The New Book of Acts

Recovering the Lost Art of Faith on the Move

Sam Whittaker

Sam Whittaker

Published by Sam Whittaker at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Sam Whittaker

Discover other titles by Sam Whittaker at Smashwords.com:

The Exiles Next Door – http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/72633

The New Book of Acts – http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/72648

A Ghost of Fire – http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/87940

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Unless indicated otherwise, Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, Today’s New International Version™ TNIV.® Copyright © 2001, 2005 by International Bible Society®. All rights reserved worldwide.

Dedication

This book goes out to all those men who have taught me and guided me in the faith. I would especially like to acknowledge Cal Bodeutsch, Dale DeWitt, Phil Long, Craig MacDonald, and especially Bill Rigg. It’s because of how God used all of you in the past that I am shaped into what I am today.

Acknowledgements

I would also like to acknowledge those people without whom this book would not exist.

MY EDITORS – Andy Martin, Leslie Schnorenberg, and John & Joan Klanderud. You guys are awesome for putting up with my grammar.

MY FAMILY – Rachel, Abigail & Gabriel Whittaker. For the oceans of your love which fill the valleys of my heart.

MY CHURCH – Grace Bible Church of Newaygo. Thanks for listening to me ramble on and on.

MY LORD, GOD – YHWH. “Because your love is better than life my lips will glorify you” (Psalm 63:3).

Foreword

Pastor Bill Rigg, Director of Salt Ministries

Sam Whittaker not only reminds us, but teaches us about the doings and the deeds of the faith.  This “New Book of Acts” could easily become a handbook of sorts, for those of us who need an overview occasionally to remind us of why we're here and what to do about it, for Christ’s sake.

Sam puts shoes on Philemon 6, which states “that the communication of thy faith may become effectual, by the acknowledging of every good thing which is in you in Christ Jesus,” as he communicates God's truth to us.  He tells us that God's truth is made to be worn, not just told, as we make our way through this world that God loves so much.

So get ready for a good conversation with Sam Whittaker - a young pastor who in Frederick Buechner's words “listens to his life,” and to the scriptures that he loves and walks.  This is not the last we’ve heard from Sam, and that’s good.

Pastor Bill Rigg

Introduction - On Becoming a Storyteller

Has the Christian Church settled down? As I look around, I’m beginning to ask, “Where are the radical communities of faith which once characterized the Church of Jesus Christ?” When this whole thing began, the people who comprised the Church were willing to march into public and say there’s a new way, a better way. These people were willing to get themselves into serious trouble for the sake of the gospel of Jesus Christ. They were a subversive movement in a culture conditioned to crush subversive movements…and they survived. Where is this today?

What about the dynamic chronicles of the moving and spreading Way of Jesus in the world? Have you read through the book of Acts in the Bible? Man! Those people just didn’t know how to stay still! Today, we like to keep our preachers in one spot for as long as we can. Back then Peter, Paul, Apollos, Barnabas and the others never seemed to stay in the same place for very long. I don’t know if we could take that sort of thing today. These itinerant apostles and preachers moved from city to city, region to region encouraging and strengthening the Church. With powerful, life-changing words, they spurred the body of Christ into action in the world. But those words were not left to speak for themselves. They were backed up with action, and we have that action recorded in books like The Acts of the Apostles.

I once heard a pastor at a conference say we are all writing our own book of Acts with our lives. It made me wonder, what am I writing? If there were an actual copy of my Acts (The Acts of Sam Whittaker, let’s call it) written down for the rest of the Christian community to read, would they be inspired or would they be discouraged? Would they laugh or would they cry? Would I be embarrassed or would I gladly admit it was my life? What about you? What would happen if people could read your book of Acts? How would it turn out?

I think we need to become more conscious of and more intentional about our choices and how they relate to the broader story God is telling in history. We need to understand each choice we make is like a movement on a map. We’re moving away from one thing and toward something else, something better. Or, we may be moving back into something we should stay away from. What does your map look like?

In writing our stories, this new book of Acts, we need to learn what it means to become the new scribes of the Christian faith. A scribe is someone who writes, who chronicles action. A scribe is a storyteller. Do you know people who are really good at telling stories? What makes them different from everybody else? They just seem to know how to alter their tone of voice to change the pace of their stories and keep your attention. They know how to make you laugh, how to make you hold your breath, how to make you breathe faster. A storyteller is simply someone who tells a story. Good storytellers are people who doesn’t just tell a story but actually draw the audience into the story with them.

Even the best storytellers, however, need good content. A good story has some interesting characters, situations, twists, and so on. It catches your imagination and makes you want to be part of the story. This is the first thing which needs to characterize the new book of Acts we are writing with our lives. The story we are telling needs to be good. I’m not simply talking morally good. I’m talking good in the sense the story is worth listening to, watching, or reading. Have you ever watched a movie and when it was finished you thought to yourself, “Please tell me that I did not just spend two hours watching that?” Or how about a movie where when it was finished you wanted to stand up and cheer? What’s the difference? The difference is we say the first movie was bad and the second one was good. What made it bad? What made it good? It is these qualities we need to consider for the true stories we are telling in the new book of Acts.

The second thing which makes a story good is delivery. It is not enough for a story to be told. How the story is told matters just as much as the content. The best analogy I can think of for this is for a person to know how to properly tell a joke. Two completely different people can tell the same joke with two completely different outcomes. If you can’t deliver a joke, it doesn’t matter how hysterical the content of it is. In the same way, we must refine our ability to deliver the telling of the continuation of God’s story through our lives.

Now, I’m not advocating we add to the Bible or that the Bible is somehow imperfect. When I say “we are writing our own book of Acts” or we are telling a “continuation of God’s story,” I don’t mean that we should literally be writing down the events of our lives for the purpose of including these things in a future edition of the Bible. Even if someone, somewhere were to step forward with a newly discovered or newly composed document and claim the Holy Spirit inspired it for inclusion in the canon of Scripture, I highly doubt it would ever end up in the Bible. There would simply be too many people who would argue with the content and implicit doctrine of such a text. What I am suggesting is we do what the people in The of Acts of the Apostles did. We should take the biblical text and live out from it.

But maybe we should also write down significant events in our individual lives and the lives of our churches. Not for inclusion in the Bible, but as an example for the next generation. Do you know the history of the church you attend? Do you know the key players who planted the church? Do you know about the lives of the women and men who contributed to the continued life of the church? If you attend a church which has only been around for a few years, then the answer to these questions is probably yes. But, if you are part of a local church which has been around for any length of time before you were born, then chances are you are ignorant of much of its history. This is a shame. Maybe our churches should be more conscious of writing down their history and Acts. These documents could serve as examples for the coming generations.

We have come to a place where we are more concerned with communicating the concepts of theology than we are with remembering the story of what God has done in and through our lives. The problem with this is that when we become all about the concepts, then actions lose value in our minds and so we do less and less of them. But we’re talking about a new book of Acts, not a new book of Ideas. Luke never wrote a document called The Ideas of the Apostles. We are presently so heavy with the ideas of theology we need to learn to balance them with the actions of theology. In 2 Corinthians 3:1-3, the Apostle Paul writes,

Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, like some people, letters of recommendation to you or from you? You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.

Are you functioning as a letter from Christ to the world? Am I? What is the practical outcome of our beliefs? How do we live the Bible? How do we publicly carry on the tradition of being the people of God today? These are questions we need to consider if we are going to make a serious attempt at writing our own book of Acts.

Chapter 1 Remember the Story

66 books. These books are divided into 1,189 chapters. There are over 31,000 verses in its pages. It contains over 783,000 words. It has 40 plus authors. It was written over 1,500 plus years. Doesn’t the Bible just overwhelm you sometimes? I think many Christians are scared away from the Bible by its sheer size, except on Sunday mornings when someone is teaching it to them in manageable, bite-size portions.

But we need not fear the Sacred Story. In fact, if we are going to get anywhere, we need to embrace it, wholeheartedly. All of the difficult passages and the questions they raise. All of the less-than-shinning examples of characters and the problems they present. All of the commands we would rather relegate to another time because we think they are culturally inappropriate for us. Why must we not fear these things? Because I once read somewhere that “perfect love drives out fear” (1 John 4:18.) We have been called and activated by this perfect love.

Something which has helped encourage me to embrace the whole Bible as useful for life, is a statement presented by Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The paragraph is titled “roots” and reads like this:

We affirm the central truths of historic orthodox Christian faith, seeing ourselves in a long line of generations taking part in the endless conversation between God and people. We believe the Bible to be the voices of many who have come before us, inspired by God to pass along their poems, stories, accounts, and letters of response and relationship with each other and the living God. To know where we’re going, we have to know where we’ve been.

This simple paragraph captures the essence of how the biblical narrative relates to people of every generation, including our own. The Bible is not some distant, heavenly text to be feared. It is a nexus of both earthly and divine writing which is to be consumed. It has come to us from a God who is not far away, but is near.

So, in writing our own book of Acts, in progressing the story of God and humanity today, we first need a grasp on our roots. We need to seriously ask ourselves the question, “What has come before?” Hopefully this question will train us to be more sensitive to the subtle nuances of the text and teach us what it means to be the people of God more fully.

What Has Come Before?

If you read the Bible long enough, you might begin to notice an interesting phenomenon. The Bible frequently repeats its own stories. This is especially true if you are reading the Old Testament, but is true for the New Testament as well. How many times do you think God reminds the nation of Israel that it was He who delivered them in the exodus from Egypt? It seems like most of the time God spends conversing with His people is in reminder of what He has already done for them.

In fact, I would be really interested to see how much of a Bible would we be left with if one were to remove all references of the recorded events save their initial appearance. Here’s an interesting exercise for you to try on your own or in a group some time: the next time you’re reading through a passage of Scripture look to see if what you are reading is discussed elsewhere in the Bible. This will be easier if your Bible contains cross-references.

Upon reflection, you might begin to wonder why this repetition happens. Were the biblical writers pressed to fill up space? No, I doubt that. Is the Bible so big its many authors simply were unaware these stories were recorded and repeated elsewhere? Probably not—no doubt the people involved in the writing of Scripture were more intimately familiar with the whole text than are its present day commentators. Were these people like some pastors today who just have to beat to death the passages of Scripture with which they’re most comfortable? I can’t imagine this as a possible answer. What then?

Let’s begin by looking at the first seven verses of Psalm 78.

My people, hear my teaching;

listen to the words of my mouth.

I will open my mouth with a parable;

I will teach you lessons from the past—

things we have heard and known,

things our ancestors have told us.

We will not hide them from their descendants;

we will tell the next generation

the praiseworthy deeds of the LORD,

his power, and the wonders he has done.

He decreed statutes for Jacob

and established the law in Israel,

which he commanded our ancestors

to teach their children,

so the next generation would know them,

even the children yet to be born,

and they in turn would tell their children.

Then they would put their trust in God

and would not forget his deeds

but would keep his commands. (Psalm 78:1-7)

This portion of an ancient song tells us why the Bible so often repeats the same stories: because there is more at stake than our present relationship with God. Asaph, the author of Psalm 78, is as much concerned with the future of the faith community of Israel as he is its present. This should teach us something not only about how we interact with the Bible, but also how we interact with the broader stories of the Church enacted in our own lives and times.

Most people see two basic sections to the Bible: The Old Testament and the New Testament. While this seems to be an obvious division, it is probably not the most accurate or most natural. I fear it also has led to many Christians ignoring the Old Testament, because, after all, why settle for the old when you can have the new? Aren’t we all driven by this preoccupation with having the newest and best of everything? This has caused a serious handicap in the Christian community. There is so much rich history, theology, and life to be found in the pages of the “Old” Testament. We need to fall in love with it again.

Learning to love the Old Testament

I think people generally avoid the Old Testament because of its size and the fact it contains many unpronounceable names. Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz, anyone?

The Jewish Bible, containing only the Old Testament, is called the TANAKH, and it is divided into 3 parts. The first part is the Torah. These are the 5 books of Moses, Genesis through Deuteronomy, and are to this day considered by the Jewish people to be the most important and central writings which guide the children of God in the best possible way of life. The word, Torah, itself means “the way.” After the Torah comes the Nevi’im. This is the Hebrew word which is translated as “the Prophets.” The prophets were, of course, the people God sent to carry messages of warning, prediction, and generally express God’s view on how things were running. Third, we have the Kethuvim. These are the various historical and poetic writings of Israel. They show how God’s people lived in harmony and disharmony with God and each other.

An interesting detail of the word, TANAKH, is it’s comprised of the beginning sounds of each of the book’s three sections. Torah (T), Nevi’im (N), and Kethuvim (K). So, even the makeup of the word, TANAKH, suggests each proceeding section is dependant on what comes before.

The more and more I think about it, I’m not sure if I like the designation “Old” for the Hebrew Scriptures. It almost has a condescending flavor to it. If I were to build a time machine to go back to the point where a bunch of people were sitting around a table somewhere, deciding what to call the various parts of the Bible, I would suggest the term, the “First” Testament for the Hebrew Bible following the example of Marvin R. Wilson. In his book, Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of Christianity, Wilson writes,

It was certainly an unfortunate day for the Church when the Jewish Scriptures began to be called the “Old Testament.” Such a title implies that this Testament is now passé. Indeed, the Church would have been better off if it had decided from the outset to use a name such as the “First” or the “Original” Testament. As we shall soon emphasize, neither Jesus nor the apostles ever declared the first thirty-nine books of sacred Scripture dead or abolished, and they must never become so for the Church (Wilson 107).

After all, what do you do with the “old” things in your house? If someone goes to your basement and sees a box with the word “drapes” written hastily on it, they might ask why you don’t have them hanging up. Your response may be, “Well, those are the old ones. We have newer, better ones up stairs.” Is this what we’ve done with the Hebrew Scriptures? We don’t like them very much, but we don’t want to throw them away entirely, so we put them in a box in the basement somewhere and forget about them. The problem is that we do need them. We need to learn to love them again. The only way we can learn to love the Hebrew Scriptures is by re-exploring them.

Without the Old, or better, the First Testament, we would not have a foundation for what came after. So, then, built upon the foundation of the Hebrew Scriptures came the next part of the story. This is what Christians have come to call the “New” Testament.

Learning to love the New Testament

Even though the New Testament is much shorter than the Old (It isn’t even ⅓ of the length) it can be no less intimidating with 27 books split into 2 basic sections. The first section contains the major narratives of the early Christian movement. These are the four Gospel accounts, plus the book of The Acts of the Apostles. These are the most reminiscent of the “Old” Testament, because of their narrative nature. They primarily tell the story of Jesus and His early followers. The second section of the New Testament is the Epistles, which itself contains two parts: The Pauline Epistles (Romans through Philemon) written by the Apostle Paul, and the General Epistles (Hebrews through Revelation) written by James, Peter, John, and one written anonymously.

Most people approach the New Testament writings in an effort to gain some kind of systematic, doctrinal knowledge. But this isn’t loving the New Testament, it’s using it. I should mention this is often how the Old Testament is also approached. Such a systematic approach to the Bible is good for some things, like learning how to locate certain passages, events or characters within the text. But this kind of approach has a fundamental flaw when it becomes the primary way in which we study the Bible. The problem is this: It makes the Scriptures submit to the reader. If it were any other book, this might be fine. But this is God’s Word.

The danger in asserting this kind of authority over the text is that we try to make God’s story work for us. It becomes about us, how our views can be served by the text, how we can make the Bible reinforce what we want it to. We can pick what we study and what we don’t study. The result is that we can believe whatever we want to believe and discard what we would rather not believe. Using the book without loving it keeps us from having a relationship with God. It also leaves us without a unified view of the biblical story.

One

What would probably help a lot of people read their entire Bible is to realize there is a single unifying story from the beginning of the Bible to the end. God is telling one story. We are as much a part of this story as are Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, King David, Daniel, Satan, Gabriel, Joseph, Mary, John, Peter, James, and Jesus. But to know our part in the story, we need to be told the stories about whom and what have come before us. We need to hear those stories and hear them often. Why do we need to hear the stories often? In the repetition of telling and hearing of what God has done, we come to see more and more not only how God has worked in the past, but also how He is working now and how He will continue to work in the future.

Think, maybe, of a favorite song. Were you intimately acquainted with the song after a single hearing? No, you had to listen…again and again. Maybe it was the tune which grabbed you first. Maybe it was a phrase which stood out to you. Maybe it was the overall feel of the song. But eventually you were able to sing the song without playing the CD or listening to the radio or an MP3.

I think maybe the stories of what God has done in the lives of those who came before should be like this, like a song you can’t get out of your head. I’m reminded of the film, Mr. Holland’s Opus, in which the main character tells the story of the first time he encountered the music of Jazz composer, John Coltrane. The music was recommended by a friend. He listened to it and hated it. So he listened to it again. He still hated it. He couldn’t figure out why, but he hated it. So he kept on listening to it until, at last, he couldn’t stop listening to it. Sometimes we don’t get it. We don’t get what the stories are about. That’s frustrating. But sometimes we need to just keep on “listening” until we can’t stop ourselves from listening. In this way the repetition of stories help us to celebrate what God is doing in the world.

Also, the repeated stories of the past give us a valuable frame of reference with which to shape our own lives to better fit into the outworking of God’s one redemption narrative. All of our stories, then, are “middles.” Our individual stories are not complete in and of themselves. They only gain their full meaning when they are placed in the larger context of God’s whole redemption story beginning with creation and continuing on until new creation and beyond.

Too often we approach the Bible like it was a book designed to answer all of our questions about life, the universe and everything. But that isn’t the point of Scripture. It wasn’t written to be an answer book. The reason the Bible exists is to tell us a story. It tells us the true story of God and humanity. This is why when some people approach the Bible for answers they can leave frustrated.

The story in a Nutshell

God’s story is of a very diverse background and history. What I want to do next is to trace a brief sketch of the single unifying story which runs throughout. But I won’t simply lay out the story as it is from beginning to end. What I want to show you is how the story is originally told in the Old Testament, and then how the New Testament retells it in a very specific way.

The first part deals with God and the beginning of all things. This part includes the creation narrative and the story of the fall. We all know how it begins. The opening lines of the story reveal to us that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This simple, opening line signals to us that the narrative is an account of everything which exists and the God who made it. But notice it is not told in straightforward prose. Genesis 1:1-2:3 is recorded in poetry. As the poem unfolds, the God of everything weaves the world together by His Word and Spirit. The Old Testament creation narrative doesn’t exist merely to convey what happened, but it is told in such a way as to dazzle us.

Then, later on when the New Testament was being recorded, we find a retelling of the same story. The writer, John, begins his account of the life, teachings, and actions of Jesus by reaching all the way back to the creation account. He writes,

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:1-5)

John begins the same way Moses begins. But John 1 and Genesis 1 are important to view in parallel for more than the reason both passages begin with the phrase, “In the beginning.”

John’s retelling of the creation of all things serves to deepen our understanding of the original narrative. By showing how Jesus, identified as “the Word,” was involved, John adds an extra dimension of meaning to a very old, sacred story which was not previously understood. Although it may not be that the idea of “the Word” being used to construct creation was the new concept given in John’s writing. In Rabbinic literature there is an eerily similar passage. Notice what Abraham Cohen states in his book Everyman’s Talmud,

Wisdom, which is here said to have come into being even before the creation of the world, was naturally identified with Torah; and since God created it first, He must have had done so for a purpose. That purpose was to draft the plan according to which the Universe was to be constructed. ‘The Torah said, I was the architectural instrument of the Holy One, blessed be He. It is customary when a human king erects a palace that he does not build it according to his own ideas but according to the ideas of an architect. The architect likewise does not depend upon the thoughts of his mind, but has parchments and tables to know how he is to plan the rooms and entrances. So did the Holy One, blessed be He, look into Torah and created the Universe accordingly (Gen. R. I, I). (Cohen 28-29)

The Rabbis already had an idea that Torah, or the “Word,” was somehow involved in the creation act. But the identification of Jesus as the Word would have been considered the dramatic, if not the blasphemous, teaching of John’s Gospel account. Yet, this is a custom which can be found throughout the New Testament. It takes portions of the already existent story of the Old Testament and retells them, giving a new angle or perspective. Yet, it is deeper than that. The New Testament does not exist simply to clarify the Old, as if saying “this is what really happened.” The story of the New Testament both fulfills and redeems the story of the Old Testament.

Biblical history is redemption history. So the parallels of the Old Story in the New are redemptive in nature. So John’s telling of creation is not about the same story from another point of view, but a renewing of the old story. John’s story, then, is not about creation, it’s about recreation or, better, New Creation. But now, setting aside the story of creation, let’s turn to the next major event: the fall.

Genesis 3:16-20 tells us about the curse which God handed to all of creation after Satan deceived Adam and Eve into eating the forbidden fruit. In the garden of Eden, God first describes what the curse looks like then He sheds blood to cover the nakedness of Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:21-24). God’s first act after the curse is an act of help. The following portion of the story covers most of the rest of the Scriptures from Genesis chapter 4 to Jude verse 25. During this portion we see how God interacts with humanity to draw them back to Him.

But again, in the New Testament, John gives a sort of retelling of the fall narrative, but his version is slightly different. John’s retelling of the fall is a reversal. Consider, then, that it’s no accident the fall happened in a garden setting and that Jesus’ resurrection (John 20:10-15), the event which reverses the fall, also happens in a garden setting. And God slaughtering an animal to cover the nakedness of the first people is paralleled by the slaughter of Jesus to cover the sins of the humanity which sprang from Adam and Eve, the first ones. What is God telling us through this parallelism? He’s telling us He is repairing the sections of the story which are broken.

The final segment of the story is found in the book of Revelation. It tells of God acting out His final measures of both the redemption and judgment. We find the initial promise of this in Genesis 3:14-15. The promise looks forward to redemption for humanity, which is embodied in the woman’s offspring; and the judgment for Satan, Anti-Christ and unrepentant humanity, which is embodied in the serpent and his offspring.

Again, the parallel for these things can be found in the writings of John. He reveals to us what these last things will be like in Revelation 20:7-21:1. These things were inaugurated or prepared, however, in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.

Why?

Isn’t this all very basic? Aren’t these things over and done with? Why keep rehearsing them? Because reading the Bible can sometimes feel overwhelming, but if we approach it remembering this foundation we have a framework to help us understand the rest of the story.

The key word we need to latch onto here is “remember.” How many times did the nation of Israel stray from what God commanded and in response God said, “Remember what I did for you…”? Look at Deuteronomy 5:15, for example. “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the LORD your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.”

Now, God could have simply said to them, “Observe the Sabbath day.” But He didn’t do that. What did He do? God reminded them that He acted on their behalf. God doesn’t simply issue an order. God links the importance of a specific command to an event in their history. God enabled them to rest from slavery, so He commands them to commemorate the event by periodically taking days to rest: Sabbath days. It’s important to remember the story of God’s people in the past because the stories of the past invigorate the life of the present with meaning and value.

Why else is it so important to remember the story? Because when we remember the story of God and humanity in the past we realize that we are part of that same story. Our lives, our words, our deeds are the new chapters of a story that has been going on since time began. This is the purpose of the Bible. It’s not supposed to be an answer book that strips truth of all its mystery. It is a written record of God and humanity painfully struggling to come back together. The Bible’s story is one of redemption, reconciliation, relationship.

Too often we separate the Bible from history in our minds. Maybe we don’t intentionally do this, but I think we often get to a place where we think of the events recorded in the Bible as some special kind of history. It’s not that we don’t believe the events happened, but we place them on a different level of importance or meaning than what we think of as the average events of our everyday lives. How do we break away from this pattern?

For now it is enough for you to know your stories and my stories are all connected. Our stories are part of God’s larger story. The major question we need to consider is, “What part have we played and what part will we play from here on out?”

Moreover, the stories of those who have come before embolden us to unflinchingly live out God’s story. In the biblical letter called Hebrews, the anonymous author spends a lengthy section summing up the lives of numerous people who have come before. A long way into the list the author says, “And what more shall I say? I do not have time to tell you about Gideon, Barak, Samson and Jephthah, about David and Samuel and the prophets, who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised…” (Hebrews 11:32-33). Then after a massive list of notable deeds performed by many people, the author of Hebrews tells us the result of intimacy with the stories of our predecessors.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. (Hebrews 12:1-3, Italics mine)

Maybe a couple of questions we should ask ourselves is this: “Am I acquainted with God’s story enough to see how it is shaping me and those around me?” and “Am I ready and willing to courageously enter into partnership with God to accomplish what He is trying to do in this world?” If you can answer “yes” to these questions, you may be one of those people who “would put their trust in God and would not forget his deeds but would keep his commands” (Psalm 78:7).

Chapter 2 The Upside Down, Underground, Subversive Church

If there’s one thing our Westernized churches collectively lack today, it’s a backbone. There, I’ve said it. The picture of the Church we find in the book of Acts is that of a group of people ready and willing to die if they have to. They were a people caught between two religious-political systems. One system, the Jewish establishment, was entrenched in countless years of tradition, and was willing to hand over dissenters to the other system, the Roman Empire, whenever they felt it necessary. Then there was Rome. This particular empire was well known for its brutality and how it sought to use that brutality against anyone who resisted Rome’s absolute authority in all areas of life.

The Jewish religious leadership saw the Christians as a group of Jewish heretics who allowed traditions and customs to be set aside to allow the Gentile pagans a way to worship God equally with Jews. The Romans saw the early Christians as just another subversive sect of the Jewish religion needing to be quelled, violently if necessary. This is the tension the early Church lived in everyday for several hundred years.

What was so shocking about the Christian response to both groups was its lack of violent resistance. Instead, the early Christian movement offered the gift of reconciliation and redemption to the two groups which were persecuting it. The early Church’s initial activities were almost entirely missional. These movements into the Jewish and Roman worlds steadily grew more and more difficult. In fact, both groups showed a decidedly uninterested, and sometimes violent, attitude toward the redeeming story of Jesus and those who followed it.

Upside Down

If you read through the Acts of the Apostles, you eventually come to a scene in which a group of people in the Jewish synagogue in the city of Thessalonica hear the story of the gospel and react very negatively. When they see that the teaching of the Apostle Paul convinces some of the people in the synagogue that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, those who are not persuaded make a violent move.

Acts 17:5 records that “they rounded up some bad characters from the marketplace, formed a mob and started a riot in the city.” The reason they do this is so they can drag Paul and Silas into the open. This is probably meant to end in a stoning or some other form of mob justice. This shouldn’t surprise us too much, however, because we see this kind of activity happening elsewhere in Acts. What we should notice is a few particular phrases in the next verse.

When the mob can’t find Paul and Silas, they settle for seizing Jason, the person known to be housing the Apostle and his companion. They also bring some of the other believers. The first thing we should notice is that Jason and the “other believers” of verse 6 were people who attended the synagogue, in all likelihood, earlier that very day right alongside those people who instigated this mob. They would have been part of the same Jewish community who worshipped God and celebrated births, weddings, Passovers and other festivals, and mourned at funerals together. But now that bond seemed to mean nothing.

Likewise, not everybody we know will be overjoyed about our relationship to Jesus and our accepting of His way for our life. Whether you’re new at this or have been a Christian for many years, we have to understand that some people will feel threatened by our beliefs and way of life. I should point out that while some of this feeling of being threatened by the Christian way of life is unfounded some of it is also not unreasonable considering our collective past.

The Christian Faith has not always had the best and most peaceful history. We have the Crusades in our past which should never have happened. Then there was the whole thing with witches, and heretics, and inquisitions. After all, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” Also, the way some of us have treated and spoken about certain groups of people in recent history is nothing short of embarrassing, not to mention evil. For some time now the Church has struggled with a kind of superiority disorder. When we define ourselves by what we’re opposed to (and therefore imply what we think we’re better than) instead of what we’re for, our outlook becomes negative, unpleasant, and just plain sinful. In short, we have at many times become the very kind of thing we were trying to avoid all along. Yet, some of the other fears and anxieties surrounding the general public’s view of the Christian Faith are based upon a false understanding of who and what we are supposed to be.

These days, there are a lot of very visible Christians in the media. Unfortunately, these Christians say and do some strange, wacky, and sometimes very un-Christian things. Many people assume that because that is what the “famous Christians” are doing, then the rest of Christianity must be acting the same way. That is what they perceive as normal and prescriptive Christian behavior and speech. But this kind of belief about Christians is as much in error as racism, sexism, or any other kind of similar “ism” you could think of. Of course, anyone’s natural reaction to being at the receiving end of this kind of wrong thinking is to immediately lash out in protest, often somewhat angrily for feelings of being wronged. Yet, we have to gracefully address this kind of error. It will do us no good to behave and react in anger, as do other maligned groups, if we at the same time report to have a different way of life. But let’s return to Acts 17 and observe another important phrase.

When the mob hauls Jason and the other believers before the Roman legal authorities, we encounter an interesting bit of thinking in part of the charge laid against the Christians. In Acts 17:6-7 we read, “These men who have caused trouble all over the world have now come here and Jason has welcomed them into his house.” The part of the charge I want you to notice is the phrase, “…caused trouble all over the world….” This is how the Today’s New International Version (TNIV) puts it. But in this case, I actually prefer the way a much older translation, the King James Version, puts it. The KJV reads, “…turned the world upside down….” What is the crowd saying?

The claim goes beyond merely causing trouble. The phrase “causing trouble” is fairly innocuous. It could mean anything. There is no real degree of trouble given in it. But if you turn something upside down, that’s a different story. Take a box, fill it with an expensive set of fine glass dishes, and then quickly turn it upside down. What happens? Along with the accompanying jarring noise of dishes clattering together, you will potentially find broken dishes when you open the box again and your mom will probably get mad at you. The charge laid by the mob against the Christians has the same sort of ring to it, but with heavy religious and political meaning.

From the point of view of both the Jewish religious leaders and the Roman officials, the Church of the 1st century was a very “upside down” organism from every angle of perspective. If you look at the teachings of Jesus, Paul, and the other Apostles in context of the historical setting in which they occurred and the present cultures in which we find ourselves, it should appear that Christians are supposed to be something like fish swimming upstream in a raging river instead of with the swift cultural currents flowing with the rest of the world. In many ways, we should, indeed, appear quite abnormal when compared to everyone else.

I’m not saying we should appear or act superior to everyone else, exuding the arrogance we often have in the past. We offer an alternative way of life that is better. This way of life is not better than all others because Christian people are better than other people, but because the way itself is a better way. It’s a better way because it is God’s way. None of the merit of the way actually resides in us apart from the working of God. This distinction is crucial, and until we learn it, we as Christians are going to have problems in continuing to be misunderstood. But the point of living in and offering the alternative way of life in Jesus is that things don’t have to be the way they currently are.

As it turns out, the way that looks to everyone else as upside down is really right-side up. It only looks upside down because the perspective of the entire world has been misaligned for thousands and thousands of years. It just doesn’t realize it.

So, one of our directions as Christians for writing our new book of Acts with our lives needs to be oriented around this perceived “upside down” way of life. In fact, if we are accused of being upside down, backwards, or at least slightly off perhaps we should stop and think that maybe this should be taken as a compliment instead of an insult. Maybe we’re again starting to get things right, by the grace of God.

Underground

Because the early Christians lived in this upside down way of life, the rest of the world began to feel effects from it. But, the world wasn’t sure if it liked what it was feeling. Sure, there were a lot of initial conversions to the new way, but there were more people who felt their long-held traditions were threatened by this redemption movement. The result was numerous persecutions of the early believers, some of whom consequently went into hiding because of the trouble. As it turns out several Christians in Rome may literally have gone “underground” at one point, hiding and holding their worship gatherings in catacombs. However, some scholars debate this idea. Yet, regardless of how early Christians became more covert in their lives, it remains true that some secretive tactics were adopted in order to keep the trouble of persecution to a minimum.

When I use the phrase, underground, I mean two essential things. I’ll cover the second meaning in the following section. The first essential facet of the meaning of “underground” is movement in life that speaks to the alternative way of Jesus. This alternative movement in life may seem almost secretive in nature because it is not designed to assault another person with belief. It is not boisterous or overbearing. It simply is what it is.

The way of many Christians in the twentieth century was a very overt, high-profile kind of faith. T-shirts, bumper stickers, hats, metal fish for cars, WWJD bracelets, and the like were in popular demand in North American Christianity and further similar forms still are. I don’t list those things to say they are evil or somehow wrong, I just don’t know how much good they’ve actually accomplished. It seems many people have substituted these external things for living an authentically alternative kind of life.

North American Christians, especially in the twentieth century, have been guilty of this also. While being very vocal about statements of belief, they have lacked in actually leading the kind of alternative life that makes people stop and wonder, “What’s different about that person?” Don’t get me wrong, I believe it’s very important to vocalize the story and meaning of our Christian faith, but never apart from the sharing of our very lives (1st Thessalonians 2:7-8). These sharing movements in life speak to the alternative way of Jesus. Evangelism is less about convincing, logical arguments than it is about embodying belief. Living your beliefs allows people to see what it’s like, not just wonder what it’s like.

So in the writing of our new book of Acts, maybe we should adopt a way of living that does not simply rely on catchy slogans and bumper stickers for the spread of the faith. Becoming “underground” in the method of living the faith means we rely less and less on things to express truth and more and more on really being what God designed us to be: A people who show the world there is a better way through compassionate action, not just a people who tell the world there is a better way. The early communities of faith were much more oriented around contact with people through actions rather than lectures. They had to be. If the first Christians were as publicly vocal about their faith as many in the twentieth century had been, a lot more of them would have been martyred, not that there was any shortage of that.

Yet, it would be a mistake to assume that the early Christians who went into a kind of quasi-hiding did so simply for self preservation. While some of that may have been of concern, it wasn’t the sole reason for it. One enlightening instruction we find in the New Testament is given by Paul to one of his disciples, a man named Timothy. Paul tells Timothy to pray for everyone, including “kings and all those in authority” (1st Timothy 2:2). Mind you, these are the same people who were persecuting the Christians. They were both the Jewish leaders and the Roman officials. The reason Paul gave for this is so people like Timothy and the other Christians could “live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness” (2:2). But don’t mistake this to mean that the Christians were to simply sit there and take persecution without any form of response.

Living “peaceful and quiet lives” doesn’t mean being a floor mat and a punching bag. This is not pacifism we’re discussing here. Yet, it is not violent resistance either. This is about an underground-style movement whose offensive tools are reconciliation and love.

“Really?” you might ask, “Those are upside down and secretive?” Yes, without question this is as true today as it was in the first century. In a world whose primary means of communicating its carnival of beliefs is through crashing planes into buildings and military maneuvers called “shock and awe,” reconciliation and love are the last things on its mind. They are the last moves anyone would ever expect. They are two of God’s most powerful tools. He instructs us to be about His business in this world using them wherever we can.

But for Christians it’s too easy to take both of those words and apply them only to the salvation of our souls. We were reconciled to Christ by His love and so we will spend eternity with Him. See how easy that is? But I think we need to take both ideas beyond the mystical experience and interject them into every aspect of our present, earthly lives. The reconciliation God brings is good for more than the believer’s soul. It’s also good in showing the world how families, friends, neighbors, communities, and nations should live in relationship with each other: reconciled. Love is good for more than understanding how God views the world. It’s also good for showing estranged spouses that there is a better way to treat each other. What about fighting co-workers? Feuding neighbors? Or how about criminals, racists, or just the obnoxious guy in line at the grocery store? Abusive actions and language may be revealed for the exiling and hurtful things they truly are when love comes to town.

When Christ generates reconciliation and love in us, they serve as course-correctors for us. If the course you are on leads you to hitting your spouse or demeaning your children, then real love and reconciliation from God have the power to correct those things in you. If the course you are on leads you to believe you are alone in this world and think that suicide is the only way, then may God bring someone into your life to show you love and help reconcile you to your broken relationships.

Remember, we’re talking about a new book of Acts. What do acts of love and reconciliation look like on both personal and global levels? How do we implement these things so when people read the Acts of our lives they want a part in what God has done with us? To answer these questions, we need to ask, “who needs love and reconciliation and in what ways?” It’s a fairly broad question, I know, so I’ll try to give you some concrete examples.

Poverty. Those of us who live in western countries like America, Australia, and many European countries are wealthy. There’s no escaping it. Even many of our poor and homeless live better lives than those in third world countries. So the major question is how can we distribute our wealth more evenly? The following statistics are taken from www.globalissues.org. It is estimated that for impoverished countries to have had universal access to basic health/nutrition, water/sanitation, education for all people, and basic reproductive health for all women living in poverty-stricken countries it would have cost $40 billion dollars in 1998. In 1998 the world spent $780 billion on its various militaries alone. Europe also spent $11 billion on ice cream. The United States spent $8 billion on cosmetics. Japan spent $35 billion in business entertainment. The world also spent $400 billion on narcotics. Priorities, anyone? The question we need to ask isn’t, “How can I help?” but, “How can I not help and still be able to sleep at night?”

The greatest problems keeping the worldwide poverty question from being solved aren’t “over there,” in the “underdeveloped” countries. The greatest problems stare at us from our mirrors. This isn’t about guilt (or if it is, it is well-earned guilt). This is about the countless lives lost, not in the “war on terror,” but in another kind of war. This is the war on poverty and it’s not being fought very well.

Yet, some have stepped up to the challenge. The “One Campaign,” championed by U2’s front man, Bono, is a terrific example. This organization is devoted to fighting the epidemics poverty and AIDS in Africa and around the world. For more information check out www.one.org.

What will be recorded in your book of Acts concerning poverty? Nobody is going to do your part for you. We can’t wait for the corporations and the governments of this world to act on behalf of the people who have nothing to offer them. It is up to us. Here’s a suggestion: have you ever considered sponsoring children through agencies like Compassion International, or World Vision? How about starting a drive in your church to adopt a village somewhere in Africa to develop basic health and sanitations needs? Or, if your church is bigger, do this not with a village, but an entire country. Network other churches in your area to take up the burden with you. So many opportunities, so little time.

Environment. Christians are finally waking up to the great need to care for the world we live in. We’re starting to realize how connected we are with our world and that the damage we do to our environment we also do to ourselves. There are lots of different directions I could go with this, but I want to briefly address the major environmental issue on a lot of people’s minds: global warming.

Honestly, I don’t care what your opinion is on global warming. It’s actually fairly pointless to get wrapped up in a debate about the symptoms of a problem when the real problem itself (environmental care in this case) is made into a side issue. Global warming is not the real problem, whether or not you believe it exists. The real problem concerns care for our world. When you see a plastic bag in a field are you inclined to pick it up and put it in a garbage can or leave it? What is your attitude toward the new strip mall going up near your neighborhood? You know, the one they had to cut one hundred trees down to make space for? But at least we’re getting a beautiful new cement parking lot for our troubles. Whatever! Don’t we have enough of those? Will you shop there anyway? Do you drive to the corner convenience store, burning fuel instead of walking the short distance? You know what? As long as you actively participate in caring for the world around you, you are on the right track. If everyone did that, maybe global warming might not even be a discussion.

You see, the danger with debating about whether or not a problem like global warming exists misses the overall concern. It places more concern on the effect than on the cause. It’s like we’re saying, “We’ve got to stop this effect, because the effect will kill us!” If that’s our attitude about global warming, then our concern isn’t really for the environment. Is it? Humanity’s original design was to be caretakers for this world. The first command given in the Bible to humanity is “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Genesis 1:28).

We mistakenly take the first part (“Be fruitful and increase in number”) as a completely separate command in and of itself. It’s not, though. The rest of what God says to the first people is the purpose for their “fruitfulness.” The reason they are instructed by God to “increase in number” is so that the earth will be filled and subdued. This recalls the state of the earth in Genesis 1:2 at its initial creation. The story tells us “the earth was formless and empty.” This is a phrase which, in the Hebrew language, evokes a sense of chaos and wildness. Each of the following six days of creation are steps toward bringing the wild creation of 1:2 to order.

The creation narrative culminates in the creation of humanity where these creatures who bear the image of God are instructed to go the opposite way of “formless and empty.” Do you see that? If something is wild in its formlessness, what must be done to bring it to order? It must be subdued. And if something is empty, what must be done to bring it to order? That’s right, it must be filled. So, God moves the environment He created from “formless and empty” to “filled and subdued” and the primary instrument He uses is part of His own creation: humanity. We are designed to care for our environment.

Subversive

You may be wondering why these concrete issues belong to a discussion of an upside-down and underground way of being the Church. I should clarify here that when I say, underground, the second facet of meaning of the word should be something like unofficial in the eyes of the state. It’s not like I’m trying to bring down the system or anything, it’s just that I’m trying to point out how we need to be different from the kingdoms of this world.

Jesus makes two very stunning statements about the nature of the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world near the end of John’s Gospel narrative. The first one is in chapter 18. When Pilate is interrogating Jesus about the charges being laid against Him by the Jews, and asks if Jesus thinks if He’s the king of the Jews, Jesus responds, “My kingdom is not of this world.” A few lines later He says, “But now my kingdom is from another place.” It isn’t really a simple answer to Pilate’s simple question, is it? This is a statement packed with meaning. One of the underlying themes in what Jesus says is that the kingdom of God looks totally different from our conceptions of the kingdoms and empires we’re surrounded with, and that have inhabited this world for thousands of years.

The kingdom of God, which finds its seed in Jesus, the anointed king from God, runs counter to all other kingdoms basically in every way imaginable. It does what other kingdoms cannot. It succeeds where other kingdoms fail. It shows its power not as others do through rulers wielding a sword, but through a king offering Himself in service and sacrifice on a Cross, inviting us to come near. The kingdom of God champions the cause of the foreigner, the orphan, and the widow rather than ignoring them. The kingdom of God embraces the poor and oppressed instead of exploiting them. The kingdom of God promotes peace instead of war. The kingdom of God seeks to care for the environment rather than raping it for resources. It values the weak over the strong. The first is last and the last is first. No other kingdom of this world would ever accept this agenda as a viable means of government. History shouts this to us. The kingdom of God appears upside down to the kingdoms of this world.

The second statement Jesus makes to Pilate, this time in chapter 19, is so shockingly subversive that I’m surprised how many people gloss over it and miss the political implications both for that time and our own. Pilate says to Jesus, “Don’t you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you?” From Pilate’s perspective, Jesus’ next response no doubt borders on insulting. Jesus says, “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above.” What is Jesus really saying to Pilate? “Without me and my Father running this show, you would have no power…you would have nothing. You would be nothing!” To those Jesus encounters who know they are broken and powerless, He grants power to live a different, upside down, underground, and better way of life. But to those Jesus encounters, like Pilate, who claim to have power and authority, Jesus subverts their claims and tells them how utterly weak they really are. The Christian message is subversive to all governments, corporations, structures, and individual designs to exercise power over people and all other areas of God’s creation. For a powerful discussion of this idea, read Greg Boyd’s The Myth of a Christian Nation.

Throughout the New Testament, we find example after example of how the initial followers of the Christian way subversively appropriate claims and terms used by the Roman Empire and apply them to the new movement. One such phrase we find is “Jesus is Lord” (Romans 10:9, 1st Corinthians 12:3, and “Christ” is added in Philippians 2:11). This is not some brilliant idea Paul cooked up on his own or that God simply handed to him saying, “Nobody ever thought of anything like this before.” No, instead Paul borrows the language of the empire and applies it Jesus, presumably so his readers would have a reference point. The origin of this phrase comes from another common saying about Caesar, the Emperor of Rome. N.T. Wright in his book, What Saint Paul Really Said, notes, “Kyrios Kaiser was the formula which said it all: Caesar is Lord” (Wright 88). This is reflected in the statements of the mob in Acts 17:5-8 where they accuse the Christians of “defying Caesar’s decrees” and claiming that there is “another king, one called Jesus.”

Another potentially interesting example of this subversive appropriation of language is the New Testament’s use of the word, “church.” Most Christian teaching surrounding this word and the Greek word from which it is translated (ekklesia) notes that in its original linguistic context it carried no religious meaning. S. Craig MacDonald writes that the “literal meaning is ‘called out group’ and it was used in the first century to describe any group of people who came together for any specific purpose” (MacDonald 48). This is true, but I think there is at least a strong possibility that the biblical use is subversive in nature. You see, ekklesia was not only used as a generic word. It was also used to refer to legal assemblies…as in assemblies sponsored by and in support of the Empire. These assemblies were political in nature. Adult male citizens gathered in these official groups regularly to discuss and vote on issues. Just as the phrase “Caesar is Lord” was appropriated to make a subversive statement about the Empire, so was the phrase “church” or ekklesia. The statement being made might have been something like, “We are the true legal assembly.” Legal, not in the eyes of the Roman Empire, but in the only eyes which matter: God’s.

Even the word, gospel, which is doubtless one of the most cherished words in the whole Christian vocabulary, was subverted from the lips of the Empire. Because imperial Rome was in the habit of expanding its territory and thus its influence in the world, it was frequently at war with other nations. Once the military was through conquering these nations, the emperor would make an official declaration of the victory. Such declarations were called euangelion in the Greek language but we translate the word as either evangelism or gospel in English. In Christian use, “gospel” announces the victory of Jesus over all powers and authorities (nations, perhaps?) through His triumph on the Cross and in His resurrection. The first Christians took this word which already existed and was loaded with heavy cultural and political meaning and applied it to the story God is telling.

So a question we need to ask ourselves is, “What has happened to the Church’s subversive spirit?” Actually, to be fair, the desire to undermine certain cultural and political movements which speak and live contrary to the way of Jesus still exists within the Church. That isn’t the problem. The problem is that the Church has adopted the overt military-style tactics of the rest of the world in the attempt to implement those desires. In other words, the essential goal is the same or at least similar to that of the early Christians but the methods and attitudes are completely different.

We have abandoned the upside down and underground way of life and exchanged it for a way that appears right-side-up and in perfect agreement with the methods of those in power throughout the world today. This is why many people see Christianity as a collection of hypocrites: we are. We claim an alternative way of living and yet live no differently from our neighbors who claim no allegiance to Jesus. We say there’s a better way to live and yet suffer from the same number of divorces, adulteries, violent relationships and drug habits as anyone else.

A few years ago, I went with a friend to a medical center because he had blacked out a few times and couldn’t figure out why. When the nurse asked him some routine questions she came across the one that asks if you’ve been doing any illegal drugs. My friend chuckled a little bit and said no. Honestly, the idea that he used drugs was pretty silly to both of us. The nurse apparently misinterpreted the laugh to mean that he was using because she suspiciously asked why he laughed. I said, “Well, ma’am, we go to a Christian college.” Which, looking back, was a really stupid answer to her question. She said, “Religion doesn’t have anything to do with it.” I wanted to tell her that sometimes it does, as in my friend’s case. But she had a point.

But does it always have to be this way? A typical response to this is something like, “Well, nobody’s perfect.” I refuse to accept that as an excuse. Because yes, while “nobody is perfect,” nobody has to accept the status quo as being the way things are always going to be.

“Nobody’s perfect” is a copout. It’s a lie to shield us from having to do the hard work of reconciliation and love. It keeps us from appearing upside down to the world. And it keeps us from living the alternative, underground, subversive life of Jesus. What would it be like if we eliminated “nobody’s perfect” from our vocabulary?

Maybe we would be able to connect with this fractured world in new, deeper ways. Maybe we would be able to identify with our forbears in the early Church whose radical way of life so disrupted the culture around them that the great persecutions were able to be shadowed only by the greater emergence of reconciliation with God in conversions. Maybe the Church of today would be able to grow a backbone. Maybe.

Chapter 3 A Church With No Name

“What’s in a name! That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet…”

-Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet.

I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?

I was involved in an interesting conversation the other day about churches, which led to an even more interesting discussion about names of churches. Many churches in the tradition of which I’m a part, including the one I currently serve, have the name Grace Bible Church (17.24%). Every time I see another church somewhere with the name Grace Bible Church, I sarcastically say to myself, “oh, how original!” Then, just to spice things up, you also have the name Grace Bible Fellowship and a few others coming in at a close second in our tradition.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying these are bad names. I’m just saying there isn’t a whole lot of originality in them. There are, no doubt, probably many valid reasons why this phenomenon exists. If I were to make a guess, I would say that most of these churches came into being during a period of time where specific points of teaching or doctrine were being very strongly emphasized. This may have been due to some kind of religious/cultural conflict or simply a rise in interest in these topics. Then I would make a further guess that the main points of teaching under scrutiny at that time were Grace and the Bible. As a result, churches which felt like they emphasized these teachings properly took a name which reflected those beliefs and teachings.

There are, of course, other church names in other denominational traditions which do this. My favorites are the ones which have numbers in them. Have you ever seen a First Baptist Church? How about a Second Baptist Church? Do you think the people of the Second Baptist in your town lament to themselves every once in a while, saying, “Man! I was really pulling for First Baptist, but those other people got to it first!”

This discussion led me to a provocative question: What if someone were to plant a church without ever giving it a name? This of course leads to a number of other different and challenging questions. One such question is: Is this even possible? One of the people I was having the conversation with didn’t seem to think so. But I felt like I’d enjoy pursuing the question further here. I hope you’ll bear with me, because I’m not simply writing this chapter to amuse myself and you, dear reader. I’m actually going somewhere with this.

Let’s try something, shall we? Let’s try asking ourselves why someone would ever want to plant a church with no name and see how far we get with it. One immediate argument against this kind of decision is that you would just be doing it to be different. First of all, what’s wrong with being different? And why is “just trying to be different” an invalid reason for doing certain things? Maybe there is a monotony that needs to be broken every once in a while so we can get out of the ruts we find ourselves in. But then let’s even assume for a moment that this argument is unquestionably right. Let’s assume that “just trying to be different” is a completely invalid rationale for planting a church with no name. What reason might then exist to not name a church?

Assuming that it would not simply be done to defy the norm, perhaps you could say that it should be done as a symbol of a different (upside down) way of life. Conventional names for churches are themselves representative or symbolic of values a particular church highly esteems. In light of this, the lack of a name could still function in much the same way, as long as it was explained that way to people who ask about it. If you belonged to such a church and someone asked you why it didn’t have a name, your response might look something like this: “We value the unique, alternative way of life Jesus has given to us. So, one of the many ways we express this uniqueness is by going against convention and refusing to identify our church by a name.”

After all, as Shakespeare points out through the words of Juliet, “What’s in a name!” I find it interesting he chose to end that phrase with an exclamation point instead of a question mark. It’s a question she asks, but it is asked in utter exasperation. Juliet knows the love of her life, Romeo, is from a family at war with her family. Therefore, she centers her lament around him having a different name, a name hostile to her own. So, she tries to escape the consequences of loving a man with the wrong name by trivializing all names. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Essentially, Juliet points out for us that names don’t make something into what it really is. The existence and makeup of a person, place, or thing is independent of any label we place on it. The landmass we call Ohio wouldn’t cease to exist if we suddenly decided to call it Indiana 2.0 or to simply call it nothing at all. Likewise, it doesn’t necessarily matter what we name a church or even if we name it. It is what it is.

Another potential reason for not naming a church might actually be drawn from a similar situation. There’s a church in Grand Rapids, Michigan called Mars Hill. Founding Pastor, Rob Bell, tells an interesting story about the church’s early days in his book, Velvet Elvis. In one of the weeks leading up to one of their initial services, a person rented a sign to indicate to people where the church was located, because they were still renting space at that time. Rob’s reaction was to have the sign sent back to where it came from. His rationale for this? “People have got to want to find it.” To this day, even though Mars Hill has its own building, they don’t have a sign. The closest thing they have is the church name and information about the hours of operation on the doors. And, yes, people find it.

The same sort of thing could be an interesting reason for creating a church with no name. Call it an experiment, if you like. How well would a church fare at drawing people in if there was no name? After all, no name means no sign, and no sign means if people are going to find it they are going to have to want to find it. Of course then you might say, “If there is no name or sign, then how will people know about the church’s existence, let alone know if they want to find it or not?” That’s a decent question, but it presupposes that the best way for a person to discover a church is to drive by it some afternoon and notice its name on a sign. I wonder if we’ve gotten to a place where (and we’d never explicitly say this if we were asked about it) advertisement via our church signs has replaced personal evangelism.

The things that should make people want to find our churches whether they have names and signs or not are the radically different and apparently upside down lives of the people who make up the church. As it turns out it is not the names of our churches which give meaning and definition to the life of the community, it’s the very lives of the people which do this. No matter what beliefs we proclaim in the names of our churches, if the lives of the people don’t match up with those words, then the names are meaningless and might as well not exist in the first place. If we paint the word Grace in prominent letters on a sign out in front of a church building but the people who meet inside live in un-forgiveness and non-charity, then the presence of the sign is a lie. It would be better if there were no sign and no name.

We all want to be Loved

At this point, maybe we should ask ourselves why we name our churches anyway. What hole are we trying to fill in doing this? Every organization you could probably think of has a name which sets it apart from all others. I don’t believe this is simply because it’s the way we’ve always done it. I believe we have developed a deep desire to name every organization. Why? I can think of at least two reasons.

The first stems from our desire to be “official.” We want to be validated. Something in a lot of us screams to stand out from the rest of the people around us in a particular way. The kind of standing out which comes along with being official is more professional than personal. This kind of respect is granted by institutions, clubs, establishments, governments, etc. We want this not only for our individual selves, but also for the organizations with which we associate. Let’s say churches, for example. When we feel our churches are more official, more recognized by the establishment, we feel better. It almost seems we have a sense of relief that we too are associated with that official church. But then the question we have to ask is, “Is being official really a helpful and healthy thing for a church?”

The second reason flows out of our desire to be “recognized.” We want to be valued. While being official is recognition from some establishment or another, the kind of recognition I’m talking about here is that which comes from the individual people with whom we more closely associate. This kind of recognition, since it comes from people we know and love, is more personal than professional. We’re all looking for some kind of approval from the people we enjoy being around. Why? Because we seem to think that if we stop receiving their approval, then they will stop wanting to be around us. As twisted as both of these reasons are, I believe they are ever present, hanging over our heads everyday like great gray storm clouds. Our fear centers on what will happen should the sky begin to fall.

This all indicates a greater desire: our desires to be validated and valued are pointers to something much deeper, much more fundamental. In short, we all just want to be loved. Don’t you want to be loved? Don’t you sometimes fear that those people you love won’t love you back? So, we say to ourselves, “If I’m official…” or “If I’m recognized…” then what? Institutions will love us? People will love us? As abhorrent as the idea seems, we do this. We try to make people love us. That’s what it boils down to. Isn’t that what having a nice name and a nice sign and a nice building for our churches is really all about? We may guilt trip ourselves into showing some concern for other people, but by far we are more interested in having new people come into our churches and loving us instead of us loving them. Is that the kind of thing we would like written about us in our new book of Acts?

Best Friends Incorporated?

It should be pointed out that there is at least one general category of organization which almost never receives a name: gatherings of friends. We don’t come up with official names for friends; we come up with official names for businesses. I think this is very telling about how we view and don’t view the nature of our local church bodies. It would seem that we think of the people we go to church with less and less as friends to be loved and more and more as business associates to be pleased so they will love us.

If one of your friends showed up at your house holding a freshly written friendship constitution and said he had a great official name for your friendship, you might begin to wonder just how early your friend had started drinking that day. Something is obviously more than a little off with that kind of picture and we all know it. We know instinctively that friendships aren’t at all about being official, and they shouldn’t be about co-dependant recognition and approval, but rather about love and honesty in relationship. We don’t place official titles on our friendships because to do so would detract something very important from them: authenticity.

What is a church when you get right down to it, but a gathering of friendships: friendship with each other and friendship with God? Have we allowed what God has designed as friendship to be incorporated into something like a business? There is good reason why friends are sometimes advised not to go into business with each other. It is easy for those relationships to come under the wrong kind of strain. Because friendship is unofficial by nature, trying to fit one into an official business kind of relationship often results in a severing of the friendship. Square peg, round hole. When we allow a sense of being official to seep into the Church, we have to ask ourselves the question, “do we lose some of the authenticity which makes friendship what it is supposed to be?”

And now for Something Completely Different

You see, this chapter is not actually about a dream of what it would be like if someone planted a church and then made an intentional effort not to give it a name. The thing I’m really getting at is the entire Church’s apparent inability to think beyond and then step beyond certain traditions and conventions. Who knows, it may not work to plant a church without a name. It may even turn out to be a total failure. But the discussion such a question can spark may get us to actually start thinking about living an alternative kind of life with an alternative kind of thinking. That alone makes asking the question worthwhile.

One of the things which make living an alternative life possible is the ability to think creatively. Creative thinking is the ability to see beyond what is common. It’s very easy to get used to a certain way of life so that any other way is inconceivable. Our churches suffer from this just as easily as individual people do. The creative well of many churches is seriously shallow and the results can be seen in various places. The most obvious one is the worship gathering itself.

How often is something completely fresh done on a Sunday morning? Have you ever walked into your gathering place only to find that it has been entirely redecorated to fit a theme for that day? Has the time of worship at your church ever started with the sermon and ended with a number of songs? Has an entire gathering been devoted to the reading of Scripture? Instead of a sermon, has your pastor ever given a monologue from the point of view of a biblical character or a person from Church history? What else?

How is the space where you gather usually decorated? Are there bare walls or is there art of some kind? And if there is art, where did it come from? Did someone buy a Thomas Kinkade print or did someone from your church actually paint or sculpt a piece of art? A lot of traditional evangelical churches tend toward the bare, whitewashed look. The most artistic they get is a big wooden Cross or three somewhere on the premises. There is a tendency to shy away from the artistic impulse. I think part of this is a fear of idolatry, which is a valid concern.

This tracks all the way back to the giving of the Law in the book of Exodus. There God commanded His people, “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth below or in the waters below” (Exodus 20:4). From this verse, it would be easy to understand why many people might fear to create or use physical things in the process of worship. But I think when we only read this single verse for the justification for that kind of attitude toward worship, we miss something important. What happens when we read past this one verse? “You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God…” (Exodus 20:5). What is going on here?

God is not prohibiting the use of physical objects in worshipping Him; He is prohibiting the worship of physical objects or any other “gods” (Exodus 20:3) which might be associated with them. In fact, God plainly instructs the Israelites to create physical objects for the expressed purpose of aiding them in their worship life. God commands the Israelites to make an ark, a table, a lamp stand, and a tent of meeting to house all of these objects. Then God gives instructions for making an altar for burnt offerings, special garments for the priests, an altar for burning incense and a basin for ritual washing. And all of these simply have to do with the place where God’s people met to worship in the early part of their national life. From this point in the story, the physical things used in worship only spread outward and into the home life of Israelite families.

In Numbers 15, God commands the people to put tassels on the corners of their clothes. These were symbolic of the commands God had been giving them up until this point. This is a physical expression of worship. In Exodus 13:9 and Deuteronomy 6:8, God commands them to tie symbols on their hands and foreheads. These are the tefillin or phylacteries. They are little boxes which contain verses of Scripture. The people were to tie the tefillin to their hands and heads as a physical symbol of a person’s closeness and adherence to God’s Law. So while God prohibits the worship of anyone or anything besides Himself, there is yet certainly precedent for the use of physical objects to aide in the worship process. So where does this leave us in our discussion of creative thinking?

Creative thinking is the stimulus for innovative and alternative living. An important passage in the discussion of creative living is Genesis 1:26-27. When God finally came to the place where He was going to crown His creative effort with the final necessary touches, He did so by making the first people. But He didn’t make them in the same way He made the other parts of His creation. In the narrative we read that God says, “Let us make human beings in our image, in our likeness…” (1:26) and then we read, “So God created human beings in His own image, in the image of God He created them; male and female he created them” (1:27).

One fact that is really interesting to me is that in the space of two verses we are told no less than four times that God created us. Three of those times the term “image” is used. It’s almost like Moses, who recorded Genesis, is trying to say, “Okay you guys, pay attention to this because it is really important for you to wrestle with what this means.” The point of telling us that God created us in His image is that we are in some mysterious way like Him. Now, exactly how we are like God is a discussion that could easily be taken thousands of different directions. But I want to focus on one particular direction: creativity.

Because I have personally enjoyed exercising some artistic energy in the past, I have always felt and understood that every artist, whether performer, painter, sculptor, or whatever always places a little piece of themselves into their art. Some of the personality of the artist always soaks through. Some writers just have a certain way of writing things. Some painters just have a way of painting things. We could go on and on with this, couldn’t we? Do you have a favorite musician? What about their music draws you? Doesn’t that sense of whatever-it-is seem to find its way into most, if not all, of their work? What about an actor whose films or plays you really enjoy? Why will you go to the video store and rent different movies just because they appear in them? It’s something about their work, isn’t it? Really, it’s just something about them. Something about them consistently shines through their work. This is how it is with God.

I think part of the reason God calls what He creates “good” on the various days of creation in Genesis 1 is that He is good and those works come from Him. So when we reach the sixth day and God creates humanity and then steps back to look at His work, He changes the tune slightly. God’s evaluation of the special work of the sixth day is not simply good, but very good because He created it in a slightly different manner than the other works. The characteristic which sets humanity apart from the other creations is that we are created in God’s image. Along with that image comes the drive or impulse to be creative creatures. God calls us very good because He is very good.

Notice the first command God gives to His very good image bearers is to “be fruitful and increase in number.” This is a command to imitate the shaping, creative work God had already been doing since the story began. Yes, it refers to the human reproductive act which is physical, but it is so deeply a spiritual thing also. It satisfies the blessing of God because it mirrors His creative values. It goes beyond the physical reproductive process. That is simply the root of the potential created in this passage. The tree which springs from this root is constantly sprouting new branches, new ways of living out the blessing God gave to the first people.

Creative thinking is essential to living the kind of lives we would be pleased to have recorded in a New book of Acts. Why was the original Acts of the Apostles recorded in the first place? Was it because the leaders of the people of God kept things the way they had always been? No, it was because they entered a hostile world with a new message – God’s ancient story was experiencing the writing of a new chapter. Yes, there is great repetition throughout the Bible. Yes, God constantly reminded people of the things He’d done in the past. But there is always a hopeful eye scanning the future. God is always whispering to prophets the plans He has in store for this place and these people. God values forward movement in His story. He values new people taking new steps to continue the narrative of the ancient story. But what happens when people refuse to move forward? What happens when people say, “no, I like things how they are, thank you…could you turn up the pipe organ music, please, so I can enjoy the 1970’s orange shag carpet”? When the life of a church sees no rebirth and renewal in its ways, it has left the blessing of Genesis 1:28 to wither and die. God calls us to the creative life because He is a creative God.

Some Traditions are still Good

Another extreme we have to be careful of is unrestrained creativity which leads to a kind of anti-traditionalism. This is the false assumption that all things that are “new” are always better than the “old” and often leads us to disregard helpful traditions and conventional ways. Some structures and methods have a lasting quality about them and some do not. The difficult part comes in deciding which things are good to keep around and in use and which things need to retire from service.

Let me give you an example. A few years ago my wife, our daughter, and myself went over to my father’s house for Thanksgiving. But before we went there, we stopped at my step-brother and his wife’s apartment to hang out for a while. We noticed the time was getting close and I could almost begin to taste the turkey and pumpkin pie. So we got in our respective vehicles and drove over to my dad’s place. We immediately noticed his grill was out and the tell-tale heat waves were rising from it. My wife and I looked at each other and one of us said, “That’s odd. I’ve never had grilled turkey before. I wonder how that’s going to work.”

When we got out of the car, we said to my step-brother and his wife, “We didn’t know you could grill a turkey!” The response we got wasn’t exactly what we expected.

“Oh, didn’t your dad tell you?”

“Tell us what?”

“We’re not having turkey for Thanksgiving this year. He’s grilling a pork loin.”

Blasphemy.

“No, he didn’t tell us.”

So the rest of the day (not to mention almost every time we have been over there since) my dad did not hear the end of it. Many mumbled complaints and jokes about how my dad saved the turkey but killed Thanksgiving floated around that day. We were not pleased. Don’t get me wrong. I like pork loin…but not for Thanksgiving. When my step-mom chimed in with a defense for my dad, she said, “Oh you guys are just stuck in a rut!” My step-brother’s response was perfect.

“Stuck in a rut once a year?”

Some traditions are inviolable. Our responsibility is to find a way to navigate between which things need updating and which things needs reinforcing. Yet, both updating and reinforcing traditions rely on the ability to think and live creatively. Both involve the process of breathing fresh life into the Church.

I think most people would agree that it is long since overdue for the time to retire the flannel graph. Do you even know what a flannel graph is? It’s what Sunday School teachers used before churches could even afford those boxy overhead projectors. They were large pieces of flannel fabric attached to an easel upon which flannel characters with Velcro on the back were placed so the teacher could tell a biblical story in a visual manner.

Now that digital projectors have come along, the sadly outdated flannel graph is obsolete. But the use of visual representations to teach biblical stories is alive and well. Just because our technology has improved and flannel graphs are part of a hazy, almost forgotten past, doesn’t mean we get rid of the visual medium altogether. In fact, it means the ability to use visuals is enhanced. Likewise, just because we have some good and exciting new worship songs doesn’t mean we need to rid ourselves of hymns. But then you could also say that since more and more churches have digital projectors we can lose physical hymn books so our bodies are freer to be used expressively in worship.

Creativity in living means having a combined matrix of old and new, where we seek a balance between what has come before and what is on the horizon. So while affirming the goodness of what has been done in the past, we need to press forward by asking difficult and even sometimes impossible questions. In other words, we don’t have to stop having turkey for Thanksgiving, but we can explore some new and intriguing desserts.

Now, I want to close with one last thought. The first local churches didn’t have names. The closest they got to names were things like, the church in Colossae, or the church in Thessalonica. They were more concerned with things like feeding the poor, taking care of the outcast and surviving persecution. They wanted to know what it meant to live lives different from the kind the Roman Empire demanded they live. At one point, giving names to churches would have been considered a “new” and creative thing.

While affirming the story of the Creation, the Fall, and other important Old Testament themes and subjects, they lived new and alternative lives whereby their world was being changed. The call to creative and alternative living in the way of Jesus the Messiah is meant to bring about change. This change is not only for the people who believe, but also for the sight of people who don’t believe. It’s not just about being changed myself. It’s about being used by God to change the world.

Chapter 4 Intensive Teaching

Why bother to Teach?

Teaching is one of the elements of worship gatherings people tend to take for granted. We always assume a sermon will be given, don’t we? Why shouldn’t we? Hasn’t it always been this way? Haven’t churches always had some songs and then one person stands up and talks for thirty minutes to an hour about the Bible? What would you think if you found out that it really wasn’t that simple?

We should begin our understanding of teaching by asking ourselves, “Why do we have a sermon?” The easy answer would probably be something like to teach the Bible to God’s people. That’s all well and good, but what if it’s supposed to go deeper than that? Why bother to teach?

Command and teach these things. Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity. Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching. Do not neglect your gift, which was given you through prophecy when the body of elders laid their hands on you. (1st Timothy 4:11-14)

Paul tells Timothy to teach the things he talks about in this letter. He says, “Command and teach these things.” Then Paul lists several areas where teaching has an impact in the Christian’s life.

One thing this tells us is that the teaching that happened in the early church was life changing. When the people heard teaching in their times of gathering, they made a conscious effort to put it into practice. Sometimes I’m afraid our sermons today are looked at like an interesting lecture people show up to hear and say, “Oh, that was nice,” and go home and forget about later. That was not at all the case in the early church. People gathered to have their lives changed by the teaching of God’s Word.

Paul then instructs Timothy to devote himself to preaching, teaching and public scripture reading and not to neglect his gift. Here Paul directs the Christian Church to actually adopt the form and the order of Jewish synagogue worship. There’s a logical progression here, beginning with Scripture reading. Scripture (usually a selection from the Torah) was read because nobody had a personal copy of the Bible. In the synagogue, these readings were also done on a schedule, so they would cycle through the entire Torah in a year. Because the New Testament had not been written at this time, it’s probably safe to assume many Christian churches adopted this practice as well. This was also the foundation of what would come next in the gathering: preaching.

Now, you need to understand that preaching and teaching are two different things in the New Testament. Preaching is the exhortation or encouragement by the teaching elder (pastor) for the people to obey the Scriptures which had just been read in the gathering. After the people were encouraged to live the Christian life, they would then have to be instructed how. Teaching was the specific instructions about Christian living. In the present day Teaching, Preaching and Public Scripture Reading are all generally done at the same time, that is, during the sermon.

So what, then, is the purpose of the sermon, the time we set aside for the teaching of the Bible? Biblically, the point is to root Christians deeper into a life of godliness and truth. One of the purposes of this rooting was so that bad or false teaching wouldn’t influence the believers against the truth.

Keep reminding God’s people of these things. Warn them before God against quarreling about words; it is of no value, and only ruins those who listen. Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth. Avoid godless chatter, because those who indulge in it will become more and more ungodly. Their teaching will spread like gangrene. Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have departed from the truth. They say that the resurrection has already taken place, and they destroy the faith of some. (2nd Timothy 2:14-18)

When Timothy speaks, he is to speak with authority. He is responsible for keeping the meeting and the teaching and preaching orderly and not letting other people direct the teaching with their own agenda. You see, it was and still is always possible that a teacher will bring with him (or her) a personal agenda which does not fit the text.

The problem we find in this passage of “quarreling about words” was possibly a situation where a person or maybe a few people would begin to argue and debate about minor word issues in the biblical text. From there, they would create some strange doctrine or teaching of their own which was not intended in the passage.

This is what Paul warns Timothy about. He says, “You need to address this problem.” We have an example of this kind of problem and its solution in Titus 1:5, 9-11. The problem was that in Crete, where Paul had left Titus to lead a group of churches, there apparently was a number of people who were “rebellious,” deceiving the church by rattling on and on about meaningless teachings which had nothing to do with the gospel. The solution was to appoint elders grounded firmly in sound doctrine who could help refute and silence those rebels who opposed the gospel Paul taught to Titus and others.

Also, we need to recognize teaching happens in many different ways. We need to be able to get past the “lecture” model sometimes and experiment with different methods and forms of teaching and preaching. In his book Preaching Re-imagined, Doug Pagitt views a difference between preaching and what he calls “speaching.” What he means by “speaching” is that we’ve degraded preaching into speech making or lecturing. That’s not necessarily the way it was originally done in the early Church. He writes, “I use this word to distinguish Speaching, which I believe to be a form of speaking that is inconsistent with the outcomes we want to see arise from our preaching, from the act of preaching, which I believe to be a good, right, and essential calling of the church” (Pagitt 48).

Today, sermons are usually a one-way street. But teaching and preaching in the ancient world allowed for at least one thing that made a sermon or a time of teaching more interactive: questions. In the synagogues of the ancient world, which if you remember were where the early Church drew its method and order, they allowed more than one person to teach and allowed the participation of people during teaching. Let’s look at two passages in Acts 13.

From Perga they went on to Pisidian Antioch. On the Sabbath they entered the synagogue and sat down. After the reading from the Law and the Prophets, the leaders of the synagogue sent word to them, saying, “Brothers, if you have a message of encouragement for the people, please speak.” (Acts 13:14-15)

As Paul and Barnabas were leaving the synagogue, the people invited them to speak further about these things on the next Sabbath. When the congregation was dismissed, many of the Jews and devout converts to Judaism followed Paul and Barnabas, who talked with them and urged them to continue in the grace of God. (Acts 13:42-43)

Notice the progression in this passage. First the synagogue leaders read scripture. Then they invited both Paul and Barnabas to give a word of encouragement or exhortation. This, by the way, is same Greek word used for “preaching” in 1st Timothy 4. After the synagogue meeting was finished and dismissed, several people then met up with Paul. Paul and Barnabas started talking with them about what they had just preached at synagogue. They are now teaching them. Just like in 1st Timothy 4 there is Scripture, preaching, and teaching in this passage. But the word “with” indicates the teaching was interactive.

Biblically, teaching is not just given by a pastor to a congregation. Teaching can happen between everyone. “Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts” (Colossians 3:16). Again we have the same three elements of teaching: 1. reading the Scripture (“the message of Christ”), 2. teaching, and 3. admonishing/preaching (a different Greek word is used in this instance, but the same essential idea is present). Except this time, everyone is doing it to some degree with each other.

Teaching and preaching aren’t the exclusive property of the pastor, though biblically pastors or teaching elders seem to have some sort of directing authority over it. Yet, everyone can be involved. Still, so few people today feel equipped to participate in anything like this. They just want to be told what the Bible says and then go on their merry way. However, even many people who faithfully attend church do not possess a comprehensive view of the overall biblical story, let alone an understanding of its many constituent parts; books, letters, authors, themes, etc.

Biblically Illiterate

Here’s part of the problem: so many Christians are simply illiterate when it comes to the Bible. They don’t know what it says, or if they do, they wouldn’t know where to find it in the Bible if they had to. In the first chapter of this book I talked about how the Bible can seem a bit overwhelming, but then I also tried to show how it didn’t have to be this way. The first chapter addresses in part how you, as an individual Christian, can approach reading the Bible without feeling like you’re about to climb Mt. Everest without equipment and wearing nothing but your skivvies. But then again, reading the Bible on your own is a fairly new development in the history of the Scriptures. It wasn’t until three or four short centuries ago that most individual people could even dream of owning a personal copy of the Bible. I know three or four hundred years seems like a long time ago. But considering that parts of the Bible existed in written form several thousand years ago (and who knows how much earlier before that it was preserved in oral tradition) three or four centuries isn’t much by comparison.

How is it, then, that these most recent generations of Christians who have the widest access to the Bible ever, still have so little knowledge of what it actually says?

For one thing, lots of Christians don’t crack open their Bibles until Sunday morning. Little contact with the Bible means little knowledge of what it says. I also wonder how much people’s knowledge of the biblical story comes from what they have been told as opposed to what they have read from the Scriptures themselves. I’m not saying hearing someone speak about the Bible is bad. After all, “faith comes by hearing” (Romans 10:17). It just isn’t always enough. When you listen to someone speak on a passage of Scripture, you are listening to them interpret it. This is, of course, inescapable but it is also just the starting point to knowing the Bible. We have to move on from here. Individually and communally, we struggle to hear its voice in a way that honors the passage in its historical and cultural setting. We have to take the text and wrestle with it, listening to what it has to say to us who live thousands of years afterwards.

Another reason so few Christians are intimately familiar with the biblical literature is that we hire a professional to do our studying for us and then they present their findings to us once or twice a week. It’s good to have a professional teacher available to lead us and facilitate the advancement of our faith. I have nothing bad to say about that alone. The problem of biblical illiteracy comes about when we don’t allow this to be a starting point for our faith. We take what the teacher gives us and say, “Okay. That must be all I need to know about that.” It isn’t. Teachers and pastors should be people who begin to open doors for our learning. They can’t walk through the doors and do the learning in our place. They can’t be the Holy Spirit.

In John 16, when Jesus is teaching His students shortly before He is arrested, He tells them something interesting about the Holy Spirit. “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come” (16:12-13). It is not your pastor’s job to guide you into all the truth. That role is left for the Holy Spirit to fill. Hopefully, what a pastor does is to allow himself to be led by the Spirit in preparation to teach, so that after you have heard, the Holy Spirit will carry you further along in the process of learning and knowing God. But to do this, you have to invest yourself in the study of the Scriptures. The good news is that you don’t have to do it alone. In fact, it might be better if you didn’t.

I imagine part of the reason God gave us local churches, places where a community of believers meet regularly, is so we might spend time together learning from the Scriptures and each other’s interpretations of the Scriptures. We all come from different perspectives and see the Bible in slightly different ways sometimes. Listening to just one person’s interpretation of the Scripture is potentially disastrous. What if that person hasn’t considered other potential interpretations? What if he hasn’t allowed himself to be led by the Spirit of God to a better understanding of the passage he is teaching?

I mean, what if the teacher had a bad week? Will the bitterness that person might have experienced carry over into his or her interaction with the biblical text and throw off the interpretation? What if a physical condition, such as exhaustion or illness, hampers a person’s ability to handle Scripture for the entire community? At that point, it is not simply the teacher who is affected, but everyone else as well. So maybe a teacher’s studying of the Bible in preparation for delivering a message is better accomplished in community. Commentaries, books, songs, and websites are all good and they can be part of the community used to develop teaching, but maybe we could take this a step or two further.

Maybe teachers could meet with other people or at least another single person to bounce off some ideas. Maybe pastors and teachers don’t have to retreat alone into their offices like groundhogs going underground and popping up occasionally to tell people what they think about seeing their shadows. While there is something to be said for having times of solitude and silence, there is also something to be said for getting out of your hole and seeing what the party is about. “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another” (Proverbs 27:17).

This is good not only for the pastor or teacher, but also for everyone else. It relieves some of the pressure from the teacher and it gives the community a little bit more ownership of the message given. It’s easier for them to remember and grasp because they had a hand in preparing it to some degree. It allows the community insight into the process of studying the Scriptures for themselves. Once this insight is gained, hopefully it will be something the different individuals and groups who make up the community can put into practice on their own.

Intensive Teaching

Another thing we need to consider is the intensity level of our teaching and learning. How long should a teacher or pastor speak in any given session? How many times a week should the Christian communities gather for learning? What other opportunities and assets are available for growth and strengthening in the alternative way of Jesus?

I think, for the most part, Christianity has grown pretty mellow about teaching and learning. I’m not talking about the content of teaching or doctrine or anything like that. I’m talking about the amount of time we actually spend together learning the story God is telling us through the Scripture and our very lives. Most devout Christians show up for the big worship event once a week, right? Then some show up for Sunday school or a midweek thing here and there. That’s good. Well, it’s a start, anyway.

One practical issue we should deal with is the duration of a learning session. How long should a teacher teach? I think that depends on a few different items. First, how much does a teacher have to say? Teachers should never say more or less than they actually have to say. When I was a student in Bible College and training to become a pastor, I was required to do a certain number of outside-of-the-class speaking engagements. I remember one in particular. I spoke at an evening worship gathering in Holland, Michigan. It lasted more than an hour. Now, there’s nothing wrong with speaking for more than an hour if you have that much to say. My philosophy is teach until you are finished teaching, unless you have a strict time constraint, as in a school classroom. The problem with my over the hour teaching was that I got lost in my notes, panicked, and repeated a huge section of something I’d already said. I said more than I really had to say.

Some people are of the philosophy a sermon or teaching session should last no longer than 25 to 30 minutes. The reasons for this have to do with people’s attention span or something like that. Some people think a sermon should last no longer than 20 minutes. If you can say something profound in 20 minutes, well, bravo to you. Personally, I’m doing good to keep it under 35, although I do still occasionally have those hour-long ones. But the point is simply to say what you need to say. But also remember that it is helpful to interact with people. Teaching isn’t simply talking to someone, it’s talking with someone.

On the question of frequency of meeting for the study of Scripture, let’s turn to the Bible itself and see what it has to say on the subject. In the Scriptures’ example, the frequency with which Jesus and, later on, the Church gathered for teaching and learning is simply staggering. During the latter part of His ministry, Jesus taught in the temple every day (Matthew 26:55). You might say, “Yeah, well, that was Jesus. He could do anything!” After Jesus’ ascension the earliest community of His followers also met every day in the temple for teaching and learning (Acts 2:46). The people Paul had contact with in Berea also gathered every day and “examined the Scriptures” (Acts 17:11). Every day. Can you imagine that kind of intensive teaching?

So what’s our excuse? Where is this kind of thirst to learn and participate in God’s story today? Is it that we’re too busy? No doubt this is the excuse some will give. But what does that say about us? Too busy? Too busy with what? A job? A family? A good book? Housework? Maintaining our accumulated stuff? Is that it? Are those things preventing us from knowing God and His Son and Spirit? When we say we’re too busy we inevitably run into the problem that we are putting something ahead of God in importance in our lives. “Sorry God. I’d love to stay and chat, but I have to watch the next episode of Lost.”

Or maybe our excuse is that we don’t understand the Bible. Well, yeah, of course we’re not going to understand it if we don’t spend time reading it! And part of the problem may be that we’re trying to understand it on our own. The point of having a community is so that those who are farther along in their faith can help and encourage those who are not as far along.

Lack of understanding cannot excuse us from engaging the Scriptures. If we refrain from studying the Bible because we allegedly don’t understand it, we are essentially saying to the Holy Spirit, “I don’t trust you to do your job of guiding me into all the truth as Jesus promised you would.” I’ll talk more about the Holy Spirit in one of the upcoming chapters, but understand that one of His primary functions is to use the Word of God we have already studied to transform us. Lack of studying the Bible means lack of transformation in us which means lack of transformation in the world on account of us.

I find it’s also good to teach on the obscure stuff. A lot of pastors avoid teaching through books of the Old Testament, for example. What they will often do, instead, is to take a character from a book and do a series of teachings on that person. Those are good, but they leave the story surrounding them fairly untouched. This is also part of what keeps Christians biblically illiterate. It’s helpful to teach on the life of David, but how much better would it be to acquaint ourselves with the whole story around him? I once taught 32 weeks on the book of 1st Samuel. The response was very positive. I’ve also heard that a new pastor who planted a new church spent the first year and then some teaching the book of Leviticus. That’s 27 chapters on Israel’s priestly laws. And the series was highly successful. How many pastors have the guts to do something like that?

Training

Intensive teaching needs to be directed toward the training of people to be ministers and servants in the Body of Christ. Learning is not a consumer activity. You don’t just show up to church, consume some teaching and then not use it in your life as a servant. Church isn’t like McDonald’s or Burger King. You don’t go simply so you can get something out of it. Church isn’t about Christians, it’s about Christ. It’s about taking off the old way of life and putting on the new, the one which has Christ’s values and concerns at its core. Church needs to be about training and equipping everyone who shows up for doing good works. “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10).

Honestly, training for anything isn’t something which can be done once a week, not if you’re trying to make real progress anyway. If you have just had major surgery on your legs, I imagine the doctors would want you to do some physical therapy. If you only showed up for physical therapy once a week for an hour or two, and then let your trainer do most of the exercising for you, it would take you a long, long time to recover, wouldn’t it? So why do we expect that going to church once a week for an hour and listening to the fruit of one person’s study of the Bible will adequately train us to do the good works which God prepared in advance for us to do?

The Bible tells us in several passages that Christians have been gifted by the Holy Spirit for participation in the work of the ministry (Romans 12, Ephesians 4, etc.). None of the passages dealing with spiritual gifts ever exclude anyone from the responsibility of doing the work of the ministry. The ministry is for everyone because God has gifted everyone for it.

Now, you may not know what your gift is, but that does not excuse a person from ministry responsibility. This is where people like myself with pastoral and teaching gifts enter the picture. Let’s look at a very important passage dealing with God-given ministry gifts.

But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it. This is why it says: “When he ascended on high, he led captives in his train and gave gifts to his people.” (What does “he ascended” mean except that he also descended to the lower, earthly regions? He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe.) It was he who gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. (Ephesians 4:7-13)

Why were these gifts given? Is it so those people can do the work of the ministry? Look again. Those gifts were given so those people could train or equip everyone to do the work of the ministry. As a pastor/teacher it is not my responsibility to do all of the work of the ministry. It is my job to train people to partner with each other and with me in doing the work of the ministry. I’ve heard before that about 90% of the work in a local church is most often performed by only about 10% of the people. But I think that it is usually a church’s own fault for not training its own people for ministry.

Have you ever been a part of a church where there was a significant ministry need, but no one stepped up? Is it possible people don’t step up because they don’t feel qualified? “Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever” (1st Corinthians 9:25 emphasis mine). How will anyone feel qualified unless they are trained, and how will anyone be trained if no one will train them? That’s got to change. So, we see that along with the gifts of the Holy Spirit there is another necessary aspect for God’s people to be able to participate in and do the work of the ministry: Training.

I didn’t just wake up one day and say, “Hey, I think I’d like to be a Pastor today.” In fact, I was resistant to the idea until about a year into my College education. Before I understood God was calling me to teach His Word to people, I was seriously looking into a career in either graphic arts or the film industry. It wasn’t until I took a year off from college and spent some time studying the Scriptures by myself and with others that the passion to teach what I had been learning began to burn in me. To this day I still love film and the graphic arts, but they all take a back seat to God’s will for me. Does this mean I can’t participate in any of those things because I’m in ministry? Absolutely not! It does mean, however, those things are either secondary to me or they are tools to use in ministry.

A significant chunk of training for the work of the ministry for everyone comes with being trained in the handling of the Scriptures. “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that all God’s people may be thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Like I said before, the development of my own teaching gift and my desire to be involved in ministry came simply from spending time in God’s Word. This passage reveals to us why that sort of thing happens. It happens because that is what God’s Word is profitable for. Invest time in Scripture and the profits it yields are training and preparation for ministry.

For this to most effectively happen, we have to be endlessly consuming Scripture and the teaching of Scripture more than one day a week. Let’s briefly look at Acts 17:10-11, a passage I referenced earlier when talking about how teaching in the early Church took place every day.

As soon as it was night, the believers sent Paul and Silas away to Berea. On arriving there, they went to the Jewish synagogue. Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.

It would be an easy thing for me to say at this point, “Therefore go home and read the Bible everyday as the Bereans did.” But that isn’t training; it’s abandonment. Training happens in groups of 2 or more. Because of the life of our present culture, it’s probably not possible for everybody to get together every day for training, but once a week isn’t cutting it either. We really ought to consider meeting more frequently. If you only use your hands and feet one day a week, you won’t accomplish much.

We need to understand that the act of training people for the work of the ministry is an ongoing process and it’s also a reproducing task. I believe that it is very true that none of us ever stop learning and being trained. And obviously the Holy Spirit of God is constantly working on us to train us and shape us into the people God desires us to be. Training is an ongoing task. I recognize God is continuously training me for the work of the ministry.

Part of this continual training takes place in my spending time every day either reading Scripture or thinking about passages I’ve read before. But it doesn’t stop there. My continual spiritual training takes place when I interact with other people and we bounce ideas off of each other and ask questions of each other.

But not only is our own spiritual/ministerial training an ongoing process but it is also a reproducing task. “And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others” (2nd Timothy 2:2). Training for ministry is not an end in and of itself. But it is meant to be passed on. Paul tells Timothy to take his training and train others with it, to entrust it to the people of his church so they can entrust it to others. Training in the Scriptures and the work of the ministry is for everybody. As a wise Jedi Master once said to his apprentice, “Pass on what you have learned.”

The Scriptural picture of training has one person reproducing himself in many others. This is what Paul did with Timothy, Barnabas, Silas, Titus and others and it’s what each of those guys did later on with yet other people. This is part of what I am doing here with you in this book. Am I trying to train all of you to be pastors? No, but that doesn’t mean none of you can be. I am here to facilitate the discovery and development of your study of the Scriptures. This chapter is an invitation to training. May you desire what God desires for you. May you submit yourself to be trained for this unbelievably important task.

Chapter 5 Radically Generous

A lot of people don’t like going to church for the simple reason that it seems like churches are always asking for money. Do you know why people have this idea? It’s because churches are always asking for money. I hope that doesn’t come as too big of a surprise to you. It really makes sense if you think about it. If churches own property (buildings, land, etc.), and if they have to pay bills (electric, water/sewer, waste management, etc.), and if they have paid staff (pastors, secretaries, worship leaders, etc.) then they are going to need money.

The problem then is the source of said money. Where does it come from? Unless it’s a mega church which produces and sells its own books, curriculums, worship CD’s and so on, it has no way to generate any kind of revenue by selling products. This is where most churches in America are at and basically where almost all churches outside of the North American continent are, too. Instead, they have to rely on the generosity of their members and attendees.

When discussing the biblical concepts of giving and generosity we need to first understand that it is of equal importance as the issues of creativity, teaching and other things we’ve already looked at. Also, we should understand that it’s not simply about an action a person or church performs, but giving and generosity are part of the overall alternative way to live in the new life of Jesus Christ. Let’s take a look at 2nd Corinthians 8:1-7. The passage may seem a bit lengthy, but please read the whole thing anyway. It contains some vital facets of what it means to live generously.

And now, brothers and sisters, we want you to know about the grace that God has given the Macedonian churches. In the midst of a very severe trial, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty welled up in rich generosity. For I testify that they gave as much as they were able, and even beyond their ability. Entirely on their own, they urgently pleaded with us for the privilege of sharing in this service to God’s people. And they went beyond our expectations; having given themselves first of all to the Lord, they gave themselves by the will of God also to us. So we urged Titus, just as he had earlier made a beginning, to bring also to completion this act of grace on your part. But since you excel in everything—in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in complete earnestness and in the love we have kindled in you—see that you also excel in this grace of giving.

A key word I want you to pick up on is the word, excel, which is of course related to the word excellent. Paul gives the Corinthian church an example of excellent giving: The churches in the region of Macedonia. What can it mean to excel or be excellent in giving? One of the churches Paul’s using as an example of excellent giving is probably the Philippian church, which was in Macedonia. If you read what Paul writes to the Philippians you get a deeper picture of excellent giving. In fact, if you have a Bible handy, why don’t you check out what Paul writes in Philippians 4:10-19?

The Philippians show us that one form of excellent giving and generous living may look like contributing to fulfill the material and financial needs of the work of a church’s or a person’s ministry regardless of your own situation. This makes giving quite a selfless way to live, doesn’t it?

It’s very unfortunate, then, that some people use the size of their contributions to expand their ego or the scope of their personal influence in a church or ministry setting. Some give more and expect their voice to become louder and more prominent in a church. Some assume that because their bank account is larger and they funnel huge amounts of money into the coffers that they somehow know the best possible way to direct the movement and life of a church. This isn’t generosity, this is greed. But instead of greed for the accumulation of money, it’s greed for power and influence over the organism into which they give their money: the Church.

This isn’t really giving. It’s purchasing. It’s exchanging money for something else. In this case it’s the purchase of influence or power or authority or whatever. Because it seeks some kind of gain it is anti-generous and anti-giving. A life that is generous must be radically different from this. The alternative way of life in Jesus calls for a radical generosity. To be radically generous is to set aside all designs and desires for self-importance. Therefore radical generosity seeks the benefit of others by giving something of yourself. It could be anything really (time, energy, a place to sleep, a meal, etc.), but in the context of this discussion let’s stay focused on the subject of fiscal generosity.

Obviously this raises some questions, such as: But what if I’m not able to give? Do I have to give the same amount as everyone else? What is a good amount to give? These are all valid and important questions, but I’ll try to provide some possible answers to these questions a little bit later. For now I want to return to a biblical example of a radically generous way to live.

Characteristics of Radical Generosity

One thing that made the giving of the Macedonian churches Paul wrote about in 2nd Corinthians excellent and therefore a good example for us was the fact they gave “as much as they were able, and even beyond their ability.” They didn’t simply give whatever change they had lying around or whatever they had left over after they made themselves comfortable. Their giving was sacrificial. They knew there was a broad need and staying comfortable without addressing that need would be a perfectly good way to lack generosity.

This indicates that giving is the first thing we need to consider when we get paid, not the last. I’ve found that subtracting what you’re going to give right away and setting it aside makes it easier than to try to take care of your other expenses first and then focus on your giving. A good rule of thumb in every situation of life, but especially in finances, is “God first.”

Another characteristic which defines the excellent giving for the Macedonian churches, and also for us if we are to give excellently, is this idea of urgency. Let’s go back to the passage in 2nd Corinthians a moment. Paul wrote, “For I testify that they gave as much as they were able, and even beyond their ability. Entirely on their own, they urgently pleaded with us for the privilege of sharing in this service to God’s people” (2nd Corinthians 8:3-4). Paul didn’t even ask them to give…they pleaded with him urgently for him to accept what they wanted to give to the collection.

What sorts of things do you consider urgent? To have an urgency to contribute to God’s work, whether it be to give time, energy or money, may be a mark that your giving is excellent, radically generous.

Another aspect of giving we need to consider is that the way in which you give (grudgingly, apathetically, or cheerfully) presents a reflection of who you really are and what you do and don’t value. Continuing our look at 2nd Corinthians, let’s look next at chapter 8, verses 8-15.

I am not commanding you, but I want to test the sincerity of your love by comparing it with the earnestness of others. For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.

And here is my judgment about what is best for you in this matter. Last year you were the first not only to give but also to have the desire to do so. Now finish the work, so that your eager willingness to do it may be matched by your completion of it, according to your means. For if the willingness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has, not according to what one does not have.

Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality. At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. The goal is equality, as it is written: “The one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.”

Here Paul begins by telling the Corinthian believers that he isn’t commanding them to give, but testing their sincerity. Why isn’t Paul commanding them to give? If anyone is forced to give then the giving is not sincere. God desires sincerity first. Paul says, “If the willingness is there, the gift is acceptable.”

Acceptable? If the Bible puts a condition of acceptability on offering it means there are some offerings and sacrifices people give that God would rather not receive. They don’t count. Included in these unacceptable offerings would be the contributions we looked at earlier where something was given so the giver would receive something else in return. The thing which taints these offerings with unacceptability is that the offerings are performed out of a desire to receive rather than to give. It’s an issue of desire.

Central to the issues of gathering, prayer and giving, which all comprise and define part of the worship experience, is the necessary element of the right desire. Again, if you have a Bible nearby, I’d invite you to open it to Exodus 25:1-9. Notice even in the Old Testament this original offering was based on the prompting of their hearts, not compulsion. The money given in this offering was used to construct the tabernacle and its furniture.

It was the first recorded church building project! This tells us that the money given is used for God’s purposes. God specifies the desire in giving because He doesn’t want His house built and purposes implemented without total cooperation on our part. Giving is only excellent when it is done out of sincere desire. Reading that passage makes me wonder if there were people at that time who said things like, “I don’t like going to worship at the tabernacle. They’re always asking for money!” If their attitudes prevented them from cheerfully giving, then God wasn’t interested in what they thought they had to offer.

Instead God seeks people who really want to contribute to what He’s doing in this world. If it’s in their heart to give, God calls them to place their offering before Him, not so they can feel proud of themselves but to know God is using them as tools in His powerful hands. This is just as true today as it would have been back then.

What this kind of excellent, sincere, desirous giving produces in the life of the Church is equality among those who gather, worship and pray. Part of the so-called “American Dream” is to be able to live comfortably without fear of any financial problems. This basically requires a person to be independently wealthy. The problem is that God never calls anyone in the Church to be independently anything. To seek independence, especially in terms of wealth, from the people who surround us is to subtly suggest that we are in some way better than them. In the Church, equality requires us to be connected with each other in profound ways. For example, I invite you to take out your Bible and take a good, hard look at what’s going on in Acts 2:42-45. This equality worked itself out in such a way that the early believers shared everything. If there was a need, others stepped in to fill those needs.

And before anyone gets any bright ideas and suggests that the passage in Acts 2:42-45 somehow doesn’t apply to us today, compare it to the other passages we’ve been reading, especially 2nd Corinthians 8:13-15. There’s nothing in the Scriptures to suggest this sort of radical generosity was temporary or was somehow set aside in favor of another model.

How much?

The obvious question regarding the issue of giving is “how much money should I give?” For those of you who feared this would become a “sermon on the amount” your fears are about to be realized. But trust me; it’s nothing to be afraid of. Let’s take one last look at 2nd Corinthians, this time at chapter 9, verses 6-15. Once again, this is a fairly lengthy passage, but I wouldn’t have included it if I didn’t think it was important.

Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously. Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work. As it is written:

“They have scattered abroad their gifts to the poor;

their righteousness endures forever.”

Now he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed and will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness. You will be made rich in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion, and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God.

This service that you perform is not only supplying the needs of God’s people but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God. Because of the service by which you have proved yourselves, people will praise God for the obedience that accompanies your confession of the gospel of Christ, and for your generosity in sharing with them and with everyone else. And in their prayers for you their hearts will go out to you, because of the surpassing grace God has given you. Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!

There is no single magic number dictated in scripture God accepts as good. What God accepts as good is what you desire in your heart to give. This is where giving is most a reflection of your value system. The rubber meets the road when you see how self-oriented or how God-oriented your spending is and also how responsible you are with it. If you’re in debt and your family is going hungry, but you’ve got a great entertainment system, it’s time to rethink your finances. Likewise, if you are doing well for yourself and family and you’re living comfortably and neither your church nor the poor receive very much or even any assistance from you, it’s time to rethink your finances.

All of this ultimately is tied up in giving thanks to God. We give because we’re thankful for what God has given us. And others thank God for what we’ve given them on God’s behalf. And when needs arise in our lives, there will be a faithful base of radically generous people willing to serve God by giving to fulfill those needs. And we can thank God for them.

We mustn’t mistake this as some sort of repayment plan, either. I often hear Christians use words like “owe,” and “debt” to describe our relationship to God based on what He’s given to us. I’m not convinced this is appropriate in any way. If what we have received from God is grace and is a gift, then the point is that we don’t owe God anything. If I showed up at your birthday party and gave you a new HD Plasma TV as a gift and said to you, “That will be two-thousand dollars” you’d seriously question whether or not I understood the concept of gift, wouldn’t you? I don’t give an offering at church because I’m trying desperately to erase some debt I owe God, but because I want to be involved in many ways with His ministry through that church.

If you’re looking for a number I personally think a good one is 10% of your income. Note that in 2nd Corinthians 8:11-12 Paul talks about giving according to your means. This giving becomes acceptable based on what one has, not on what one doesn’t have. So we’re back to the issue of acceptability. Except this time we’re told that one of the characteristics which make an offering acceptable isn’t just based on the desire, but it’s also based on a person’s means. This gives us an insight into something Jesus says in the gospel of Mark.

Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a fraction of a penny.

Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.” (Mark 12:41-44)

Obviously, the poor widow gave a lesser total amount than everyone else, but that’s not the way Jesus viewed it. His statements about her giving more are likely based on her means.

Also, giving doesn’t always mean giving directly to the church. It could mean buying groceries for a hungry family with a low income. It could mean donating coats, hats, and gloves for people who need to stay warm in the winter but simply can’t afford these things. It could mean finding places where people who have no homes gather and serving them inexpensive food like hot dogs. Do I need to go on? Use your imagination.

Okay, so notice what I’m not saying. I’m not saying, “Don’t give to your church.” I really don’t want to receive a ton of letters from church treasurers asking why I told people not to give to their respective local churches. I am saying, “Be discerning and wise in your giving.” It’s possible to contribute to people, churches, and causes which not only shouldn’t receive our financial support, but don’t really need it in the first place. I don’t need to talk about Benny Hinn and others who sit on gold plated chairs in front of television cameras telling you how God will bless you if you give to their “ministry,” do I?

Who owns your stuff?

Let’s take a moment to think about the biblical concept of contentment and then apply it to possessions. Some people feel entitled to certain things. Maybe it’s nice furniture. Maybe it’s a certain kind of home. It could be some people feel entitled to certain brands of clothing. Most people, without explicitly saying so, feel entitled to possessions. In 1st Timothy 6:6 Paul writes “godliness with contentment is great gain.” If we are content we are satisfied and desire no more than what we have. Contentment results in the erasure of any sense of entitlement we might possess. In addition to Paul’s assertion that godliness with contentment is great gain, the apostle adds:

For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. (1 Timothy 6:7-10)

The apostle never says money is evil, he states the love of money is a root leading to evil. If you came home from work today to discover your house had been stripped bare save for a few ratty pieces of clothing and a box of ramen noodles, could you be content? I believe all of us, unfortunately myself included, would be outraged, our sense of entitlement to possessions violated. Yet Paul can say “but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that.”

A friend of mine recently directed me to read Jeremiah 27:5, in which God states, “With my great power and outstretched arm I made the earth and its people and the animals that are on it, and I give it to anyone I please.” A consumerist culture forgets or ignores the fact that God is the maker and therefore the owner of everything that exists. He chooses to lend stewardship of all material things to whomever He desires. We can own nothing, only be the stewards of things, which God will eventually hand over to someone else. Psalm 24:1-2 tells us “The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it; for he founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters.” God wants us to understand that we only possess His things, we never own them. God owns everything and distributes it to us not that we may own it, but that we may distribute it to others in need.

I believe people who search for contentment in material things never find what they are looking for because God did not create us to own stuff. One might even say God created us not to own stuff. When we try to own, we stray from the purpose of our design. Ecclesiastes 3:11 tells us that God has “set eternity in the human heart.” In that statement there is a hint as to why material possessions fail in the task of generating contentment. We long to participate in something eternal and the possession of material things is not eternal. We hate limits.

The teacher in Ecclesiastes repeatedly tells us our pursuit of limited things, whether they are possessions or philosophies, is like “chasing after the wind.” This image conjures the idea of ultimate futility.

To the person who pleases him, God gives wisdom, knowledge and happiness, but to the sinner he gives the task of gathering and storing up wealth to hand it over to the one who pleases God. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. (Ecclesiastes 2:26)

Better one handful with tranquility than two handfuls with toil and chasing after the wind. (Ecclesiastes 4:6)

Now, just so you know, I see a difference between “owning” and “possessing.” Ownership implies power over an object, which belongs to God and no one else. Possession, in the biblical sense, simply implies placement of an object, which God decides and implements with the power He owns. But, just because we can never own anything doesn’t mean it is outside of God’s will for us to possess anything. There is nothing wrong with possessing things…as long as they do not possess us. In terms of possessions, contentment looks like the ability to let go of something when we no longer need it or when someone else needs it more than we do. How tightly or loosely we hold onto our possessions has much to do with how generous we are as God’s people. I suspect generosity and contentment are tapestries woven from the same thread. When we are content we are more able to be generous. You might even say contentment fuels generosity.

The (un)generous Church

So, if you’re one of those people who don’t like going to church because they’re always asking for money, then I would ponder if there was a deeper issue at the heart of the matter. Most statistics indicate the average churchgoer gives somewhere around 2 to 3 percent of their income. So, some people don’t attend church because they don’t want to be asked for money and many people who do attend give in fairly small amounts. Has it ever occurred to you that some churches ask for money because they actually don’t have enough to run properly and fulfill God’s mission in the world at the same time? Yes, I know there are lots of churches out there who have more than enough and still ask for more. I’m not disputing the existence of churches which act as financial sponges, unnecessarily soaking up resources which could benefit the work of other smaller churches. But, should that prevent us from being God’s hands and feet in the world?

Some people don’t give because they are in ferocious debt and are barely able to stay afloat. Others don’t give and simply make excuses. It’s not in their heart to give…but that doesn’t make it okay or good. While God isn’t interested in accepting the offering of a person who doesn’t really want to give it, He likewise isn’t pleased with people who hoard His resources for themselves. This is especially true when you consider there are many people and churches who struggle to do His work because they don’t have the financial resources to do so.

Where are you in regard to all of this? What is your attitude? Is your giving generous and a reflection of the new life God has placed in you? Or is it all about you? Is your giving (or lack thereof) a reflection that you are keeping part of your heart back from God? Jesus said, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Luke 12:34). Where is your heart? Look at the things you surround yourself with. Do you surround yourself with stereo equipment, books, toys, videogames, boats, cars, houses, etc? Or do you surround yourself with the poor, the needy, and the church and its work? What’s your treasure? What makes you excited to get rid of your financial resources? Things? Or, the work of Christ? Do you lack generosity, or are you radically generous?

Chapter 6 Violence is for Wimps

Saturation

Gangs. Terrorists. Enraged spouses. Playground bullies. Our world is addicted to violence. I mean, we really do love a good fight, don’t we? We’re saturated with the stuff. It shows up everywhere, doesn’t it? It’s especially obvious in our entertainment. Movies, TV, videogames, music…everywhere. What’s really interesting to me is that we’ve essentially replaced conflict in our storytelling with all-out violence.

Now, what do I mean by that last sentence? I mean that every story requires a form of conflict to bring the story to its resolution. Otherwise the story is really going nowhere. But that doesn’t mean that every story requires violence. Conflict and violence are not necessarily the same thing. A story can move along a line of conflict without ever getting truly violent. A great example of this is the film 12 Angry Men. If you haven’t seen this film, you must do so now. There are 2 versions: an older one and a newer one. I prefer the newer one. Go rent it. Don’t worry; this book will be here when you’re finished.

If you haven’t seen the film, it’s about a jury who has to decide if a person is guilty or innocent of murder. The whole film takes place in a single room. It’s brilliant because there are no stabbings, shootings, bombings, martial arts fight scenes or anything like that. But it is chockfull of conflict. The conflict in the movie is almost entirely verbal, yet there isn’t a great amount of coarse language either.

Our culture is so saturated with violence and a desire for it that if even a hint of conflict is in the air, it starts drooling and pulls out guns, knives, and nukes, itching for the inevitable sequels to Die Hard and Terminator. But it’s not just in our entertainment, is it? It’s in the way we relate to neighbors and nations (the war on terror). It’s in the way our children attend school and college (Columbine and Virginia Tech). It’s in the way some men try to conquer women (rape). The line of reasoning is that if party #2 doesn’t see things the way party #1 does, then one party or the other is going to bring the other in line with its own way, sometimes using violence and not always as a last resort.

Some have suggested that the real life problems of violence can be attributed to the violence we put in our entertainment. So, if we somehow eliminated violence from video games, movies and TV the violence would sputter out after a while, right? Yeah, well, the problem is that violence has been around long before these forms of entertainment even existed (Genesis 4:8). If we ever could get away with the total removal of violence from these forms, do you know what we would be left with? Boring video games, people in the Middle East still suicide bombing each other, and people in the West still dropping bombs on the nations we don’t like. Really the solutions offered by the anti-violence in video games and TV groups are fairly uncreative alternatives. There’s got to be a better way.

Instead of taking away violent entertainment from people’s lives and leaving a big empty space to be filled with who-knows-what, let’s return to the tools of love and reconciliation we looked at in chapter 2. Modeling and teaching these ways of living is the beginning of the rehabilitation of our culture from its addiction to violence. What is violent conflict, after all, but the absence of reconciliation? If you perform an act of violence, generally what you are doing is attempting to damage or destroy a person you feel has harmed or wronged you and who you desire to wrong in some reciprocal way. If you perform an act of reconciliation, what you are doing is attempting to bring healing and restoration to a person who has wronged you or who you have wronged in some way. Violence and reconciliation seek opposite ends. Violence seeks for you to win, while reconciliation seeks for you and the other person to win.

What does this look like on a personal scale? Is there someone you know who you feel like punching every time you see them? How about that annoying coworker? How about the people who live in the apartment near yours who blast loud music in the early hours of the morning? Is it a brother or sister who gets on your nerves? Is it the slow clerk in the express checkout lane? Could it be the guy who takes the parking space you clearly were about to enter? You need to reconcile with them if possible.

What does this look like on a global scale? How are we ever going to win a war against terrorists by killing them and making more of them angrier with us and more determined to strike back? When are we going to realize that violence is cyclical and that the more violent we are with them, the more violent they will be with us? Or, looking at it from a different angle, should we be drawing a line between “us” and “them” in the first place? We need to start asking how we can begin to seek global reconciliation.

Now I’d like to let you in on a little secret: Violence is for wimps. Yeah, you heard me. And before you get any bright ideas, I’ve already got plans to turn that into a bumper sticker! Okay, be honest; how many of you saw the title of this chapter in the table of contents and came here first?

What I mean when I say violence is for wimps is some people can’t stand it when they’re not in control. When you see the word, “wimp,” you’re probably thinking of a person who is weak, right? People who desire control over others are generally very weak people. They are weak in the sense that they are unable to imagine a better way of life outside of themselves having power over others. Their vision of life is very small and impotent because they can’t see past themselves. They are very limited because they only rely on their own understanding and strength. This is why some dictators live in fear of the people they govern. They fear that someone will rise up and break free. Yet this isn’t true only of the Hitlers and Husseins of our world, is it? It can happen anywhere. It can happen in schools, homes, jobs. It can happen anywhere people believe they should control others.

People seek means to forcibly bend other people to their will. Then when things don’t go their way, say, if someone resists being controlled, the person desiring the power of control retaliates with further violence. I’d like to outline these three characteristics of a disposition toward violence: an obsession with control, forcibly asserting the will, and retaliation. Then we’ll take a brief look at God’s way, which is a way of shalom and how it is embodied in Jesus and the early Christian community.

Violence as Obsession for Control

The first characteristic or stage of violence is an obsession for control. Violence is ultimately about control, about a person or people “getting their way.” Often, if someone believes they have the truth and others do not, they begin to see an obligation on their part to bring others in line with that perspective of the truth. But, when the other person declines participation what can sometimes happen is the first person, the one who holds the belief, will not accept the other person’s decision. So, now the first person has a choice to make. He can either wish the other person the best or he can continue to pursue his agenda.

Which do you think most often happens? Yeah, the first person will usually try to continue the debate. But what if the other person isn’t interested? What if, in fact, the other person is turned off more and more by the persistent attempts of the first guy to proselytize him? And what if the first guy just won’t let up?

If you’ve ever experienced anything like this you probably would say the first guy is really annoying and not much fun to be around. You might tag him with all kinds of labels like fanatic, wacko, zealot, etc. But there’s potentially a lot more going on here than a delinquent member of society. In this relentless kind of attitude we find an obsession for control, which is one of the seeds from which violence grows.

In this case the obsession for control is centered on one person getting others to believe the same information he believes. The violence which comes out of this is often verbal more than physical. Degradation of the other in the form of name-calling and belittling their cherished beliefs and traditions is a way to attack or do violence to a person’s beliefs and emotional well being.

To the person with the obsession for control, none of this is as important as himself and the version of truth he clings to. And it’s of no consequence if a person is damaged in someway during the process of getting him to believe like the first person does. Violence doesn’t care as long as it gets its own way.

This can be just as true of Christians as it can be of Muslims, atheists, patriots, anarchists, abortionists, pro-lifers, and so on. I’m not saying it’s bad to believe in a single vision of the truth. Even people who tell you they don’t believe in absolute truth or a singular vision of reality are in a sense doing so, because they exclude the possibility of just one thing being true. It’s the exclusiveness of an idea which gives it that sense of absoluteness, even if it only comes in a small dose.

Holding to a single vision for life can turn bad if we try to force ourselves onto someone else when they don’t want it. The problem with trying to establish this kind of violent control over people is that it goes against the grain of our ability to choose. Regardless of whether or not the way of life we believe is right or not it’s up to each person to choose it or reject it. And there are certainly better alternatives than trying to control someone’s belief. We must peacefully invite others into a better way of life. An obsession for control indicates a proclivity towards violence, not peace.

Violence as Asserting the Will

Have you ever demanded anything? Did you actually use the word “demand” when you did it? How did that go over? I remember being very young and holding a broken toy in my hands. I wanted the toy fixed. On the cartoons I watched I would see powerful characters getting things done by making demands of other characters. “It seems to work for them,” I must have thought to myself, “I’ll give it a try, too.” So I did indeed give it a try. I gave my mom the toy, explaining how I wanted it fixed. Then I added something like, “And it had better be fixed when I come back!” Needless to say my mom’s response wasn’t what I was looking for.

In my six-year-old brain I had this illusion of power. I thought I could assert my will and then what I wanted to happen would become reality. As it turns out, I was wrong. Apparently, my mom was a little incensed at her six-year-old son giving her orders. But I don’t think it entirely had to do with my age. I’m pretty sure if my father (a grown man, mind you) had come home that day and attempted to make a similar assertion of his will he would have ended up sleeping on the couch that night.

We’re not as powerful as we sometimes like to think we are, are we? Nevertheless, there are lots of people out there who not only attempt to assert their will over other people, but they actually succeed at it. This sort of event is usually accompanied by either a threat (subtle or overt) or a demonstration of violence. Assertion of the will is the second characteristic and stage of violence.

The most obvious example of this is an international one: When one country invades or oppresses another. We could talk all day about what was going on when Iraq invaded Kuwait in the early 90’s, how the U.S. then invaded Iraq, or really how the U.S. continues to invade other countries. Now, what does this look like when we distill it to a smaller, more personal scale?

Have you ever seen a parent pushing a shopping cart with a small child in the seat who issues a blood curdling scream until the parent relents and gives the kid what he wants? How about when a teenage boyfriend pressures his girlfriend to have sex with him? “If you really loved me…” Or what about anyone who has ever used the “if-you-really-loved-me” card to get what they wanted? And tell me what you think of the bully who beats up other kids for their lunch money, and the popular kids who pick on the unpopular kids, and the…you get the point.

Asserting your will where it isn’t welcome is an act of violence, sometime physical but not always. Violence makes demands and pushes other people around and manipulates them, sometimes forcing them to perform the whims of the violator. Who are the people in every society who regularly make demands? Terrorists, people who take hostages. The thing which makes terrorists so dangerous in the first place is they believe what they are doing is right. They want to be terrorists.

Likewise, people who assert their will want to be exactly what they are. Except when I was going to school as a young boy, we didn’t call them terrorists. We called them bullies. That’s what people who assert their will on others are; they’re bullies. They are violent because that is how they learned to get what they want. And it’s really too bad because bullies don’t have any real friends; they only know people who live in fear under them.

Violence as Retaliation

Now, what happens to people who don’t go along with the whims of the violators, bullies and terrorists of this world? What is the outcome for them? When a person who is already prone to violence feels snubbed by the refusal of their will the result is almost always immediate retaliation. This is the third and usually the most physical stage of violence.

This is where the playground bully pushes the smaller kid down. This is when the abusive spouse hits the other one. This is what happens when a recently fired employee shows up at work with a gun. This is who was behind the school shootings. This is when the Empire strikes back.

Retaliation and revenge show us the true weakness behind violence. These are a signal to us that those who use the violence were never really in control in the first place. The fact that they feel they must lash out in response indicates the power they wield is only temporary at best, nonexistent at worst. Retaliation is meant to save face in the presence of an opposing element. People retaliate so they can maintain their illusion of power.

If you ever find yourself on the cusp of striking back at someone who you feel has wronged you or done something deserving of your wrath, ask yourself why you feel the need to do so. Is it because what they did was wrong and you think you have the power, the might to make it right? Do you think it’s your duty to put them in their place? Or could it possibly be you desire to be in control, and getting your revenge on them will somehow magically give you that power to do so? The problem is revenge never satisfies.

In the aftermath of retaliation, we’re always left wanting more because violence cannot put us back into the same relationship we had with a person before the incident. Violence does not restore, it tears down. It does not reconcile, it separates further. It does not redeem, it creates an ever greater rift and deepens the debt of hatred.

Violence is for wimps because it is powerless to bring justice, restoration, and peace to this broken world. It shatters even more the wholeness this world needs. It’s like the kid who breaks the toy saying, “If I can’t play with it, nobody can!” Nobody wants to play with that kid. Nobody wants to be his friend because he’s selfish and demanding. He’s a bully, a hostage-taker, a terrorist. He’s a wimp because he can’t do anything but subtract, take away, leave a void. He is powerless. Violence is for wimps.

Violence, Shalom, and Jesus

So, what is the alternative? How do we combat violence without using violence to do so? We must saturate ourselves with shalom, the peace of God instead of violence. We must not mistake peace to here mean a mere absence of violence or conflict. Instead it indicates wholeness for the entire universal. Yes, violence and conflict are absent from the biblical picture of shalom, but so much more is present in it than the noticeable lack of the sound of swords clanging and the report of gunshots.

The peace of God is present when things are restored, put back together into their intended state. Shalom is found when people you wouldn’t normally expect to find in the same place come together for common purpose. This is how the Scripture describes the Church. In Paul’s discussion of what the Church is in Ephesians 2:11-22, we catch a glimpse of this shalom, this peace.

He says Jesus “is our peace,” and that he has taken the two basic groups of people in this world (those who were God’s people and those who weren’t) and “has made the two one.” Jesus is our shalom, and therefore has brought together all kinds of people who would never have given each other the time of day before. You see, it’s not about national pride or individual egos. It’s not about who’s in charge and who serves. It’s about everyone serving each other equally. This is what it looks like when shalom saturates a community of people.

To create this Jesus had to “[destroy]…the dividing wall of hostility” (2:14 Italics mine). How did He destroy hostility, violence? “His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity…thus making peace…to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility” (Ephesians 2:15-16). He put hostility to death not by doing violence to it, but by allowing it to do violence to Him, exhausting its strength on Him.

Peace takes real power, real strength to establish and maintain. It is so much harder for anyone to maintain peace than it is for them to lash out violently. To carry on the tradition of shalom initiated by Jesus on the Cross, we too have to be willing to receive violence without returning it. And not only do we not exchange violence for violence, but we exchange good deeds for violence. Look at this passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans.

Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. On the contrary:

“If your enemy is hungry, feed him;

if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.

In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. (Romans 12:17-21)

If we are to overcome evil, we are going to have to do it by using more good, not more evil and more violence. The world already has enough evil and violence, why add to it? Why contribute to the problem? This may sound like simply allowing abuse to come upon you, but if you examine it carefully, it’s really about a proactive attempt to abolish evil by overwhelming it. The point of the passage isn’t about allowing violence to happen to you, is it? The point is to generate massive amounts of good. That was the way of Jesus.

Let’s look at Jesus in regards to the three stages of violence we looked at earlier. First, what about an obsession for control? Not Jesus. The one guy who could have thrown His weight around and given some lessons in control didn’t seem interested. Jesus isn’t about manipulating people like puppets. He’s not about temper tantrums when He doesn’t get His way. The closest He comes to this is where he goes after the money changers and sellers in the temple. But that wasn’t about Himself. It was about His Father and the people who were being exploited by the corrupted system of temple-worship. The cleansing of the temple was a defense of others.

How about asserting the will? Again, we do not find this sort of thing in Jesus. “Yet not my will, but yours be done,” He says in Luke 22:42. Then He tells us in Mark 10:45, “For the son of man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Jesus is simply not interested in asserting His will over others. In fact, He submits to the Father’s will. Then He serves other people rather than demanding service. What kind of king is He? What kind of ruler talks this way and does these things? Only Jesus. He’s the only one who could ever put this kind of life into effect and invite us to join Him, because the ways of this world are not His ways.

And what does Jesus do with retaliation? Nothing. You don’t see a scene where Jesus walks out of the tomb and says, “Alright! Where are Pilate and those priests? I’ll teach them to crucify me!” What Jesus taught in Matthew 5:38-42 He put into practice on the Cross. He took upon Himself the evil done to Him by those at hand and by the rest of us in our sin and turned it into something good. He took the most vicious act of hate and turned it into redemption.

He could have retaliated if He wanted to. He could have stopped the whole thing and brought down unrivaled destruction on His attackers if He chose. He certainly demonstrated amazing abilities before this. Surely removing himself from the Cross and leveling those lined up against Him was not outside the scope of His power. A certain hymn suggests He could have called ten thousand angels to His rescue. Perhaps He could have. He is the Son of God, after all. But He did none of those things. Instead He took everything hurled at Him and died a brutal death.

He was more interested in creating shalom than more violence. He was more interested in creating a pathway for a rebellious creation to return back to its creator. He is our peace and He shows us the way to more peace. He gives us the path. “I am the way,” He says in John 14:6. John also relays Jesus’ words about the violence and struggle we have with the world. He says, “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). But this victory over the world and its violent ways is not for Jesus alone, He also gives it to us. “For everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith” (1 John 5:4).

I’m not afraid of this world and what it thinks it can do. Jesus has already overcome this world through His act of love on the Cross. And not only that, but because Jesus has overcome the world, so have I. And so have you, if you are of Christ.

Chapter 7 Spirit on the Move

Dynamic

God is not stationary. He is a living, moving, active being who is interested in what happens to His creation. From the very first time we meet Him in Genesis 1:1 He is busy doing things and creating stuff. How anyone could conceive that God spends most of His time sitting up in heaven away from us observing the comings and goings of this world is beyond me. And yet, I wonder how many of us think something like this? The picture the Scriptures paint is that of a God intimately involved with the world. God does something here every day.

The word that comes to mind is dynamic. To me, dynamic suggests something alive and flowing with ability and power. In this way God is very much a dynamic being. I think this is why He is called the “living God” twenty-eight times throughout the biblical story. That phrase contrasts Him to the countless false gods we encounter in the Bible and in our own day. These things are idols: static, powerless, dead things which are not worthy of worship. The living God is anything but.

Many people seem to think of God as some kind of rigid disciplinary figure because He “does not change like shifting shadows” (James 1:17). While it’s true the character and nature of God never change, that does not stop God from doing new things. “See, the former things have taken place, and new things I declare; before they spring into being I announce them to you” (Isaiah 42:9). “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:19). “From now on I will tell you of new things, of hidden things unknown to you” (Isaiah 48:6). “The LORD will create a new thing on the earth” (Jeremiah 31:22). Jesus gave a “new command” (John 13:34). He created a “new covenant” through His blood (1 Corinthians 11:25). He promises to make a “new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1), a “new Jerusalem” (Revelation 21:2). In fact, He wants to “[make] everything new” (Revelation 21:5). The Father and the Son seem to be endlessly working on us and this place.

The Spirit

In the Biblical story we’re also introduced to the Holy Spirit of God. Not an impersonal force, but a person, another member of the Godhead. The Holy Spirit is also always on the move. Genesis 1:2 says, “And the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” I want you to notice the word, hovering. Commenting on this word, the JPS Torah Commentary says “The basic idea…is vibration, movement. Hitherto all is static, lifeless, immobile. Motion, which is the essential element in change, originates with God’s dynamic presence” (Sarna 7).

The dynamic power of the Spirit of God was present during the initial creation of all things. We should probably also understand this power continues to work in the world even today. Speaking about all creatures one writer says, “When you send your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground” (Psalm 104:30). Notice this isn’t a reference to the initial creation. It doesn’t say “were created,” but “are created.” Then the writer says God “renews” the face of the ground, the earth. It’s continual. The Holy Spirit of God is still actively involved in the act of creation.

“Formless and Empty”

When we read the first two verses of Genesis we see the creation was at first made formless and empty. It was raw, wild, untamed. God created the earth to be a chaotic mass of material. This brings back all those memories of being really young and opening up a can of Play-Doh. That little colored mass had so much potential, didn’t it? A whole world of possibilities sat there in a small, balled up lump waiting for you to take its wild, formless heap and make something spectacular out of it.

There’s a passage in the book of Exodus where we see this chaotic kind of situation filled with potential. But this time it’s on a much smaller, more human level. Exodus 18:13-27 gives us an interesting little scene early on in the life of the nation of Israel. Moses is out in the wilderness with the young nation and he’s doing the whole legal work of the nation by himself. His father-in-law visits and when he sees what Moses is doing he says, “what you are doing is not good.” Why? Is it because Moses is going to wear himself out? Yes, that’s part of it. Is it because there is no way one man can realistically take care of all the judicial matters of an entire nation on his own? Again, yes, but that’s not the heart of the problem. The central problem with what Moses is attempting to do is it’s disorganized, it’s formless and empty.

Look again at what Moses’ father-in-law says. He says what Moses is doing is not “good.” If you return to the creation account of Genesis 1 you will find this same word repeated a number of times after most of the six days. Why does God declare His creative work good? Is it simply because He likes the way it looks? No, it’s because He is good and the work of His hands are a reflection of Himself. But it’s also good for another reason. Each step in the act of creation is a step away from formlessness and emptiness. When God created on the six days, He took the raw, formless and empty material and shaped it into something. He forms creatures to fill the earth.

God’s intended movement of the whole creation is from formless and empty to formed and full. This is why God commands Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply, to “fill” the earth. This is what God values. He desires to see His whole creation brought to order. And He sends the Holy Spirit to hover, to move over the face of the formless creation to initiate a change toward form and fullness.

You’re Full of It

When the Spirit of God is on the move unbelievably powerful things begin to happen. Ignorant fishermen get the courage to stand up to prominent religious leaders (Acts 4). Important officials submit themselves to the teaching of the followers of an executed Jewish Messiah (Acts 8). Murderers of Christians become leaders of the faith they once rejected (Acts 9). It’s amazing really. Look at this section from the short book by the lead singer of U2, Bono, titled On the Move:

Love was on the move. Mercy was on the move. God was on the move. Moving people of all kinds to work with others they had never met and never would have cared to meet. Conservative church groups hanging out with the spokesmen for the gay community, all singing off the same hymn sheet on AIDS…soccer moms and quarterbacks…hip-hop stars and country stars…this is what happens when God gets on the move: crazy stuff happens!

Popes were seen wearing sunglasses…

Jesse Helms was seen with a ghetto blaster…

Crazy stuff! Evidence of the Spirit. (Bono 14-15)

In the Gospel of John, Jesus promises the Spirit will fill His followers after He ascends. He says to them “he lives with you and will be in you” (John 14:17 italics mine). Paul says much the same thing to the Christians in the city of Ephesus when he encourages them to “not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18).

This filling of the Spirit is not about a change in location for the Spirit of God. God, and therefore the Holy Spirit, is omnipresent, meaning His presence is everywhere. It’s not like the Spirit is finally allowed access to some spot of universal geography He couldn’t go before. The filling of the Spirit of God is, instead, the regenerating and empowering act of God in the life of a believing person (a true Christian) or group of people (a church). Regeneration is often correctly associated with salvation. But it should also be understood to be more than simply the saving of a person’s soul. Regeneration means “to give life again.” When the Spirit of God fills a person and regenerates him or her, aside from that person receiving eternal life in the future, that person is also opened up to life that is truly life here and now.

A Life of Acts Animated

If the Spirit is on the move and is in us who believe, then we too are being animated towards movement. Regeneration accomplishes the opening up of the potential for people to live the Christian life. And by the way, the Christian life isn’t about holding to a set of disconnected beliefs. While belief is a key aspect of who we are as followers of Jesus Christ, it is not life itself, as if merely holding information in your brain was the whole point. The Christian life is a series of interactions with the world. Our focus should be on engaging with and caring for the world, which has been broken almost since the beginning of time.

Belief is not life, but it is what gives meaning, purpose, and direction to life. This is why Christian doctrine is important, but not the be-all and end-all of our existence. If we allow teaching to take first place in defining who and what we are, we will become intellectuals who do nothing. Likewise, if we try only to live the Christian life by the Spirit, but do not allow the teaching of the Bible to define what that looks like, we will become aimless. We will be “tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and cunning craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming” (Ephesians 4:14). To truly generate a New Book of Acts worth reading requires the marriage of two distinct things: Belief informed by sound Biblical teaching and the application of those beliefs in the movements of our lives.

This life is a life of acts. We can’t escape acting. The question we need to ask ourselves is whether or not we are going to allow our lives, and therefore our acts, to be animated by the Spirit of God. This will mean serious study of the Scriptures and discussions of how to apply them to our lives today. This will also mean that we allow the Holy Spirit to do His work in us and not resist or quench His working. It’s not about the great things we come up with and the wonderful things we do. It’s about what He can do through broken vessels like us.

I think we too often consider the Holy Spirit a tool to be used to accomplish the things we need or want to do, when in fact it is the other way around. We are the tools. The Spirit can and probably will use whomever He chooses. It’s not like He is so fortunate that He gets to work in us. He’s not the one with the immeasurably great privilege. It’s us. He has been filling, working in, and moving people who have been frustrating Him for thousands of years. Sometimes the tools try to act like they’re the workman, like they’re the ones in control. How we must get on His nerves sometimes! And yet, He hasn’t given up on us.

Be Still

But, we also have to come to a point where we realize we need times of rest and rejuvenation. I mean, hey, even God rested on the seventh day. The dynamic, regenerating, forming and filling life given by the Spirit can take a lot out of a person. And yet God, no doubt through His Spirit in us, offers us comfort and rest. It would probably be smart of us to take Him up on that offer once in a while.

In 2nd Corinthians, Paul relays just such a time. “For when we came into Macedonia, this body of ours had no rest, but we were harassed at every turn—conflicts on the outside, fears within. But God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus, and not only by his coming but also by the comfort you had given him” (2nd Corinthians 7:5-7). God provided comfort and rest to someone who had no rest. How does God do this? He does it through another person. Somehow it can be said that God is doing the comforting. I would argue that this act of comfort and giving rest is an act of the Christian life animated by the filling of the Spirit in the life and acts of Titus. Titus performs a task of giving rest, but it is an act empowered by God.

Part of the idea here is that we serve to alternate with each other in working under the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit. Paul needed the comfort and rest God empowered Titus to give. This probably means that Paul could in turn perform in a similar manner for Titus and others. It’s a little like carpooling. Titus and Paul don’t have to drive two separate cars and be going a hundred miles and hour each at the same time, all the time. That will just wear out two cars very quickly. Instead Paul drives for a while and Titus alternates with him to give him a reprieve. The Christian community is still designed to carry on this tradition of giving rest and comfort to each other.

And this rest has a purpose, too. It enables us to be refreshed by God and by each other (sometimes at the same time) so that we maintain an effective life in the Spirit when we get back on the move. So, how are you on the move right now? You see, in some way, all of us who believe are moving or going somewhere with our faith.

Some of us are going forward, some backward, and some of us are being dragged forward by the Spirit, kicking and screaming the whole way. Which one of these are you? If you could choose a way, which would it be? I know which one I would choose. Do you?

Chapter 8 Churches as Launching Pads for Missional Activity

Something New

The life of the Church is a cycle of living activity that is only complete when the Church is on the move, active for Christ in the world. So, let’s talk about a theology of going.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: The old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. (2nd Corinthians 5:17-20)

In the Church, God began doing and making something new. He is making a people like this world has never seen before. God is forming in us His new humanity.

What makes this new humanity so different from the old one? I mean, why would God bother to create a new humanity in the first place? The obvious answer is that something was not quite right with the old one. The old humanity chose a path which led away from its Creator, its God. It shirked its original design to be the caretakers of the whole world in partnership with God. It said, “Thanks for everything, God, but I think I’ll try things my way for a while.” The old humanity was led into rebellion against God by God’s enemy, the Satan, the accuser. In this rebellion the old humanity went down into the mud of sin and took the whole creation with it.

But, from the moment of rebellion, God set in motion a plan to reclaim the creation using the very humanity which had walked away from Him. However, He would have to do something different, because the old humanity obviously wasn’t going to be fully cooperative. Still, God was unwilling to completely wipe out the old humanity and then begin all over again with a completely new model. So, God would show the creation and the old humanity what humanity was truly supposed to be. This is where the new humanity comes into the picture.

In Jesus, God showed the whole creation, including its wayward stewards, what humanity was supposed to be like. Then Jesus gained a following. There were other people who thought, “Oh, I get it! It’s not really about sex, alcohol, money, fame, entertainment or any of this other stuff that turns my head because those things turn my head away from God. Now I’m beginning to see it.” So this following was transformed into the new humanity through the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. Jesus’ blood was spilled and His life was spent and then parts of the old humanity became renewed, redeemed by this sacrifice to show the rest of creation what existence is all about.

But, the new humanity is not simply a showpiece in the house of God, like a trophy. The new humanity has an active purpose. That active purpose is to go and represent Christ to the whole world. But in order to do that, we must not think of Church as an event that happens once or twice a week in one place. We need to believe that Church can be in any and every time, and at any and every place.

To represent Christ to the whole world, to be the Church in every time, at any place, in every way, we have got to relearn the art of “Go.” Imagine yourself in a long line of cars at a stoplight that turns green but no one moves because the car in front doesn’t move. How do you feel about the first car at that point? Some people would yell some things they wouldn’t normally say in polite company. But what if that first car was the Church?

The apostle Paul calls us Christ’s ambassadors. The apostle Peter uses a similar idea to ‘ambassadors’ in his 1st letter. The term he uses for it is priesthood. “You also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1st Peter 2:5). A priest’s job can be described this way: A priest is a person who actively and intentionally displays the life-giving power of God. But does it matter if we put God’s power on display in our lives if we’re not going to the world to display it? Or could it even be said that if we’re not going, we’re not putting God’s life and power on display?

In these verses both ambassadors and priests are people who ‘represent’ God, particularly Jesus. We represent Him not by carrying the message, but by being the message. Notice that in 2nd Corinthians 5:18-20 it’s not simply about the words of reconciliation but the ministry of reconciliation. Ministry is never exclusively about words, but a combination of words and deeds.

If we make the message totally about the words concerning the message, but divorce the words from what God has done in us, and is doing in us then we are being neither ambassadors nor priests. Brennan Manning said “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, and walk out the door and deny Him with their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.” It’s about more than our words; it’s also what we do.

The Church is most potentially what it was designed to be when the building where it gathers for worship is vacant. Our worship gatherings on Sunday mornings must not be the single thing that defines us as Church. That is only a fraction of what Church is about. If we allow Church to be defined by this one physical gathering we have missed the whole point. Is gathering for worship important? Yes! Is it the only important function of Church? Not a chance!

I say we have believed the lie that Church only happens on Sundays for far too long. If we wanted, we could gather for worship on Thursdays in someone’s basement. There is nothing magic about Sunday.

Two major problems arise when we make church about our once a week regular gathering: 1.) We make Church about Christians, which it is not and 2.) We become tied to only a visible expression of Church. First, Church is not about Christians. It’s about Christ. We don’t gather for our own sake because that would be selfish. Regular gathering is instead about worshipping Christ and learning to minister to others from God’s Word.

Second, our worship gathering is only one visible expression of the Church. The reality of God’s people goes far beyond what our eyes can see. The most basic principle of faith in anything is that there is more than what we can see. If we tie ourselves to the visible we ignore the invisible.

If those things happen then we make Church about Christians and not about Christ and the people He desires to deliver. If we become tied to that which is visible, we become inwardly focused and selfish. One thing a selfish congregation cannot do is go. As long as we are about “us,” about our programs, about what we get out of worship, then we’re not representing, not being the Church God made us to be.

Launching Pad

If the regular Sunday worship gathering is not the central event of the Church, then what is? I submit to you that the central event of Christianity is mission.

One thing I believe needs to be said about mission is that it is about more than getting people into a church. A lot of the time we spend on mission-related activity, such as personal evangelism or community services, are generally focused on getting people interested in “coming to our church.” Filling the seats is a good thing. But, as the central event of the Church, our mission’s primary direction isn’t necessarily to be concerned with this. Numerical growth is only a potential result of the Church’s mission. Instead, mission takes followers of Jesus Christ in outward directions. Instead of getting non-Christians into a local church, mission is about getting Christians out of our churches and into the neighborhoods where non-Christians live, unaware or simply uninterested in what happens when a local church gathers.

Mission is also about more than convincing people of four or five statements of belief or fact. We’re emerging out of an age where formulaic belief systems are all-important. Yet, at the same time, we can’t allow ourselves to be directed solely by what we feel and by our personal experience. All of these things must be held in moderation and, whenever necessary, in tension with each other. All of these aspects, or ways to believe, must be part of the overall conversation which is generated by the Church in its mission. The mission of the church should welcome all people from all walks of life to a common table set by the servant hands of Christ Jesus and all of us who claim to follow Him. At this table we eat, drink, and encourage one another in all areas of life. It is at this table, this place of conversation, where we discuss and learn about laughter, crisis, addiction, personal salvation, exile, restoration, what it means to bear the image of God, freedom from the power of sin, care for God’s good world, and on and on we could go.

I’d also like to explore a few thoughts on long-term and short-term missions, as well as some other key identifying factors and what these might mean in developing our understanding of Church and mission. For the longest time, when people heard the word “missionary” they conceived of a person who raised funds and left the United States or some European countries and traveled to distant, dark jungles in search of savages to convert. No doubt for some this idea still exists. But, generally speaking, these notions of missions and missionaries are beginning to break down and be reconstructed into a broader, fuller description of what missions are and the activities ‘missionaries’ do.

A somewhat recent development in the area of missions is what are broadly referred to as short-term missions. These, as you might guess from the name, are trips undertaken by an individual or a group of people to some location, either foreign or domestic, with some specific goal or objective over a short period of time. What makes this different from long-term missions is the truncated length of time spent on the trip. Obviously. The time may span anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. This kind of endeavor has grown increasingly more popular among churches over recent years. This may indicate an interesting phenomenon in our churches: fear of commitment to the mission of Jesus Christ.

Long-term missions often appear to have an inaccessible quality to them. I don’t want to leave behind my treasured comforts, which is what a long-term commitment to mission activity seems to suggest to many people. This is of course based on the false assumption that mission necessarily means “foreign.” It’s also based on another false assumption: that the only people who can do mission are officially authorized and sponsored missionaries. This is simply untrue. Mission can occur anywhere.

So, because of this fear of commitment to a life of mission work overseas, lots of Christians ignore their calling to be ambassadors and priests. Short-term missions are the result of this kind of thinking. A short-term project requires a substantially smaller commitment and is therefore viewed as much more accessible to the average Christian. It is this misconception and misapplication of mission that is crippling the Church’s mission in and to this world.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m mostly in favor of short-term missions for a number of reasons. Let me be very clear about this. Short-term missions are not the problem; they are a result and even a potential solution to the problem. First, they have the potential to open up a person’s understanding to the reality that there is a much wider world outside of the life they normally live day-in, day-out. Many people need this kind of experience. We all too often suffer from a kind of cultural tunnel-vision which keeps us from seeing the greater needs and suffering of the majority of our world’s population. Sometimes being put into a foreign context or even a dramatically different domestic context serves as a powerful eye-opener for people.

Second, and probably a result of the first, short-term missions often have a way of generating further interest in mission participation. The experience of being involved with God’s work seems to awaken a thirst for more. We need this especially if the surge of short-term missions indicates a lack of commitment to Jesus’ mission in and to the world. Hopefully one result of this is people will take their new understanding of mission and apply it to their home context. Our description of mission and missionary must be retooled to include the way we interact with everyone, not just intentional evangelism of foreigners in distant lands. Mission is possible everywhere.

So where does the worship gathering fit into this scheme for mission? The regular worship gatherings are important to mission because they are the launching pads for mission. Think of it organically. A worship gathering is like a seed. In it is all the potential for a healthy, growing, living thing. While the seed and its contents are all compacted together it’s going through a process of nourishment. Think of what Paul says in Colossians 3:16. “Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns and songs from the Spirit, singing with gratitude in your hearts.” The nourishment of Christians in worship is never only for themselves, is it? It’s also for “one another.” But then this isn’t to be kept inside the walls of the church either. It’s all part of the “message of Christ,” the “ministry of reconciliation.” As with a seed, it all starts in one location. When that seed is ready it opens, and the contents of the worship gathering spill outward and grow in various directions. And it does so with a mission.

Faith and Movement

God is calling His Church to be on the move, to go. Sometimes this is scary, it is difficult because we don’t know exactly where He is calling us to go. But we’re not the first people to face such a situation, are we? “By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going” (Hebrews 11:8).

Abraham knew he was called by God to go, to move into a new land, a strange place he had never been. He didn’t even know where it was he was going…but he still went. Hebrews says he went “by faith.” How many of us could do that? Yet that is what God is calling us to: faith that what He has for us to do can be done, regardless of our fears.

I understand the desire to have some idea of what God wants us to do or where to go, but at what point does “I’m praying for God’s will to be revealed in my life” turn into an excuse not to go? And people, we’ve got to stop telling God we’re not going to do certain things, because you know that’s the stuff He’s going to have us do. I remember when I was younger telling God there was no way I could do what I saw the pastor doing every week. There was no way I could come up with a new teaching every Sunday for a church. Yet that is where I now am and what I love doing. Like Abraham, we are called into strange territory, perhaps not literally a strange land, but definitely we’re called to go and do something we would never have done without God’s call.

If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. If we are a new creation, He’s going to ask us to do some new things. Being a Christian means being ready for something different: A different destiny, a different kind of life, a different purpose, and making a difference in the world.

If we are God’s people, then we are His ambassadors, His priests meant to represent Him by putting His power and new life on display in our lives. The only way this can be accomplished is if we, by the power of God given through the Holy Spirit, go out and engage the hurting, unbelieving world with the love of Christ, not just in word but in deed. “Abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us” (1st Peter 2:11-12). So, go. And let this world see you and say, “That’s different, that’s good. I want a part of that.”

Chapter 9 Narrative Apologetics

When most people hear the word ‘apologetics,’ they probably assume its meaning has something to do with being sorry. After all, when you apologize for something it usually means you realize you did something wrong and are sorry for it. While there is a slight relationship between apologetics and apology, we have to understand that when a person practices the two, they do something very different with each.

Why so Defensive?

1 Peter 3:15 says, “But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” When Peter writes about giving an “answer,” the Greek word he uses is apologia (sound familiar?). It can just as easily be translated “defense.” Therefore, apologetics means a ‘defense’ of something. It should be pointed out that when you defend something you are never to be sorry for doing so. In fact, if you practice apologetics you should believe in and stand up for that which you defend, not “apologize” or say you’re sorry for it. Enter: Christian apologetics, or the defense of the faith.

I should point out here my view on apologetics is in some ways very different than many of the traditional ways of doing the defense of the faith. The reason for this is that much of the existing Christian apologetic has been shaped by the Enlightenment and the Modern period with strict adherence to logic and observable evidence. I am not saying these things are bad, only that there is more. Some of the arguments for the existence of God, for example, have proven useful in the past and will no doubt continue to do so in the present and future. Also, physical evidence produced through the efforts of archeology has and hopefully will continue to strengthen the claims of Scripture.

A good example of this is the appearance of the James ossuary. This was the artifact which led to a flurry of controversy and speculation a number of years ago. An ossuary is a stone box in which is placed the bones of a person after their flesh has decayed while lying in a tomb for about a year. This practice lasted only for about 100 years, or so. During this time Jesus and His first disciples lived. The ossuary in question was found and bears an inscription which reads “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” Now, whether or not you believe this artifact is genuine is not my point. The point is that archeology has provided us with some interesting and provocative physical evidence to support some of the Christian historical claims. Yet, it seems odd to me to defend faith solely with objective and physical evidence when Scripture clearly tells us “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1 – emphasis mine).

Is there a place in the defense of the faith for objective, physical evidence of the history proclaimed in God’s Word? You bet there is! In fact, later I plan to point out where logic and objective reason are helpful to this different form of the defense of the faith. But since so much of the Christian apologetic has rested on this in the past I want to take this opportunity to explore some different, less familiar territory. I want to explore in this chapter something I’ve come to think of as a narrative apologetic. I understand this may be new to many of you and that it may also be a suspicious and strange idea. Nevertheless, allow me to assure you that I am basing my ideas and conclusions on solid Biblical example.

How it’s Different

Before we go on too far, I should explain what I mean by a narrative apologetic. First of all, understand that what we think of as traditional apologetics has a tendency to focus more upon external things: historical/archaeological evidence, the historical reliability of the biblical texts, and the like. You might say the primary question which accompanies traditional apologetics is “What can I see?” A narrative apologetic focuses more upon internal things: the change God makes within a person who believes. The primary question which accompanies narrative apologetics is “What can I say?” Narrative apologetics deals with your personal story and your encounter with the transforming power of God.

Recently, I noticed somebody new at our Sunday worship gathering so I went over to say hello and introduce myself. Almost immediately after this person told me her name, she told me when she was saved. I found this refreshing. As a pastor, I enjoy studying and discussing theology and its many accompanying concepts. But this woman did better than that. She told me her story. We can discuss and debate the hypostatic union until we’re blue in the face, but until our stories intersect with Jesus’ story it means very little.

To narrative apologetics, the use of “story” is extremely significant. Consider, for example, that most of the content of the Bible is either narrative or narrative/poetry. There certainly are sections of theological teaching (Paul’s Letters and the General Letters) but even those often contain sections of narrative to accompany the teaching. This makes the most sense because our lives are lived stories. None of us come home at the end of a busy workday and say to our spouse, “You’ll never believe the epistemological concepts I struggled with today!” Instead, we tell our stories to one another.

In his book The Younger Evangelicals, Robert E. Webber relates an account of a debate between himself and an atheist centering on the existence of God. He writes,

I knew my opponent would come ready to use his rational arguments against the existence of God to destroy my rational arguments for the existence of God. In order to shift the discussion away from arguments for or against God’s existence, I used my opening comments to inform my opponent and the listening audience that I would not discuss traditional arguments for the existence of God. When asked “Well, how then shall we proceed?” I answered, “Let’s talk about the reality of the communities of Israel and Jesus. Let’s probe those stories to uncover what they tell us about the origin, meaning, and destiny of the world.” In this way I shifted the discussion from propositions based on evidence to stories based on faith. (Webber 83)

Biblical Narratives of Defense

One notable example of narrative serving as apologetic is found in Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians. To remind the Corinthians of the gospel in which they believed, he uses three separate narratives. Let’s look at a portion of 1 Corinthians 15.

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. (1 Corinthians 15:3-9).

The first two narratives consist of eyewitness accounts. The first narrative is that of the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. The second narrative is Jesus’ appearing after his resurrection to the apostles and disciples. These are not cleverly constructed logical arguments about why God exists or why Jesus must be the Son of God. They are simply a telling of the story. Yet, Paul refers to them in defense of the veracity of those events. In a court of law today a handful of credible eyewitnesses trumps a potential reconstruction of an event almost every time. Imagine what 512 credible eyewitnesses could do for a case.

The third narrative Paul tells in the 1 Corinthians passage is his own story. His story consists of a condensed account of his conversion experience. At the heart of his story is the telling of how, upon encountering the risen Jesus, Paul was greatly changed from being a person who persecuted the Church to being a person who became a leader of it. He appeals to this story as evidence in favor of the resurrection.

This places narrative apologetics heavily in the realm of experience. This, of course, is where we begin to run into some potential problems. Yet, we also find the solution to those problems in God’s great narrative. The key problem we face in using a narrative apologetic comes in the interpretation of our stories. Yes, just as the Bible (God’s narrative of His interaction with humanity) needs interpretation, so too our personal stories require interpretation. What if a person claims God has done something in his life which does not seem to fit the character and values of God? How are we to know whether or not the story is true or good? I pray the answer is self-evident.

The Right Filter

The question we need to ask is, “Will experience (our narrative) interpret the Bible (God’s narrative), or will the Bible (God’s narrative) interpret experience (our narrative)?” Essentially it comes down to a question of filters. Will experience be our filter or will the Bible be our filter? If a person’s story does not match up with or goes against what the Bible teaches, then his story may be considered false. This is where things like logic and objective reason are quite helpful in aiding a narrative apologetic to do its work.

Yet logic and reason must draw on the Bible as their standard of accuracy in interpreting our stories. If the Bible says “Love your enemy” and someone comes along and says God has told him to hate his enemy, we know his story is based on incorrect experience. I think this is what we most fear with something like a defense of the faith based upon our personal stories. We’re afraid to mess up what God is doing.

But when we realize that God has done something in our lives, because that is both what we experience and what the Bible reveals to us, we have a defense of the faith in the form of a story. I think there are several reasons why this kind of apologetic is good and useful. One is that it is not limited to people who have gone through the training of higher education in the area of apologetics. Telling another person the story of what God has done in your life is something you don’t really need training to do. You know your story because you’ve experienced it. It comes naturally to a person who is already used to telling stories around the water cooler at work to be able to say, “This is what God has done in my life…” Anyone can do that. This is especially significant for the average Christian who doesn’t have the time or money to go through an extensive and intensive college level apologetics course.

An apologetic for everyone

After all, it is not only the highly educated and trained who are called to give a defense of the faith. Everyone who belongs to the Body of Christ is called to help in the defense. Look at what Paul writes in Ephesians 4:11-13, “So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” Conspicuously absent from the list of leadership gifts is “apologist.” Why? Because it is no single person’s occupation to defend the faith, it is everyone’s business. If you have a pulse, you have the ability to verbally defend the faith.

Now, having established narrative apologetics as a potential means of defending the faith accessible by everyone, we need to make a brief note as to the manner of its communication. Ephesians 2 makes it clear that we are saved by grace. What is grace? Grace is the expression of God’s unmerited love toward us. You might condense it into this: Grace is Love.

If God has invested His love into us, why is it that so many Christians have such a difficult time showing love to someone who doesn’t know the story? How many Christians do you know of that when they talk about “the world” do so with an air of contempt? “Oh that’s just the world!” Just the world? Not very loving, is it? Is this the same world John speaks of when he writes “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16)?

Grace means, when we invest time in sharing our narrative apologetic, we do so in a way that is both loving and takes a stand for what is true. We don’t have to be jerks about it. We don’t have to be arrogant, thinking what we have is right and everybody else is wrong. If we get caught in the trap of superiority, then grace becomes erased from our vocabulary. Let’s go back to the passage in 1 Peter 3. Aside from instructing us to be ready to give a defense, what else does it say? “But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander” (15-16).

Communicating our stories to those who do not yet believe must be done with “gentleness and respect.” These are the marks of a person who has been touched by God’s grace. Gentleness and respect means that we don’t bash people over the head with the Bible. It means we don’t demean people by labeling them.

We treat them gently. Gentleness means that even though our words and communication could be harsh and condemning, they are not. Just because we have been redeemed by the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, that does not give us the right to lord ourselves over other people. By the very example of Jesus Christ, we must learn gentleness and servant-hood. In Mark 10, we find the explicit teaching of this.

Jesus called them together and said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:42-45)

Paul echoes this teaching in Philippians.

In your relationships with one another, have the same attitude of mind Christ Jesus had: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human being, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:5-11)

I am not God and you are not God. Let’s leave the judging up to Him, shall we?

We treat people respectfully. This means when we talk to them we recognize that they too are human beings created in God’s image (Gen 1:27) and hold tremendous value in the Father’s eyes. Respect means when we look at a person we see them for who they truly are; people God created and died for because He loves them. And if they have not heard the story, then it is up to us to share it with them respectfully and gently, if they are willing to hear it. Whether we are using data distilled from recognized historical facts or using our stories to present the truth of what the gospel is all about, the best possible apologetic is always love.

Our natural instincts would probably compel us most of the time to lash out against ideas and people who suggest something is wrong with our faith. I’ve recently finished reading a book called The Jesus Family Tomb by Simcha Jacobovici and Charlie Pellegrino. In the book, they suggest they have found a tomb in Jerusalem which contained 10 ossuaries (like the James ossuary) containing the remains of people from the 1st century. The shocking part is they claim some of these remains likely belonged to Jesus, Mary Magdalene and an alleged son of theirs named Judah. What is your initial reaction to that? Disgust? Anger? Fear? Is it combinations of unidentifiable emotions that make you want to scream? If you could meet with the authors of this book (who also produced a television program about it for the Discovery Channel) what would you say to them? How would you say it? Would Jesus approve?

We must also understand that there are some people who will not be willing to hear it. To doggedly pursue them with a story they are unwilling to hear will not endear the gospel to them. Respect may mean that we do not push the gospel story on a person who won’t listen. Perhaps God has not at this time broken their heart enough to let the river of life flow into them. I’ve heard before that it takes an average of 7 or 8 times of hearing the gospel for a person to make a decision about it. This means we may take heart in knowing when we share the narrative with a person who rejects it, it may not be the right time.

Apologetics does not have to be an overwhelming subject reserved for professional theologians. Anyone can participate in the defense of the faith. In fact, I believe God is calling all of us to do so. We need not fear the memorization of facts and complicated arguments. Those things certainly have their place. But of first importance are God’s story and the telling of how it has intersected with our stories. That is primary.

Chapter 10 The New Book of Acts

What if…?

So what would it look like if someone came along and wrote a new book of Acts? But let’s get more specific. What if someone wrote a book of Acts about the Christian Church during the twentieth century? That’s exactly what I intend to do in a brief form in this last chapter. I want to present you with some of the best and worst movements of Christianity over the last 100 years, or so.

I’m focusing on the twentieth century because to start way back where the original book of Acts left off would be too much story to cover in such a short space. And yet, I also feel to focus on the twenty-first century alone would be not enough, although there certainly is no shortage of movement in this century (good and bad), is there? There are some very exciting and strange things going on today in the life and acts of the Church. One such movement or conversation centers on the issues of what is being called the Emerging Church, which is still in its infancy or younger days. But I believe we must give it some time to grow and room to breathe before we can confidently and adequately begin to comment on and chronicle it.

Also, I decided to observe the acts of the Church during the twentieth century because it is out of that time that the tree trunk of the Church of today and tomorrow grows. For better or for worse, our roots most recently have taken their nourishment from our time in the twentieth century.

So, now I’d like to present you with a short writing about the acts of the Church over the previous century. I address it to you as “friends of God” for a specific reason. The original book of The Acts of the Apostles, like the Gospel of Luke, was written by a Physician named Luke to a person called Theophilus. That name means “friend of God,” or maybe “friend of the gods” if it was given in a more Greco-Roman pagan sense. It could have been a real name or it could have been a code name of sorts to protect his or her identity should the letter have fallen into the wrong hands. Either way, we don’t know for sure. Yet, I wanted to preserve a bit of that tradition here.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to again encourage you to write your own Acts. It may help you take stock of where you’ve been and give you some perspective on where you’re going. We could all use some more of this, couldn’t we? And so, without further ado, The New Book of Acts…

The Acts of the Church During the 20th Century

In this book, dear friends of God, I will tell you the story of the acts of the believers of God in Jesus Christ during the twentieth century. Through it, I pray you will be both moved of the Spirit and be warned by example towards further acts of light and life pleasing to God.

The story of God and His people continued in the lives of many men and women who placed their trust and whole lives in Jesus, who is the way, the truth, and the life. It will be in a few notable examples that I hope the power of Christ, as it was on display in this exiled world during the twentieth century, will be evident. Some of them were pastors, some missionaries, some pilots, some musicians, and some wives. But they all had in common a love for God in their hearts and were compelled by the Spirit to join His ongoing, worldwide mission.

The first half of the century saw a mix of great hope and great despair. Two major wars rocked the world, leaving uncountable lives and even entire nations in ruin. Also during this time, Christianity began to pull in on itself, leaving the world stage. This was done at first to take stock of its fundamental/core of beliefs, and then increasingly it became a movement toward inwardly focused isolation. Yet some voices protested the retreat and marched forward openly with the gospel of Jesus Christ fresh upon their lips.

Sam Vinton, Sr., felt the call of God on his life. He left the comfort of life in America and traveled for months by boat to the country of Belgian Congo (as it was called at that time) in central Africa. There he gave not only the gospel, but also aid and education. In this way he demonstrated the love of God for the whole person by not only ministering to their souls but also to their physical needs. For God created not only our immaterial beings, but also our physical beings and called them “very good.”

Over seventy-six years of service Sam became affectionately known to the people of Congo as “Baba V.” Baba is a Swahili word meaning “father.” In this case, it shows the love and mutual respect that happened when God’s Word and love were revealed where they were previously unknown.

In another part of the world, England, an atheist named Clive Staples Lewis gave his life to Christ at the age of 31 partially under the guidance of his friend, J.R.R. Tolkien. After his conversion he became a very vocal and very public defender of the Christian faith. Through a ministry of writing, public speaking, and radio broadcast, C.S. Lewis helped to present the gospel of Jesus Christ as a viable and serious option in the world’s marketplace of thought and life. His own life of service to Christ was lived mostly between the 1930’s to the late 1950’s.

Through his writing Lewis also touched the lives of countless children through stories he published with veiled, yet nevertheless strong references to the biblical story. His Chronicles of Narnia series for young readers were instrumental in this endeavor. These seven volumes also demonstrated again for the world that good, solid creative art could be produced by the Christian community. They offered an alternative message of hope for the world in an age where the Modern life grew more cynical.

He wrote of himself in the preface of his popular book, Mere Christianity, “I am a very ordinary layman of the Church of England, not especially ‘high,’ nor especially ‘low,’ nor especially anything else” (Lewis 6). In this statement he offers us a glimpse into the heart of the servant of God. We are called to serve with humility whereby we do not think too highly of ourselves, or too lowly.

Around the same time (1941) on the North American continent, a young preacher named Billy Graham (who also later helped to establish the group, Youth for Christ) stepped into his first and last pastorate. For God had not destined this man to preach to Christians. Instead God had granted Billy Graham the gift of preaching to those who did not identify themselves with Christ, those who did not believe. Graham would preach to the entire world. He was an evangelist.

Sports stadiums would fill with people. Billy would tell them of their need for Jesus Christ. He would tell them the gospel. And they listened.

There is no telling how many lives have been touched with the power of the gospel of Christ through the mouthpiece that is Dr. Billy Graham. There is no telling how many people have placed their trust in the living God and His only Son, Jesus, through His instrument. There is no telling…at least not on this side of eternity.

Another startling example of people committed to doing acts in service to Jesus Christ is the Elliot family and the other families which accompanied them on missionary efforts in the mid 1950’s in Ecuador, South America.

Their goal was to evangelize a dangerous tribe of natives called the Auca, which were sometimes known to harass explorers. The missionaries made contact in 1955 by spotting them from their plane. Over time they dropped small gifts to the Aucas, trying to befriend them. Later, in early January of 1956, the five men landed the plane on a small beach near where they had spotted the tribe.

It was two days later, when they met with the Auca Indians, that the five men, Jim Elliot, Nate Saint (the pilot), Peter Fleming, Ed McCully, and Roger Youderian were speared to death by the Aucas. But the power of forgiveness would win over the tragic murders because Jim’s wife, Elisabeth, and Nate’s wife, Rachel, learned the language of the tribe and carried the gospel to them in 1958. The violent Aucas converted to Christianity and became peaceful.

In a journal entry by Jim Elliot dated October 28th, 1949 (as recorded in Elisabeth’s book, Shadow of the Almighty), the missionary wrote, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose” (Elliot 108).

Another notable account of a brave missionary woman traveling to a tribal people is that of Marilyn Laszlo, who went to the remote Hauna village in Papua New Guinea in 1969. Laszlo traveled to Papua New Guinea with Wycliff Bible Translators. Her mission was to listen to the Hauna language, which had no written form, transcribe it into a workable language, teach the people how to read it, and then translate the Bible into it so it could be printed for them.

Apart from this, Marilyn also helped the Hauna with some basic medical issues and worked on some other projects to help improve their quality of life. It was a combination of her translation efforts and other work which brought many of the villagers to a redeeming relationship with Jesus Christ. As it is written in the book of Isaiah, “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who bring salvation” (52:7).

Somewhat later in the second half of the twentieth century, a South African Bishop named Desmond Tutu participated in his country’s struggle with apartheid. Apartheid was very similar to the racial segregation that had existed strongly in North America. It divided the people and exiled them from the dignity afforded them in God’s blueprint for humanity. For God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, in our likeness” (Genesis 1:26).

Tutu also served as the chairman for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This was a court, of sorts, which enabled victims of apartheid-related violence to speak about what had happened to them, to face their violators. It also offered amnesty to the perpetrators of violence if they offered testimony to their actions and requested forgiveness. Tutu has said, “Good is stronger than evil; love is stronger than hate; light is stronger than darkness; life is stronger than death. Victory is ours, through him who loves us.”

There was also a young pastor in Brooklyn who started out humbly, almost feebly, but who God greatly empowered to lead two small, dying congregations into an unbelievably bright and powerful future. Jim Cymbala took on two small churches and nearly ran himself into the grave at an early age. But through perseverance and allowing the Holy Spirit to move and stregthen him and the people, the two churches joined and became a startlingly powerful community.

Jim tells the story of the Brooklyn Tabernacle in Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire. There he recognizes the power of prayer in the life of the believer.

From this day on, the prayer meeting will be the barometer of our church. What happens on Tuesday night will be the gauge by which we will judge success or failure because that will be the measure by which God blesses us. (Cymbala 27)

And bless them, God certainly did. At first the churches faced every kind of struggle. Financial desolation, lack of faithfulness, low attendance, and high apathy all contributed to the stagnancy of the congregations. Today the Brooklyn Tabernacle ministers to thousands of people every week. In the early 1970’s, God raised an unconfident, inexperienced young man into a strong communicator of the Word.

Then, in the late 1980’s through the late 1990’s, a man who grew up on a farm in Indiana was propelled forward in the Christian music industry. But he would not be remembered for his music only, but also for his missionary work among Native Americans.

Rich Mullins, best known for writing and recording the song, Awesome God, showed great care and concern for the Native American people from a very young age. His sister, Debbie, noted that as they would watch Cowboy and Indian shows on TV, Rich, as a young boy, would always cry whenever an Indian (almost always portrayed as villains) would get killed by the heroes.

Aside from his popular career in music on the stage, Rich moved onto a Navajo Reservation in New Mexico to perform missionary work with the organization, Compassion International. He lived among the Native Americans, teaching them the gospel and music. Rich was tragically killed in a car accident in 1997. Yet, the impact of his work is still felt today among many, many people in part through a foundation, called Kid Brothers of St. Frank, established in honor of the work he did.

Unfortunately, not all of the Acts of Christians in the twentieth century have been beneficial to the cause of Christ. As noted earlier, some Christians withdrew from participation in carrying the gospel outward and caring for this broken world. Many Christians so isolated themselves from the mission of God in the world that an exclusionist Christian culture formed which seemed to repel people seeking God, rather than inviting them in.

Along with the isolationist problem came another difficult struggle with judgmentalism. Many prominent Christians stepped forward to publicly condemn not only sin, but also the sinners whom Jesus died to save. As it is written, “For God so loved the world” (John 3:16 Italics mine).

Another notable smudge on Christianity during the twentieth century centers on the unseemly work of people who have come to be known as “televangelists.” Many Christians who ran (and still run) Christian television programs have been known to pocket the money raised for their “ministries” for their own ill uses.

And yet, we must treat these people and these various problems with the same grace with which Jesus Christ has treated us. I do not list these people to condemn them. I simply draw your attention to them to show you, dear friends of God, that we all have the potential to err. We all may use the Acts of our lives for the wrong purposes. The people and problems stand to show us just how much we all need the grace of God.

And then there’s you, friends of God. You are part of this ongoing story God is telling in the world. What part have you played in this story? What have you written with your life? What are your Acts?

New Genesis

I would like to close this little book with something kind of different. I’ve taken a familiar passage from the book of Genesis and have given it a hopeful remixing. It’s short, but I think it’s good. That may not mean much coming from the guy who wrote it, but what can I do?

The passage originally described the event which cascaded into the Fall of Creation; Eve plucking the fruit from the tree and giving some to Adam, and the subsequent consummation of that fruit and the Curse. But what I present to you here is something other than an account of the great decline.

Instead, what I give to you is the story of the gospel in a parable of sorts. It is based upon the wording of the Genesis account of the Fall and the Curse. I tip my hat to the Apostle Paul who, in his letter to the Colossians, refers frequently to the “fruit” of the gospel. This is what a New Book of Acts in our lives should lead to…a new genesis, new life for the world.

When the people of the world began to see that the fruit of the Gospel of Christ was good for food, pleasing to the eye, good for peace and wholeness, they took some and ate it. They also took some and gave it to their friends and family who were with them, and they ate it. When they ate, the eyes of their understanding were opened and they realized they were naked without God. So they cried out to Him and He answered.

Now the gospel is bearing fruit throughout the whole world…won’t you be a part of it? Won’t you plant more seeds?

Peace be with you all.

-Sam Whittaker. Newaygo, Michigan. 2007

Bibliography

1. Remember the Story

Cohen, Abraham Everyman’s Talmud: The Major Teachings of the Rabbinic Sages. Schocken Books. New York, 1949.

Mars Hill Bible Church. Directions. n. pag. Online. Internet. 31 July 2007. Available: http://www.marshill.org/believe/directions/

Wilson, Marvin R. Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids. 1989.

2. The Upside-Down, Underground, Subversive Church

MacDonald, S. Craig Understanding Your Bible. Grace Gospel Fellowship. Grand Rapids, 1995.

Wright, N. T. What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Grand Rapids, 1997.

4. Intensive Teaching

Pagitt, Doug Preaching Reimagined: The Role of the Sermon in Communities of Faith. Zondervan. Grand Rapids, 2005.

Lucas, George, dir. Return of the Jedi. With Mark Hamill and Frank Oz. 20th Century Fox Film Corporation, 1983.

7. Spirit on the Move

Bono. On the Move. Word Publishing Group. Nashville, 2006.

Sarna, Nahum. The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis. The Jewish Publication Society. Philadelphia, 1989.

9. Narrative Apologetics

Mullins, Rich. “Jesus.” The Jesus Record. Myrrh Records, 080688559229, 1998.

Jacobovici, Simcha and Charles Pellegrino. The Jesus family Tomb. HarperCollins Publishers. New York, 2007.

Webber, Robert E. The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the challenges of the new world. Baker Books. Grand Rapids, 2002.

10. The New Book of Acts

Cymbala, Jim with Dean Merrill. Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire. Zondervan. Grand Rapids, 1997.

Elliot, Elisabeth. Shadow of the Almighty: The life and testament of Jim Elliot. Harper. New York, 1958.

To read more of Sam’s writing,

Sam’s Blog http://sam-whittaker.blogspot.com/

Sam’s Website http://samwhittaker.webstarts.com/

Sam’s Smashwords ebooks http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/samwhittaker

For print and ebooks visit www.amazon.com

Sam’s novel, A Ghost of Fire, is now available.

Steve Nicholas wasn’t looking for drama. He was just looking for a job. But when he lands a position as a janitor at a respectable data processing company, strange things begin to happen. There’s the smell of smoke and the echoes of childlike laughter. But these inexplicable things may only be the beginning of something much more menacing.

He soon begins to have increasingly terrifying nightmares and to experience ghostly encounters while awake. It won’t be long until Steve finds himself caught between warring supernatural forces.

If he isn’t careful he might get burned…or worse.

Table of Contents

The New Book of Acts

Foreword

Midpoint