gave us a CD of his teaching, and from what we have heard so far he’s a faithful and skillful teacher with a heart for both the gospel and spiritual formation of believers.  We’re eager to talk to him and find out more about his story and his influences.  Three interesting things we know so far: if we do get the house that we like, he would be a reasonably close neighbor; every week at church he explains a traditional phrase to get the people in touch with traditional ways of talking about doctrine; and while he is African American, he really feels that black churches have overemphasized racial particularity, whereas he emphasizes racial unity in Christ in what seems like a very scripturally grounded way.

As you can tell, we are very excited about the future and feel blessed beyond measure, not because we deserve it but because God is gracious.  We’re thankful to God for His providence and for the relationships that we were able to begin.  We do believe that God planted the desire to relocate in us, and we are so grateful that He doesn’t seem to want us to do it alone.

Ramsay MacMullen imagines an ancient Christian conversion

In Christianizing the Roman Empire (thanks for the book recommendation, Joel!), MacMullen tries to stay close to the written record in explaining why people converted to Christianity when it was illegal.  He argues that most of the evidence suggests that non-Christians converted because miraculous cures and exorcisms showed them the power of God.  Early Christian sources record that “exorcist” was a special office in the church.  He tries to synthesize the evidence to conjecture about how this might have been lived out:

Testing to see if I can imagine in some detail a scene that conflicts with no point of the little that is known about conversion in the second and third centuries, I would choose the room of some sick person: there, a servant talking to a mistress, or one spouse to another, saying, perhaps, “Unquestionably they can help, if you believe.  And I know, I have seen, I have heard, they have related to me, they have books, they have a special person, a sort of officer.  It is true.  Besides and anyway, if you don’t believe, then you are doomed when a certain time comes, so say the prophecies; whereas, if you do, they they can help even in great sickness.  I know people who have seen or who have spoken with others who have seen.  And healing is even the least that they tell.  Theirs is truly a God all-powerful.  He has worked a hundred wonders.”  So the priest is sent for, or an exorcist; illness is healed; the household after that counts as Christian; it is baptized; and through instruction it comes to accept the first consequences: that all other cults are false and wicked, all seeming gods, the same.” (40-41)

UPDATE (2/22/10): I added a world that I unwittingly omitted from MacMullen’s quote.

Loving others by respecting their independence from us

In Life Together, Bonhoeffer seems really interested exploring the implications of the idea that we’re individual people justified in Christ who are bound together in Christ (I discussed some this here).  While his words offer a challenge to the radical individualism of our culture, he does not erase individuals but rather roots the value of individuals in God.  He writes that we often have a tendency to engage in “self-justification,” which can lead to criticism of others and easily taking offense at others, rather than resting our justification by God’s grace.  Confidence in our justification by grace means that we can forgive others in light of God’s forgiveness and see them as people who display “the richness of God’s creative glory” (93).

For Bonhoeffer, a major part of living with other Christians is recognizing that we cannot and should not control them to shape into what we wish them to be; they are God’s people as we are.  This means that they are not our projects, but God’s projects, just as we are.  Therefore, even when we must confront a believer in his or her sin, it must be in the knowledge that God and His Word judge them, not us.

Life Together doesn’t get into the issue of how we can love non-Christians, and there are sometimes that the version that I read sounded universalistic (whether because of the original or the translator).  But from my reading, the rest of the book wouldn’t support that interpretation of those passages.  I tried to think about how Bonhoeffer’s paradigm for loving other Christians might apply to loving non-Christians, and I think that the teachings about love in Life Together can be extended in two ways.  First, the unbeliever is still an individual independent from us whom we cannot and should not control.  Like our fellow Christians, we should not want to mold this person but rather we should pray that God will do it; an unbeliever is no more our personal project than a fellow believer is.  Second, just as we relate to our fellow Christians through Christ, we can recognize that we have nothing to offer the world except through Jesus Christ.  Even our talents and service we offer in Christ’s name.  And so we hope to be used by God to bring those who are alienated from Him into relationship with Him through Jesus.

Toby Sumpter on God’s interruptions

Toby Sumpter, writing in Credenda Agenda, follows the logic of God’s intervention into human life from the Incarnation to the world to come (following his postmillennial eschatology).  He writes that God interrupts the way that people do things, calling them to a new way of life.  It’s really just worth it to read the whole article, which isn’t too long but covers a lot of ground.  Here is a taste:

Generally, this Commission goes under the twin titles mercy ministry and evangelism: the gospel declared to the poor. These are the two sides of the one blade of the Word. And John Piper has helpfully said that the way we keep these two sides together, the way we ensure that this sword remains unified is through a robust doctrine of Hell. He says in a round table discussion with D.A. Carson and Tim Keller, “We exist to relieve all suffering, especially eternal suffering.” He goes on to describe how a ministry of so-called “mercy” that neglects the reality of the possibility of Hell after this life is an enormous failure. In other words, like Jesus, the urgency of our intervention is authorized by the reality of final judgment and eternal torment. I hereby resolve to increase my use of the words “damn” and “hell.” Jesus interrupts every conversation, every story with a good damn.

A good damn consists of condemning the brokenness, condemning the sin, and pointing to the reality of final judgment. It intervenes to pull, drag, and beg the slaves of sin and brokenness out of the fire that is already kindled in their lives. It offers grace and freedom to every form of poverty. Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett define poverty as a complex breakdown in relationships. “Poverty is the result of relationships that do not work, that are not just, that are not for life, that are not harmonious or enjoyable. Poverty is the absence of shalom in all its meanings.” (When Helping Hurts, 62)

Sumpter also wrote an article about the early church creeds and the gospel last month.