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ZONDERVAN

The Radical Reformission

Copyright © 2004 by Mars Hill Church

All rights reserved under International and Pan -American Copyright Conventions.

By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non -exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of

this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down loaded, decompiled, reverse

engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval

system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now

known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of

Zondervan

AER Edition January 2009 ISBN : 978-0-310-54142-4

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Driscoll, Mark, 1970–The radical reformission : reaching out without selling out / Mark

Driscoll.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-310-25659-3

1. Evangelistic work—United States.

2. Christianity and culture—

United States.

I. Title.

BV3793.D75 2004

269'.2—dc22

2004010004

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy

Bible: New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by

International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights

reserved.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic,

mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations

in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

04 05 06 07 08 /❖ DC/ 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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To Grace

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contents

acknowledgments

9

introduction:

11

my personal reformission and the emerging

reformission movement

part 1: loving your Lord through the gospel

1. eat, drink, and be a merry missionary:

27

imitating the reformission of Jesus

reformission interview w ith David Bruce:

Hollywood Jesus

2. and now, the news:

45

shaping a reformission gospel

reformission interview w ith Ichabod Caine:

Christians and country music

3. shotgun weddings to Jesus:

65

reformission evangelism

reformission interview w ith Stef Hjertager:

from dancer to deacon

part 2: loving your neighbor in the culture

4. Elvis in Eden:

91

a reformission understanding of culture

reformission interview w ith Crash:

what would Jesus tattoo?

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5. going to seminary at the grocery store:

117

connecting with culture in reformission

reformission interview w ith Tim Ottley:

rocking for the Lamb

6. the sin of light beer:

139

how syncretism and sectarianism

undermine reformission

reformission interview w ith Mike Hale:

Protestant pubs

7. postmodern pandemonium:

159

defeating the new demons

reformission interview w ith Jenny Schneider:

glued to the tube

conclusion:

181

from demons to dreams:

building a kingdom culture

postscript

191

appendix:

193

peering through portals into tomorrow

notes

201

about the publisher 209

share your thoughts 210

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acknowledgments

Iwant to thank those people who have had the biggest impact

on my life and ministry:

Thanks to my mom and pop for giving their lives to make mine great.

Thanks to my bride, Grace, for buying me the Bible I teach from and

for pointing me to Jesus.

Thanks to my children for the joy it is to be their dad.

Thanks to my mother-in-law and father-in-law for their support.

Thanks to Greg Kappas for giving a young punk a shot at ministry.

Thanks to Antioch Bible Church for funding our church plant.

Thanks to Lief Moi and Mike Gunn for helping me plant Mars Hill

Church.

Thanks to David Nicholas for joining me in founding the Acts 29

Network and for serving Christ with me.

Thanks to the Acts 29 church planters for their courage.

Thanks to the members of Mars Hill Church for allowing me to be

their pastor.

Thanks to the elders of Mars Hill for their devotion.

Thanks to Jon and Esther Phelps for their kindness.

Thanks to Brad and Diane Sessler for their selflessness.

Thanks to Bob Buford, Linda Stanley, Dave Travis, and Brad Smith at

Leadership Network for their generosity.

Thanks to Lesslie Newbigin for his prophetic voice.

Thanks to the Puritans for their example.

Thanks to Dr. Gerry Breshears for helping shape my theology.

Thanks to Charles Haddon Spurgeon for his inspiration.

Thanks to John, Paul, and the other Beatles at Zondervan for

publishing this book.

Thanks to Jesus for the empty tomb and for something to preach.

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introduction

m y p e r s o n a l r e f o r m i s s i o n a n d t h e

e m e r g i n g r e f o r m i s s i o n m o v e m e n t

Culturally,I am Irish,which means I have two emotions:

angry and asleep. I was raised as the oldest of five kids in a hardworking, blue-collar Catholic family near the airport in Seattle, Washington.

It was a Norman Rockwell–Precious Moments kind of neighborhood

just up the hill from the strip clubs and the hunting grounds of the

Green River Killer and Ted Bundy.

Growing up, I thought that as long as I believed in a nebulous Sky

Fairy named God and was a decent, moral person outperforming those

below me on the ethical food chain, I would end my life hearing the old

theme song from The Jeffersons television show and be “movin’ on up”

to heaven with all the other good guys. So I worked hard through high

school and graduated Most Likely to Succeed and student body president. I was very proud to have never drunk alcohol, smoked a cigarette,

tried a drug, or voted Republican.

Upon graduation, I was awarded a few scholarships that enabled

me to be the first person in my family to go to college. So, wanting to

get out of the city and try something new, I moved about three hundred miles away to Washington State University, which is tucked away

in the wheatfields of eastern Washington. The university was far away

from big city life, complete with cows, instead of prostitutes, standing

around like dumb meat.

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the RADICAL reformission

Without a car and majoring in boredom, I began reading a

nice Bible my high school girlfriend had given me as a graduation

present. She was a pastor’s daughter who, in retrospect, should

not have been dating me. Nonetheless, she has turned out to be an

amazing wife who is the embodiment of her name, Grace. To this

day, I preach each Sunday from the Bible she gave me, even on the

Sundays when, as a good professional hypocrite, I tell the unmarried people never to date non-Christians.

After a bad few weeks of a frat experience that landed me in

the freshman equivalent of purgatory—a dorm—I sat down to

read the Gospels. Frankly, they seemed boring because they kept

saying the same thing. I wondered if the Bible wasn’t written by

an old man with dementia, or by a young man who had gone to

my “publick skewl.” As I continued to read, Jesus seemed okay,

but the guys I really liked—because of their self-control and

strength—were the denominational leaders of that day: the Pharisees. They were about the only guys in the cast of characters with

any guts. I identified with them and was convinced they were the

good guys in the story . . . until they killed Jesus. I wasn’t much of

a theologian at the time, but murdering Jesus did seem like a bad

move.

Moving on, as Peter says, I found the writings of Paul hard

to understand. His obsession with sin reminded me of a DEA

dog at the airport sniffing around for drugs with tail-wagging

enthusiasm. My problem was that I thought sin was something

you do, not understanding that sin is something you are, like

being French Canadian. To me, sins were terrible things that very

bad people do, such as rape, murder, drug dealing, and what my

construction-worker dad called being antiunion. Consequently,

Paul seemed to be going after bad people. And since I was a good

person, I skipped Paul and started reading John’s Revelation. It

12

sounded eerily similar to the revelations an altar-boy buddy of

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introduction

mine had reported seeing while assisting our priest with a Mass,

shortly after smoking lots of marijuana.

In my first college philosophy class, I read Augustine, who

said that sin naturally flows from our polluted hearts like sewage

out of a culvert. He explained that the root of sin is pride and that

the worst sins include things like false morality and autonomy

from God. This was, I believe, God’s extending to me the right

foot of fellowship.

I then read the entire New Testament over the course of the

next few weeks. God opened my eyes to the fact that I was a Pharisee and that the worst sinners are often the most moral and spiritual people who, like I was doing, pursue righteousness apart

from Jesus. As I was sitting on my dorm bed, the words of Romans

1:6, “And you also are among those who are called to belong to

Jesus Christ,” sounded in my head like an alarm. I realized that

God had been pursuing me and was, in that moment, screaming

into the three pounds of meat between my ears that I belong to

Jesus.

That week, I started teaching my first Bible study. At the time,

The Simpsons on television was all the rage among drunken college guys. My dorm room had cable television, also known as

evangelistic bait. So I gathered the guys from my dorm floor

together and told them they could watch the show in our room if

they also attended my Bible study beforehand. Much to my surprise, about ten guys showed up.

It then dawned on me that I had been a Christian for only a

few days, had never been in a Bible study, and did not really know

anything in the Bible other than the fact that I sucked and that Jesus

is God. So I told the guys they could ask me any question about the

Bible and I would take the following week to research the answer,

since I didn’t have any answers yet. This was my first ministry, and

it inspired me to begin buying commentaries, reference materials,

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theology texts, apologetics books, and the like, which were more

interesting by far than most of my classes. For example, I had a class

in women’s studies in which I learned that men are a plague ruining the world and that I needed to get in touch with my feminine

side, which made about as much sense as telling a dog to get in

touch with its feline side.

Shortly thereafter, I found a good church that met my criteria. First, the pastor was a man who had been in the military and

knew how to kill people in self-defense. Second, he taught

through the Bible verse by verse, so that I could learn to trust the

Scriptures and to love Jesus without feeling like we had a thinly

veiled homosexual relationship. I attended their men’s retreat in

Idaho with other hairy image-bearers of God, and spent a weekend talking about things such as sex, pipe tobacco, and monotheism. It was about the best weekend I could remember having in

my life at that time.

Late one night during the retreat, I went down to the river

and was compelled by God to kneel for some time in prayer. Then

it happened! He spoke to me and told me what to do with the days

between my birth and judgment—in other words, my life. He told

me to lead men, preach Scripture, plant churches, marry Grace,

and trust him. So I married Grace, began studying Scripture with

the enthusiasm of a glutton at a buffet, and started preparing

myself to become a pastor who does not go to jail for doing something stupid. To pay the bills, I edited the opinions section of the

campus newspaper, writing inflammatory columns that led to

debates, radio interviews, and even a few bomb threats—which

was wonderful, because the only thing worse than dying is living

a boring life.

After graduation, Grace and I moved back to Seattle and

began visiting churches. We finally settled into a large suburban

14

church where I felt at home because it met my criteria. First, the

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introduction

pastor (who looked like Mr. T) had been an NFL linebacker and

knew how to kill people in self-defense. Second, he taught the

Bible verse by verse in a real way, one that enabled me to have a

relationship with Jesus that did not feel like he was my lifelong

prom date.

Grace and I volunteered in college ministry for a few years

and met Lief Moi, who later became a dear friend and a founding elder at our church. He hosted a weekly, three-hour, national

Christian call-in radio program that focused on cultural issues

and evangelizing lost people. I spent the next six years cohosting

the radio show and learning a great deal about the views and

struggles of young non-Christians and new Christians. After a

few years of serving at the church, we were sent out to plant our

own church in urban Seattle, where Grace and I were living and

had grown up.

The church—Mars Hill Church—started in my living room

with about a dozen people: a few great families and some collegeage folks. In the fall of 1996, a week before my twenty-sixth birthday, we launched the church with about 150 people. Shortly

thereafter, I received a phone call from a young pastor named

Chris Seay, who was involved with an organization called Leadership Network. He asked about our church and informed me of

a conference for young pastors that he was helping to lead at the

Mount Hermon Conference Center in California. The conference

included Dieter Zander, who was on staff at Willow Creek at the

time, and Tim Celek, with whom Dieter had written a book,

Inside the Soul of a New Generation.

I had never met another young senior pastor and had never

been to a pastors’ conference, but I decided to accept their offer to

participate. They gave me a main session in which to rant for about

an hour. The conference theme was the oh-so-trendy—and now

somewhat embarrassing—topic of Generation X. Approximately

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five hundred young pastors from across the nation showed up—

each one, myself included, with some sort of facial hair, like a peculiar Esau-esque antishaving cult.

My sermon, “The Flight from God,” was on the emerging culture of postmodernism. That one message quite unexpectedly

launched a national platform. To my surprise and delight, it ended

up being the bestselling tape from any event at the conference

center that year. Upon my return home, my phone began ringing

with calls from media outlets ranging from National Public Radio

and Mother Jones magazine, to The 700 Club television program,

Christianity Today magazine , and a host of others—all wanting

interviews. Then other conferences began sending requests for me

to travel and teach across the United States and Canada, and

denominations began to request consultations.

A team of young pastors, including myself, was then formed

by Leadership Network, and we flew around the country speaking to other pastors about the emerging culture and the emerging

church, in conjunction with older theoreticians, such as Leonard

Sweet, Stan Grenz, Sally Morgenthaler, George Hunsberger, and

Tom Sine. I must confess that I felt like the short guy in The Wiz-

ard of Oz standing behind the curtain, pulling levers to proliferate the illusion of an empire, since our new church was broke and

was running with fewer than two hundred people. When the secretaries for high-powered people called to speak with me, I was

answering the phone at home in my underwear, since we didn’t

even have an office or a secretary.

The travel, combined with my pastoral ignorance and the

work of trying to grow a young church, quickly became wearying. Furthermore, the speaking team of young pastors eventually

split into various networks. Rather than trying to help build any

of the newly emerging networks, I chose to stick close to home

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and concentrate on my marriage, young children, and needy

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church. At this time, God spoke to me very clearly, rebuking me

for lacking the humility, ministry success, or wisdom to be traveling, writing books, and acting like a rock star flying around the

country to stand on stages before crowds.

In retrospect, my trip to the woodshed with the Father probably saved my life. At the time, there was a growing national buzz

about the emerging church in the emerging culture. This led to

the founding of a number of networks led by young men like me,

most of whom were friends and acquaintances and whom the

Enemy baited with lust.

For example, a young church-planter who had planted a

church in Southern California helped launch and direct a wellknown network, until a moral failure cost him both his position

as senior pastor and his platform. Likewise, a young churchplanter in Colorado had helped shape a singles’ network, until he

too was disqualified for moral failure. Sadly, there’s a whole list of

other young pastors of a variety of note with similar stories.

Meanwhile, some of the pastors from the original Leadership

Network’s Young Leaders team had continued together without

falling into temptation and have now resurfaced as the Emergent

Village Network with Brian McLaren.

During these few years, I spent much less time traveling and

more time with my wife at home, playing with my kids, stabilizing our quickly growing church, and cofounding the Acts 29

Church Planting Network (which has, at the time of this writing,

started over one hundred churches in eight nations in a five-year

period).

Now that the time has come to write, I am presenting this

book as a contribution toward the furtherance of the emerging

church in the emerging culture. Many of the insights in this book

are gleaned from my experiences as a founding pastor, the experiences of the theoreticians I’ve been privileged to meet, the

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church planters with whom I’ve helped launch churches, the

thousands of people I’ve spoken to across the country on the

radio, the thousands of conversations I’ve had with pastors at conferences, and personal meditation on Scripture.

Since the mid-1990s, the conversation among young pastors

has evolved from reaching Generation X, to ministering in a postmodern culture, to a more mature and profitable investigation of

what a movement of missionaries would look like, missionaries

sent not from America to another nation but from America to

America. This “reformission” is a radical call to reform the

church’s traditionally flawed view of missions as something carried out only in foreign lands and to focus instead on the urgent

need in our own neighborhoods, which are filled with diverse cultures of Americans who desperately need the gospel of Jesus and

life in his church. Most significant, they need a gospel and a

church that are faithful both to the scriptural texts and to the cultural contexts of America. The timing of this reformission is critical. George Barna has said, “The first and most important statistic

is that there are a lot of Americans who don’t go to church—and

their numbers are increasing. The figure has jumped from just 21

percent of the population in 1991 to 33 percent today. In fact, if

all the unchurched people in the U.S. were to establish their own

country, they would form the eleventh most populated nation on

the planet.” 1

What I am advocating is not an abandonment of missions

across the globe but rather an emphasis on missions that begin

across the street, like Jesus commanded (Acts 1:8).

Meanwhile, the churches in our neighborhoods may be more

akin to museums memorializing a yesterday when God showed

up in glory to transform people, than to the pivot points of a

movement working to reform the culture of the present day.

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Reformission requires that we all learn the principles handed

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introduction

down to us from mentors who are seasoned cross-cultural missionary pioneers, such as Lesslie Newbigin, Hudson Taylor, and

Roland Allen. These missionaries are most adept at helping us to

cross from our church subcultures into the dominant cultures

that surround us. Subsequently, at the heart of reformission are

clear distinctions between the gospel, the culture, and the church

(see figure).2

The Gospel and Our Culture Network’s

adaptation of Lesslie Newbigin’s

triangular movement of the gospel*

* From The Church between Gospel and Culture, ed. George Hunsberger (Grand Rapids:

Eerdmans, 1996).

First, the gospel of Jesus Christ is the heart of the Scriptures.

To put it succinctly, Paul said that the gospel is of primary importance and consists of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection to save

sinners, in accordance with the Scriptures (1 Cor. 15:1–8).

Second, we have the various cultures in which people live

their lives (for example, ancient Jews and Gentiles; modern, urban

homosexual artists; modern, rural heterosexual farmers). Our

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lives shape, and are shaped by, the culture we live in, and the

gospel must be fitted to (not altered for) particular people, times,

and circumstances so that evangelism will be effective.

Third, we have the church, or the gathering of God’s people—

which includes those who are not Christians (Matt. 13:24–30)—

where people are built up in their faith and knitted together in loving community. They can then faithfully engage those in the culture with the gospel, while experiencing its transforming power in

their own lives.

Reformission is a radical call for Christians and Christian

churches to recommit to living and speaking the gospel, and to

doing so regardless of the pressures to compromise the truth of the

gospel or to conceal its power within the safety of the church. The

goal of reformission is to continually unleash the gospel to do its

work of reforming dominant cultures and church subcultures.

Reformission therefore begins with a simple return to Jesus,

who by grace saves us and sends us into mission. Jesus has called

us to (1) the gospel (loving our Lord), (2) the culture (loving

our neighbor), and (3) the church (loving our brother). But one

of the causes of our failure to fulfill our mission in the American church is that the various Christian traditions are faithful

on only one or two of these counts. When we fail to love our

Lord, neighbor, and brother simultaneously, we bury our mission in one of three holes: the parachurch, liberalism, or fundamentalism.

Gospel + Culture–Church = Parachurch

First, many Christians become so frustrated with the church

that they try to bring the gospel into the culture without it. This

is commonly referred to as the parachurch, which includes evangelistic ministries such as Young Life and Campus Crusade for

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Christ. The success of these ministries is due in large part to their

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involvement in culture and in loving people, whereas the church

often functions as an irrelevant subculture. But the failure of such

ministries is that they are often disconnected from the local

church, connecting unchurched people to Jesus without connecting them to the rest of Jesus’ people. This can lead to theological

immaturity. Once someone is saved, he or she is encouraged to do

little more than get other people saved.

Also, since parachurch ministries are often age-specific, they

lack the benefits of a church culture in which all generations are

integrated to help people navigate the transitions of life. This further separates families from each other if mom, dad, and kids are

each involved in disconnected life-stage ministries outside of their

church, rather than in integrated ministries within it.

The parachurch tends to love the Lord and love its neighbors,

but not to love its brothers.

Culture + Church–Gospel = Liberalism

Second, some churches are so concerned with being culturally relevant that, though they are deeply involved in the culture,

they neglect the gospel. They convert people to the church and to

good works, but not to Jesus. This is classic liberal Christianity,

and it exists largely in the dying mainline churches. The success of

these ministries lies in that they are involved in the social and

political fabric of their culture, loving people and doing good

works. Their failure is that they bring to the culture a false gospel

of accommodation, rather than confrontation, by seeking to bless

people as they are rather than calling them to a repentant faith

that transforms them. Often the motive for this is timidity

because, as Paul says, the gospel is foolish and a stumbling block

to the unrepentant. Liberal Christians are happy to speak of institutional sin but are reticent to speak of personal sin because they

will find themselves at odds with sinners in the culture.

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Liberal Christians run the risk of loving their neighbors and

their brothers at the expense of loving their Lord.

Church + Gospel–Culture = Fundamentalism

Third, some churches are more into their church and its traditions, buildings, and politics than the gospel. Though they know

the gospel theologically, they rarely take it out of their church.

This is classic fundamentalist Christianity, which flourishes most

widely in more independent-minded, Bible-believing churches.

The success of these churches lies in that they love the church and

often love the people in the church. Their failure is that it is debatable whether they love Jesus and lost people in the culture as

much as they love their own church. Pastors at these churches are

prone to speak about the needs of the church, focusing on building up its people and keeping them from sinning. These churches

exist to bring other Christians in, more than to send them out

into the culture with the gospel. Over time, they can become so

inwardly focused that the gospel is replaced with rules, legalism,

and morality supported with mere prooftexts from the Bible.

Fundamentalist Christians are commonly found to love their

Lord and their brothers, but not their neighbors.

Reformission is a gathering of the best aspects of each of

these types of Christianity: living in the tension of being Christians and churches who are culturally liberal yet theologically conservative and who are driven by the gospel of grace to love their

Lord, brothers, and neighbors. This book focuses on issues related

to the scriptural content of the gospel and the cultural context of

its ministry, and I write out of my sincere love as a pastor for

Christians, churches, lost people, and culture.

In this book, we will examine these themes both theologically

and practically. Each chapter is broken into the following sections:

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First, we will remember the teachings of Scripture and examine

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them for instruction. Second, as an act of correction, we will

repent of those values, beliefs, and behaviors which are sinful.

Third, we will redeem our future by obeying God and living by

the grace he provides us for action. Fourth, we will reflect with

God through the study of Scripture, both alone and in community with others.

I invite you to turn the page and begin a radical journey with

me as we explore what life in Christ can mean in the context of an

emerging church in a changing world. Along the way, I will share

insights from my story and from the stories of others.

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C H A P T E R

1

eat, drink, and be a

merry missionary

i m i t a t i n g t h e r e f o r m i s s i o n o f J e s u s

Jesus. The first word of this book must be Jesus, because

everything, reformission included, begins and ends with him. But the

longer someone is a Christian, the greater their propensity to diminish

the Jesus of the Bible until he becomes a predictable little God who

ceases to surprise them. Therefore, it is imperative that all Christians

continually search the Scriptures in order to see Jesus clearly. And as we

read of Jesus’ involvement in culture, we see a free and radical God

whose life is so shocking that it is self-evident that the story is true,

because no one in their right mind could make it up. Therefore, to prepare you for reformission, I first want to remind you of the beautifully

scandalous life and grace of Jesus Christ.

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remembering:

what God’s stor y reveals

The story begins with God making all things, then creating a

man named Adam. Though Adam is technically perfect, it is still

not good for him to be alone. The Bible never tells us why, exactly.

Perhaps he would have forgotten to pick up the trash around the

Garden of Eden, and the place eventually would have looked like

an eternal fraternity without a hint of an annual spring cleaning.

Whatever the case, God creates a perfect woman who is beautiful, sinless, and naked—the same kind of woman every guy ever

since has been searching for. Adam meets her and, recognizing that

his life has just taken a turn for the better, he sings her a song, after

which their marriage is consummated. The Bible could end right

there, after only two chapters, with the man and woman naked, eating fruit, and trying to fill the earth all by their happy, horny, holy

selves.

But ever since the dreadful day of the Thud in Eden, we have

all been walking around scratching our thick skulls, trying to figure

out how to get back to that glorious time. Why? Because our happy,

naked first parents sinned against God and brought a curse upon

themselves and all of creation. They sinned because they believed

the lies of a talking serpent who had been an angel until he got

kicked out of heaven for his pride.

After they are exiled from Eden, our first parents have two

boys, and before long, one boy kills the other. From there, carnage

and death ensue, and people grow so wicked that God floods the

earth, killing nearly everyone. But he starts over with another

decent guy named Noah, who nevertheless ends up having a bad

day, gets drunk, and passes out naked in his tent like some redneck

on vacation.

As time rolls along, God also works through a cowardly old

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beautiful antique of a wife to avoid conflict. God also chooses to

work through a guy named Jacob, even though he’s a trickster and

a con man. Later, God raises up a stuttering murderer named

Moses to lead his people. Years later, a king named David comes

onto the leadership stage, but he becomes an adulterer, a murderer, and an odd type pointing ahead to the promised Christ.

David’s son Solomon redefines addiction, with more wine,

women, and money than any guy could possibly know what to do

with, though he gave it a good Hefneresque run. This brief list

doesn’t even include the prophets, like Ezekiel, whom God tells

to cook a meal over his own feces; Hosea, who marries a prostitute; Jeremiah, who cries like a newly crowned beauty queen all

the time; or any of the freaks on cable television right now talking about Jee-zus along with their wives, who by God’s grace alone

are not naked like their mother Eve.

And to top it all off, God comes to earth. He has a mom

whom everyone thinks is a slut, a dad whom they think has the

brilliance of a five-watt bulb for believing the “virgin birth” line,

and brothers who likely pummel him frequently, because even

God would have to get at least one wedgie from his brothers if he

were to be fully human. The God-Man goes through puberty and

likely goes through that weird vocal transition in which, in the

course of one syllable, a young man can seamlessly go from

sounding like Barry White to sounding like Cindy Brady. God

comes hiding in human flesh and, according to Isaiah the prophet,

he’s a regular-looking guy. In sum, nobody knows exactly who this

guy is.

Doesn’t the story sound like the plot of a trashy, daytime television talk show? The God-Man is born to a teenage virgin in an

animal stall, grows up with a blue-collar dad in a dumpy rural

town, and has a weird cousin named John, who lives in the woods

and survives on a steady diet of bugs, sugar, and repentance.

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Somehow John becomes the leader of a religious movement

with a small posse of guys you’d have to think probably looked

like clones of the kid on the porch in the movie Deliverance. Then

Jesus takes a few of John’s posse as his own. At this point in the

story, God is thirty years of age and a classic underachiever with

no wife, kids, stable career, or even much of a home.

But apparently God is fun to hang with, because he and his

posse get invited to a lot of parties, including a wedding, which is

basically a week-long wine and dance party celebrating some

lucky guy’s attempt to get back to Genesis 1 and 2. This would be

the first of Jesus’ many parties.

The constipated religious leaders of his day accuse him of

being a drunkard, a glutton, and a crooked guy who always hangs

out with the wrong people: easy girls like Mary, crooked mafia

types like Matthew, and the kids in high school who always wear

black concert T-shirts, sport greasy male ponytails, and smoke

cigarettes just off school property during lunch (Matt. 11:19). To

the religious leaders, Jesus is a scandal—his followers are felons—

and every time they see Jesus, it agitates them that he is always

surrounded by a crowd, telling knock-knock jokes to miscreants

who love his sense of humor (because his perfection had to have

included comedic timing).

Anyway, Jesus shows up at a wedding and begins his public

ministry. God has come to earth, and he kicks things off as a bartender. Some poor kids getting married have run out of wine and

face humiliation with their friends and family. So Jesus’ mom,

Mary, comes and asks her son, God, to do something about it.

In a show of irony, he takes six large stone jars used for ceremonial washing and asks for them to be filled with water, not for

cleansing and religious purification but so he can turn that water

into wine. And this is not the cheap wine named after a bird or a

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handgun but good wine, fine wine, the kind bearing a foreign

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name most Americans can’t even pronounce because it is not

spelled B-u-d-w-e-i-s-e-r.

The Bible says that this is how the sovereign, eternal God of

the universe first makes his glory known. Paul says this message

of Jesus sounds like foolishness and that many people trip over

him in their failed attempts to find him. Why? The reasons are

legion, but they include the ignorance of the freedom of Christ

from which Christians obtain their freedom in Christ. In an effort

to illustrate this truth, I will tell you about an experience I had

with a gay cowboy friend of mine.

repenting:

what happened in a bar

As a newer Christian, I was the plankton in a conservative,

suburban megachurch food chain. My hope was to get called up

to the big leagues and be a full-time pastor, and so I attended a

solid Bible-teaching seminary, volunteered at the church, and

labored to build a good reputation as a morally upright man. I

did not drink, smoke, or do anything that could give others the

impression that I was a bad sinner.

Then I got a phone call from an old college friend whom God

had used to bring me to faith. He was a zealous charismaniac type

who had relentlessly chased me around campus the first few

months of my freshman year, trying to get me to pray the Sinner’s

Prayer. After my conversion, he became a Christian friend. But in

the years since college, I had lost touch with him. So I was now

happy to hear his voice on the phone, and we scheduled a time to

get together.

Over lunch, he informed me that he had been a closet homosexual throughout college, had joined the military after graduation,

and had recently been discharged for having sex with fellow soldiers. He was presently frequenting public bathrooms throughout

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the city and having anonymous sex with various men. He shared

that he was wrestling through whether he believed that he was a

sinner and whether he still believed in God. When I invited him to

attend church with me, he declined, saying that it was unfair for me

to expect him to come into my Christian subculture, since I was

unwilling to go with him into his homosexual subculture.

And he was right. So, feeling convicted to be like Jesus, I told

him I would be happy to go into his world if he would come into

mine. Seeing an evil dervish grin emerge on his face, I knew I was

in trouble. He invited me to a gay country and western bar he frequented. At the time, I did not drink and disliked no one more

than limp-wristed gay men and cowboys. I could not conceive of

a worse purgatory than the one awaiting me.

I went home to inform my lovely bride about the mess I had

gotten myself into, discovering that she was both supportive and

good humored. The following week, I went out with my skinny,

feminine gay buddy, who was dressed up in tight jeans, goofy

boots, and a big hat for a night of country line-dancing. Walking

through the front door of the queer cowboy club, I was hit with

the shrill sound of country and western music and the sight of a

sea of skinny men sporting tight jeans, well-groomed mustaches,

and boots, even though we were in the middle of downtown Seattle and at least an hour’s drive away from the nearest horse.

My friend took me to the bar and introduced me to a number

of his gay buddies, who were drinking—of course—light beer.

Feeling like I was wearing someone else’s underwear, I stood there

and tried to be inconspicuous, praying that no one would recognize me. Then someone I had graduated from high school with

approached me with a surprised look. She asked, “What are you

doing here?” And I quickly blurted, “I’m married to a woman and

here with a friend, but I’m not a gay guy, so please don’t tell any32

one I’m a queer.” She laughed and we chatted for a few minutes

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until a song she obviously liked came on, and she then shuffled off

to the dance floor with her girlfriend.

Then a guy introduced himself and hit on me. Stunned, I did

not immediately respond but instead stared at the poor guy, trying to figure out why he looked so familiar, how he could mistake

me for a gay guy, and if I was really good looking. It then hit me

and I asked him, “Are you my mailman?” He replied, “Yes, I am a

mailman.” Suddenly, I wanted to kill myself and never get mail

again.

My buddy had abandoned me at the bar, and I frantically

searched for him in hopes that if I was with him, no one else

would hit on me. I found him drinking a fruity drink and flirting

with an enormous man. I asked him how long we were staying,

since the first five minutes in this hell were about all I could handle. But he said, “Mark, I have to go to a special room upstairs for

about an hour, so you are welcome to come up with me or stay

down here until I return.” I asked what they did in that room,

hoping I would not throw up my dinner after hearing his answer.

Here’s how he responded: “It’s not an orgy. It’s a meeting for the

gay rodeo committee.”

Gay rodeo?

Those were simply the last two words I had ever anticipated

hearing together. He explained that the queer cowboys were hoping to have a rodeo and that he was on the planning committee.

Not wanting to sit at the bar for an hour getting hit on, I chose to

go to the planning meeting with a few dozen other guys. We all

sat in a circle like we were in a home Bible study. The meeting

opened with introductions, everyone giving their names and

vocations.

I had prided myself on aspiring to the pastorate but now

found myself in an awkward position. My buddy leaned over and

whispered in my ear, “What are you going to tell them you do for

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a living?” Unsure, I said, “I have no idea. Maybe I’ll tell them I am

a teacher or a spiritual director.”

When it came to my turn, I tried to avoid the inevitable conflict and lied to them by saying I was a spiritual something-orother, hoping the queer cowboys would smile, nod, and ignore me.

But one of the cowboys asked what my religion was. So I came out

of my closet and told him I was a Bible-thumping, old-school

Christian preacher, causing some of the guys to laugh, thinking I

was kidding. The rest of the meeting went well and was not all that

different from the boring staff meetings we had at the megachurch,

where people who hadn’t done much tried to appear as if they had.

The guys were very nice, so afterward when we returned downstairs, I ended up buying some of them beers. However, I did not

drink that evening because I wanted to respect the church’s

authority over me, which forbade alcohol consumption.

One of the guys asked if I was actually a real pastor and began

explaining how his lover and many of his friends had died of

AIDS. Actually, he began discipling me, articulating with great

pain the loneliness and death that filled his community and

explaining why he feared death. He asked what happens when

someone dies and wanted to know what would happen to him,

in particular. He was attentive as I sought to relate the gospel to

his life: sin causes death, but Jesus is God who became a man and

died—when he was about the same age as this man—in order to

rise from death, forgive sin, and give eternal life to those who

repent of sin and trust in him. I explained that only Jesus can take

us through our own deaths and comfort us after the deaths of

others, because he alone has been through death and come back.

The man was not converted during our chat, but in many

ways, I was.

As I left the bar, God convicted me about my proud addic34

tion to morality and my attempt to look like a decent guy so that

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others would like me. I was so insecure that I feared not only that

my Christian friends would see me walking out of a gay bar with

queer cowboys but also that the queer cowboys would reject me

for being a Bible thumper who, deep down, believed they were

running headlong to hell in their cowboy boots. I cared more

about how I appeared to people than about whether I shared the

passion of Jesus for those who are lost.

That night, I learned that reformission requires that Christians and their churches move forward on their knees, continually

confessing their addictions to morality and the appearance of

godliness, which does not penetrate the heart and transform lives.

In the end, I learned that God’s mission is not to create a team of

moral and decent people but rather to create a movement of holy

loving missionaries who are comfortable and truthful around lost

sinners and who, in this way, look more like Jesus than most of

his pastors do.

redeeming:

what it means to cross barriers

Driving home from the gay cowboy bar with my buddy, it hit

me that I had just spent an evening in Samaria. In Jesus’ day, what

we now refer to as the Holy Land was divided into three regions.

In the north was Galilee, in the south was Judea, and in the middle was Samaria. Samaria was the ghetto, where all the unclean

and undesirable mixed-race people, with their convoluted Oprahesque mixed religion, lived.

What’s our modern-day equivalent to Samaria? Could it be

Salt Lake City, Utah, which is filled with people who claim to worship Jesus but who have their own religion, complete with their

own temple and sacred underpants?

In Jesus’ day, the tension between Samaritans and Jews was

intense. The Samaritans still claimed to believe in the first five

books of the Old Testament, though they had cut themselves off

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from the riches of the rest of the Old Testament; they claimed to

be children of Abraham, though they continued as a blended religion filled with pagan and occultic beliefs and practices. The Jews

were so disgusted by the Samaritans that they rarely traveled

through their land. When they did, it was not uncommon for Jews

to be detained and harassed merely for traveling through Samaria.

When Jesus relocated his ministry to Galilee, he chose to

travel through Samaria, rather than avoiding that region. On his

way, he sat down at Jacob’s well for a rest while his disciples went

to town to buy lunch. As he rested, a Samaritan woman came to

the well to draw water. We do not know her name; we do, however, know her reputation. She was the dirty, leathery faced town

whore. After a string of five failed marriages, she had resorted to

shacking up with a man with whom she traded sex for rent.

She did not say a word to Jesus, likely because she guessed

that a Jewish rabbi was not interested in chitchat with a woman

like her. She arrived at the well alone in the heat of midday,

because she knew that the reputable women who had gathered

earlier in the cool of the day to draw water and to gossip would

have welcomed her about as warmly as the KKK would have

greeted Malcolm X at a Klan rally.

The story takes a surprising twist when Jesus spoke kindly to

her, asking, “Will you give me a drink?” Stunned, the woman likely

scrunched up her nose and stared at Jesus in bewilderment,

because in that cultural setting, men did not befriend women,

Jews did not befriend Samaritans, and upright rabbis did not

befriend crooked sinners. But Jesus is holy, which simply means

he is different without being sinful, and so he spoke to her kindly,

asking her a favor and treating her as a friend.

Travelers in that day usually carried a container for water, and

Jesus’ men had apparently taken theirs into town, leaving him

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tainer. This act of drinking from her vessel would likely have been

viewed as sinful, dirty, and ritually unclean by the Jews. So his

request, while not in violation of Scripture, trampled religious

moral dogma.

A master teacher, Jesus used the metaphor of water to speak

to the woman about salvation—or cleansing living water—given

by God. In a clever attempt to expose her sin and her need for

God’s forgiveness, Jesus requested that she first go home to get

her husband before he would give her living water. She replied

with a half-truth, that she had no husband. Jesus then named her

sin, saying he knew that she had been married five times and was

now living in sin with a man who was not her husband.

The naming of the woman’s sin was the turning point in the

conversation, as the woman then recognized Jesus as a prophet

deserving respect, so she referred to him as “sir.” This would have

been appropriate, since the Samaritans were waiting not for a Messiah but instead for the promised prophet who would be like Moses.

The woman asked Jesus about the theological issue dividing

their religions, races, and worship. Where should she go to confess her sin and be reconciled to God? Should she go to her

Samaritan temple on nearby Mount Gerizim, or should she travel

to the temple in Jerusalem?

Jesus’ answer was nothing less than the first shot in a revolution that has continued ever since. In his simple answer, he

declared an end to both Samaritan and Jewish worship in favor

of worship that requires not just outward tradition and ritual but,

more important, inward spirit and truth to please God. Jesus

declared that the Father was actively seeking worshipers and that

he would give people the truth by sending the Holy Spirit to teach

them whom to worship. Because of the Spirit, people would no

longer need to go to any sacred place such as a temple. Instead,

we can worship God anywhere and everywhere, if we turn from

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sin to receive the Spirit, who would dwell in us, thereby making

our bodies (including the body of this woman, who likely smelled

like cheap liquor and men at that very moment) into a new temple where the presence of God dwells. 1

The word Jesus tenderly used for worship literally means “to

kiss toward.” In Jesus, God had just blown this haggard harlot a

metaphorical kiss of loving grace and had proposed a covenant of

love that, unlike all the others she had experienced, would endure.

Predictably, the woman was so stunned that she sobered up. With

her heart now yearning for forgiveness and understanding, she

told Jesus that she longed for the day when God would come as

the Messiah-Christ and explain all of these things to her. Peering

into her tearful eyes, and likely leaving a painful silence before

speaking, Jesus simply declared, “I who speak to you am he.”

Lest we overlook the magnitude of this moment, notice that

this is the only place in John’s gospel that Jesus declares that he is

the promised Old Testament Messiah. And he reserved this great

revelation not for the seminary professors or megachurch senior

pastors but for the woman he had come to earth to spiritually

court at a lonely well in the heat of the noontime sun. And Jesus

revealed her sin, putting his finger on the dirtiest and most

scarred portion of her soul, which smelled like death, hell, and

sin. He cleaned it, healed it, forgave it, and replaced it with grace

and the Holy Spirit, as only he can.

Born again, the woman decided to start her life over, which is

the essence of repentance. She sprinted back into Sychar with

good news to tell. She told anyone who would listen that she had

been a sick and wicked woman governed by her loneliness and

perversion but that things had changed once she met Jesus. We

can only imagine the looks on people’s faces, including the many

men who likely had seen her unclothed but who had never seen

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Testament, she was doing the work of mission in her culture,

pointing others to Jesus for salvation and life.

Many heretical, outcast idolators came to believe in Jesus

because of this woman’s testimony. They correctly saw him as Savior for all nations of the earth because of one changed life. They

then invited Jesus to join them as friends in sinful Sychar. So he

remained with them for two days, teaching and seeing many more

people believe.

It is likely that John’s account gives just the highlights of a

lengthy conversation that Jesus had with the woman. But it illustrates Jesus’ bold crossing of the barriers that had separated

people from God. Jesus overcame the racial barrier between Jews

and Samaritans to show that though the message of salvation

came from God through the Jews, it was ultimately intended for

all nations of the earth. Jesus overcame the sin barrier and

exposed the habitual sexual sin of the woman as the reason she

had been unable to worship. Jesus overcame the gender barrier

and showed God’s gracious heart for this woman and for all

women. Jesus overcame the geographical barrier and opened the

possibility that everyone everywhere could worship if they would

repent of sin, because the Father was seeking them and would give

them the truth and the Spirit.

And in his greatest act of love for this woman, Jesus later

hung on a Roman cross—punished between two thieves—dying

for the many sins of this woman. Jesus then rose from death and

ascended into heaven to prepare an eternal home for her. He then

sent the Holy Spirit to empower her new life and ministry.

Reformission is ultimately about being like Jesus, through his

empowering grace. One of the underlying keys to reformission is

knowing that neither the freedom of Christ nor our freedom in

Christ is intended to permit us to dance as close to sin as possible

without crossing the line. But both are intended to permit us to

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dance as close to sinners as possible by crossing the lines that

unnecessarily separate the people God has found from those he is

still seeking. To be a Christian, literally, is to be a “little Christ.” It

is imperative that Christians be like Jesus, by living freely within

the culture as missionaries who are as faithful to the Father and

his gospel as Jesus was in his own time and place.

I am advocating not sin but freedom. That freedom is denied

by many traditions and theological systems because they fear that

some people will use their freedom to sin against Christ. But rules,

regulations, and the pursuit of outward morality are ultimately

incapable of preventing sin. They can only, at best, rearrange the

flesh and get people to stop drinking, smoking, and having sex,

only to start being proud of their morality. Jesus’ love for us and

our love for him are, frankly, the only tethers that will keep us

from abusing our freedom, yet they will enable us to venture as far

into the culture and into relationships with lost people as Jesus

did, because we go with him.

So reformission requires that God’s people understand their

mission with razor-sharp clarity. The mission is to be close to

Jesus. This transforms our hearts to love what he loves, hate what

he hates, and to pursue relationships with lost people in hopes of

connecting with them and, subsequently, connecting them with

him. This actually protects us from sin, because the way to avoid

sin is not to avoid sinners but to stick close to Jesus.

reflecting:

reformission questions

If you have not recently read the account of Jesus and the

woman at the well, I would encourage you to read John 4:1–42

and then answer the following questions.

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1.

Who do some Christians in your town, or the larger area

in which you live, consider to be Samaritans? Why do

you think some Christians dislike them?

2.

What parts of your town or area are like Samaria to

you—the places you avoid because you do not like the

people who live there?

3.

What were the Samaritan woman’s sins? What do you

think might be some common sins among the Samaritans in your town?

4.

What pains must the woman’s sins have caused her?

What pains are your Samaritans’ sins causing them?

5.

In your area, where are the Jacob’s wells and pagan temples where the Samaritans hang out?

6.

What barriers did Jesus need to cross to evangelize the

Samaritan woman? What barriers would you need to

cross to connect with the Samaritans in your culture?

7.

What changes took place in the woman’s lifestyle? What

might change in the lives of the Samaritans in your town

or area if they met Jesus and repented of their sinful

lifestyles?

8.

Why do you think Jesus’ disciples did not say anything

when they saw him speaking with the Samaritan woman?

What do you think some of your Christian friends might

say if you befriended a Samaritan?

9.

Why was the woman at the well best suited to do mission

to Sychar? Which people, if converted, would be best

suited for mission in your town?

10.

What was Jesus’ sense of urgency for harvesting souls,

and do you and your Christian friends share his sense of

urgency? Why or why not?

11.

In what ways is your salvation story (or perhaps the story

of someone you know) similar to the story of the woman

at the well?

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interview

with David Bruce:

Hollywood Jesus

1.What is your name?

David Bruce

2. Do you consider yourself to be a Christian?

Yes. My spiritual journey began in North Hollywood, California, where

I grew up in a Christian home. I responded to Christ at age nine through

baptism. I have always been a follower of Jesus Christ. After working in

radio, television, and publishing, I moved to Chicago to attend seminary,

where I graduated with an M.Div. degree. I have pastored several churches.

3. What is your age?

55

4. What is your vocation?

I am host of the HollywoodJesus.com

website [which has received more than 148

million hits], a church leader, an author, and

a speaker. I have always had a deep and abiding interest in both Jesus and film. I have an

immense library of books on theology, popular culture, and film, and thousands of

videos and DVDs. I love to go to church and

to film festivals. For me, they are both spiritual experiences. This continuing interest in

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culture and Jesus led to the creation of the HollywoodJesus.com website in

1998. Actually, the site resulted from a challenge given by Billy Graham to use

the internet for good.

5. How have people responded to your faith and

website?

I get scores of e-mails a day from all over the world; about 50 percent

are from non-Christians regarding faith issues. It has afforded me the best

evangelistic opportunity of my life. God has been so gracious. It has been

my pleasure to enter into dialogue and to journey with them.

6. Do you consider yourself a missionar y to your

culture?

Yes, in the truest sense. The Mars Hill approach of Acts 17 is my model

for ministry. Instead of throwing rocks at culture, I build bridges. I use Hollywood films as common ground, just as any missionary would use native

stories. I look for redemptive analogies—connecting points to the gospel

of Jesus Christ.

7. What insights have you gained that would be

helpful to Christians and churches?

The top one hundred films of all time have just one thing in common.

They are all about relationship. The same is true of pop music, country

and western, novels, and television shows. People respond to relationship;

it’s what we all seek most. The church can furnish positive and caring relationships and help people come to a personal relationship with God

through Jesus Christ. In fact, that is what the church is all about. Instead of

throwing rocks at the culture, as the church often does, it needs to build

bridges to a hurting world in need of a healing relationship with God. Bottom line: let’s find common ground and build bridges to a world that “God

so loves.”

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C H A P T E R 2

and now, the news

s h a p i n g a r e f o r m i s s i o n g o s p e l

Afew years ago,a friend kindly invited me to cohost a latenight national radio talk show with him. During the six years that Street

Talk aired, we spent three hours every Saturday night “giving straight

answers to tough questions” from callers in their teens and early twenties who tuned in from across the country. We did not screen our calls,

and we promised to answer any question about life and God, which

made for wildly unpredictable radio.

For the first few years of the show, the majority of questions were

the usual inquiries from struggling and new Christians about such

things as the deity of Jesus and the trustworthiness of the Bible. But as

the show matured and began airing on some non-Christian stations, the

nature of the calls shifted, coming more from a pagan and unchurched

audience whose questions were not addressed in the Christian books on

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apologetics and evangelism available at the time. The new nonChristian listeners, for example, believed that there is a God, that

God answers prayer, and that Jesus existed and performed miracles. Their resistance to Christianity was often not theological but

practical; they were concerned that they might have to alter such

things as their sex lives and drug use if they converted.

As we answered very frank questions, our audience began

growing because people identified with the tough issues we were

tackling. Simultaneously, a backlash from Christians began to

grow, because many of them did not consider it appropriate to

have these conversations on their Christian radio stations.

And then the call came in. God had recently saved a young

couple who lived in Texas. They had only a very basic understanding of the Bible but sincerely loved Jesus and were earnestly

trying to arrange their lives in such a way as to honor him. But

one issue had become concerning to them: their pastor and Christian friends had told them that oral sex is a sin. The wife, who

called our show, explained that her husband enjoyed her performing oral sex on him and that she enjoyed doing so. She said

that they had read the Bible trying to find an answer but did not

see any prohibition against it, though their Christian friends were

vehement in their assertion that it is evil. She emphasized that

they would do whatever the Bible says, but they did not want to

stop what they were doing unless it is a sin.

I remember taking a deep breath and looking across the

microphone at my friend who hosted the show. We both raised

our eyebrows, recognizing the hornets nest we were about to stir

up. We could tell the woman the truth and inflame much of our

Christian audience, or we could disobey God and keep our radio

program on the air. My friend waved toward the microphone, sig46

naling me to answer the question, which I did, taking the woman

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through the Song of Songs and showing her how the Bible poetically describes the act as a beautiful and enjoyable experience to

be shared only by married couples. She and her husband thanked

us, and the phone began ringing off the hook with calls from irate

Christians accusing us of promoting sodomy and perversion.

Within a few days, the outrage grew so intense that some radio stations around the country began dropping us from their programming schedules, despite our excellent ratings. Though we had been

faithful to God and to Scripture, we had violated the taboos of a

segment of the Christian subculture.

In hindsight, our radio show underwent the same process that

the early church had. As the gospel jumped from the Jewish culture

to the unreached Gentile culture, a rigorous debate followed in an

effort to sort out what is gospel, what is sin, and what is simply

baggage the sending culture had added to the gospel like barnacles that attach to a boat as it sits tied to a dock. In the apostle Paul’s

day, these controversial issues included the eating of meat sacrificed to idols, the proper day of worship, circumcision, dietary

restrictions, cursing, holidays, and sexual activities.1 These were

not widely debated or controversial issues within Judaism, since

the Jews had settled these matters within their own culture. But

when the gospel moved into Gentile cultures, commonly held

assumptions were suddenly called into question, which upset

many Jewish Christians who believed that people from other cultures should convert to both Jesus and their culture. Likewise, as

the gospel moves into new cultures in our day, and as new cultures

emerge, we must struggle to sift out what is cultural and what is

scriptural.

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remembering:

sifting cultural from scriptural

For example, as a pastor in Seattle, I have fielded the following difficult cultural questions that probably had not been widely

debated before in the history of the Christian faith. You may find

them offensive, but recognize that these are questions that some

people today are asking, whether we’re ready to hear them or not:

● Can I pierce any part of my body in an attempt to look

like a spinning rack displaying fishing lures at a tackle

shop?

● Can I tattoo the body God has given me?

● If I am an HIV-positive new Christian, can I still get

married someday?

● Can I get a sex change because I feel like God made me

the wrong gender?

● Can I get breast implants as my husband’s Christmas

gift?

● What words count as swearing, who decides this, and if

I disagree, can I cuss them out?

● Can I continue to make a living by being a professional

blackjack player now that I am a Christian?

● Is it okay for a woman to look like a man, or a man to

look like a woman?

● Is it okay to improve my appearance with plastic

surgery?

● Does a wife really need to submit to her husband, or is

this an outdated practice of a long-forgotten culture in

which people were happily married for longer than it

took to grow a beard?

● Is it a sin to use birth control or to get a vasectomy to

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● Are there any sexual practices between a husband and

wife that are outlawed in the Scriptures?

● Why are smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, or taking

prescription mood-altering medications okay, but

smoking pot is considered a sin?

● How can masturbation be a sin if it’s never mentioned

in the Bible?

● Can a woman be a pastor?

● Is homosexuality always a sin, or can a loving and

monogamous same-sex couple remain together if they

become Christians?

● If a married couple videotapes their lovemaking solely

for their own viewing pleasure, is this a sin?

The salvation of the Gentiles in my town, like the salvation

of the Gentiles in the New Testament, raises a host of theological

questions that desperately need to be answered. As a pastor, I have

frequently been asked each of the questions listed above and have

had to provide thoughtful and biblical answers. They were asked

by sincere new Christians who had no church background and

wanted to know whether the things they were doing were sins to

repent of or matters of freedom. Reformission is about the old

gospel answering without blushing the new questions that emerge

from new cultures.

repenting:

nostalgia and innovation

For some Christians, however, the pace and types of change

in their culture, combined with the types of questions and sins

that ensue, are nothing short of frustrating. Why? Partly because

people are prone to live either in the past or in the future, while

neglecting the present. Christians, however, are supposed to live

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today, in light of yesterday, for the sake of tomorrow. Therefore,

shouldn’t the propensity for either nostalgia or innovation be

repented of as sin?

Arguably, most Christians and churches prefer the past to the

present or the future, because the past is over, while the present and

the future still require a lot of work. A naive romanticism in each of

us desperately wants to believe there was a time after Genesis 2 when

the world was a wonderful place to live, when things were better and

easier than they are today. This powerful delusion enables us to

excuse our laziness and failure to be about reformission because of

the difficult days we live in. No wonder many denominations and

theological traditions continually speak more of the days past when

their movement began than of the present days that are upon them

and the future days into which they are moving.

For example, a pastor friend of mine was hired by a dying

church. At one time, the church’s enormous facility had housed

nearly nine thousand people, but the congregation had dwindled

over the years to roughly one hundred, most of whom were

beyond retirement age. They hired him in hopes of keeping their

church from joining the more than three thousand churches in

the United States that die each year. What he quickly learned,

however, was that while they wanted things to change, they did

not want to change. To this day, they remain unwilling to change

the aesthetics of their very dated sanctuary, or to upgrade their

sound system, which is nearly thirty years old, or to reconsider

the style of their worship music, or to make any adjustments to

their programming or philosophy of ministry.

Decades ago, these people had successfully practiced mission

and brought the gospel to their culture because they were simultaneously faithful to the content of Scripture and to the context

of ministry. But as the times changed, they did not, preferring to

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for a return to the day when people walked to church, preferred

an organ to a band, and were loyal to the denominational traditions of their parents.

This propensity among God’s people to be nostalgic is nothing new. After the more than four hundred years of the Israelites’

brutal slavery to Egyptian pharaohs, God liberated his people. But

they soon began reminiscing about the “good old days” when they

were slaves, and they longed to return to the past. However foolish this may seem, nostalgia remains perennially popular.

Perhaps Solomon said it best: “Do not say, ‘Why were the old

days better than these?’ For it is not wise to ask such questions”

(Eccl. 7:10). There has never been a “good old day” since the Great

Thud in Eden. Every age is filled with sin, sinners, God’s love, and

work to be done. Each generation has its resistance to the gospel,

and each culture is equally far from God because of sin and

equally close to God because of his love. As Solomon repeatedly

says, there is indeed nothing new under the sun.

At its best, a sense of tradition informed by a grasp of the successes and failures of Christians who have gone before us is vital

today. At its worst, traditionalism fails to distinguish between biblical principles for ministry and cultural methods for implementing

those principles. Traditionalism clings to dated ineffective methods

in the name of staying truer to tradition than to Scripture.

The result of traditionalism is a Christianity that has all of the

right answers to all of the wrong questions, because the questions

that were once pressing are no longer being asked. The dying church

I mentioned desired to attract the multitude of non-Christians who

lived close to them, so they hosted a debate between an atheist and

a Christian. They went to great expense only to have no one from the

community attend. Why? Because the church did not know that

atheism, popular a generation or two ago, is virtually dead today.

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This church believed that people are either Christians or atheists,

and because they didn’t know their neighbors, they wrongly

assumed that, since their neighbors were not Christians, they must

be atheists. Actually, their neighbors were very spiritual people who

spent great amounts of time praying but had no idea to whom.

Today’s danger is not only nostalgia. Equally damaging to

reformission is the tendency, most common among young Christians frustrated with the constraints and failures of backwardlooking churches and ministries, to ignore church history and its

lessons in pursuit of unrestrained and undiscerning innovation.

The irony of this innovation is that churches and ministries that

pursue it become so relevant to the culture that they are, in fact,

irrelevant and are unable to call lost people from or to anything

because they have lost the distinctive and countercultural nature

of the gospel. Unrestrained and undiscerning innovation not only

contextualizes the gospel to fit a culture but also capitulates it to

a culture. This is akin to the behavior of the Israelites, who were

prone not only to buddy up with pagan neighbors but also to

worship their gods, have sex at their sacred places, and dance

around their golden calves.

I recall a terse conversation I had with a very successful and wellknown young pastor who desired to reach the many gay, lesbian, and

transgendered people living in his urban area. He explained that to

do so, he had appointed to his church’s leadership someone who had

been born a man but was undergoing a sex change operation to

become a woman and was living with a male lover. He explained that

by elevating this person into a position of leadership, he had won

approval from the gay, lesbian, and transgendered community and

that this person was greatly helping the people in his church to

become more accepting of people like him-her.

Some other pastors and I confronted the young pastor on this

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matter and told him that, while we agreed that such people need

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Christ and should be welcomed into the church if they are willing

to give the gospel of repentance a hearing, they are still sinners acting out their fallen nature. They should be told that a relationship

with Jesus would require a lifestyle change. We clarified that God

teaches that he has made us male and female and that no matter

what a plastic surgeon might do with someone’s plumbing, God’s

selection of gender remains intact. The pastor vehemently disagreed,

arguing that he was simply being relevant to his culture, while we

argued, to no avail, that he needed also to be faithful to his God.

Innovation, when not tethered to the truth of the gospel, leads

to heresy. Every heretic in the history of the church who took relevance to the culture beyond the bounds of orthodoxy did what

Paul, in the opening chapter of Romans, calls exchanging the truth

of God for a lie. Paul argues that the true motive inspiring such

heretics is that they are either sinning or want to be sinning, and

so they suppress the truth like a teenage boy frantically trying to

hide his porn magazine when his mom walks into the room.

Whatever happened to that pastor? Eventually he was fired

for habitual sexual sin, as he too became so much like the culture

in which he lived that in his relevance he became irrelevant and

in his innovation he became a heretic.

The underlying motivations for both traditionalism and innovation are a sense of homelessness and a sense of lostness. In our

fast-paced and ever-changing culture of insanity, many Christians

are prone either to cling to yesterday or to run headlong into

tomorrow searching for a home. What’s our goal? Not to perpetuate a tradition or embrace an innovation. The goal of reformission

is Jesus, to faithfully walk with him on each step of our journey as

we head toward the home he has prepared for us. Anything and

everything less than life in him, ministry through him, glory to him,

by grace from him as we journey with him must continually be

repented of as sin, regardless of our history or degree of hipness.

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redeeming:

the language of our culture

Once we have cleansed the gospel from the stains of traditionalism and innovation, we are ready to contextualize it in a way that

is faithful both to the content of Scripture and the context of ministry. The gospel was meant to live here on the earth among cultures, just as Jesus did during his incarnation. Reformission requires

that we carefully express the truth of the gospel in the languages

and cultures of the people whom God has called us to evangelize.

Since every presentation of the gospel is culturally expressed,

the form of its presentation must continually change as the culture changes, while the content of the gospel remains unchanged

and truthful. For example, Billy Graham’s booklet Steps to Peace

with God presents the gospel in terms of peace. It was designed

for people who had suffered through a horrendous World War

and were desperately longing for peace. God has used it in the

lives of many thousands of people in past years. But younger

people who have never experienced the horrors of a war like the

World Wars and Vietnam are less likely than their parents and

grandparents to identify with the thrust of a gospel of peace.

Likewise, the late Bill Bright’s Campus Crusade for Christ

presentation of the four spiritual laws explains the gospel in terms

of four laws that regulate the spiritual world in the same way that

four laws govern the physical world, according to Newtonian

physics. But younger generations familiar with quantum physics

and chaos theory are increasingly less likely to agree with the

finality of Newtonian physics or natural laws. They are therefore

less likely to relate to a gospel presentation of spiritual laws.

Sometimes you hear the gospel presented in terms of a private

religious experience and a loving personal relationship with Jesus.

This approach to the gospel made sense to a countercultural hippie

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generation that had abandoned traditional institutions and authorities (such as the church) in favor of direct and unmediated encounters with God through everything from alternative religions to drug

use. But younger people from broken homes in a shattered lonely

society desire a community of faith in which to journey and are less

likely to see the appeal in an autonomous faith. In addition, people

who were raised apart from the church often have less resistance to

ancient traditions and institutions. These are foreign experiences

that intrigue them, rather than bad memories that repel them.

I don’t mean to criticize godly people who have been used of

God to bring many to faith. In fact, I have a great deal of respect

and appreciation for these people. For example, as a new Christian working at a hotel, I once had the privilege of chatting for

about ten minutes with Dr. Billy Graham, who was staying there

as a guest. He was sitting in the restaurant by himself, wearing a

Minnesota Twins baseball cap, reading the paper, and eating breakfast when I introduced myself. He asked if I knew the Lord, and I

explained that I was a new Christian and that God had called me

into ministry. His words were encouraging, and he kindly promised to pray for me. After our conversation ended, other people

seated around him in the restaurant recognized who he was, and

rather than rushing off to avoid being bothered, Dr. Graham graciously stayed in the restaurant to visit with people, share the

gospel, and pray over the children who came to sit on his lap and

have their photos taken with him as if he were Santa Claus. His

gracious spirit and humble approachability made a great impression on many of the non-Christians I worked with. To this day, I

sincerely thank God for working through Billy Graham in such a

wonderfully faithful manner, both in and out of the pulpit.

Rather than critiquing the methods of men like Dr. Graham,

I am simply saying that we should follow their example and be

faithful in our own day. Since the gospel must be contextualized

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in a way that is accessible to the culture and faithful to the Scriptures, God’s people must continually review their presentation of

the gospel to ensure that the form in which they present it is the

most effective one.

Isn’t the way God has chosen to put our Bible together the

perfect example of how this is to be done? In the days of the early

church, many cultures needed to hear about Jesus in a way they

could relate to. So God inspired the writing of four gospels, each

designed to present the gospel in the most effective manner to

four different cultural groups. This was done without changing

the gospel message of Jesus as God, who lived a sinless life, died

as a substitute for his people, was buried, and rose from death to

forgive repentant sinners according to the promises of Scripture.

Let’s do a quick overview of what’s distinctive about each gospel:

Matthew

Mark

Luke

John

Author

Jewish

Jewish

Gentile

Jewish

Christian;

Christian;

Christian

Christian and

former

cousin of

doctor

Jesus’

despised tax

Barnabas

youngest

collector

disciple

Primary

Jews

Romans

Gentiles

Greeks

Audience

Portrait of

Jewish

Faithful

Perfect man

God

Jesus

Messiah and

servant

king

Jesus’

Traced to

No

Traced to

Jesus as the

Genealogy Abraham and

genealogy,

Adam

eternal Word

David,

since Jesus’

to show that

of God

showing Jesus accomplishJesus was

as the

ments, and

fully human

fulfillment of

not his

Old

family, are

Testament

what is

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prophecy

important

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Notable

Roughly

Briefest

Roughly

Roughly

Features

60%

gospel; few

50%

90% is

of the book

Old

of the book

unique

is Jesus’

Testament

is Jesus’

to John; no

words from

quotes;

words;

parables or

his teaching

explains

thirteen

exorcisms;

as a rabbi; Jewish words

women

seven “I AM”

about fifty and customs mentioned

statements

Old

for nonthat are

of Jesus

Testament

Jews;

omitted

prove

quotes

150 present-from other

he is God

tense verbs

gospels;

emphasizing

Jewish

Jesus’

customs

actions;

explained;

thirty-five

a focus on

miracles,

Jesus’ early

40% of the

years and

book is Jesus’ emotional

words

life

The way the Gospels in our Bible have been arranged provides a perfect example of how the same gospel story can be presented in different ways. Some critics of Scripture have argued

that the differences between the Gospels are contradictions. This

could not be farther from the truth. The four gospels simply are

similar to your local nightly news. The first three gospels are like

local network television affiliates for ABC, NBC, and CBS, which

generally report the same stories with some variation in eyewitness accounts and details. This explains why roughly 60 percent of

the first three gospels give the same information. John, on the

other hand, is more like one of the national cable television newscasts—such as CNN—which have news stories that are rarely

found on the local nightly news. This explains why roughly 90

percent of John is unique to his account.

As God’s people on reformission, we too are to function as

reporters, telling the good news about Jesus in a way that is both

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scripturally accurate and culturally accessible. So it is vital that we

continually look for ways of presenting the gospel that will be best

suited for the people we encounter so that they can journey toward

Jesus. To help people on this journey, I’ve found it useful to provide them with certain signposts. Signposts, of course, can be very

helpful in giving people directions. We used to live on one of the

busiest streets in our city, right next door to the seventy-thousandseat college football stadium. Giving directions to our home was

incredibly easy since the city is filled with signposts directing

people to the stadium. But after we became weary of the continual noise and traffic, we purchased a new home in the quietest and

most tucked away neighborhood we could find. The only problem

was that our dead-end lane was so private that it did not even have

a name, which made it nearly impossible to give directions to

friends and family members. In addition, none of the internet

mapping websites was able to provide accurate directions to our

home. So we had to resort to customizing the directions for our

guests and carefully explaining which signposts would direct them

to our home. Likewise, the cultures that surround you are filled

with lost people who cannot find Jesus unless you give them directions with signposts to guide them. I’ve found the following signposts to be particularly helpful for directing people to Jesus, and I

offer them in hopes that you will find them helpful too.

signpost 1: the gospel connects to this life

While previous generations worried about what would happen to them after they died, and were compelled by the idea of

belonging to Jesus for the benefits in the life to come, many people

today plan on living long but miserable lives and are likely to be

more compelled by the idea of belonging to Jesus for the benefits

in this life. After all, even if there were no life after death, the joys

of belonging to Jesus during this life would, by themselves, make

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signpost 2: the gospel infuses daily activities with meaning

Every day, people eat, sleep, work, play, love, and hate, but

they do not know why. Not knowing where they come from or to

whom they are going, they lack the ability to make their lives

meaningful. Consequently, our culture is filled with “successful”

people who are mired in anxiety and confusion because they do

not know the point of all their toil. But the gospel reveals Jesus as

Lord over all of life, who infuses even mundane tasks such as dishwashing with meaning as acts of worship.

signpost 3: the gospel names sin and points the way to for-

giveness

No matter how strenuously people fight them, their consciences prevail in revealing the filthiness of what they have done

to others and of what others have done to them. This, in part,

explains the explosion in popularity of everything from medication to therapy to make people feel better. Only the gospel

can show people not only how bad sin truly is but also the justice of God through Jesus’ death in our place to forgive our sin.

Once forgiven, we can leave sin behind and move on in newness

of life.

signpost 4: the gospel transforms life

The gospel is about the grace of God given to us through

Jesus’ death and resurrection for our sins. Grace saves us, and

grace forgives and cleanses us when we sin. But grace also empowers us to live new and transformed lives of victory over stubborn

sin. In this way, the gospel is about life—new life—in Christ.

What people long for most is not just a way to cope with who they

are and how to manage their sins. They also yearn for new lives as

new people, hence the popularity of television makeover shows.

However, an internal makeover is possible only by the transforming power of God’s grace.

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signpost 5: the gospel builds a spiritual family

One of the prominent metaphors of the church in the New

Testament is a household—or an extended family—held together

by the blood of Christ. No wonder the New Testament tells Christians to treat one another as brothers and sisters. In our day of

devastated families and generational fracturing, churches that

operate like loving spiritual families, caring for and correcting one

another in love, can be the most convincing proof of the power

and benefits of the gospel.

signpost 6: the gospel is about participation with God

While it is true that we are saved not by our good works but

by the good works of Jesus (Eph. 2:8–9), it is also true that we are

saved to good works (Eph. 2:10). The gospel is not simply about

getting my sins forgiven and then sitting around until I get to

heaven or until Jesus returns. The gospel compels us to participate with God in the culture we live in. Any gospel that does not

compel us into mission overlooks both the duties and delights of

being a Christian.

signpost 7: the gospel is about Jesus as the means and end of

our salvation

Simply, Jesus is not a means to things such as wealth, health,

heaven, happiness, wisdom, and success in marriage, church, ministry, theology, or politics. Anytime that Jesus is used as a means

to an end, a false gospel has been introduced and the thing

improperly focused on becomes a false god. To remain on task

with reformission, we must continually be about Jesus as the

means and end of God’s will, and we must both proclaim his truth

and live his lifestyle, which is the topic of the next chapter.

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reflecting:

reformission questions

1.

If you were to write a gospel for the people in your culture, where would you start?

2.

If you were to write a gospel for the people in your culture, how would you explain sin?

3.

If you were to write a gospel for the people in your culture, how would you explain Jesus?

4.

If you were to write a gospel for the people in your culture, what about Jesus’ life and teaching would they most

resonate with and struggle with? Why?

5.

Which of the signposts have been most helpful to you

personally?

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reformission

interview

with Icabod Caine

Christians and

country music

1. What is your name?

Ichabod Caine

2. Do you consider yourself to be a Christian?

Yes

3. What is your age?

53

4. What is your vocation?

KMPS Morning Man in Seattle (country music with more than thirtyfive years in the industry)

5. How have people responded to your faith and

vocation?

Christians go “hey cool,”

and non-Christians have a general respect, and maybe there’s a

sliver who are hostile to the

gospel, but most are encouraging. My challenge is to be careful as to how vocal I am. There’s

always this thing about they

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won’t let you share your faith, but God oftentimes puts you in a position

where you don’t have that kind of liberty; I really do. You look at Jesus—

he didn’t do thirty-minute sermons; he did short encouraging thoughts

and he did proverbs and he spoke in parables. So in that sense, I like to

think I am doing my part yet staying in the confines of what my gig calls

me to be, which is a disc jockey who happens to be a Christian. I don’t think

you separate the sacred from the secular. It’s all sacred. Oftentimes what

we think is sacred is not and what we think is secular is not, so in that sense,

I think we are really basically clueless.

6. Do you consider yourself a missionar y to your

culture?

This question is fraught with some guilt because it basically says you

have to be out there . . . God calls us to be in love with Christ, that’s the

issue. If you’re in love with Christ on a daily basis, the rest takes care of

itself. The idea of loading you up with how many Christian scalps have you

gotten may make someone think, “Oh, I guess I am doing it wrong.” If you

are in love with Jesus, you don’t have to worry about anything else. Jesus

said to go make disciples of all nations; he did not say to go save them.

There are really two different arenas here, and we get caught up thinking I

may not be doing my part. After having said all this, I still answer this question yes.

7. What insights have you gained that would be

helpful to Christians and churches?

Be real. Even if they don’t agree with you, if you are authentic and

you’re real, that can’t help but have an attraction. And if you think you are

really doing something heavyweight for God and you think it’s really religious, you are probably totally wrong.

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C H A P T E R 3

shotgun weddings

to Jesus

r e f o r m i s s i o n e v a n g e l i s m

remembering:

participation

When God called me to plant our church, Mars Hill Church, I had

worked for nearly two years overseeing a college ministry, but I had

never been a pastor or even been an official member of any church. I

was unsure of how to begin a church, and so I simply read the Bible and

tried to imitate how Jesus gathered the first workers for his ministry. In

the opening chapter of John’s gospel, I saw that Jesus began his ministry

not with a large crowd, a formal program, or an organized event but

rather by informally building friendships with a few men. Once those

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men trusted him, their friends, family members, and coworkers

also became his followers. This simple pattern seemed attainable.

So my wife, Grace, and I began opening our lives and home

to practice hospitality and extend friendship to anyone who

would accept, and within a short time, the small group meeting

in our living room grew to about twenty people. At that time, we

moved the weekly congregational gathering into a larger room at

a nearby church but continued growing the church by bringing

people into our home. This pattern continued for the first years

of the church until our house simply could not accommodate the

more than sixty people who were in our home each week for Bible

studies, meals, meetings, and prayer. By this point, our church had

grown to a few hundred people, and it had become obvious that

every Christian in our church needed to practice Jesus’ pattern.

After some Bible teaching on the principles I write about in

this book, people in our church began seeing themselves as missionaries in the culture, building friendships for the purpose of

showing and sharing the love of Jesus with lost people. Our

church continued to grow, and today it is one of the largest in

Seattle, having grown at an average of nearly 60 percent each year

since its inception. As our people function as missionaries, evangelism is done by the whole church instead of through the dated

evangelistic routine of relying on the ministries of professionals,

programs, or large formal events. Reformission requires that every

Christian and church realize that missions is about not something

they do but something they are. We are all on a mission with Jesus

every day, and we are either good missionaries or bad.

In the routine model, there are two options. In the first, a

notable speaker is brought in to present the gospel to a large audience and to call them to make a decision for Jesus. In the second,

Christians are sent out to ask non-Christians leading questions

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In both options, the emphasis is on eliciting a swift decision

for Christ without taking the time to build a friendship. In both

versions, those who walk forward, stand up, raise their hand, pray

a prayer, sign a card, or indicate by some other means their decisions are deemed converts and told to assimilate into churches.

Whether they were truly converted is debatable, and the odds of

their assimilating into churches are uncertain, unless they already

have trustworthy friendships with someone in a church who can

serve as a tour guide, introducing them to the language, values,

and systems of the church. While Scripture gives examples of the

routine model, 1 the mission model of Jesus may prove to be more

faithful to God, more fruitful to lost people, and more appealing

to Christians who are otherwise fearful of using drive-by evangelism techniques such as knocking on doors and street witnessing (which can feel a lot like playing Duck, Duck, Damned, a

revision of the children’s game Duck, Duck, Goose).

While these routine patterns of evangelism have proven fruitful in the past—and remain fruitful in some cultural contexts—

their effectiveness is waning in the emerging American culture.

There was a time when door-to-door evangelism and door-todoor business sales made sense, because many wives were home

all day and husbands came home at night for dinner. This routine is no longer as effective because there are fewer stay-at-home

wives and mothers. In addition, people’s lives are so filled with

entertainment, sales pitches, advertising, self-help seminars, and

large emotionally moving events of various sorts that people are

often unimpressed by large church events or slick Jesus sales

pitches complete with canned leading questions.

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Routine Presentation

Reformission Participation

Evangelism

Evangelism

(Believe in Jesus, then

(Belong to the church,

belong to the church.)

then believe in Jesus.)

Gospel information is

A genuine, spiritual friendship

presented.

between a Christian and a

non-Christian is built.

Hearers are called to make a

The non-Christian sees

decision about Jesus.

authentic faith and

ministry lived openly and

participates in it.

If an affirmative decision is made,

The gospel is naturally present

the person is welcomed into the

in word and deed within

church.

the friendship.

Then friendship is extended

The non-Christian’s conversion

to the person.

to Jesus follows his or her

conversion to Christian

friendships and the church.

The convert is trained for

The church celebrates the

service in ministry by being

conversion of their friend.

separated from the culture.

In reformission evangelism, people are called to come and see

the transformed lives of God’s people before they are called to

repent of sin and to trust in God. 2 Taking a cue from dating is

helpful on this point. If we desire people to be happily married to

Jesus as his loving bride, it makes sense to let them go out on a

few dates with him instead of just putting a shotgun to their heads

and asking them to hurry up, put on a white dress, and try to look

happy for the photos.

Reformission evangelism understands that the transformed

lives of people in the church are both the greatest argument for,

and the greatest explanation of, the gospel. Therefore, it welcomes

non-Christians into the church, not so much through evangelistic

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programs as through informal relationships like Jesus developed

with his first disciples. In our church in Seattle, as lost people

become friends with Christians, they often get connected to various ministries (for example, helping to run concerts, helping to

guide a rock-climbing expedition, taking a class on biblical marriage, helping to develop a website, joining a Bible study, serving

the needy) and participate in them before they possess saving faith.

In this way, reformission evangelism depends on friendship and

hospitality as conduits for the gospel.

As trust is earned over time, lost people will often speak with

their Christian friends about “our church” before they speak about

“our God.” Often they convert first to the church and friendships

with its members, and second to God, whom they meet in their

friendships and experiences in the church. For example, a woman

in our church who knows that she is not a Christian asked if she

could host a Bible study in her home and have someone else teach

it, because she enjoyed the people in “our church” so much that

she was excited to have them in her home.

Reformission evangelism considers it vital that lost people be

brought close enough to witness the natural and practical outworking of the gospel in people’s lives. Reformission Christians are

not ashamed of the gospel, and they speak about Jesus and pray to

him in front of their lost friends as they would around their Christian friends; and their lost friends appreciate their authenticity.

Their lost friends are comfortable asking them questions about the

Christian life, and these reformission Christians have earned the

right to give answers as a result of their friendship and hospitality.

At some point, God may grant saving faith to their lost friends

and enable them to pass from death to life, but their salvation is

ultimately between them and God, as he alone gives salvation. The

precise moment of their conversion is known by God, but it is often

unknown to them, because authentic conversion is commonly

experienced more as a process than as a single moment. Ultimately,

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what matters most is not when they meet Jesus but that at some

point they begin loving him with new hearts and will continue to

do so forever.

One of the most fascinating aspects of reformission evangelism is that lost people actually function as missionaries themselves before their conversion. Lost people commonly speak with

lost family and friends of what they are learning about Jesus, even

inviting them to church and introducing them to their Christian

friends. Hence, reformission evangelism is careful not to sever lost

people or new Christians from their tribe of lost friends, because

those relationships present further opportunities for evangelism.

The only exception would be if those relationships were causing

someone to fall back into a habitual sin.

opportunities in our experience economy

Reformission evangelism, patterned after the example of Jesus,

is particularly appropriate for our current economy, in which people

live much of their lives pursuing experiences. In their book The

Experience Economy, James Gilmore and Joseph Pine II trace the

transitions our economy has undergone from its original commodity base to the present focus on experiences.3 To understand our

current economy, it is important to view it as a series of layers, as

new economies are laid upon the old, that work simultaneously and

in conjunction with each other. I will briefly summarize the authors’

research, with the addition of an information-economy layer.

Layer 1: Commodities-based economy. In this base level of

economy, natural resources are extracted by hand from the earth.

If you want a home, you must begin by chopping down a tree,

and if you want a cup of coffee, you must grow coffee beans. In

this economy, people spend most of their time working the raw

materials extracted from creation with their hands. If you want

something, you must provide it for yourself.

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Layer 2: Goods-based economy. In this next level of economy,

you pay someone else to make a commodity into a good. If you

want a home, you can buy lumber with which to build one, and

if you want a cup of coffee, you can purchase coffee beans. In this

economy, people have the luxury of acquiring resources through

purchase, trade, and barter because experts in various fields have

prepared things for their use.

Layer 3: Services-based economy. In this level of economy,

someone else turns a commodity into a good and serves it to you.

If you want to buy a home, you can pay people (architects, contractors, interior designers, gardeners, painters) to do the work

for you, and if you want a cup of coffee, you can sit in a restaurant

while other people do all of the work, from growing coffee beans

to bringing a hot cup of decaf to your table. In this economy,

people can pay specialists to do various tasks for them.

Layer 4: Information-based economy. In this economy, insight,

advice, and counsel that are important to your quality of life—

or vital to the improvement of the other economies—are invaluable resources. People in this level of economy value information,

in addition to commodities, goods, and services, to the degree that

they will pay large sums of money for such things as televisions,

radios, newspapers, books, magazines, and the internet. In addition, information is used to teach customers about the values of

their business. Examples include coffee shops that inform people

of their environmentally safe beans and the philanthropy they

undertake with profits.

Layer 5: Experience-based economy. In this highest level of

economy, people are not provided with an external commodity

or good but are given an experience that provides an internal

memory. For example, Starbucks coffee shops include each of the

five economic layers and are designed to provide an aesthetic

experience that appeals to all of the senses. In Starbucks, the

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music, the scent of coffee, the flavors, the colors and lighting, the

feel of the furniture, the amenities (wireless internet connections,

board games, newspapers, magazines), and the sale of products

(mugs, tea accessories, seasonal products, home espresso machines)

combine to create an experience that is much more complicated

than just drinking a cup of coffee. The memory of getting out of

the house, conducting business, chatting with a friend, and reading a book by a fire is of great value.

People have always craved experiences, but what sets our time

in history apart are the amount of leisure time we have to engage

in these experiences, the affordability of technology, and the escalating income and quality of life that make it possible for the

masses to experience what only the wealthy could afford in previous centuries. Travel is relatively cheap; multi-million-dollar

films can be enjoyed for mere dollars; televisions, DVDs, and

home-theater systems are ubiquitous; and personal services are

viewed as an entitlement.

However, not all experiences are the same. People in our culture pursue at least three types of experiences.

1.

Observation experiences. These occur when a person is simply observing an event, such as sitting at home watching a

TV show or viewing artwork at a gallery. In worship, this

form of experience is common in seeker-sensitive churches

where a band performs and the people in the congregation

do not sing along but watch the singers as they perform.

2.

Participation experiences. These require some type of

effort for involvement in an experience, such as voting via

phone or internet to help select the winner of a reality TV

program or taking an art class at a gallery. In worship, this

would include congregational singing, clapping, the raising of hands, kneeling, and other expressions of partici72

pating in the worship of the church.

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3.

Immersion experiences. These go even further than participation experiences in that the consumer is helping to create the experience rather than observing or participating

in someone else’s experience, such as video games with

multiple players and interactive internet chat rooms. In

worship experiences, this would include the same elements of participation experiences but would go even farther by, for example, allowing people, while the sermon is

being preached, to paint or draw scenes from the sermon

text to be displayed after the service, permitting people to

come forward for communion when they feel prepared,

allowing people in the congregation to call out the songs

they would like to sing next, or permitting congregants to

interrupt the sermon to ask questions of the preacher.

Reformission evangelism to our growing experience economy will require Christians and churches to steep the gospel in

the culture with increasing creativity, hospitality, and authenticity. This is necessary because lost people living in an experiencebased economy are willing to immerse themselves in the life of a

Christian community to experience it for themselves and to see

firsthand the experiences of people Jesus has transformed.

the benefits of reformission evangelism

In conclusion, the benefits of reformission evangelism are

many, including the following.

● Reformission evangelism blurs the lines between

evangelism and discipleship, enabling non-Christians

to learn a great deal about Scripture and the Christian

life before making a decision for Christ.

● People’s conversion to Jesus is also a conversion of their

old lifestyles to his mission of reaching lost people.

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This enables them both to be involved in reformission

even before their own conversion—through

preexisting relationships with people both outside of

and inside of the church—and habituates them if and

when they are converted to be about reformission.

● Their conversion is not merely a mental assent to facts

they believe but is a conversion of the totality of their

lives. This prevents them from being carnal Christians

and people who live apart from repentance and

holiness, wrongly believing they have been saved

because they have a few theological facts in order.

● Reformission insists that evangelism is more about a

lifestyle for all of God’s people than just a ministry

program or department for some of God’s people, and

that the gospel is made clearest by the honest words and

open lives of those who have been transformed by grace.

In theory, reformission evangelism may sound wonderful.

But for it to happen in reality, God’s people must first admit that

their own attitudes often get in the way. It is imperative that

Christians develop a habit of confessing and repenting of their

self-righteousness, which prohibits this natural progress of the

gospel through the culture. In saying this, I recognize that I may

sound self-righteous and hypocritically judgmental, and so I will

illustrate this point through one of my own sinful experiences.

repenting:

self-righteousness

I wanted to buy diapers.

Just diapers.

It wasn’t like I was searching for something rare, like a bald

eagle or a literate wrestling fan.

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Just diapers.

I desperately needed the diapers because my young daughter

had just magically recycled milk into a rainbow of neon colors.

As I drove the car, she screamed and cried like a Red Sox fan come

World Series time, because she, like a Sox fan, desperately longed

for a change.

But we were no longer in our sane city of Seattle. Instead, we

were in a parallel universe of heat and grumpy elderly men popping Viagra out of PEZ dispensers like kids on Halloween. This

culture resembles hell but goes by the name of South Florida.

Leaving my daughter and wife in the car, I ran into a large grocery store and combed every aisle without finding a single diaper.

Finally, I stopped a young man with a mop and asked him where

the diapers were. He said I would have to go to a drug store instead

because they did not have any diapers at the grocery store. Amazed

both at seeing that some men mop and at the fact that some grocery stores don’t have diapers, I ran out and sped to a nearby pharmacy. Upon entering, I was delighted to see a row of diapers stacked

to the third heaven. Quickly scanning along the row of diapers, I

soon found myself at the end without having found the correct size.

They were all adult diapers!

Shaking my head and staring at the floor, I walked to the

counter and asked an old woman in a red vest if they carried any

children’s diapers.

She said, “No.”

No?

As she walked away, I could hear her diaper shuffling. I was so

astonished that I nearly needed one off the shelf for myself.

My first thought was that God hated these Floridians and was

doubled over in heaven laughing at them. My second thought was

that it was only me who hated them and was doubled over laughing at them.

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Why?

Because their universe was foreign to me. I did not—could

not—understand a childless community where wealthy eightyyear-old men trade in their eighty-year-old wives for four twentyyear-old girlfriends who change their diapers for them. Upon

returning to the car, I told my wife that I was grateful that God

had not sent me into ministry in South Florida, because wealthy

old people are like kryptonite to me.

While I know that our pluralistic and multicultural society

frowns on prejudice, the fact remains that we all have prejudices.

The more I read the Bible, the more I am convicted of my dislike

of some people and of my arrogant self-righteousness. To illustrate my point, I will share with you some of the people whom I

had sinful attitudes against that I had to repent of.

I used to dislike men with ridiculously hairy ears and noses,

because it looks like they snorted a cat, and I hate cats.

I used to dislike men who wore tank tops, because they

remind me of Detroit, and I don’t like Detroit because it is a thirdworld city where a lot of people wear tank tops.

I used to not like Canada, because it is filled with Canadians,

and Canadians are hockey fans, and hockey is dumb because it

claims to be a sport but does not even have a ball or a pitcher.

I used to not like people who wear white shoes or socks with

dark-colored pants, because they look like they are attending a

formal event in Canada or Detroit.

I used to dislike minivans, because they are the product of a

vast feminist conspiracy to inflict a dignity vasectomy upon men.

I used to dislike men who wear pastel colors, because it is

impossible to be masculine wearing turquoise, sea-foam green,

lemon yellow, or peach, and these colors are often worn by boy

bands, and I despise boy bands because they are happy, they dance,

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I used to not like people who eat lots of foods that end in

“-itos,” listen to country music, or refer to Jesus, Elvis, and Dale

Jarrett as the Holy Trinity, so I was prejudiced against most of the

Deep South.

I used to not like people who wear a mullet (a haircut prevalent at state fairs, NASCAR races, and wrestling matches that is

long in the back and short in the front. It is also referred to as the

Soccer Rocker, Camaro Cut, Tennessee Mudflap, Kentucky Waterfall, Ape Drape, Achey Breaky Bad Mistakey, Beaver Paddle, Canadian Passsport, Crazy Charismatic Coiffure, and Hockey Hair),

because they look like one of the guys in the middle of the evolutionary chart and remind me of my photo in my late-1980s highschool yearbook.

I know this all sounds terrible, and it is. But I’d appreciate your

being honest also and admitting that you too have your list of

people whom you dislike. You probably think your list is better

than mine because it has abortion doctors, rapists, pedophiles, corporate thieves, used-car salesmen, politicians, and evil dictators on

it. But the fact that we each have a list means that we are all pretty

much the same and are just haggling over the details of who should

wear the white hats and who should wear the black. This also helps

explain the finger-pointing both in the church and in the culture

between blacks and whites, young and old, rich and poor, ugly and

beautiful, smart and dumb, urban and rural, self-help and selfacceptance, victims and perpetrators, Republicans and Democrats,

Chevy and Ford, Mac and PC, married and single, homosexual

and heterosexual, male and female, and educated and uneducated,

to name a few. The more we understand the concept of reformission, the more we realize that everyone is unlovely, Jesus loves

everyone, and it is his love alone that makes us lovely.

The bottom line is that we are all self-righteous. We are all

prone to secretly believe that we are somehow better than others

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because of things we do or do not do. The Scriptures teach that no

one is inherently righteous and that our only righteousness comes

from Jesus as a gift.4 Anyone who fails to embrace this humbling

fact invariably pursues righteousness on his or her own, which is

the grievous sin of self-righteousness.

As long as Christians fail to repent of self-righteousness, we

will continue to speak of evangelism in terms such as outreach,

which implies we will not embrace lost people but will keep them

at least an arm’s length away. Unrepentant self-righteousness also

permits us to justify our sin by viewing ourselves as “clean” and

others as “dirty,” which then causes us to avoid others in an effort

to remain untainted. Repentance enables us to kneel humbly with

fellow sinners at the foot of the cross so they can see Jesus without our pride rising up to encumber their view.

Self-righteousness has so seeped into American Christianity

that being a missionary to one’s neighbors is easily overlooked

because of the sickness of our faith. How sick are we when the most

popular books among American Christians are about how to get

blessed by praying a small section of Old Testament Scripture like a

pagan mantra, and about the Rapture, as if the goal of the Christian

life were to get more junk and leave this trailer park of a planet

before God’s tornado touches down on all the sinners? Only through

repentant eyes will we see that God has a plan, by the power of the

gospel of grace, to build a community of transformed people.

redeeming:

Trinitarian community

This new community of transformed people, called the

church, should be patterned after the one true God, who eternally

exists as a Trinitarian community of Father, Son, and Spirit. God

made men and women in his image and likeness, which means, in

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explains why God told our father Adam that it was not good for

him to be alone, though at that time both he and his environment

were perfect. God made Eve to be in friendship, marriage covenant,

and community together with Adam. But they were soon separated

by their sin, which came between them. Since our first parents, we

have all been born into a world in which we long for gracious, joyous, and endless friendship and community but find this longing

unsatisfied because of the sin that separates us from friendship with

God and one another.

In his book Bowling Alone, Harvard professor Robert Putnam

explains this phenomenon by showing that our world is arranged

by various sorts of capital.5 Physical capital includes the objects

that we possess and use. Human capital includes the skills, talents,

and abilities that God has given people. Social capital includes the

friends, acquaintances, coworkers, family members, and other

relationships that form a web of trust and reciprocity.

Traditionally, people have lived their lives in these socialcapital networks by formally and informally bartering goods,

services, information, favors, and the like. Basically, this means

that I do something nice to help you because we have some type

of relationship, with the understanding that, later on, you will

help me when I need it, because I’ve made a deposit into our

invisible social-capital account.

Traditionally, the largest repository of social capital has been the

church.6 Roughly half of all membership in organizations, charitable

giving, and community service is connected to religious organizations, making them the number-one repository of social friendships

and connecting opportunities in our nation.7 But as spirituality has

become more of a private affair, the percentage of the population that

attends Protestant churches has declined from 15 percent to 12 percent in just the last quarter-century. 8 Correspondingly, in the past

twenty-five years, there has been a decline in both the number of

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friendships and the number of organizations that people typically

join to build friendships—everything from labor unions to professional associations and civic groups.9 In addition, between 1970 and

1999, the divorce rate has tripled, the teen suicide rate has tripled,

and depression has become more prevalent, which has contributed

to a disconnected culture of loneliness.10

The decline in our nation’s social capital inevitably reduces

all of life to a transaction-based culture in which the only way you

can get anyone to help you is to pay them. So if you are lonely and

want someone to speak to, you may have to pay a counselor. If

you can’t pick up your dry cleaning, you may have to hire a personal assistant. If you want to work out with someone, you may

have to hire a personal trainer. And if your car breaks down, you

may have to call a cab—rather than a neighbor—to pick you up.

Many people are lonely and lack the community gathering

points in which they can make meaningful human contacts. The

following statistics demonstrate this altering of our relational

landscape in the past twenty-five years.

● Playing cards as a social activity is down 25 percent. 11

● Frequenting bars, nightclubs, and taverns is down 40

percent.12

● The number of full-service restaurants has decreased 25

percent, and the number of bars (including coffee bars)

and luncheonettes has decreased 50 percent, but the

number of fast-food outlets has increased 100 percent, as

more people eat alone and eat more meals in their cars.13

● Having a social evening with someone from one’s

neighborhood is down 33 percent. 14

● Attending social clubs and meetings is down 58 percent. 15

● Family dinners are down 33 percent.16

● Having friends over to one’s home is down 45 percent.17

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● From 1980 to 1993, participation in America’s numberone participant sport, bowling, was up 10 percent, but

the number of bowling leagues decreased 40 percent, as

more people bowled alone. 18

● From 1985 to 1999, the readiness of the average

American to make new friends declined by nearly 33

percent.19

People are increasingly busy, isolated, lonely, disconnected,

and without any helpful solutions in the culture. The isolation is

now so entrenched that many people don’t know how to practice

hospitality. This trend is even reflected in new architecture, which

replaces large dining and living rooms designed for human contact with walk-in closets, home offices, and personal entertainment rooms. Here lonely people can watch sitcoms about

friendships and reality-based shows in which characters pretend

to interact with human beings, a thing apparently fascinating and

foreign to many lonely, isolated individuals.

Living alone, driving alone, eating alone, sleeping alone, having sex alone, and working alone make many people so depressed

that they cope with the assistance of medication rather than

human contact. Some, however, seek out human connection

through groups, as 40 percent of all Americans are now in some

form of group (Sunday schools, support groups, writing groups,

self-improvement groups, cause-oriented groups, therapy groups,

civic-betterment groups, recovery groups, weight-loss groups, literary groups), because they are dying of loneliness, particularly if

they are single, and even more so if they are divorced.20

The time, money, and energy spent by previous generations

on building friendships and community are increasingly being

spent in impersonal pursuits such as pet care and beauty regimens.

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● From 1992 to 1999, the amount of time spent caring

for a pet increased 15 percent.21

● From 1992 to 1999, the amount of time spent for

personal grooming increased 5–7 percent.22

Isn’t it odd that we are apparently becoming a nation of

attractive people who sit at home alone at night with our pets,

watching television shows about relationships and taking medication for the depression brought on by our loneliness? Meanwhile, our neighbors, whom we do not know, are spending their

evenings in much the same way.

Reformission requires that in our increasingly individualistic,

lonely, and depressed culture, we avoid proclaiming solely a personal relationship with Jesus. The gospel requires us to proclaim

and embody the full work of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Jesus

has accomplished four things which people long for. First, Jesus

takes away the sins that separate us from God so that we can be

connected to God, which fills our spiritual longings. Second, Jesus

takes away the sins that separate us from each other so that we

can be reconciled to each other as the church, which fills our

social longings. Third, Jesus forgives the sins we have committed,

thereby cleansing us of our filth, which fills our emotional longing for forgiveness. Fourth, Jesus cleanses us of the defilement that

has come upon us through the sins of others, which fulfills our

psychological longing for healing, cleansing, and new life.

In conclusion, reformission evangelism is about seeing the

many real needs of people in the culture and realizing that our

kindest gift is to connect them to Jesus and his people. To do so,

we must delve into the culture to understand the real needs of

people, which is the next issue we will examine.

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reflecting:

reformission questions

1.

What do you think are your most cumbersome sins for

which Jesus died to make you a Christian?

2.

Which sins has Jesus taken away so that you could be

reconciled to your Christian friends?

3.

Which most troubling sins has Jesus forgiven you of so

that you would not have to live in guilt?

4.

Which sins committed against you have defiled you

most, and how has Jesus cleansed you from their stains?

5.

Which people have sinned most grievously against you,

and how has Jesus enabled you to forgive them?

6.

In what ways are you self-righteous?

7.

Name a few non-Christian family members or friends

whom you are in relationship with and answer the following questions with them in mind.

a.

Which most obvious sins will they need to

repent of to become Christians?

b.

How are their sins separating them from God

and other people?

c.

How has their sin caused them to feel guilty?

d.

How have sins which have been committed

against them defiled them in such a way that

their identities are largely tied to those sad circumstances?

e.

What unforgiving bitterness do they hold

against people who have sinned against them,

and how is that bitterness damaging their lives?

f.

How would you best communicate the gospel to

them in terms that they can relate to?

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reformission

interview

with Stef Hjertager

from dancer to deacon

1. What is your name?

Stef Hjertager

2. Do you consider yourself to be a Christian?

Yes

3. What is your age?

26

4. What was your vocation prior to your conversion?

Exotic dancer

5. What is your current

vocation and ministr y?

Office administrator for a game development company. I am currently a serving

lead and deacon for our church.

6. Explain your conversion and

how friends were vital to your

salvation.

I was thirteen when I decided that my

life needed a little change. I started smoking

and drinking, and by the time I was fifteen

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or sixteen, I was doing and dealing drugs. I also started to have sexual relationships about that time. I spent a few years like that, then I thought life

could only get better if I lived on my own. So I graduated from high school

and moved out at seventeen. It was a great place. There was a needleexchanging program at the manager’s office, and there were cockroaches in

the bedroom. It wasn’t even an apartment; it was a motel that I paid for by

the week. I couldn’t afford it for long, so I decided I needed to make some

quick money. After waitressing at an exotic club for a few weeks, I realized the

best money was in dancing, so I became an exotic dancer.

At the club that I was working at, I met my future husband. We became

best friends right away. He convinced me that I really shouldn’t be doing

drugs. After a terrible overdose experience and his convincing words, I quit.

About three months after we met, we moved into an apartment together

and decided to be an exclusive couple. A few more years went by before

things started to change in our lives.

God decided that it was time for me to stop running from him.

When God started to grab ahold of my life, it was a process, not a sudden moment. Greg had recently become a Christian and was holding a

Bible study in our home. I was not yet interested in God at all. Greg had

purchased his own Bible and was reading it at work every day. He would

come home and talk about it all the time. I was raised in a very legalistic

church and was kicked out when I was a teenager. From then on, I wanted

nothing to do with the church or God or anything. One morning when

Greg got home from work, I sat him down and told him how things were

going to be. I explained to him that I didn’t care if he had a Bible study in

the house, I didn’t care if he read the Bible or even talked about it. I just

wanted nothing to do with his God or the Bible or anything. He did his

thing and I did mine.

Since the study was in our home and I was playing hostess, I started to

overhear the Word of God. In the beginning, I kept my distance, but over time,

it really started to get to me. I was very much on a search for truth and what

the Bible really did say once I started to hear more. There were things I was

never taught, and I wondered if there was more that I missed.

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Learning the truth was very difficult, though. At the time, it seemed that

I couldn’t get anything right. God was using my friends to tell me about him.

To show me where in my life I wasn’t living according to God’s will. To be

honest, I did not like their honesty. I did not like hearing that my life and the

choices that I was making were not what God wanted. I didn’t like hearing

my friends tell me I was wrong. I didn’t want to change my ways. I was sinning in my heart by fighting the advice that my friends were giving me. I was

even starting to dislike my friends. I came from a place where you did what

you wanted, and I did what I wanted and no one had the right to tell anyone

what they were doing was wrong. However, I started to notice that God was

the one who could say what I was doing was wrong. I didn’t like that either.

But over time, God was gracious and started to teach my heart and

mind to want his will for my life and not my own. Even though I didn’t

like what my friends were saying, they still kept saying it. They didn’t stop

telling me about God and what he wanted. For a long time, it was hard

because I understood what they were saying, but I couldn’t seem to do it.

I really wanted to do what God wanted for my life, but I just couldn’t seem

to stop sinning. You know what? I learned that we won’t ever stop sinning.

We are that way from the core. So what do you do? You rely on God, and

only then can you do what is in his will. It is only when you are in relationship with God and trusting him that you even understand what he

wishes for your life and how to then follow him without trial.

In the process of reading and

studying the Bible, I started to

believe. We went to a church

called Mars Hill Church for a

weekly Wednesday night Bible

study on the book of Revelation. I

was amazed at and in utter awe of

how brutally honestly the pastor

spoke. It was truly God speaking

directly into my heart and life.

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Over that summer, Greg and I spent many hours with people from the

church. We had dinners and did BBQs. We just simply got to know people.

But with that, we received good godly teaching from the elders and members alike. Basically, God was not thrilled with where we were in our lives,

and he was taking the opportunity to let us know in a very upfront and

honest way.

I was informed that my job was sinful. Mind you, I had a feeling it wasn’t

the best of occupations, but I was positive that God could work through that

somehow and I would be able to keep dancing. In the end, it was hard to take.

I didn’t know how we were going to survive with so much less money per

month if I quit like God asked. What I didn’t understand at the time is that

God is my Father. He is there to take care of me and help me when times are

both good and bad. To be quite honest, my head was still spinning from really

starting to understand God and what he was all about. Then to go and have to

completely change my occupation was a bit of a shocker.

God also informed me that both Greg and I were living in sin. We had

been living together for two and a half years at this point and knew that

“someday” we would get married, but we didn’t know when. We spoke to

the pastor, and he let us know of our sinful situation, and we both felt compelled to get married ASAP.

So three days before we got married, Greg told me I had to quit dancing. Understand that he was still in his spiritual infancy also at this point

and that laying down the law for his future wife was not an easy task. So

then, after a long conversation, the decision was made, and I quit dancing.

Three weeks after we had spoken to the Mars Hill pastor, we got married.

I am not exactly sure when I officially became a Christian. What I do

know is that Jesus Christ died on the cross for the sins of his people. He

shed more than just tears for their salvation. He suffered brutally and more

than any of us will ever know. Then three days later, he rose again to conquer sin and death so that we too may rise again and live with him someday. I thank the Lord Jesus Christ for the sacrifice he made for us so that

we might live again with him forever.

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C H A P T E R 4

Elvis in Eden

a r e f o r m i s s i o n u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f c u l t u r e

I am so hairy that I think I’m part Wookie.Subsequently,I

spend an inordinate percentage of my life shaving and sitting in a barber’s chair for a haircut. Every time I get my hair cut, I undergo a crosscultural experience. My barbershop is down the street from our church

in an area known as the eccentric hangout for self-identified urban hipsters. Its claim to fame is an annual summer-solstice parade that features a nudist bicycling team. The barbershop is part of a small chain

that promotes arty concerts and provides the finest selection of waitingarea pornography in our city.

On one occasion, my young son Zac and I were getting our hair cut

by a large flamboyant woman with bleached-blond hair, a black concert tank top, bright red lipstick, jeans, and tattoos large enough to double as billboards. During the haircut, she fired a succession of questions

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at me about parenting that made me feel like a contestant on a

game show. Near the end of the haircut, she thanked me for my

insight, told my son that he had a good daddy, and then informed

us that she was going to be a good “daddy” too.

Looking as if he had just taken a swig from a milk jug that was

years past the expiration date, my son stared at me, wanting an

explanation for how this woman could be a daddy. So I asked the

woman if she was planning on getting pregnant. She said that she

was not but that her girlfriend planned to conceive through a

threesome with a male friend who liked to have sex with her and

her “wife.”

The woman could not have been nicer, yet she saw no difference between her marriage and mine, or my family and the one

she was creating. Although we live in the same zip code, listen to

the same music, and are roughly the same age, we live in very different cultures.

remembering:

creation and curse

As Christians on reformission living in an era of pluralism,

we will encounter a variety of cultures each day. Consequently, it

is vital for us to understand culture as an enormous framework

within which people live their lives.

Listen to a few descriptions of culture:

Cultural commentator Rodney Clapp says that culture “takes

in media, advertising, information technology, fashion, ritual, worship, academic disciplines, public symbols, lifestyles and everyday

practices such as automobile commuting or childbearing. ”1

Author Renato Rosaldo says, “Culture lends significance to

human experience by selecting from and organizing it. It refers

broadly to the forms through which people make sense of their lives,

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inhabit a set-aside domain. . . . From the pirouettes of classical ballet to the most brute of brute facts, all of human conduct is culturally mediated. Culture encompasses the everyday and the esoteric,

the mundane and the elevated, the ridiculous and the sublime. ”2

Missionary pioneer Lesslie Newbigin says that “by the word

culture we have to understand the sum total ways of living developed by a group of human beings and handed on from generation

to generation. Central to culture is language. The language of a

people provides the means by which they express their way of perceiving things and of coping with them. Around that center one

would have to group their visual and musical arts, their technologies, their law, and their social and political organization. And

one must also include in culture, and as fundamental to any culture, a set of beliefs, experiences, and practices that seek to grasp

and express the ultimate nature of things, that which gives shape

and meaning to life, that which claims final loyalty. I am speaking,

obviously, about religion. Religion—including the Christian religion—is thus part of culture. ”3

People live in culture as naturally as fish live in water and tornados hit trailer parks. But most people are as unaware of their

cultural assumptions as they are of their bad breath, because it is

so familiar to them. Therefore, Christians on reformission must

be particularly attentive to both the culture they live in and the

other cultures they encounter.

While arguably every academic discipline depends on understanding the what of culture, only Christian theology can explain

the why of culture. People create culture because God made them

to fill, work, and keep the earth.

But because of sin, the innate desire God has placed within us

to create culture has become bent and crooked. In Genesis, fallen

culture begins with a welcoming of Satan, evil, chaos, lies, Scripture-twisting, a weak man’s abdication of leadership, coveting,

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shame, separation between people, running from God, blaming

others for sin, family strife, and death. The fulfillment of this

cursed culture will be the eternal torments of hell.

Cultures are hard to untangle and understand because they

reflect both the beauty of creation and the ugliness of the Fall. To

help us better untangle the various cultures that we encounter,

allow me to share some perspectives. For the purposes of this

book, it will be beneficial for you to think in terms of the people

who live near you, because that is where your reformission evangelism occurs. Remember that every culture can mediate the

gospel if we expend the effort to determine how to work through

that culture. Our ultimate goal is to have people from every culture worshiping Jesus through their culture—the vision gloriously pictured in the book of Revelation.

how to evaluate culture: thoughts, values, and experiences

One way to study a culture and what motivates people to

order their lives in particular ways is to examine what they do.

Much of what the people in a culture do is determined by how

they think, what they value, and what experiences have shaped

them as a people. These are the essential ingredients of a culture,

which explains why many people gather in tribes around them.

Thought tribes. The first ingredient of a culture is the cognitive aspect, or how its people think and arrive at their beliefs. For

example, are the people who live within a few miles of you more

likely to make decisions by academic rigor or emotional hunch,

family consensus or individual perspective, consistency with tradition or desire for innovation, personal interest or community

benefit, or some other way of thinking? In academic ivory towers, this branch of philosophy falls under the category of epistemology. On the street, it is simply the answer to the perennial

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While it is important to recognize that ideas have consequences, I would discourage overemphasizing the cognitive aspect

of your culture. It is common—particularly as the windfalls and

pitfalls of postmodernism are debated in the fools’ parade of books

on the matter—for Christians to believe there is a cause-and-effect

relationship between the actions and philosophical framework

underlying any person’s moral decision-making process.

The truth is that most people are contradictions, neither logical nor coherent in their reasoning. Like the guy who put the following bumper stickers on his truck: “Meat Is Murder” along with

“Keep Abortion Safe and Legal,” and “Jesus Is My Copilot” along

with “The Goddess Is Alive and Magic Is Afoot.” And who hasn’t

stood in line at a coffee shop behind someone ordering scones the

size of North and South Carolina along with a bucket of coffee

bathed in chocolate—with, of course, low-fat milk to keep them

from gaining weight?

Most people don’t spend time discussing the differences

between early and late Wittgenstein and the effects of his thought

on their moral decision-making because they are preoccupied

with whether their jeans make their butts look big or if it’s just

that their big butts make their butts look big.

Values tribes. The second ingredient of a culture are the values that are often so widely assumed that they are rarely articulated or defended. Behind the ordering of lives and cultures, these

values compel the decisions and sacrifices people make in devoting themselves to possessions, status, experiences, causes, and

movements.

For example, in my city of Seattle, people value independence, which explains why they are likely to be single, to cohabitate, and to avoid having children. Commitments such as

marriage and parenting would require them to live sacrificially,

undermining their independence. Their value of independence

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also explains why Seattleites tend to prefer independent bookstores, coffee shops, music stores, record labels, rock bands,

restaurants, and clothing stores over national chains and products. It also explains why they are reluctant to attend church and

embrace a spirituality that requires that a denomination, a theology, a pastor, the Bible, or even Jesus be in authority over them.

The trick to uncovering people’s values is to assess how they

invest their time, energy, money, and passion. What do they love

and what do they hate? What do they talk about? What do they

rally around? But values can be tricky because they are often little more than ideals, what people merely wish they valued and

cared for, what they are committed to in theory but not in practice. Many vegetarians eat meat, environmentalists don’t recycle,

employees don’t work, and Christians don’t read their Bibles.

Ideals are what you want; values are what you do. Ideals become

values only if they are lived out.

Experience tribes. The third ingredient of a culture are the

experiences that shape people. Some experiences are chosen by

people because they enjoy them. A quick scan of the magazine

rack at your local store can reveal the passion various cultures

have for sex, hobbies, home-improvement projects, drug use, film,

music, sports, cigar smoking, off-road driving, cars, home theaters, and fitness.

Some experiences are forced on people. These experiences are

likely to be devastating and painful, but they shape a person

nonetheless. Having conducted premarital counseling for over

one hundred couples during my first five years as a pastor, I am

devastated by the number of people who have been sexually

abused as children and the effects that sin had on their lives.

All of these ingredients (thinking, values, and experiences)

combine to create the cultures in which people live. From the out96

side, these cultures can easily be misunderstood. For example,

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some people at our church dress in a gothic fashion, complete

with faces painted white, hair dyed black, and dark clothing. I was

speaking with a visiting pastor once before a church service when

a woman dressed in this style walked by, and the pastor commented that it was good for the woman to be in church because

she obviously needed to meet Jesus and overcome her depression.

But the woman he spoke of was a leader in our church and a godly

woman who dressed that way because of her sense of personal

style. She was in no way depressed.

To be faithful in reformission, we must embed ourselves in a

culture and develop friendships with lost people so that we can be

informed and avoid making erroneous judgments. Non-Christian

friends actually help to disciple us in culture as we evangelize them

in Christ. For example, the president of the chamber of commerce

in our neighborhood has become a good friend to a pastor at our

church. Though he is not a Christian, he has done a tremendous

amount to teach us about the history and future of our local culture and how we can best embed ourselves in it. He’s even placed

one of our pastors on the chamber of commerce board to help

shape our local culture. Because we care about the same culture

he does, he sees us as allies and friends, even though he is aware

that our hope is that he and other people would come to love Jesus.

Friends like this are invaluable to reformission.

In addition to understanding the cultures around your

church, you also need to be aware that your church has a culture

of its own. Reformission requires that we ask the same hard questions about the thinking, values, and experiences that shape our

church cultures. We must then evaluate our findings in the light

of Scripture to measure how faithful we are being to God. This

will help to ensure that we are not hypocritically judging the cultures around us while neglecting to judge our own. For instance,

a very overweight pastor friend of mine continually preaches

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against smoking, which is not mentioned in the Bible, while he

conveniently ignores the buffet of verses on gluttony because the

values in his church are different from those of the surrounding

cultures and of the Scriptures.

Last, the thoughts, values, and experiences of a culture present both opportunities and obstacles for the gospel. The better we

understand a culture, the better prepared we will be to reach that

culture so that God can transform how people think, what they

value, and how they experience life.

how to evaluate culture: high, folk, and pop

Another way we can evaluate a culture is by examining the

various styles within it, including its subcultures. Christian cultural commentator Ken Myers explains that culture exists in the

three forms: high, folk, and pop.4

High culture is like a gourmet meal prepared and served by

professionals. It is marked by a connection to traditions of the past,

which requires training, patience, reflection, and a cultivated ability to enjoy and appreciate. High culture is commonly referred to

as art. Examples would include opera, classical music, and ballet.

Folk culture is like a home-cooked meal made from scratch

using a family recipe. It emerges from a particular community of

people as an expression and extension of their lives together, and

it is highly enduring because it is part of who they are. Because of

its community aspect, folk culture flourishes in rural areas, smaller

towns, and in the neighborhoods of larger cities, which function

to some degree as enclaves or tribes with particular values and

styles that bind people together. These variables make folk culture

highly personal, endearing, and enduring. Examples of folk culture would include black spiritual songs that have endured for generations as the articulation of the life of a community, and some

forms of independent punk rock.

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Pop culture is like a fast-food meal ordered from a drive-up

window and cooked by a high-school kid in a uniform who wants

to know if you would prefer to supersize your order. It is intended

for mass audiences and lacks the sophistication of high culture

and the personal touch of folk culture. Pop culture has spread

with the growth of American cities and suburbs. While pop culture is more accessible, it also requires less engagement and is

more fleeting, trite, disposable, and faddish. It values the individual over the community, newness over tradition, and instant

experience over patience. Pop culture also features someone’s personality over the quality of their work and is becoming more difficult to distinguish from advertising. Examples of pop culture

are legion, because since the 1960s it has been the dominant

American culture. It is perhaps best exemplified by Michael Jackson, who in an effort to not fade from pop cultural popularity,

has continually reinvented his image so thoroughly that he has

transformed from a black man to a white woman.

While each of these cultural forms can mediate the gospel

(arguably some more easily than others), this fact is often overlooked because people tend to attach a moral value to the cultural

form they prefer. This is also true in the church, as can be seen in

the “worship wars,” clashes between people who prefer different

styles of worship music and perceive their preferred cultural form

as more devout than others. Isn’t this simply a debate as to

whether God should be worshiped through high, folk, or pop cultural forms?

For example, in some churches, people desire to sing old

hymns led by an organ and a robed choir (high culture). But their

desire conflicts with people who want to sing contemporary praise

songs led by a band wearing casual clothes and playing keyboards

and acoustic guitars (pop culture). But their desire conflicts with

people who want to burn the hymnal and ignore contemporary

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Christian worship music, to write their own songs and perform

them with amplifiers cranked so loud that they blow a wind strong

enough to part the Red Sea (folk culture). Some churches caught

in the crossfire have resorted to a blended form of worship in

which all three styles are used in the same service, which is often

about as tasty as having a vintage merlot with your Big Mac.

Why is this significant? Because issues of style and culture

affect how you live your life, how you worship God, and how you

will be perceived by lost people in your culture. In practical terms,

your cultural preferences help determine the way you dress, where

you live, what you drive, the entertainment you enjoy, whom you

trust, what friends you have, and how you perceive and communicate the gospel.

Do you spot the cultural issue for reformission churches? Our

challenge is to determine whether the cultural form that dominates

how we do life when gathered for worship and scattered for mission

is best suited for evangelizing the people in our community. This is

a crucial matter because even declining churches are often unable

to see that the cultural form through which they mediate the gospel

each week is failing to reach people. Some churches and leaders do

not see their failure because the few Christians who attend their

church do so because they enjoy it, find it meaningful, and therefore do not consider that they are a declining cultural minority.

Reformission Christians and churches exist to perpetuate the

gospel and should be swift to change their cultural forms if they

are not the most beneficial for achieving that goal. This is what

Paul told the Corinthians about being all things to all people and

using all means to see as many people as possible saved (1 Cor.

9:19–23). Reformission churches have to continually examine and

adjust their musical styles, websites, aesthetics, acoustics, programming, and just about everything but their Bible in an effort

to effectively communicate the gospel to as many people as pos100

sible in the cultures around them.

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how to evaluate culture: waves

Another way to untangle culture is by understanding what

futurist Alvin Toeffler describes as three chronological waves of

change that have crashed upon the beach of the Western world.5

The first wave was an agricultural age, in which people were primarily concerned with survival through working the land with

their hands. The agricultural age peaked in the United States in

the eighteenth century, when more than 80 percent of the workforce was employed on farms.6 Today, less than 3 percent of Americans work on farms.7

The second wave was an industrial age, in which people were

primarily concerned with efficiency and building machines and

industrial centers to increase automation and production. By the

1880s, the United States had overtaken England as the world’s

leading manufacturer. Subsequently, many Americans moved

from their farms to the city to work in factories. But today, manufacturing jobs employ only 17 percent of the U.S. population.8

The third wave is our current technological age, in which people

are primarily concerned with exchanging information and experiences. The technological age arguably began with the invention of

the telephone and leaped forward with the creation of the internet.

While it took the telephone seventy years to penetrate the homes of

75 percent of the American population,9 it took the internet just

seven years to achieve the same result. Amazingly, the presence of

DVD players leaped from 18 percent to 56 percent in just three

years, and the technological age continues to flourish.10

In our technological age, Christian institutions such as denominations, missions organizations, and theological institutions that

had their beginning in the agricultural and industrial ages are finding it increasingly difficult to thrive. This is in part because the values driving our national culture have transitioned from the big

eating the small, to the fast eating the slow. In previous cultural

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waves, centralizing power, standardizing systems, and creating large

organizations were the keys to longevity and respect. But many of

these churches and organizations were slow to react to cultural

changes because their size made responding difficult. In our present cultural wave, the keys to survival are the decentralizing of

power, the flexibility of systems, and the creation of smaller independent organizations that can band together as needed for particular tasks. In practice, Christians and churches on reformission

first need to assess which cultural wave they are in now and which

cultural wave they will be in during the next five years. Then with

this knowledge in hand, they need to reorganize themselves so

they’ll be able to quickly respond to the changing demands of the

cultures around them.

how to evaluate culture: Sins and sins

Another way to evaluate culture is by examining the universal and particular sins common in that culture. Universal sins are

those offenses which the Bible condemns for all people in all cultures, including sexual immorality, idolatry, adultery, prostitution,

homosexuality, theft, drunkenness, greed, slander, and swindling

(1 Cor. 6:9–10)—or the central elements of most television shows.

Particular sins are those offenses that are sinful for some

people under some circumstances but not for all people under all

circumstances. All Christians are commanded by God to avoid

universal sins. But Christians are also commanded by God to

avoid sins that are particular to them, without unfairly condemning or restricting the freedoms of fellow Christians who

involve themselves differently in controversial cultural matters.

For example, I personally disdain cigarettes, but I cannot forbid

everyone in my church from smoking, because the Bible does not.

This is, in part, what Paul means throughout the New Testament

when he speaks of weak and strong Christians. In truth, every

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to restrict our freedoms because of our weaknesses, while we are

able to use our Christian liberty in areas in which we are strong.

Reformission recognizes that Christians will have differing

personal convictions in matters of culture and welcomes those differences that are not sinful, because what pleases God is unity, not

uniformity. Uniformity undermines reformission and often is promoted by erroneous restrictive and permissive theologies. Restrictive Christians go too far and name everything a universal sin,

forbidding some cultural activities that the Bible does not, such as

listening to certain musical styles, getting tattoos, watching movies,

smoking cigarettes, consuming alcohol, and body piercing. Conversely, permissive churches are prone to naming everything a particular sin and bless activities which the Bible forbids, such as drug

use, fornication, homosexuality, and cohabitation before marriage.

I’m not advocating either a permissive or a restrictive approach

to debatable cultural issues. Rather, I am encouraging Christians on

reformission to involve themselves in their local cultures not merely

for the purpose of entertainment but primarily for the purpose of

education. As a missionary, you will need to watch television shows

and movies, listen to music, read books, peruse magazines, attend

events, join organizations, surf websites, and befriend people that

you might not like to better understand people that Jesus loves. I

often read magazines intended for teenage girls, not because I need

to take tests to discover if I am compatible with my boyfriend or

because I need leg-waxing tips, but because I want to see young

women meet Jesus, and so I want to understand them better.

Last, reformission understands that Scripture is replete with

principles that give us wisdom in our decision-making. So as you

consider an area of your culture that you are unsure about participating in, these principles will help you determine if that activity

would be a particular sin for you. The importance of this matter

became clear to me after witnessing the experience of a Christian

friend. She is a gifted designer who ran a specialty wedding-invitation

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business. One of her prospective clients was a homosexual couple

seeking to have a same-sex union, and she was torn over whether

she should obey the city ordinance that recognized such relationships, or her conscience, which did not permit her to participate.

After prayerfully wrestling with the issue, she turned away the

prospective clients, and when they asked if it was because they were

gay, she told the truth and said that though she had no ill will

toward them, she was not comfortable with being involved. She

soon found herself maligned in the media by various gay-rights

advocates, and the opposition eventually forced her to shut down

her business. As our culture becomes increasingly less tolerant of

Christian principles, it is important that God’s people operate with

discernment, and I hope that the following principles will help

guide your cultural decision-making.

Biblical Principles for Cultural Decision-Making

● Is it beneficial to me personally and to the gospel generally

(1 Cor. 6:12)?

● Will I lose self-control and be mastered by what I participate in

(1 Cor. 6:12)?

● Will I be doing this in the presence of someone who I know

will fall into sin as a result (1 Cor. 8:9–10)?

● Is it a violation of the laws of my city, state, or nation (Rom.

13:1–7)?

● If I fail to do this, will I lose opportunities to share the gospel

(1 Cor. 10:27–30)?

● Can I do this with a clear conscience (Acts 24:16)?

● Will this cause me to sin by feeding sinful desires (Rom. 13:13–14)?

● Am I convinced that this is what God desires for me to do

(Rom. 13:5)?

● Does my participation proceed from my faith in Jesus Christ

(Rom. 14:23)?

● Am I doing this to help other people, or am I just being selfish

(1 Cor. 10:24)?

● Can I do this in a way that glorifies God (1 Cor. 10:31–33)?

● Am I following the example of Jesus Christ to help save sinners

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(1 Cor. 10:33–11:1)?

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repenting:

like Jonah did

Once we have searched our conscience and the Scriptures to

determine in what ways we can participate in our culture, we

must then obey the Bible’s command to love our neighbor. Note

that the Bible does not call us to like our neighbor. The reason for

this distinction is because every culture is filled with people who

are about as pleasant to be around as receiving a blow from a roofing hammer to your frontal lobe. Some Christians refuse to be

about reformission simply because they avoid people they find

unpleasant.

The book of Jonah is particularly helpful in shedding some

light on this tendency. During the time of Jonah, the nation of Israel

was much like our own nation—financially prosperous but spiritually impoverished. The bitter enemy of Israel was Assyria, whose

resume included witchcraft, murder, prostitution, drunkenness,

cruelty, and pride (Nahum 3). One of the principal Assyrian cities

was Nineveh, which was fortified by hundred-foot walls surrounding the city. The walls were wide enough for three chariots

to run atop side by side, and made these sinners feel invincible.

God commanded Jonah to go east to preach to Nineveh, but

instead Jonah fled south to Tarshish. Before long, he was swallowed by an enormous fish that likely smelled like an outhouse at

a county fair. Usually, when a man eats bad fish, he vomits, but in

this case, the fish ate a bad man and vomited him up, near Nineveh of course.

Realizing that he would not win his fight with God, Jonah

entered Nineveh and simply said, “Forty more days and Nineveh

will be overturned.” Those words exploded through the great city,

dropping half a million people to their knees in brokenness,

repentance, and fear of the Lord.

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In the concluding chapter of the book, Jonah’s heart is

exposed, and the reasons for his running are revealed in his frank

and irreverent argument with God. Following the greatest revival

in the history of the world, Jonah was happy to receive God’s grace

but furious to see it extended to people he did not like.

God, who got the first word in the book, also got the last

word. He rebuked Jonah for loving a plant that shaded his head

more than he loved the Ninevites. And the book brings us all, like

Jonah, under the conviction that we love the things God has given

us—homes, cars, hobbies, health, friends—more than our great

cities and the spiritually blind people who annoy us. We pass these

people every day and ignore them because our minds are consumed with ourselves rather than with our God and our neighbor.

Throughout the book, Jonah simply looks wicked—at least

as wicked as the pagans he was sent to preach to. But I believe that

God continued to pursue Jonah long after the events concluded

in Nineveh and that eventually the prophet was brought to repentance. This would explain why the book was written. If Jonah had

remained unrepentant, we would expect the book to vindicate

him as the victim of a mean God who nearly drowned him, later

gave him third-degree burns, and spanked his inner child. Or we

would expect the book to simply record the greatest revival in history, with Jonah taking all the credit for being such a phenomenal preacher. Or perhaps the book never would have been written

at all. But instead, we get an honest glimpse of exactly how sinful

Jonah was, how gracious God is, and what kind of self-righteous,

racist prig Jonah would be without God.

To this day, the Jews gather in the synagogue each year on the

Day of Atonement to read Jonah. After the reading, they reply,

“We are Jonah.” This truth is essential for rightly relating to Jonah.

We are Jonah when, because we do not like them, we run from

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God’s call on our lives to bring the gospel to lost people, whom he

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Elvis in Eden

loves. We are Jonah because we too have been sent to proclaim

repentance to great but wicked cities filled with people like the

Ninevites—people whom God loves but we don’t like.

And Jonah leaves us to ponder who we would be if God had

stopped running after us and simply left us to ourselves. In what

ways are we running from God’s call to bring the gospel to others? What will repentance look like for us? What could happen if

God captured the hearts of people in your town because you

pointed them to him? What if the heart God’s people had for their

cities was like Jesus’ heart for Jerusalem instead of like Jonah’s

heart for Nineveh?

redeeming:

the heart of culture

Jesus wept over the condition of Jerusalem. Once we have

repented of our sin of indifference, we too will weep over our

towns and long for their transformation. The question persists,

How can such change occur?

For the past two hundred years, the answer has been debated

in a bitter fight between two ideologies. In his book A Conflict of

Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, social commentator Thomas Sowell deftly explains that the political conflict

between the right (Republican) and the left (Democrat) stems

from vastly differing understandings of human nature. 11

Sowell defines the two visions for the transformation of our

culture as “constrained” and “unconstrained.” The constrained

(Republican) vision views human nature as selfishly sinful and

places its hope in restraining our sin through the law. The unconstrained (Democratic) vision is diametrically opposed to this. It

optimistically perceives human nature as basically good and capable of perfection in this life through social planning, including

public education, government programs, and social services. The

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one thing the two visions have in common is that their faith rests

in institutions; they simply disagree as to whether these institutions should release us or restrain us.

But our faith rests in Jesus alone, who redeems people and

their cultures. Reformission requires that we get off these tired

tracks on which Republican and Democratic politics run. Instead,

we should focus our attention on the gospel because our ultimate

hope rests in God, not in human governments, programs, or institutions.

To understand both the human problem and the divine solution, we must begin at the beginning. After his sin, our first father,

Adam, blamed his dissatisfaction with his culture on his wife and

the God who made her. We, his children, follow in Adam’s footsteps when we blame our dissatisfaction with life on something or

someone “out there” in the culture (our parents, school, church,

nation), rather than on something within us (pride, folly, sin,

selfishness, rebellion). This pattern of blame remains popular

because people are more inclined to see themselves as victims

than as sinners.

St. Paul calls sin the mystery of iniquity, and human history

has proven him right. The problem with every culture is not ultimately “out there” in the culture but is within the people of the

culture. This mystery of the crookedness of human nature has

puzzled lost people in the culture so fully that we now have a veritable army of counselors and psychologists armed with some two

hundred different therapeutic systems trying to straighten people

out. These systems speculate that the causes of our imperfection

range from an unconscious mind filled with primal urges (Sigmund Freud), to a collective unconsciousness from our racial history (Carl Jung), to our environmental (emotional and physical)

conditioning (B. F. Skinner), to the lack of awareness of our inner

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goodness (Carl Rogers). All we are missing is a theory in which a

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Elvis in Eden

magic bunny—hidden deep in the drink cooler of a Provo, Utah,

convenience store—is the center of an invisible web of mind control causing human beings to do terrible things to one another.

Reformission requires that God’s people address sin theologically.

First, to change a culture, we must change the people in that

culture. The question that arises is whether people do what they

are, or if they are what they do. The answer to this is imperative,

because if we are what we do, then all we need to do is train people

to act differently, and they will change themselves. But if we do

what we are, then we do bad because we are bad, and we cannot

do good until we become good, the very thing which bad people

cannot do, no matter how many dollars are spent and organizations are founded to help them.

The Bible clearly teaches that we do what we are. It also

repeatedly teaches (particularly in Proverbs and in the teachings

of Jesus) that our sin comes from our hearts, the center of who

we are. Our heart is a rock band, and culture is a loudspeaker, and

if we don’t like the music, spending lots of money to fund organizations to “fix” the speakers won’t change the tune. To rightly

diagnose any human conduct, we must overcome our propensity

to deal merely with cultural effects (lying, adultery, theft) and

instead focus on the cause (the sin in our hearts). The sinful

nature of our hearts is the root of all cultural problems and sins.

The unredeemed heart is a glutton for sin and death. Only God

can give a person a new heart, one with new desires for a

redeemed life that contributes to a transformed culture.

Second, if we aspire to straighten out crooked people, we must

define what a “good person” is. This too has been the source of

much conflict because there is little agreement as to what constitutes this good person we aspire to become. The Bible teaches that

Jesus of Nazareth, who lived on the earth some two thousand years

ago, was God in human flesh. And though Jesus was tempted as

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we are, he remained without sin. Because of this, he was the perfect person and is our perfect example of what a person is supposed to be. People must compare themselves with Jesus to see

their sin. Only by seeing Jesus can anyone be aware of the sin they

need to repent of so that Jesus can redeem them to be like him.

In conclusion, if we aspire to seek any change in our culture,

we must resist the temptation to first change the culture. Instead,

we must begin by bringing the gospel to people so that they can

be given a new heart out of which a Christian life flows. As more

people live out of their new heart, new families, churches, businesses, and governments will result that together will transform

culture.

reflecting:

reformission questions

1.

What are the dominant thoughts, values, and life experiences that have shaped you and your church? What are

the similarities and differences between your thoughts,

values, and experiences and those of the average lost person in your culture?

2.

Do you prefer high, folk, or pop culture? Does your

church mediate the gospel primarily through high, folk,

or pop culture? Where do high, folk, and pop cultures

exist in your local culture?

3.

What are the agricultural, industrial, and technological

aspects of your culture? Which is dominant? Which are

you most connected to? Which are the people in your

church most connected to?

4.

For what issues in your culture do you need wisdom and

discernment to understand? In what areas are you culturally weak? In what areas are you culturally strong? For you,

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what sins are particular sins, instead of universal sins?

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5.

Do you have a new heart that loves God, hates sin, and

causes you to become a new person more like Jesus? If

so, in what ways has your new heart caused change in

your life?

6.

In what ways have you or your church wrongly sought

to change people’s behavior (including your own) rather

than first focusing on their hearts?

7.

In what ways have you or your church placed faith in

institutions to change people at the expense of placing

your faith in God and in God’s working through you?

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reformission

interview

with Crash

what would Jesus

tattoo?

1. What is your name?

Crash

2. Do you consider yourself to be a Christian?

Yes

3. What is your age?

33

4. What is your vocation?

I own several tattoo studios and a new

tattoo magazine, and I write for several

international tattoo publications.

5. What services does your

business provide?

Tattoos and piercings

6. What is your ministr y?

Revealing the truth of the gospel to

everyone I come in contact with, primarily

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people between eighteen and thirty-five, and many who are very unlikely

to set foot in a traditional church setting.

7. Why is the popularity of tattoos and piercings

growing?

Nothing more than a

growing and changing culture. The primary purpose is

to express individuality.

Much less common is the

attempt to stand in defiance

of conventional belief systems, but over the last ten

years, this motivation has

diminished drastically as

society has become more

and more accepting of these

expressions.

8. Do you consider yourself a missionar y to your

culture?

I feel that I was put in this particular profession for the purpose of

reaching this postmodern generation with the truth of the gospel in the

arena of a desperate, lost, and angry culture. My goal every day is not to target and convert anyone but to look for opportunities when I might be able

to show Christ’s love to people who have never once been shown what the

real message of the gospel is. What they have been told, and what they’ve

seen themselves, are the lies of legalism maquerading as the gospel, and

“quick to judge and condemn” Christians pointing their fingers at them.

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9. How have Christians responded to your ministr y?

Though they are few and far between, I have encountered several great

men who have hearts for the lost and who have provided encouragement

to me personally. It is most unfortunate that the vast majority of “Christians” that I have encountered arbitrarily dismiss this generation as “lost”

or, worse, unworthy of their time and attention. There is a tendency among

Christians to confuse culture with sin and thereby condemn anyone who

does not conform to their own fashions, never seeing the damage they have

done to the cause of Christ.

From what I see in the Gospels, Jesus preached to society from within

the culture of his day, not from above it as the Pharisees did. In my opinion, the majority of churches today are more concerned with converting

one cultural image into their own cultural image, with the implication

that theirs is “Christian” (where no one drinks alcohol or listens to secular music and everyone dresses in business attire), while those cultures

which differ from their view are not. Once again, this is definitively pharisaical. Unfortunately, I find this sums up the majority of the church world

all too well.

For us to make any real difference in this age, we need to recognize the

power of the gospel to change

lives, that we were called from

within a particular cultural setting, and that it is our duty to try

to spread the good news of the

gospel from within that setting.

To simply take the gospel and

leave our culture, not its sin, is to

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steal potential from the kingdom. We are to be “in the world but

not of the world”; to me this speaks of our culture and how we are

to affect those around us who might not otherwise receive the

truth, all without being held captive by the sins which are within

every culture. “Sheep among wolves,” so to speak.

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C H A P T E R 5

going to seminary at

the grocery store

c o n n e c t i n g w i t h c u l t u r e i n r e f o r m i s s i o n

Adear friend invited me to travel to India to speak at a conference for Indian church-planters who were doing reformission in

small rural villages that had never heard of Jesus Christ. Shortly after

landing at an airport in India, I found myself trying to negotiate a ride

with the driver of a rickshaw, which is basically a cross between a bicycle, a motorcycle, and a cart—an effective form of both transportation

and suicide. The driver of this Kevorkian Cart and I did not speak the

same language, and so communication was nearly impossible. I found

myself foolishly speaking slowly and loudly to him in an effort to

explain where I needed to travel. But the problem wasn’t that the man

was deaf or stupid; he was simply from another culture.

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Likewise, our nation is filled with a seemingly endless number

of cultures that do not understand what the church is saying, even

if they do speak the same language. In this way, our day is quite

similar to the days when the gospel first spread throughout the

Roman Empire, which was filled with a variety of cultures. We need

to be like our New Testament brothers and sisters, seeking to bring

the gospel to the cultures around us in a way that is faithful to

Scripture and accessible to those cultures, be they first-generation

immigrants or skateboarding teenagers and their single-parent

mothers. One of the greatest mentors for us is the apostle Paul, who

was chosen by God for the difficult task of bringing the gospel,

which had become embedded in Jewish culture, to unreached Gentile cultures.

remembering:

Paul on Mars Hill

As a traveling apostle, Paul’s custom was to preach the gospel

first to the Jews and then to the Gentiles. Because the Jews had the

Old Testament Scriptures, Paul began with the Scriptures as common ground, using the Jews’ prophets, theological categories, language, and teaching style to prove that Jesus was the fulfillment

of all that their Scriptures had promised and for which they had

eagerly waited.

But when working among Gentiles, Paul employed different

methods and language to convey the same gospel. A good example

is his approach on Mars Hill (Acts 17:16–34). Athens had been

home to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander the Great, and

possessed a proud heritage as one of the greatest cultural centers in

the history of the world. As Paul first entered Athens, he was burdened by the great need of a people who had unparalleled philosophy, literature, architecture, art, and education but did not have

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Jesus. As he made the five-mile walk into town, he was troubled by

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the numerous idols that littered the land, and he longed for the

transformation of Athens.

Paul began his ministry in Athens by proclaiming the gospel

to the Jews in the synagogue. Then he continued his proclamation of the gospel in the Agora marketplace, where vendors, farmers, healers, magicians, performers, and philosophers collected in

the open courtyard that served as the gathering place for the

city—the easiest place to draw a crowd.

Because the Athenians had never heard about the Jesus whom

Paul was preaching, they brought him before the Areopagus

(“Mars Hill” in Latin), which was the Athenian court of perhaps

thirty philosophers who sat as the judges of Athens, entrusted

with guarding Athenian philosophy by evaluating any new ideas

brought into the city. Paul stood before the court in the same

place where Socrates had defended his own teachings some 450

years earlier. They asked Paul to explain his teachings, and a crowd

gathered to hear the exchange. Mars Hill was that day’s equivalent of television talk shows in which audience members with

gaps in their teeth large enough to hold corn cobs stand up to lecture fellow mental midgets on pressing social issues with pithy

counsel such as, “You need a girl with more junk in her trunk.”

Courageously, Paul stood alone to proclaim the gospel, beginning by respectfully establishing common ground with his hearers

so he could work from their culture to the Scriptures. His method

was the reverse of his approach in the synagogue, where he worked

from the Scriptures to the culture. He noted that the Athenians

were a spiritual people, as was he. But he also noted that their spirituality did not include an understanding of who God is.

Like people in our own day, the Athenians were very spiritual

yet in their ignorance embraced pluralism and a wide assortment

of gods. A popular saying from Petronius was, “It is easier to find

a god in Athens than a man.” The ancient historian Pliny recorded

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that in the time of Nero (the 60s), Athens had over thirty thousand public statues, in addition to countless private statues in

homes, all dedicated to various gods.

The circumstances leading to the creation of the altars that Paul

saw littering the landscape began six hundred years before, when

Athens was struck with a plague. Hundreds of people were ill and

dying, and the city grew desperate to pacify the capricious gods

whom they believed were tormenting them. The poet Epimenides

devised a plan to appease the gods by letting sheep roam the city

freely, trusting that the various gods would lead the sheep to lay

down near their temple, where they could then be sacrificed to

appease that moody local deity. But many sheep laid down in places

where there were no temples, and so it was assumed that there must

be gods that they had not known about who ruled over these areas.

To pacify these gods, they erected altars to them, upon which they

sacrificed the sheep. Because they did not know the name of these

deities, they simply inscribed “to an unknown god” on the altars.

Paul used the opportunity provided by the culture as a starting point for the proclamation of the gospel. He began by explaining God as the creator who is separate from creation (in refutation

of the Athenian’s pantheism) and as the king who rules over all

of heaven and earth (in refutation of their belief that gods ruled

over only certain geographic regions). He continued by explaining that God does not live in temples built by men (in refutation

of their belief that gods need homes like people do), and that he

is utterly self-existent, not dependant on people for anything

(unlike their concept of the gods as capricious humans with

supernatural powers), but is in fact the sole source of all life and

breath (in refutation of their pantheism). Paul then explained that

God created one man and that from that one man he made all

men and nations of the earth and determined exactly when and

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where they would live (in refutation of their Epicurean belief that

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life is little more than random chance) so that people would seek

him and find him (in refutation of their Stoic fatalism) because he

has drawn near to people (in refutation of their belief that the

gods are either not distinct from people and creation or so transcendent that they cannot be known).

Picking a fight by denouncing their proud philosophical and

religious history as ignorance and error where necessary, Paul also

embraced the aspects of their culture that were helpful to his mission. For example, Paul quoted Epimenides, who had written of

the great Greek god Zeus, “In him we live and move and have our

being.” Paul also quoted the Greek poet Aratus, who wrote of Zeus

approximately three hundred years before, “We are his offspring.”

In so doing, Paul affirmed some of their spiritual concepts but

showed that they were wrongly applied to Zeus and should

instead be applied to Jesus. In our day, this would be akin to

unearthing partial truths about God from a culture’s film, music,

comedy, sports, literature, theater, philosophy, economics, medicine, or politics and working from those truths to the truth of

Jesus as the ultimate answer to all human questions and cultural

problems.

Paul then commanded them to repent of their false notions

of God, idolatry, and years of ignorant spirituality, because Jesus

had risen physically from death (in refutation of both the Epicurean belief that there is no resurrection and the Stoic belief that

the resurrection is not physical). Upon hearing about the resurrection, the reactions of those present on Mars Hill ranged, as they

always do upon the proclamation of the gospel, from curiosity, to

contempt, to conversion.

God used Paul’s faithfulness to bring the gospel from Paul’s

Jewish culture to the Greek culture of Athens, and also to move

between cultures within the Greek culture, as illustrated by both

Dionysius and Damaris being given new hearts that trusted in

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Jesus. Dionysius was a philosopher and a member of the Mars Hill

court who was likely a well-educated, powerful, and affluent man

who became the pastor of the first Christian church in Athens and

died a martyr’s death. Damaris was likely a common woman,

since no title is given for her. But because of God’s grace, the Jewish Paul, the powerful and rich Greek man Dionysius, and the

simple Greek woman Damaris were reconciled to God and each

other through Jesus Christ.

repenting:

bad theology

You and I live in our own Mars Hill, as do all of God’s people.

Surrounding us are multitudes of lost people who hold false

notions of spirituality, God, and salvation; many of them even

wrongly believe they are Christians. This point was made particularly poignant to me while taking a private tour of MTV Studios

in Times Square with some friends who are fellow pastors. After

meeting veejays like Matt Pinfield and passing artists like Jewel in

the hallway, we were privileged to spend some time in a conference room with a young woman who was the director of marketing. She explained that MTV had likely done more demographic

research on emerging generations than any other organization

and found that they were very spiritual and devoted to such things

as a confident belief in God and a commitment to a life of prayer.

When we asked what young people thought of God, however, her

answer was very Athenian. She explained that the young people

they had studied believed in God and spoke to him but had no

idea who he is.

While some Christians lament the condition of our spiritual

but post-Christian nation, reformission sees our day as a great

opportunity for the gospel, not unlike Paul’s day on Mars Hill.

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But numerous errors in Christian theology restrain us from going

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to Mars Hill, seeing any idols, talking to any pagans, or quoting

any godless songwriters, who are unknowingly dancing around

the truth some of the time. Before we seek to be helpful to our

cultural context, we must first correct any erroneous theological

assumptions we may have. Here are some of the more common

Christian myths about culture that may be hindering your

reformission.

myth 1: culture and worldliness

Worldliness is the collective sinfulness that flows from human

hearts to pollute God’s good creation. Worldliness shows up in

everything: nations, causes, movements, agendas, technologies,

governments, businesses, philosophies, entertainment, and social

structures of all sorts that promote the lusts of our flesh and of

our wandering eyes. It exalts our pride and gives us cause to boast

in ourselves rather than in God.

To help define what the Bible means by worldliness, we must

mention the teachings of Jesus and his disciples. Jesus taught that

Christians are no longer of this world but instead are citizens of

the kingdom that is not of this world.

Echoing Jesus, the writers of the New Testament condemn

worldliness. John tells us not to love this world,1 because it is passing away,2 it cannot understand us,3 and it will hate us as it did

our Lord,4 while it loves liars who proclaim God’s approval of this

world in its present state of war against him.5

James tells us that part of our religious duty is to keep ourselves from being polluted by this world,6 to watch our tongues,

which speak hell into this world,7 and not to become friends with

this world lest we make ourselves enemies of God.8

Peter commands that we be alive to Christ and dead to temptations in this world9 so that we might avoid the corruption that

those evil desires cast upon us. 10

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Paul says that the world in all of its collective wisdom does

not know God,11 prefers lies that promote sin to Scripture, which

demands repentance,12 and parades foolish human teachers13 who

offer little more than arrogant and hollow speculation about life

and God14 that is merely false wisdom taught by Satan, 15 who is

using the world to enslave people to sin and death16 and stands

condemned by God.17

Jesus came into the darkness of the world to show his love for

us and to shine his light upon us. 18 And he has now sent us on

reformission into the world to live as he lived.19 By Jesus’ empowering grace through the Holy Spirit in us, we can overcome the

world.20 Living in reformission therefore requires renewed thinking so that we will be shaped not by the patterns, values, and

rhythms of this world but instead by Jesus’ kingdom.21 Faithfulness also requires that we wage our war against the world with the

gospel weapons of grace, love, and truth, which the world does

not have access to,22 as we concern ourselves with being like Jesus,

who has gone before us and now goes with us.23

All of this is to say that worldliness is a sin, and before we naively

seek to be relevant to a dying world, we must realize the dangers

before us and proceed with our eyes open and our hands ready for

spiritual war. Tragically, I have seen many young pastors undertake

reformission without a wise understanding of worldliness, pastors

who, rather than converting lost people, were themselves converted

and are no longer pastors but instead are adulterers, divorcees, alcoholics, perverts, homosexuals, feminists, and nut jobs. Most frightening of all are the pastors who have become worldly but remain

pastors who preach a gospel that cannot save because it is little more

than the hollow echo of a cursed world.

But while culture certainly contains elements of worldliness,

the two are not synonymous. This point is incredibly significant,

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which by itself nearly kills reformission. Every culture has, in addition to worldliness, aspects of the good creation and the good

image and likeness of God that people are made in. Because of this,

there are elements in every culture that could be used to oppose

God and his work on the earth but that are in and of themselves

neutral and useable for either sin or worship. Examples include

tasty food that could be used for either sinful gluttony or holy

feasting, music that could be used for either idolatry or worship,

and stylish clothing that could be used for either lust or beauty.

Last, it was God who created cultures at Babel when he scattered people across the earth with various languages. It was God

who worked through cultures as varied as Babylon, Israel, Nineveh, and Egypt to redeem his people. It was God who came to

the earth as a man who lived in a culture. And when Jesus

ascended into heaven, it was God who enabled the disciples at

Pentecost to proclaim the gospel in the languages and dialects of

the many cultures that were assembled. In his kingdom, God

promises that people from every race, culture, language, and

nation will be present to worship him as their culture follows

them into heaven. Automatically equating one’s involvement in

culture with worldliness not only is silly but also condemns the

life of Jesus and compels his followers to be unlike him.

myth 2: garbage in, garbage out

As a college freshman and a new Christian in the early 1990s,

I had a Christian buddy tell me to throw all of my “secular” music

out and get new “Christian” music. He reasoned that if I listened

to non-Christian music, it would shape my mind and cause me to

end up living like a non-Christian. While I doubted that listening

to the Cure would compel me to wear eye shadow, I acquiesced

and threw out all my CDs. I then bought “Christian” music that I

did not like but tried to enjoy because I was told it was good for

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me, like cauliflower. I remember visiting my parents on a holiday

once when someone (likely the teenage pothead miscreants from

the neighborhood) broke into my 1969 Chevy truck and stole all

of my Christian music. To this day I still crack a crooked smile

every time I picture the look that must have come over the kids’

faces when they popped my Keith Green, Michael W. Smith, Steven

Curtis Chapman, and Maranatha worship tapes into their stereo.

When the insurance money finally showed up and I had to

replace my music, I was torn between buying the “secular” music

that I enjoyed and the “Christian” music that I did not. After

much prayer, I decided that God loved me and allowed my music

to be stolen so that I could buy back the old albums that I enjoyed.

And so I did, and as the pastor of a church filled with “secular”

bands that hosts “secular” concerts, I have not had a regret since.

Meanwhile, my buddy’s theology of “garbage in, garbage out”

remains quite popular but has numerous flaws. First, there is no

such thing as a pure culture untainted by sin and sinners, including Christian entertainment, which has had its share of scandalous behavior. Second, it is uncertain what distinguishes clean

“Christian” and unclean “secular” entertainment forms and why

Bibleman is so much better than Spiderman. Third, “garbage in,

garbage out” theology assumes that if Christians see and hear sin

up close, they will want to participate in it. But the fact is that sin

looks good only from a distance; the closer you get to it, the more

clearly you see it, the more sickening it becomes. Though I grew

up in a neighborhood filled with drug use, I have never tried

drugs in any form because seeing strung-out junkies walking

around shaking and talking to themselves while going to the bathroom in their pants was more than enough to convince me that

drugs are in no way fun or enjoyable.

Reformission requires discernment by God’s people to filter

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through a biblical and theological grid in order to cling to that

which is good and reject that which is evil. As we engage culture,

we must watch films, listen to music, read books, watch television,

shop at stores, and engage in other activities as theologians and

missionaries filled with wisdom and discernment, seeking to better grasp life in our Mars Hill. We do this so we can begin the

transforming work of the gospel in our culture.

myth 3: Builders, Boomers, and Busters

When the Baby Boom generation (named after the increase

in births following the World Wars) came of age and broke with

the lifestyle of their parents, the Builder generation (so named

because they built our nation politically, spiritually, economically,

militarily), the result was the creation of a generational identity.24

The problem with this identity, like all generalizations, is that it

accurately reflects only some people in that group. Not everyone

spent the 1960s and 1970s unclean, unshaven, naked, and high,

munching on vegetables while driving around the country in VW

vans looking for God like a game of hippie hide-and-seek.

Baby Boomers

Busters/

Millenials/

Generation X

Generation Y

78 million people

43 million people

73 million people

born 1946–1964

born 1965–1976

born 1977–1994

I was born in 1970, and my generation has been given a few

names, including Generation X by some Canadian guy because

we apparently lack any identity and are the generational equivalent of a generic brand. We have also been called the Busters

because we were supposed to be a broken generation, abandoned

by our selfish hippie parents who got sobered up, shaved, and

became yuppies who did not have the time to raise the kids they

failed to abort. Some kids are already being called the Millenials,

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which is very sad because their name does not begin with a B,

therefore ruining the entire marketing genius of this generational

silliness that attempts to create a market where there is none,

much like drawing arbitrary nonexistent lines on maps.

Evaluating people by their age group makes about as much

sense as categorizing people by their height. Not all six-foot-tall

old men are the same, and neither are all fifteen-year-old women.

Even a cursory flip through the channels on your television or

radio will prove that in our pluralistic and multicultural society,

there is no simple way to break people into groups by any factor,

including age.

Christians have fallen into the same trap, starting different

services at their churches and hiring a pastor who is the same age

as the group the services are supposed to be reaching. We must

dig deeper into our understanding of the people we are seeking to

reach than simply noting their age. People are highly complex,

and any attempt to divide them by something as arbitrary as age

is naive, silly, and doomed to fail.

How smart would it be to have three church services targeting people according to their height? The first service would be

for people under five feet tall, the second for people between five

and six feet tall, and the third for people over six feet tall. And how

wise would it be for each service to have a different pastor carefully selected by his height, and worship music that incorporated

a lot of prooftext verses about height (lots of songs about Zacchaeus for the first service, and lots of songs about the Nephthalim for the third)? Reformission requires that God’s people pay

more attention to the particular people in their culture than to

the many books on generational theory written by self-appointed

experts who, in the end, are speaking at best of only a narrow,

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Now that we have some of our theology of culture in order,

we are ready to follow in Paul’s footsteps and walk around our

Athens searching for reformission clues.

redeeming:

the art of being in exile

God promised Abraham that his descendants would be

blessed in order to be a blessing to the nations and cultures of the

earth. We, his spiritual offspring, are likewise called to the same

task by Jesus’ marching orders in the Great Commission. This all

seems very reasonable until we notice the manner in which God

has often fulfilled this mandate. Historically, God has sent his

people into exile so that they at least in part could be about

reformission. Throughout history, God has sent his people into

captivity in godless foreign cultures such as Babylon (Jer. 29:4),

where they were forced to cross cultures and bring the knowledge

of God to people they had previously avoided, whether they liked

it or not.

This is precisely what happened, for example, to Daniel, who

was born into an affluent Jewish home in Judah and was well

bred, well fed, and well read. As a young man, likely a teen, he was

taken into exile in Babylon against his will, but under the sovereign hand of God. Babylon was a godless and wicked nation,

which is why the Rolling Stones named an album after it. Babylon was ruled by King Nebuchadnezzar, who attacked Israel, plundered God’s temple, and used the stolen sacred items in his own

temple to worship false gods.

At first glance, young Daniel appears to be a classic limpwristed theologically liberal Christian who was happy to blend

the biblical truth with Babylonian paganism in an effort to avoid

conflict. He was valedictorian of the famed Babylonian Marilyn

Manson Academy and graduated with straight A’s in witchcraft,

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sorcery, astrology, magic, dream interpretation, divination, and

the occult. Daniel was also buddies with, and an employee of, the

Hitleresque kings in Babylon, whom he loved and served faithfully, ultimately becoming both a trusted advisor and key political leader in Babylon. Daniel’s name, which was a tribute to a son

of David and a priest who is mentioned in the Scriptures, was

changed to the Babylonian name Belteshazzar, likely a tribute to

a pagan Babylonian god. At first glance, Daniel’s resume in no way

resembles a godly young man’s and would likely get him kicked

out of most Christian high schools today.

At second glance, however, young Daniel appears to have

completely separated himself from Babylonian paganism like a

dogmatic Bible-thumping fundamentalist. Daniel refused to bow

down to the false gods and idols of Babylon. He refused to stop

praying to and worshiping his God alone. He refused to eat the

king’s food. He refused to refer to himself by the pagan name

given to him, thereby forbidding Babylon to define his identity.

And as he walked with his accountability group of godly friends,

Daniel preferred death by lion mauling and fire to violating his

conscience and the Scriptures.

In Daniel, we see the tension of reformissionaries who seek to

be faithful to God in the time and place in which he has sent them

into exile. Daniel was very helpful to the king and the Babylonians yet clearly told him that the king was a sinful enemy of God,

needing to repent of his ways and trust the one true God. Daniel

was as keenly aware as anyone of the sinfulness of Babylonian culture, and though he was immersed in that culture, he in no way

endorsed or participated in its worldly elements. Daniel was recognized as a capable and skilled man, yet he continually and

humbly attributed all of his wisdom and insight to his God, a fact

that even the king came to learn. And despite his young age and

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difficult task, Daniel managed to glorify God while proclaiming

and living the truth in a way that was both faithful to God and

accessible to Babylon.

Do you spot the parallels to our situation? God desires to

bless all nations and cultures of the earth through us, and so he

has sent us into exile in places and among peoples no less strange

or lost than the Babylonians. I would never have chosen Seattle

as my place of ministry because it is one of the most politically

liberal, expensive yet uncharitable, and least churched yet most

self-righteous cities in the nation. But as Paul said on Mars Hill,

it is ultimately God who has chosen my birthday and address,

placing me in Seattle today (Acts 17:26). Likewise, where you live

is a place of Babylonian exile where God has placed you to be

about reformission. And it is incumbent upon you to be wise,

faithful, and fruitful, like Daniel was, so that the gospel can take

root in your Babylonian soil.

reflecting:

reformission questions

To make sure we move from the theoretical to the practical,

let me suggest that you consider undertaking a one-week research

project along with some Christian friends. If you are part of a

small group, you might want to make a mutual commitment to

try this. Or you may wish to do this as a family unit. Here are the

four parts to this cultural-immersion project:

1.

Try shopping at a new grocery store, reading magazines

(especially their ads) you would never pick up (middleaged male plumbers could read Cosmo Girl), listening to

new music (Christian-pop fans would do well to tune in

the hardcore station), listening to new teachers (Christian-radio fans should tune in to a sexual talk program

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like Tom Leykis or Howard Stern), and watching a movie

you normally would not.

2.

During the week, make an effort to learn from the people

whom you encounter in public settings, such as the bank

teller or grocery store clerk. Simply ask them what they’ve

learned about people after interacting with so many. You

will find that they are a wealth of insight.

3.

Most important, speak with lost people who are not like

you, not for the purpose of converting them but rather

for the purpose of learning what life is like for them in

their culture.

4.

After you have undergone your reformission refocus and

have returned to your normal routine, ask the following

questions about your culture, including your Christian

culture. If you are reading this book as part of a group

experience, your group may find it helpful to share your

answers to these questions.

a.

Where do people spend their time and money?

b.

What do people do during their free time?

c.

What do they fear?

d.

What do they dream about?

e.

Where do they shop?

f.

What cultural experiences do they value?

g.

What are the most painful experiences they have

had?

h.

What music do they listen to?

i.

What film and television do they watch?

j.

What do they find humorous?

k.

In what ways are they self-righteous?

l.

What do they read?

m.

What is their spirituality?

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n.

Whom do they trust? Why?

o.

What do they think about the gospel?

p.

What sins will the gospel first confront and then

heal for these people?

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reformission

interview

with Tim Ottley

rocking for the Lamb

1. What is your name?

Tim Ottley

2. What is your age?

30

3. Do you consider yourself to be a Christian?

Yes

4. What is your vocation?

I am a band manager. I oversee the daily operations of the band and

make sure everything gets done. I don’t do everything myself, but I make

sure that we hire the right people for each job and that each of them does

a good job.

5. What bands have you

promoted?

I have worked with a variety

of bands. I got my start in

Nashville with a label called Tattoo, where I worked with the

Choir and Common Children.

From there I spent several years

on the road and worked with

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various bands, finally finding a home with POD. I now work in their management office, where I also work with Blindside and Year of the Rabbit.

6. How have people responded to Christians in the

musical mainstream?

I think the idea of crossing over is an old issue, and I think it is more

symptomatic of the lack of vision most bands show about their career. I

think the problem lies in the fact that when people start their band, they

don’t give enough thought to whether this band should be in the Christian scene or work in the general market. I have certainly worked with

bands who were in the Christian music industry who had no business

being there. They didn’t want to minister to other Christians. It just happened that they got offered a deal with a Christian label. They then wanted

to cross over to where they should have started.

So I guess that is all to say that I would hope for Christians that they

would spend more time early in the band’s development deciding what

their mission field is. I think the general market labels are simply looking

to make money and have a hit, so their focus is not about message or mission; it is about dollars. There is certainly interest in a lot of the Christian

bands right now from the mainstream labels, given the success that some

of these bands have had over the last few years.

7. Why are Christian artists moving farther into the

mainstream?

Well, I think the fact that there is more money and more celebrity on

offer doesn’t hurt. That said, I certainly think there are artistic reasons.

Christian music is a genre defined, unlike any other, by the beliefs of the

musicians. But that doesn’t limit the music that various artists will want

to make. But the Christian music industry has to have some pretty welldefined boundaries to survive. I think there are restrictions in terms of

both musical and lyrical content that true artists would wish to be free of.

That said, I want to restate that I think it is an issue of where you feel called

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to minister. For the artists I work with, they feel called to minister outside

of the Christian industry for both artistic and spiritual reasons. I think

there are plenty of great bands inside of the Christian industry who are

very happy and indeed greatly blessed because that is where they have

been called to be.

8. Why is the mainstream embracing Christian artists?

Well, I think the mainstream industry is embracing them because they

are reaping financial rewards. Which is probably also the best explanation

for why non-Christian corporations bought up all of the Christian record

labels. It is still like any business, and it always comes down to the bottom

line. But I think that there is also an element in which God is using this

music to speak to a world in pain. Certainly in this country of the last few

years, people have turned to more positive and uplifting music because of

all they see around them. The heart of man will always seek God; there is

only one thing that can fill the emptiness and hopelessness we all feel. And

I know there is money and fame at issue and we live in a cynical world that

manipulates music and art to make money. But I know that this Godinspired music is touching peoples’ hearts and bringing true hope. The

world will stand in the way of that and the Devil will do what he can to

make us ineffective, but God will always find a way to work and bring true

hope. As an aside, I

would like to say that I

hope that people pray

for my bands and for

me. I know we stand in

a difficult place and that

at any moment we

could get it wrong and

distort the way in which

people see God through

us. We certainly face

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criticism often for not doing enough. Often people want us to do

their job for them. It isn’t the job of my band to preach the gospel

to your friend you brought to the show or gave a CD to. It is your

job; God called you to do it. We play music, and hopefully people

feel better when we are done.

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C H A P T E R 6

the sin of light beer

h o w s y n c r e t i s m a n d s e c t a r i a n i s m

u n d e r m i n e r e f o r m i s s i o n

My first car,a 1956 Chevy,had only sixty thousand miles

on it. I owned it for a few years before foolishly selling it because it had

four doors and I did not think it was cool enough for me. In high

school, I used to drive the car to my summer job as a warehouse grunt

unloading cargo containers on the Seattle waterfront. The commute

was always a harrowing experience because I could not afford decent

radial tires and the roads I traveled were covered with ruts from the

many semis hauling cargo in and out of the warehouses. So I routinely

got stuck in those ruts and found myself veering head-on into oncoming traffic nearly every day.

Similarly, the journey of the gospel from the time of Jesus to the

present day has encountered a number of well-worn and dangerous ruts

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that are seemingly impossible to avoid. Because of their deadly

nature, it is critical that we be aware of them and attempt to avoid

traveling in them as much as possible. We want to avoid veering

off of reformission.

remembering:

the Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, and Essenes

rut 1: separating from culture like a Pharisee

The Pharisees were a very zealous and conservative sectarian

movement that Paul had been a part of prior to his conversion.

They were highly committed to getting back to the Scriptures and

their brand of hard-line old-time religion. They developed a litany

of laws to separate themselves from others in an effort to maintain their purity and righteousness by living in their own isolated

culture. The Pharisees basically believed that they were good and

clean before God, so they looked down on everyone else and conveniently overlooked their own sins and hypocrisy.

Isn’t this same rut traveled in our day whenever something

posing as the gospel emphasizes anything we must do for God

over what God has done for us in Jesus? We also travel this rut

whenever we impose man-made rules on people in the name of

achieving holiness by avoiding sinners and hiding out in a

Christian culture. We travel this rut whenever we hold a selfrighteous and judgmental attitude that sees the sin in others but

not in ourselves.

Sadly, many people despise Christianity because all they have

known are arrogant, self-righteous, and judgmental people claiming to be Christians, who avoid them as if they were infected and

do little more than yell at them to be moral when they should be

explaining how to be redeemed. Flipping through a phone book

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once, I saw one such church advertising itself as “Separated” and

“Reaching Out to Seattle,” presumably much like a boxer reaches

out to an opponent with a jab.

rut 2: blending into culture like a Sadducee

The Sadducees were a more culturally accommodating liberal movement than the Pharisees. Rather than pulling away from

the dominant culture, they were happy to syncretize with it. Their

compromise was so thorough that they even denied a future resurrection and the existence of angels and demons (Mark 12:18–27; Acts 23:8).

We travel this rut today whenever we don’t take sin and Scripture seriously. We also travel this rut whenever being approved by

a culture becomes more important than being faithful to God.

Last, this well-worn rut eventually leads to a universalism in

which every religion leads to salvation and in which there is little,

if any, distinction between true and false gospels. In my city, this

includes the churches that promote themselves as “open and

affirming,” which is Judas-speak for pro-sodomy.

rut 3: ruling over culture like a Zealot

The Zealots pursued political power in an effort to forward

their national and moral agendas by force and authority. They

routinely mistook the kingdom of God for their kingdom and

sought to usher it in by might. Today this form of Christianity

exists in both the religious right and left. It’s present wherever

people are more interested in sermons about legislative politics

than in sermons about sin and repentance, wherever people get

more excited about elections than Easter, wherever more people

sign political petitions than sign up to join a Bible study, and

wherever people believe that if we simply elect more people like

us, the world will be a wonderful place.

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rut 4: ignoring culture like an Essene

The Essenes were not concerned with being separated from

the culture like the Pharisees, or with cultural relevance like the

Sadducees, or with political power like the Zealots. Instead, they

wanted to personally encounter God in spiritual experiences. To

accomplish this, they withdrew from society, denied themselves

pleasure, and lived free from distraction in monkish privacy so

they could have mystical encounters with God. This form of Christianity exists wherever people seek out spiritual highs like a junkie

needing a fix, wandering from church to church and event to event

hoping to be touched by God through the latest anointed spiritual

bartender who’s serving up hundred-proof glasses of ditzy deity.

The problem with each of these ruts is that they are ways of

seeking godliness, as we define it, rather than as God defines it.

But the things that those who are stuck in them desire (holiness,

cultural relevance, social transformation, spiritual experience)

can’t be brought about by legalism, liberalism, legislation, or

lunacy; instead, they are the natural effects of faith in the powerful gospel and come from God alone to those who are about his

reformission business.

repenting:

syncretism and sectarianism

Now that we have identified the ruts we are most likely to get

stuck in, we can, like a two-wheel-drive pickup in a snowbank,

repent, get unstuck, and get back on the road to reformission.

While the four ruts seem to be different, they are in many

ways alike. For example, both the Pharisees and Essenes are sectarians who don’t go far enough into culture. And both the Sad142

duccees and Zealots are syncretists who go too far into the culture.

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The popularity of syncretism and sectarianism, however,

should not surprise us, because Jesus predicted they would come.

Knowing that we were being sent into the world as he had been

sent into the world, Jesus prayed to the Father, “I am coming to

you now, but I say these things while I am still in the world, so

that they may have the full measure of my joy within them. I have

given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are

not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is

not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them

from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of

it. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me

into the world, I have sent them into the world” (John 17:13–18).

With his death quickly approaching, Jesus had nearly completed the work the Father had sent him to do. Jesus prayed that

his death and resurrection would birth a full joy within us. This

joy in Christ is the well from which reformission is drawn. This

point is important because too often the evangelistic task of

speaking about Jesus is promoted as a work or something we must

do, rather than as an overflowing of joy within us that explodes

out of us because we have met God in Christ. Jesus then prayed

that we would live a reformission life of tension, holding the

gospel in one hand and the culture in the other, furiously refusing to let go of either so that we might be simultaneously faithful

to the text of Scripture and to the context of our ministry.

To let go of culture is fundamentalist sectarianism. Sectarianism is the huddling up of God’s people to enjoy each other and

Jesus without caring about anyone who is lost and dying outside

of Christ. To justify themselves, sectarians will often quote 1 Thessalonians 5:22 from the King James Version, which poorly translates this verse to say that we are to avoid every appearance of evil,

when the text actually says that we should avoid every kind of evil,

which is a different matter altogether. Sectarianism inevitably

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leads to irrelevance and is unfaithful to Jesus’ prayer that we not

leave this sick and dying world that does not know him.

While sectarians may cling to the gospel for their personal

piety, they hide their light under a bushel. And so the story of

Jesus stays at home with my family, with my church, and with my

Christian friends because for us salvation is a place to end and not

a place to begin. Eventually, sectarians become so dated and

removed from people in the world that their churches are little

more than museums dedicated to the past, with dumb reader

boards outside that sound like silly telegraphs from an alien

planet.

To let go of the gospel is liberal syncretism, which also leads

to irrelevance. How? By rarely, if ever, speaking of sin and repentance in personal and not just institutional and systemic terms.

Syncretism simply baptizes unscriptural beliefs in the name of

limp-wrested relevance, social progress, being nice, and making

a good nonjudgmental impression. Syncretism inevitably dissolves into a universalism in which God loves everyone, and will

forgive everyone’s sins and take everyone to heaven because he

simply lacks the courage to judge anyone. Eventually, syncretists

become less distinctively Christian in favor of an inoffensive spiritual mush. Visiting syncretistic churches is like entering a mutual

admiration society in which people pat each other on the back

for having a social conscience and nod in agreement through sermons that sound like sappy greeting cards strung together to

make us feel like we just got a divine back rub while doing aromatherapy, drinking herbal tea, and listening to taped sounds of

running water.

The problem with both syncretism and sectarianism is that

they deny the clear teaching of the Scriptures that the power of

God unleashed through the gospel of Jesus Christ can transform

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anyone. Sectarians do not live by the necessary faith in the gospel

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and therefore believe that evil hearts and sinful actions and

worldly social structures are more powerful than God, unable to

be redeemed, and therefore are a waste of our energies because

they are destined to be meat on God’s grill anyway, so why bother?

Likewise, syncretists do not live by the necessary faith in the

gospel and therefore believe that the hearts of people aren’t that

bad, their actions aren’t that sinful, and since people are doing the

best they can, we can’t expect any sort of radical transformation,

and so we should simply bless them with a sentimental love.

Sectarians love God but fail to love their neighbor. Syncretists

love their neighbor but fail to love God. Jesus expects us to love

him and our neighbor (including our enemies) and says that if

we fail to do so, we are no better than the godless pagans who love

their drinking and strip-poker buddies (Matt. 5:43–47). To love

our neighbors, we must meet them in their culture. To love our

neighbors, we must call them to repent of sin and be transformed

by Jesus.

redeeming:

stout faith

To illustrate the pitfalls of syncretism and sectarianism, I

want to unabashedly play plank and speck with the numerous

Christians who consider alcohol consumption unfit for God’s

people and a measure of one’s lack of piety. Prior to my conversion at age nineteen, my Christian buddies repeatedly told me that

all alcohol consumption is a sin, even though I did not drink at

that time. After my conversion, the same mantra was repeated to

me, though I still did not drink. After I entered the ministry as a

man of legal drinking age, the drum was again repeatedly beaten

for me by well-meaning older pastors. So I never drank alcohol

until I was thirty years of age. About that time, I was studying the

Scriptures for a sermon about Jesus’ first miracle of turning water

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into wine, as reported in John’s gospel, a miracle that Jesus performed when he was about my age. My Bible study convicted me

of my sin of abstinence from alcohol. So in repentance I drank a

hard cider over lunch with our worship pastor.

Since that time, further studies of church history have led me

to discover that a number of God’s people down through the years

have greatly enjoyed alcohol. 1 Saint Gall was a missionary to the

Celts and a renowned brewer. After Charlemagne’s reign, the

church became Europe’s exclusive brewer. When a young woman

was preparing for marriage, her church brewed a special bridal

ale, from which we derive our word bridal. Pastor John Calvin’s

annual salary package included upwards of 250 gallons of wine

to be enjoyed by him and his guests. Martin Luther once wrote of

the Reformation, “While I sat still and drank beer with Philip and

Amsdorf, God dealt the papacy a mighty blow. ”2 Luther’s wife

Catherine was a skilled brewer, and his love letters to her when

they were apart lamented his inability to drink her beer. When the

Puritan’s landed at Plymouth Rock, the first permanent building

they erected was a brewery.

Tragically, as feminism grew in America around the turn of the

twentieth century, the women’s suffrage and prohibition movements, which were the results of a feminine piety that came to dominate the church, also flourished. This all occurred as more women

became pastors and the church became more feminine. At the same

time, some denominations even began to condemn alcohol as sinful. In 1869, Methodist pastor Dr. Thomas Welch created the very

“Christian” grape juice (Welch’s) to replace communion wine. Consequently, many churches no longer offered communion wine,

though it is what Jesus had at the Last Supper. The marriage of

Christianity and feminism helped to create a dry nation that put

out of business all but the largest brewers, who were able to survive

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and root beer. This horror explains why today American beer is

largely mass produced, watered down, light on calories, and feminine compared with rich, dark, heavy, and more “biblical” European beers.

Thankfully, the resurgence of microbrewing in the United

States is helping to overcome the great loss and to resurrect the

art of brewing. I personally long for the return to the glory days

of Christian pubs where God’s men gather to drink beer and talk

theology. If anyone should take me up on this suggestion, I would

offer the following as possible brand names for your brews: Lord’s

Lager, Holy Hefeweizen, Pastor’s Porter, Allelulia Ale, Saintly

Stout, and Lucifer’s Light.

In saying this, I fully expect that it raises questions for readers who, without searching the Scriptures on the matter, may have

simply assumed that alcohol consumption and love for Jesus are

mutually exclusive. So I’ll briefly address the common arguments

against alcohol consumption. But let me first mention some

points on which all Bible-believing Christians agree.

Biblical Prohibitions against Drunkenness

● Drunkenness is a sin (Deut. 21:20; Eccl. 10:17; Luke

12:45; 21:34; Rom. 13:13; 1 Cor. 5:11; Eph. 5:18; 1 Peter

4:3).

● No priest was to drink alcohol while performing his

duties (Lev. 10:9; Ezek. 44:21), though he could

consume while not working (Num. 18:12, 27, 30).

● No king was to drink while judging law (Prov. 31:4–5).

● An elder or pastor cannot be a drunkard (1 Tim. 3:3;

Titus 1:7).

● No drunkard will inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor.

6:10; Gal. 5:21).

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Biblical Problems Caused by Drunkenness

● incest (Gen. 19:32–35)

● violence (Prov. 4:17)

● adultery (Rev. 17:2)

● mockery and brawling (Prov. 20:1)

● poverty (Prov. 21:17)

● late night and early morning drinking (Isa. 5:11–12)

● hallucinations (Isa. 28:7)

● legendary antics (Isa. 5:22)

● murder (2 Sam. 11:13–15)

● gluttony and poverty (Prov. 23:20–21)

● vomiting (Jer. 25:27; 48:26; Isa. 19:14)

● staggering (Jer. 25:27; Ps. 107:27; Job 12:25)

● madness (Jer. 51:7)

● loudness combined with laughter and then prolonged

sleep (Jer. 51:39)

● nakedness (Hab. 2:15; Lam. 4:21)

● sloth (Joel 1:5)

● escapism (Hos. 4:11)

● depression (Luke 21:34)

● staying up to party all night (1 Thess. 5:7)

All Bible-believing Christians agree that drunkenness is a sin

that causes a life of misery. In addition, Christians are to obey

their government in regard to alcohol consumption, which means

that such things as underage drinking in America are sinful (Rom.

13:1–7).

But in an effort to prohibit God’s people from all alcohol consumption, some Christians argue that terms such as new wine and

mixed wine in the Bible refer to nonalcoholic wine. Curiously, the

same people who often argue that when the Bible says “wine,” it

does not mean wine (what else could it mean, hubcap?) are also the

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most strenuous proponents of the inerrancy and truth of God’s

Word. But according to Scripture, new wine can still intoxicate, and

mixed wine refers to special wines made by mixing various wines,

sometimes with spices, and does not refer to wine cut with water.3

The only time such a practice is mentioned in the Bible is in regard

to sinful merchants who cut wine with water to rob customers.4

When God refers to pouring out his mixed wine on his enemies,

he does not mean he will dilute justice.5 And finally, the Bible does

speak of grape juice,6 and so if God meant to speak of nonalcoholic

wine, he would have said grape juice to avoid confusion.

three positions on drinking

In his well-argued book God Gave Wine, Kenneth Gentry Jr.

describes three positions on alcohol common among Biblebelieving Christians.7 His work is particularly helpful because

while he argues for the biblical freedom of God’s people to consume alcohol in moderation, he himself does not consume alcohol, and therefore he is arguing from pure motives, concerned

only with the truth.

First, prohibitionists wrongly teach that all drinking is a sin

and that alcohol itself is an evil. This position is untenable because

the Bible teaches that God makes “wine that gladdens the heart

of man” (Ps. 104:14–15), because Scripture is clear that Jesus’ first

miracle was creating over one hundred gallons of wine at a wedding party, and because Jesus ate enough food and drank enough

alcohol to be falsely accused of gluttony and drunkenness.8 So if

alcohol is inherently evil, then God is evil because he makes it,

and Jesus is sinful because he drank it. At the risk of pointing out

the obvious, isn’t it a terrible thing for us to try to be holier than

Jesus by not drinking?

Second, abstentionists wrongly teach that drinking is not sinful but that all Christians should avoid drinking out of love for

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others and a desire not to cause anyone to stumble. Yes, Christians should avoid drinking in the presence of others who are

unable to practice moderation and self-control.9 But it is unreasonable to demand that all Christians abstain from all alcohol.

The Bible teaches that God gave wine to his people even though

they used it to worship the pagan god Baal. 10 Jesus drank alcohol

even though there were undoubtedly people in his day who were

alcoholics.11 Paul says that only a demon would compel Bible

teachers to forbid things that God made good12 and that drinking

alcohol can be done in a way that glorifies God. 13

Third, moderationists rightly teach that drinking is not a sin

and that each person must let Christian conscience guide them

without judging others. This position is both reasonable and biblical because wine itself is neutral and can be used in both good and

bad ways.14 When used in a right and redeemed way, alcohol is a

gift from God to be drunk with gladness, particularly when feasting. 15 When used in this way, feasting and drinking are foretastes of

the kingdom, which will include new wine. 16 This also explains why

in Scripture a lack of wine reflects the absence of joy.17

Biblical Occasions to Drink Alcohol in Moderation

● celebration (Gen. 14:17–20)

● the Lord’s Supper (Matt. 26:29; Mark 14:25; Luke 22:18)

● medicinal purposes (Prov. 31:6; 1 Tim. 5:23)

● worship (Exod. 29:40; Num. 28:14; Matt. 26:27; 1 Cor.

11:25–26).

● thanksgiving to God (Prov. 3:9–10)

● happiness (Deut. 14:26)

why does this matter?

Now that we have established a flexible theology of alcohol

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be asking, “Why does all of this matter?” It matters because alcohol is a very real example of the pitfalls of syncretism and sectarianism. Prohibition began as a syncretistic liberalism that took

away alcohol and the Christian freedom to drink. This happened

because churches aligned themselves with a non-Christian feminism that attempted to eliminate the pub as a gathering place for

men to do theology, politics, and business. This syncretism undermined the clear teachings of Scripture in an effort to fabricate a

theology that supported its cultural form of morality.18

Over time the prohibitionist mindset became so entrenched

in evangelical and fundamentalist thinking that it is now a sectarian belief intended to keep God’s people out of the pubs, clubs,

and dinner parties where sinners gather to make friendships and

memories—the very places where Jesus was often found. Heresy

happens when the truth is taken too far, as is the case with drunkenness, and or is not taken far enough, as is the case with prohibition. Confusion about the gospel is truly at the root of this issue.

While we are called to abstain from sin, that does not mean that

we must abstain from culture to do so.

Martin Luther poked fun at the logical conclusion of this

illogical thinking, saying, “Do you suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused? Men can go

wrong with wine and women. Shall we then prohibit and abolish

women?” 19 His humorous argument makes the point well. Men

sin with women, but we should not abolish women. People worship rock stars, but we should not abolish music. People worship

food, but we should not abolish grocery stores.

This truth was clearly reinforced in my mind during a conversation with a conservative Jewish rabbi who explained to me

his pride in being part of “the world’s most organized religion.” He

explained the lists of rules intended to insulate his people from the

dark and dying culture around them. He said that their religious

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meetings were in Hebrew and that they did not attempt to convert

anyone because to do so would require his people to get involved

in the culture. To stay holy, they abstained from the culture as

much as possible, because sin is caught from infected people, just

like a cold. When I asked him about the benefits of his faith, he

explained that he and his people were basically better than everyone else because they obeyed man-made rules that quarantined

them from sinners. Though I was grieved by the depth of his

blindness and self-righteousness, I admit I was impressed by the

consistency of his thinking. Tragically, he is leading a fools’ parade

of nice virgins who never drink, cuss, or watch a dirty movie but

are skipping into hell because they don’t love Jesus.

Here’s what I’d like you to remember from this chapter:

reformission is not about abstention; it is about redemption. We

must throw ourselves into the culture so that all that God made

good is taken back and used in a way that glorifies him. Our goal

is not to avoid drinking, singing, working, playing, eating, lovemaking, and the like. Instead, our goal must be to redeem those

things through the power of the gospel so that they are used

rightly according to Scripture, bringing God glory and his people

a satisfied joy.

This matter is of urgent importance. The transition from a

modern to a postmodern world has created a widening and

increasingly angry division between Christians as to what a faithful witness looks like. Therefore, in the next chapter, I will critique

both modern and postmodern cultures to encourage you to see

them as equally lost and godless but not beyond the transforming

power of the gospel and reformission.

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reflecting:

reformission questions

1.

Which of the following ruts are you most likely to fall into?

Why?

a.

A Pharisee who avoids culture.

b.

A Sadducee who compromises too much and accommodates culture.

c.

A Zealot who hopes to rule over culture through politics and power.

d.

An Essene who ignores culture in favor of religious

experiences.

2.

In what ways have you gone too far into the culture and compromised your conscience or Christian witness?

3.

In what ways have you not gone far enough into the culture

and missed opportunities for evangelism and ministry?

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interview

with Mike Hale

Protestant pubs

1. What is your name?

Mike Hale

2. Do you consider yourself to be a Christian?

Yes

3. What is your age?

59

4. What is your vocation?

I am the founder and president of Hales Ales Brewery.

5. Name some famous brewers and pubs in the histor y

of the church.

I have no knowledge of

famous brewers or pubs in the

history of the church.

6. Why did you open

your pub?

I started the Brewery in

1983, and I came to know the

Lord Jesus in 1986.

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7. How will your pub contribute to the progress of the

gospel?

I am unclear as to how the pub will contribute to the advancement of

the gospel. I do witness to my employees and customers as the Spirit gives

me openings, and my wife and I pray for them and the building most every

day, generally and by name as the Spirit leads. Also, I am more and more

convinced that the prohibition of drink by well-meaning Christians is a

manifestation of the religious spirit as a substitution for the cross of

Christ—you know, substitutions of our own works of righteousness to

earn salvation. My presence here has led many Christians to rethink this

position. On a more personal note, this job is teaching me humility, which

is leading to more gentleness, patience, longsuffering, and the ability to

love more, if very slowly.

8. Do you serve light beer?

We do not serve light beer because it doesn’t taste very good. Our role

is to make the best beer we can.

9. How have people reacted to your owning a pub?

Many of my fellow Christians felt being a brewer or even a drinker of

beer was a problem, but it seemed to me that leaving my company, which

was dependent on me, would be irresponsible and not a good witness. After

much study and seeking of godly men’s opinions, I felt confirmed in that

decision. Among other Scriptures was the one about staying in your circumstance until the Lord changes it for you. I have given the Lord every

opportunity to pull me from this job, but he has kept me here, most

recently in a dramatic way. Long story. Most people are surprised that a

Christian would brew beer or own a pub.

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10. Why do many Christians see drinking as

incongruent with faith?

This flows from the historic position of American Christians. Most,

when giving it some thought and study, conclude it is better than banking

or lawyering. Just kidding, but many bankers and lawyers have confessed

reservations about their professions to me. I have concluded that Jesus is

much more concerned about who we are than what we do.

11. How would you respond to the charge that you are

encouraging alcoholism?

Encouraging alcoholism is the most serious consideration I have had.

Along with this is concern for ordinary drunkenness or even overindulgence. I have concluded that this is a personal choice for each individual.

The Christian alcoholics I have spoken with blame not the beer they drank

but themselves for drinking too much of it. I have been unable to find evidence in my own experience or from my friends’ experience that drinking

is habit-forming or addictive in and of itself.

With regard to harm to a fetus, my mother drank during her pregnancy, as did most mothers in that era,

without undue harm. I don’t believe

that moderate drinking is any threat to

the unborn. Now abortion, that is a

threat.

There are many medical studies

showing that moderate drinking of

any type of alcohol is beneficial to the

heart, mind, and body. I would, however, restrict unsupervised drinking, or

for that matter unsupervised driving,

to the age of thirty. I don’t encourage

alcoholism, not by example and not by

word. In my pub, and in most pubs, by

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law we must remove the drink of anyone who appears intoxicated

and refuse them further service. I don’t believe alcohol to be a

harmful substance but rather a blessing. But if the Lord chooses

to remove me from here and give me a more reputable service to

perform, I would be pleased. But I am not called to please men

but rather him who has sent me. My mission is to discern his will

and to follow it, and I do my best.

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C H A P T E R 7

postmodern

pandemonium

d e f e a t i n g t h e n e w d e m o n s

remembering:

the cultural mandate

It was the middle of the night, and my family and I were sleeping

soundly in our beds when I was awakened by a distraught person banging on our front door and yelling. I leaped from my bed and told my

wife to grab our children and lock herself in our bedroom, where she

could hide and call the police. Ordering her not to open the bedroom

door for any reason, I grabbed my handgun and took position at the

bottom of our stairs, between our front door and my family, praying

that I would not need to kill this person and then have to preach at the

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funeral. Fortunately, the police arrived before tensions escalated

out of control. Unfortunately, this was not the first time such a

thing had happened to my family. We had been harassed by

demons, people, and demon-possessed people on more than one

occasion.

My heart was racing so fast I laid awake for the rest of the

night. I was filled with longing for the coming of King Jesus and

his kingdom. After that day comes, we will not need locks on our

homes, police officers, 911, or handguns and we will not fear,

because sin and sinners will be no more.

Today, however, is not the end but the middle of history.

Today, our eyes peer into the kingdom of heaven as we long for its

coming, while our feet plod thorough the mud of the cultures on

the earth.

While we are here, we are supposed to be cultivating a culture like the kingdom. In his book Re-visioning Mission, Richard

Cote writes, “The word ‘culture’ derives its semantic origin from

the Latin cultura, which initially referred to the cultivation of the

soil and then by extension to the cultivation of the mind and

spirit. . . . It embraces all aspects of human life in a given society:

its values, beliefs, customs, forms of knowledge and art, etc. It is

no longer an ‘elitist’ concept of the educated but one that applies

to every individual and to all peoples. ”1 Culture is not something

that God’s reformission people are merely to participate in; it is

also something we are to cultivate, or plow, by living for the kingdom of heaven among the cultures of earth.2

In the first two chapters of Genesis, we see the elements of

this kingdom culture. They include living in harmonious dignity

with God and creation, blessing, feasting, masculinity and femininity, goodness, wisdom, work, marriage, song, lovemaking, and

lots of children who honor their moms and dads to the glory of

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their God. This poetic vision is so holy, other, and different from

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our world that it requires great faith for us to believe that the

redemption of our culture is possible.

repenting:

modernity and postmodernity

Because the kingdom is our model, we must be wary of every

generation’s tendancy to tout a “new” culture to replace the kingdom. A case in point is the present-day postmodern bandwagon.

What can we say about postmodernism?

First, postmodernism is basically a philosophical junk drawer

in which people toss anything and everything they cannot make

sense of. If you ask four philosophers what postmodernity is, you

will get five answers.

Second, postmodernity is not actually that new, as demonstrated by the fact that philosopher Huston Smith wrote about

life on the other side of postmodernity in his 1982 book Beyond

the Postmodern Mind.3

Third, even a cursory reading of Ecclesiastes shows that culture is a stationary bike that each generation climbs on in hopes

of getting somewhere only to die and fall off so that the new

young stud can take his turn peddling and, like a fool, make pronouncements about his progress. We would be wise to see postmodernity as simply the new guy on the old bike and not mistake

cultural change for kingdom progress.

Fourth, postmodern culture is not something we should

ignore, oppose, or embrace; rather, it is simply another culture

that we should seek to redeem and transform by the power of the

gospel. Indeed, culture is an old whore, and modernity and postmodernity are simply her old and new dresses.

Part of the confusion comes from the fact that even defining

postmodernism is a very unpostmodern thing to do. Nonetheless, I will attempt in the stream of consciousness that follows to

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take you on a journey through the emerging matrix of our world.

Are you ready for the ride? Remember, this is not an academic

treatment of the subject. Instead, I will write whatever comes to

mind for a while and then stop, because anything more than that

on this subject gives me a headache of Absalomic proportions.

The troubles began with the well-meaning Roman emperor

Constantine, who took the faith of a ragtag group of persecuted

also-rans and transformed it into a first-rate religion. In so doing,

he wed state and church, and their bizarre freak-show child

became known as Constantinianism, or what the founding fathers

of America over a millennium later would call civil religion. The

church and her kingdom experienced great favor and freedom

within the confines of the kingdom of the emperor. Over time, it

became vogue to be a Christian, to the degree that some presentday nations fund churches with tax dollars, and every president of

the United States has claimed to follow Jesus and then commenced his term, and the systematic violation of most of Jesus’

commands, with a public prayer from a highly trained professional. The religious right has so committed itself to revisionist

history that it sells the myth that the founding fathers were all

good Christian folks with minivans who attended fundamentalist churches and received the Constitution on tablets of stone

from deist Thomas Jefferson, who encountered the triune god

(slavery, deism, and rationalism) on the same grassy knoll from

which Roman Catholic John F. Kennedy was later killed.

A little over a thousand years into this doomed marriage of

church and state, Rene Descartes was commissioned by the nowwealthy church to create a defense of the Christian faith against

the emerging academic elite, which dismissed church teaching as

outdated and unfounded superstition. Not satisfied with God’s

defense of himself by saying that people who don’t believe in him

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are fools (Ps. 14:1), Decartes decided to create a big bottom piece

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on which to construct his giant Jenga game of philosophical

inquiry. And what was his bottom piece? Simply, “I think, therefore I am.”

With the firing of this rationalist shot, the human relay

marathon toward disenlightenment commenced, since the only

thing that could now be trusted was the individual and his or her

mind. Armed with the scientific method, the four-hundred-year

marathon proceeded from scientific rationalism (we can trust

only what the mind can prove through “objective” scientific testing) to deistic naturalism (the world is a closed system that runs

like a machine according to laws that cannot be violated, even by

God) to skepticism (since God and miracles cannot be proven

by science and violate our natural laws, it is unreasonable to consider religion as anything more than good morals for social

order) to atheism (God does not exist, or as Nietzsche saw it

before he lost his mind, God is an outdated concept that we

killed).

This handing off of the baton, along with the evolutionary myth

that we are born good and are getting better all the time—thanks to

education, science, and social engineering—resulted in the oppression of the less fit and the killing of those who resisted “progress.”We

also learned from the industrial, scientific, and technological revolutions that science is good for more than just creating television

altars before which the entire family can be numbed into a vegetative state by sports, game shows, and America’s Funniest Home Videos

of Modern, Highly Evolved, Well-Educated People Laughing at Other

Modern, Highly Evolved, Well-Educated People Getting Kicked in the

Groin. Yes, we could build bombs and guns and kill the bad guys.

And so we did. Subsequently, the twentieth century witnessed more

bloodshed and groin shots than all of human history.

Convinced the race should be called off before the world

ended, some postmodern philosophers decided to pull the bottom

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piece out from under Descartes’ now-towering Jenga game. Men

like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Richard Rorty began

building on the critiques of Wittgenstein, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and

Kant to raise objections against the modern project. Is the concept

of rugged individualism a dangerous myth? Is the human mind

entirely trustworthy? Is it possible that objectivity is not possible?

Is not naturalism an unproven faith assumption? Is not the human

condition evil and not good? Is it truly funny to watch men get

kicked in the groin?

And so postmodernity began. Not as a unified system of

thought or as a collective dream for the future but instead as a critique, a deconstruction of a project that had laid its foundation

with Constantine and became a high rise with Descartes. Now

that the bottom piece of the Jenga game is almost entirely kicked

out, the Western church finds itself, for the first time since Constantine, being dragged from the center of power and influence

like a spoiled kid throwing a fit on the floor because he doesn’t

want to leave the party.

By this time, the Western church, having been in bed with the

king so long and having enoyed the benefits of his palace so greatly

that the concept of leaving had become unthinkable, had lost any

concept of missions from the margins. So now, kicked out of the

palace and sent by God on a mission into the chaos of the collapsing world, the mighty and empowered people of God instead pack

up their evangelical-fish-sticker-baptized minivans and head at

breakneck speed to suburban and rural areas far away from sinners

and their cities. There they can safely hawk Christian gifts, market

Christian bands to disadvantaged kids whose parents never allowed

them to watch MTV, and invite their friends into the ghetto and

erect the walls. Occasionally they toss a moral hand grenade over

the wall at abortion doctors and homos and call it evangelism, the

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good news of the loving and well-marketed Rambo-Christ. At the

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same time, the mainline liberal church, which had happily married

itself to the spirit of the modern age rather than to Jesus, now finds

herself a lonely widow too old and senile to know that the deep

conversations she has over breakfast each morning are with an

imaginary friend and not her groom, who has long since died.

Meanwhile, the world surfs the internet, forming a global nation.

Information expands at a rate unparalleled in human history. Everyone is spiritual, and atheists are now passe. People know that they are

sinful, but without the hope of the gospel, they fall into depression

and run to shrinks and drug companies to help them cope. People

long to connect in community as whole people, while the church

remains a goofy collection of individual minds with very bad pop

music. Filmmakers are the new preachers, telling spiritual parables

to a listening world, while nutty, Christian, end-times-prophecy

Kaczynskis throw books on the shelves and films into the theaters

trying to predict when we’ll get off the postmodern roller coaster.

And the lost—precariously propped up by Viagra and Prozac—try

to squeeze out ten minutes of semisanity in our breakneck, isolated,

selfish, debt-ridden, sexually confused, and lonely world.

Welcome to the postmodern pandemonium with its demons.

Perhaps modernity and its lonely individualism, arrogant

rationalism, judgmental skepticism, and atheism was a demon

that needed to be cast out. But as Jesus taught, unless that demon

is replaced with the Holy Spirit, we are in deep dung, because

seven new demons will take its place. After spending some years

speaking with pastors from around the nation, including arguably

most of the important leaders in what has been dubbed the

emerging church, I have seen seven troubling demons that have

entered the American church and brought fatal wounds to those

ministering on the cutting edge. As we trod through the mud of

culture, we must avoid the traps set by these demons so that we

will continue to be about kingdom business.

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redeeming:

from new demons to kingdom values

demon 1: the Sky Fairy

Jesus is not a nice old man in a button-up cardigan sweater

and loafers singing happy songs while loading everyone onto a

trolly headed to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe to meet King

Friday like some Mr. Rogers clone. That god is the neutered and

limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy of pop culture that wants to bless

everyone, does not care what you call him/her/it/they, never gets

angry, and would never talk about sin or send anyone to hell. This

mythical Sky Fairy is increasingly mistaken for Jesus, however, by

many young pastors and Christians I have met who don’t want

the gospel to be the offensive and foolish stumbling block that it

is. So they remake Jesus into a feathered-hair fairy in lavender

tights and take the sword of revelation out of his hand, replacing

it with a daisy.

Perhaps this phenomenon is best articulated by non-Christian

and leading postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty, who teaches

at Stanford University. Rorty says, “I’m delighted that Liberal theologians do their best to do what Pio Nono said shouldn’t be

done—try to accommodate Christianity to modern science, modern culture, and democratic society. If I were a Fundamentalist

Christian, I’d be appalled by the wishy-washiness of their version of

the Christian faith. But since I am a non-believer who is frightened

of the barbarity of many Fundamentalist Christians (e.g., their

homophobia), I welcome theological Liberalism. Maybe Liberal

theologians will eventually produce a version of Christianity so

wishy-washy that nobody will be interested in being a Christian

anymore. If so, something will have been lost, but probably more

will have been gained. ”4

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When our goal becomes innovation rather than faithfulness,

we inevitably become simply a new kind of heretic who has

accommodated God and his gospel to the degree that, as Paul

told the Corinthians, we have a different Jesus and a different

gospel. Ours is an increasingly spiritual age, but God’s people

should in no way perceive this as an indication that lost people

who believe in the Sky Fairy are any closer to the true God than

the atheists of a previous generation were. As we work among

cultures that value trendiness, we must not forget that the kingdom values timeless truths like sin, repentance, and faith that

leads to good works.

demon 2: keeping it real . . . sinful

One of the most popular mantras chanted by young pastors

who align themselves with postmodernity is that God’s people

need to be more real and authentic. In general, this is wise. A disingenuous faith is repugnant to believers and nonbelievers alike.

But because we are sinners, simply encouraging people to be

who they are in the name of authenticity is dangerous because it

can easily be taken as a license to sin without repentance. In the

opening chapter of Romans, Paul says that people are prone to be

real rather than repentant because they love to sin, which explains

why Jesus told us to deny ourselves rather than to be ourselves.

This tragic fact has conveniently been ignored by many

emerging church leaders ministering in the postmodern pandemonium. The list of young pastors who have been known to be

fired from ministry for fornicating, committing adultery, frequenting strip clubs, and getting drunk is very troubling. When

confronted, one such young pastor weakly argued that he was

being authentic and muttered some misquote of Scripture about

not judging people. As we work among cultures that value realness, we must not forget that the kingdom first values repentance.

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demon 3: hermeneutics of the Dragon

In the opening chapter of his scathing rant to the Corinthians, Paul mocks the self-appointed wise philosophers of his day.

What would he write if he were living in our day? Would he say

postmodernity is just another pretentious philosophy destined

for the dung heap of history?

Postmodernity is tough to pin down, though, because it

changes the rules of hermeneutics but keeps the Bible. Some postmodern pastors keep the Bible but reduce it to a story lacking any

authority over us, feeling free to play with the interpretation and

meaning of particular texts. They do not believe in a singular

truthful interpretation. They believe that the interpreter ultimately has authority over the text and can therefore use it as he or

she pleases rather than submit to it.

While this dance may seem novel, it is as old as Eden. Satan

first used this tactic on Adam and Eve, and later used it to tempt

Jesus, by manipulating God’s Word to change its meaning. In previous generations, the fight was over the inerrancy of Scripture.

Today, the fight is over the authority and meaning of Scripture.

Possibly the most astonishing examples that I have seen are the

reinterpretation of Scripture so that Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus, and a seminary professor and friend who teaches

Bible interpretation for a living but goes through wives like socks.

As we go about reformission among the cultures of the earth,

we must not forget that Scripture speaks of itself as a sword, and

that our enemy, the Dragon, continually seeks to run us through

with that sword, as he did our first parents.

demon 4: from creation back to ex nihilo

Modernity was a great building project whose aim was to

construct a utopian society to the glory of man, a project similar

to the Tower of Babel. This pride, combined with the Darwinian

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institutions, organizations, religions, and denominations. The

modern era was about constructing institutions to shape people

who would help humanity.

But what the modern era overlooked was human sinfulness,

and what it lacked was a transcendent vision of what sinners need

to have better lives. So the modern project became a bloodbath.

More people were killed in the twentieth century than in all of

human history as competing visions fought for preeminence.

Weary of conflict and war, postmodernity is a negative reaction to modernity rather than a positive vision of a better alternative. In its simplest form, this is what the philosophers are

calling deconstruction, which is an academic way of saying that

some people, like little kids, enjoy breaking things by tearing them

apart. But deconstruction is easier than construction, and deconstruction without a rebuilding plan leads to homelessness. Cultures, like homes, house people, and cultures unfit for residency

need to be torn down like junk houses. But then an architect is

needed to create a vision of something better or there will be a lot

of people left homeless. This sense of homelessness pervades

those who have undertaken to deconstruct God, Scripture, gender, sin, the meaning of life, and anything else they can find.

Christians, especially young Christian leaders, are often so

influenced by all this postmodern whining that their faith becomes,

in large part, defined by what they are against rather than what they

are for. They will articulate with great passion that they are against

megachurches and any and every type of Christianity they can find.

But when you ask them what they are for, you are often met with

blank stares, because they do not know. Sadly, this also explains why

many of the Christian churches and ministries that have aligned

themselves with postmodern thinking remain insular, small, critical, and negative, exchanging God’s mission for cultural malaise.

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Many of the critiques of modern Christianity are legitimate and

desperately needed. Every movement of God to redeem a culture

begins with frustration and as a reaction. But those reactions and

frustrations are seasons that must be quickly passed through, like

puberty, so that maturity, vision, mission, and the hope of the gospel

can become the primary issues for God’s people on reformission.

We must remember to do more than critique the work of others; we

must help cultivate a kingdom counterculture where we live.

demon 5: the customer is always evil

People are more likely to worship themselves than God,

which is idolatry. This explains why we all long for the world to

bend to our needs and why we become frustrated when someone

or something does not work in our favor. This proclivity toward

self-worship (also known as self-esteem, self-actualization, selfhelp, and self-fulfillment) is particularly dangerous when combined with the economic value that the market should provide

whatever people think they need. The result is a gluttonous and

spoiled culture, as the following statistics indicate.

● In ninety nations, people spend less each year than we

in the United States spend on our garbage bags.5

● Each year more Americans declare bankruptcy than

graduate from college.6

● We have twice as many malls as high schools.7

● We spend more on shoes, jewelry, and watches than on

higher education.8

● Our supermarkets have 250 percent more items than

they did twenty years ago.9

● Parents spend six hours shopping each week, and forty

minutes playing with their children. 10

● Only one-fourth of shoppers have a particular

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● Seventy percent of Americans visit a mall each week;

that’s more than visit houses of worship.12

The assumption that everyone is a customer to be marketed

to is a great pitfall for those who proclaim the gospel, because we

tend to cast God as a product, and as mainstream a product as

possible. After all, scriptural teaching about the curse, death as the

wages of sin, the flooding of the earth, the killing of Egyptian

babies, the slaughter of perverts in Sodom and Gomorrah, and

the fiery torments of hell is a tough sell even for the best of marketing firms.

Yet today everything from sex to Jesus is pimped, since some

preachers have traded in prophecy for pandering. Meanwhile,

people have become so seasoned from the years of direct mail,

online pop-up ads, commercials, and the endless parade of advertising on everything from billboards to ball caps that they tend to

view the church as just another business and the preacher as yet

another huckster.

Businesses of all sorts shamelessly pander to felt needs, and customers love the benefits they reap from fierce competition. People

often take the same approach to God when they “shop” for a new

church that emphasizes their felt needs and offers more amenities

for them to consume. They expect God and his church to play their

game by assessing their felt needs, marketing to them with a good

pitch from a winsome salesman, and providing spiritual goods and

services that beat the competition down the street, whether it’s a selfhelp guru or another religion or church. Churches that buy into this

worship of humanity are prone to fashion their churches after malls,

complete with departments or ministries for each family member in

an effort to keep the shoppers happy.

People with this transaction mindset about God and church

will even see ministry not as something they do with the spiritual

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gifts God has given them but rather as something that is done for

them as a religious service by someone else. Consequently, churches

pandering to this mindset are filled with consumers who take more

than they give and with observers who watch more than they participate. At its extreme, some people will actually pick from the programs and offerings of the several churches and ministries they like

best without giving time or service to any of them, all the while failing to see their selfishness.

In the modern church, catering to the consumer mindset

meant creating large churches that preached a positive message

focused on Jesus’ resurrection victory. In the postmodern church,

it means creating small churches that have a despairing message

focused on Jesus’ bloody suffering, have a more pessimistic attitude, and continue to meet people’s felt needs, which have simply

changed. But as we cultivate a counterculture, we must not forget

that what people need most is to die to themselves and live for

God. If we simply give people what they want, we will not be giving them what they need.

demon 6: the photocopy heresy

The vast majority of isms, such as postmodernism and feminism, spring from the myth of egalitarianism, the silly notion

that everyone is equal. Like all heresies, this one is half true. In

one sense, everyone is equal because we are all made in the image

and likeness of God. But the fact remains that some people are

smarter than others, some people are nicer than others, some are

more helpful than others, some are more hardworking, some

more trustworthy, and some more gifted by God. The apex of folly

is our culture’s myth that everyone’s opinion is of equal merit,

and so we have Joe Uninformed calling in on talk radio to give his

two cents, and attempts by nightly newscasters to get the opinions of regular people about issues concerning nations they can172

not spell the name of or locate on a map.

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In an effort to maintain equality, our culture has pursued a

bland sameness, such as by erasing distinctions between males

and females in the name of making people equal, as if difference

necessarily translates into inequality. Michel Foucault, one of the

patriarchs of postmodernity, was an active homosexual until his

death from AIDS in 1984 at the age of fifty-seven.13 Postmodern

patriarch Richard Rorty was clear about the influences of his

upbringing in a home which was closely tied to communism.

These factors in large part explain the postmodern fascination

with gender, class, race, and the ensuing effort to eradicate distinctions between people in the name of fairness and equality.

Theologically, a postmodern church addicted to egalitarianism is also marked by a confusion over gender issues, such as masculinity and femininity, and sexual issues, such as homosexuality

and bisexuality, as well as by a peculiar commitment to making

sure that everyone’s voice is equally heard and everyone’s input is

equally considered, whether or not it is foolish, as if the church

were one big internet chat room. Some churches have gone so far

as to replace a preaching monologue from a recognized leader to

a spiritual dialogue among a group of peers who refuse to

acknowledge any leader in authority over them. This makes about

as much sense as shooting your doctor and gathering with the

other patients in his lobby to speculate about what is wrong with

one another and randomly write out prescriptions for one

another in the name of equality.

Tragically, this pursuit of a flat culture of bland sameness and

silly equality has resulted in postmodern theologies that are seeking to diminish even God in an effort to make him equal with us

and more like us. An example would be open theism, which

teaches that God does not rule over history and know the future

but rather, like us, is trapped in history, striving to create the

future with us. Are we truly to believe that human history is a

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buddy-cop movie in which we journey throughout time fighting

the world, the flesh, and the Devil with God, whose hands are tied

and fingers are crossed in hopes that the good guys will win in the

end? As we work among cultures that despise hierarchy, we must

remember the kingdom values of children honoring their parents, wives respecting their husbands, Christians following the

leadership of their pastors, and churches submitting to Jesus,

because the governments of home and church belong to God and

not the culture.

demon 7: the hyphenated Christian

Some experts think that postmoderns are simply a new kind

of Christian, like a Western or Eastern Christian. But many postmodern Christians are so postmodern that their hyphenated

Christianity has in effect negated their Christianity, like a New

Age Christian or a Buddhist Christian.

The reason why postmodern Christianity is ineffective has to

do with authority and power. Postmoderns see scriptural texts as

means by which spiritual leaders exercise power over people. And

because of their suspicion of power and authority, postmoderns

who are consistent in their thinking reject any authority beyond

themselves, and they reject any claim to truth, other than their

truth claim that there is no such thing as a valid truth claim. The

problem is rarely a philosophical hang-up but rather a stubbornly

hard heart that receives truth as readily as a large rock receives

bullets.

The Bible claims to be a revelation from God that can be

understood only by God’s bypassing our resistance and renewing

our hearts and minds to both know and love him and his truth.

Postmodern culture claims that revelation is not possible and that

all we are left with is the speculation of competing interest groups

who seek to impose their authority over us. Because of this, we

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have descended from the light of truth into the darkness of perspective.

As it became increasingly apparent that there would never be

widespread agreement on the truth, it became more popular to

speak of truths. Someone could believe that something is true yet

wouldn’t expect anyone else to agree.

But since we all have to live on the same planet and get along

to some degree, it was soon discovered that allowing everyone to

have their own truths made it difficult to build a society of united

people. Consequently, values then became in vogue as a list of

things that most people considered to be good and helpful to the

building of the culture, values such as tolerance, freedom, and

equality.

However, though these values helped to undergird our culture, some people persisted in having strong convictions. Thus,

the idea of opinions was born. If people are passionate about

something, such as Jesus’ being the only means to salvation, their

opinion is to be considered not truth, a truth, or even just a value

that should be promoted but rather as simply a personal opinion

that they should be careful to keep to themselves in the name of

politeness and equality, because people who disagree with them

are just as right as they are.

So the postmodern concept of perspective was born. Now,

people who claim to know the truth or a truth or even have an

opinion about most anything that matters are dismissed as only

looking at things from their narrow and biased perspective,

because after all, revelation does not exist; speculation is all we

have, and who can trust mere perspective?

But as we work among cultures, we must never proclaim

Jesus as God merely from our limited and biased perspective but

rather as God and the King who rules over a kingdom that

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includes the cultures of the earth. And the view from his throne

is not simply one of the many equally valid perspectives but truth.

If we fail in this, hyphenated postmodern Christians will reject

any singular interpretation of Scripture, arguing that it is just your

perspective and that there are other perspectives, none of which

are true, so we should be tolerant of all. They will reject any leadership and shun what they call “organized religion,” preferring to

have self-styled spiritual experiences. They will also shun any

form of officially responsible leadership, making them bad parents, spouses, and church members. In addition, they will demand

that the Bible be taught as a series of suggestions rather than commands, that ministry be facilitated rather than led, and that selfdiscovery be promoted over obedience to God.

And reformission will cease.

Now that we have investigated how to move through the mud

of the modern and postmodern worlds, we can begin building a

kingdom culture where we live. In the final chapter, I will share

with you what this looks like at our church and will try to inspire

you to pursue the dreams that God has given you for the place in

which you live.

reflecting:

reformission questions

1.

Take the time, perhaps over the next few days or weeks,

to read the gospel of John and circle each occurrence of

the word truth, or a derivative thereof. What did you

learn about truth? How does what John says about truth

differ from what your local culture believes about truth?

2.

Do you consider yourself to be more modern or postmodern? Why?

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3.

Which of the seven demons is most worrisome to you?

Why?

4.

Do you think any of the seven demons are compatible

with Christianity? Why or why not?

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interview

with Jenny Schneider

glued to the tube

1. What is your name?

Jenny Schneider

2. Do you consider yourself to be a Christian?

Yes. I committed my life to Christ at the age of thirteen.

3. What is your age?

27

4. What is your vocation?

I work in Broadcast Standards for a major television network. My

department monitors and edits prime-time and children’s programming,

network commercials, and so on for content. This is to ensure that in anything and everything on-air,

there is nothing that our audience would be too offended by

(sex, violence, language). We

work with producers, advertisers,

and animators at every phase of

the production of their commercials or shows and monitor what

they are writing or producing to

broadcast on the network.

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5. Why do you believe your vocation is an important

part of your faith?

Being a Christian in the entertainment industry is definitely a challenge, but it is an important part of my faith because Jesus tells us in

Matthew 5:16, “Let your light so shine before men, that they see your good

works and glorify your Father in Heaven.” I want my life to be a testimony

of God’s saving power, which ultimately brings him glory.

6. How has it been tough to do your job well and be a

Christian?

The toughest part for me has been that I see, firsthand, what is allowed

to air on network television. The trend today seems to be to see how far

the envelope can be pushed or to take risks and gauge how much the audience can handle before they will protest.

7. How have people reacted to your job?

For the most part, Christians are encouraged when I tell them about my

job because they know I am here representing Christ. As for non-Christians,

most are respectful and accepting of my faith, since Hollywood is a very liberal place where the motto is “whatever works for you.”

8. Why should Christians be involved in Hollywood?

As believers, we need to be involved in Hollywood because television

and the media reach such a broad audience, and we cannot underestimate

what God can accomplish through any medium. After all, Jesus went out,

got involved with the people, and immersed himself in the culture of his

day for the sake of reaching people with the gospel. How else will the entertainment industry be reached if Christians are not here, involved in their

lives, even if it is only on a professional level?

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conclusion

f r o m d e m o n s t o d r e a m s :

b u i l d i n g a k i n g d o m c u l t u r e

This is the end ofthe book,and I’m supposed to go out with

a bang, like the fireworks finale on the Fourth of July. But I’m sitting at

home on a Saturday, which is supposed to be my day off, in my daddy

chair drinking tea, wearing my pajamas, and trying, to no avail, to be

profound. I am hoping that you will recommend this book to your

friends and that I will become so important that I can do eccentric

things like Prince and maybe one day change my name to a symbol

because I have never liked the name Mark. My kids are in the playroom

running around like midget demons arguing over crackers and juice

with all the intensity of opponents and advocates of the death penalty

at a state-sponsored execution. My lovely bride is making soup that

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smells good, and I am in a hurry because we have someone coming over and I need to shave so that I will look like an official pastor instead of a hobo.

The man who is coming over is a brand-new Christian. He is

a photographer who was assigned to take pictures for a documentary on me and our church. When we first met, he told me to

pretend he wasn’t there as he followed me around, shooting photos of me doing the dishes, preaching, getting the mail, serving

communion, and renting stupid action movies at the video store,

which was weird because everyone there wondered why I had my

own paparazzo. He stressed that he needed to be objective, but

before long, reformission evangelism occurred, and he was eating with my family and becoming a friend who asked buckets of

questions about life and God while we drove around in my 1978

Chevy truck. He asked me for a Bible, which he began reading,

and last week God changed his heart. On Sunday, right before I

preached, he came up to me, and I asked him if he needed to take

more photos that day. He said that he had given his life to Jesus

and was just going to church. That morning, I got to serve him

communion. He’s an amazing guy who has filmed for major

media outlets some of the most horrific wars and evils in the

world, from Haiti to Kosovo to Rwanda to Afghanistan. As we’ve

talked, I’ve found he’s pretty burned out trying to find hope in

the cultures under the sun, and he longs for a kingdom culture.

Tomorrow, I get to stand on the large stage at our church and

speak to a big crowd about Jesus and how one day he is coming

back with a sickle in his hand to eliminate sin and sinners. Right

before taking the stage, I will go to the bathroom, because for

some reason I always have to pee before I preach, probably

because I get nervous. My text is Revelation 14, and just this

morning I was meditating on the fact that once the final angel is

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opportunity for repentance will cease, reformission will come to

an end, and I will be out of a job. Honestly, I cannot wait for that

day when I get to join the choir of worshipers, see the people who

have passed from death to life, and sleep in every day because

Jesus has things covered.

In the meantime, I have a lot of work to do where God has

called me. My city is an absolute spiritual disaster. If Satan were

in charge of it, I would assume it would look pretty much like it

does right now, which leads me to believe that’s exactly what is

happening. The task of transforming this city seems completely

overwhelming, and since we started our church seven years ago,

I frequently have to remind myself that Jesus’ tomb is empty, so

that I don’t lose hope and form a therapy group with Jim Beam,

Jose Cuervo, and Johnnie Walker.

The problem with my pastoral job is that I don’t really know

what I’m doing. So I read every book I can find and I cling to the

Bible like a kid who can’t swim but somehow found a life preserver in the middle of the ocean. The principles I’ve shared with

you in this book are things I’ve discovered while messing up, since

I have a tendency to find landmines by stepping on them.

Often, I just want to be left alone or to start preaching sermons that sound like pithy statements strung together from fortune cookies and just cash my paycheck every week. But I can’t

help myself. Invariably, I see the needs of the culture and the condition of the church, and like the Hulk, my skin becomes green,

my eyes bulge out of my head, and I lose the ability to speak in

full sentences. So I just keep going and more people keep getting

saved and more churches keep getting planted and I keep seeing

more that needs to be done.

The only thing that gets me out of bed on Monday is the picture in Revelation of King Jesus on his throne ruling over all of

creation, which is his kingdom. I’ve never seen what John saw, so

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I am forced to take his word for it. But because Jesus is in charge

of everything, there is hope, even for my city. In closing, I want to

show you what I’m up against as we seek to build our kingdom

culture. I do this not to boast but rather because I want you to see

what reformission looks like in practice. I don’t expect you to do

what we do, because you live somewhere else that is probably as

messed up as where I live but in different ways. So you’ll need to

think through what you are up against there and what your kingdom culture would look like. The appendix at the end of this book

may also help you to envision the future so that you can prepare

for it.

Men in our kingdom culture. In Seattle, the young men are,

generally, pathetic. They are unlikely to go to church, get married,

have children, or do much of anything else that smacks of being

responsible. But they are known to be highly skilled at smoking

pot, masturbating, playing video games, playing air guitar, freeloading, and having sex with their insignificant others. However,

the emerging-church massage-parlor antics of labyrinth-walking

by candlelight will do little more than increase the pool of extras

for television’s Will and Grace. If there is any hope for a kingdom

culture to be built in Seattle, getting the young men to undergo a

complete cranial-rectal extraction is priority number one.

While the rest of the organizations in the city are busy trying

to clean up the messes made by these young men, including

unwed mothers, fatherless children, and crime, we focus our

efforts on converting them and training them in what it means to

be a godly man. So far our training on everything from how to

study the Bible, get a job, invest money, buy a home, court a

woman, brew beer, have good sex, and be a pastor-dad to their

children has been very successful for hundreds of young men. We

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God will give them a wife, and we have childless college men starting college funds in faith that one day God will give them a wife

and children. We have a long way to go, but the building of our

kingdom culture begins with building the men who will build that

culture by building churches, families, and businesses. Therefore,

in our kingdom culture, we take very seriously Paul’s words that

men are the glory of God (1 Cor. 11:7).

Sex in our kingdom culture. In our city, marriage, sex, and

children are three unrelated issues. Young people live together and

sleep together with no plans to get married or have children. And

should a pregnancy occur, aborting the baby is assumed by many

to be the only option. In our kingdom culture, we connect these

three issues. We put prospective couples through a rigorous premarital process that clearly defines the biblical roles of husbands

and wives. We average more than a wedding every week. We also

value liberated marital sex and provide frank teaching on everything from why husbands enjoy oral sex to the different types of

orgasms a wife can experience. In our kingdom culture, the marriage covenant is sacred and the marriage bed is sensual. We speak

frankly, but not crassly, about sexuality because if our people do

not get their information from the living waters of Scripture, their

thirst will compel them to drink from the toilet of pornography

and perversion.

Children in our kingdom culture. Our city is filled with young

people who either are gay or are shacking up with the person they

are dating. Consequently, our city has fewer children per capita

than every American city except San Francisco. Many of these

children have no father. To say that our city hates children may

sound harsh, but in practice, it’s a reality. In our kingdom culture,

children are welcomed as a blessing from God because they will

ensure that reformission continues well into the future. We value

children not simply because they are cute or teach us life lessons

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but also because a reformission legacy matters. We believe that we

should multiply and have lots of children, and then cultivate those

children to live fruitful lives that include one day having lots of

children who live fruitful lives.

Home in our kingdom culture. In our city, home building is a

lost art because everyone works in the marketplace. In our kingdom culture, the home and the marketplace are equally important. While the husbands work in the marketplace, the wives build

the home. Our home building includes helping people to buy a

home and settle down rather than wandering from city to city.

We offer training on buying a home and have church members

who assist as realtors and mortgage brokers. One of our pastors

even got his real-estate license so he could manage the home purchases of our people and give them their realtor’s fees back to put

toward their down payments. We encourage people to purchase

homes large enough to have others live with them, either in a

rental or gratis situation (often to help other people save enough

money to buy their own homes), so that we have Christian community. We encourage our people to buy their homes with hospitality and ministry in mind so that they have enough space to

host Bible studies and parties and to practice reformision evangelism.

Beauty in our kingdom culture. In our city, great value is

placed on creativity and the arts. In our kingdom culture, we also

hold these things in high regard and believe that one of God’s

attributes is beauty. We display paintings, photos, and works in

other media for the sake of beauty and the encouragement of

artists. We run an all-ages concert venue in which young people

can enjoy non-Christian (and occasionally Christian) bands in a

great room. We paint the walls of our homes and church because

we worship God and not an orthodontist who only believes in

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We take aesthetics very seriously in everything from our building

to our website. And our sound system is very important, since

God cares about acoustics, and when he sings over us in the kingdom (Zeph. 3:17), we expect it to sound good.

Joy in our kingdom culture. In our kingdom culture, we laugh

a great deal and embrace irony and sarcasm as gifts from our

hilarious God. Jesus told us that the kingdom will be filled with

joy, and so we make it a habit to take God very seriously and

everything else very lightly. Some people misperceive our joy as

triteness, but it is instead for us a demonstration of faith. Because

our God rules over everything and is good, we are free to laugh,

especially when times are tough. In our kingdom culture, good

food, good drink, good friends, and good times filled with laughter stand in contrast to the worry, hurry, and busy of stressed and

depressed people who do not trust God.

Practical theology in our kingdom culture. In our kingdom culture, we believe that claiming Jesus as Lord means that he rules

over everything from our pots and pans to our genitals and car

horns. As we read the Old Testament, we see that God talks about

such things as why it is important to go to the bathroom in a hole,

because otherwise people will step in it, and we believe that God

truly cares about the minutiae of our lives. Consequently, in our

kingdom culture, theology is intensely practical and connected to

how we live every day as we work our jobs, clean our dishes, and

brush our teeth to the glory of God. The Wisdom Literature contains some of our favorite biblical treasures.

Emerging leaders in our kingdom culture. Our city is very

young and is dominated by the youth culture. In his day, Isaiah

lamented that the youth culture was so domineering that it

oppressed God’s people (Isa. 3:12). Likewise, in our day, youthfulness is worshiped. You’ll never see a middle-aged woman grace

the cover of a Victoria’s Secret catalog. The American concept of

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adolescence excuses immaturity among young people and welcomes rebellion and folly as rites of passage. In our kingdom culture, young people are identified not as adolescents but rather as

Christians of whom Christian living is expected. We believe that

because some of the greatest prophets and kings in the Bible were

in their teens and early twenties, Christian maturity and leadership should be expected at a young age.

Church planting in our kingdom culture. Our city is one of the

least churched in our nation, and our churches tend to be smaller

and more theologically liberal than the national average. In addition, many of these churches are dead and dying because they are

detached from both the Scriptures and culture. The situation is

so bleak that even if God should stir the hearts of a fraction of the

people in our city to attend church, there would not be enough

seats for them. For those who could get a seat, it is questionable

whether they would hear the gospel. In our kingdom culture,

church planting is the logical outgrowth of reformission, since

every culture and community needs vibrant churches to be the

reformission base from which the gospel is taken into the culture.

We give away one-tenth of our annual budget in order to help

start churches wherever in the world God raises up a qualified

leader to do reformission. We fund only nationals to plant

churches, start orphanages, build schools, and do reformission,

because we believe that every nation should have native Christians doing in their culture what we do in ours.

I pray that Seattle will no longer be known as one of the leastchurched, least-married, most-perverted, and most-childless

cities in our nation. I pray that Seattle will no longer be the

national testing ground for godless political agendas and false

gospels. I pray that so many people will have met Jesus and had

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schools, homes, marriages, children, and churches would be holy,

or different, because people had met God.

I pray that you and God’s people in your culture would

clearly see the opportunities for and obstacles to the gospel where

you live. I pray that you and God’s people would weep over the

condition of your city. I pray that you and God’s people would

envision what your kingdom culture will be.

I pray that God would protect you from the world, the flesh,

and the Devil, which conspire to thwart reformission. I pray that

God would open to the gospel of grace the hearts of the lost

people that you meet. I pray that God would get his glory, that

your city would get its kingdom culture, and that you would get

your joy.

Amen.

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postscript

The words printed here are concepts. You must go through the experiences.

—Augustine

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appendix

p e e r i n g t h r o u g h p o r t a l s i n t o t o m o r r o w

Regarding the future,a Chinese proverb says,“The person who

does not worry about the future will shortly have worries about the

present.” Indeed, many of the present crises in the church and the culture are the result of the failure to anticipate the future and prepare for

it. Also, many crises that the church and the culture might have suffered

were averted because of foresight and prevention.

Discerning the future, however, is a highly subjective activity for

everyone but our omniscient God and the prophets through whom he

speaks. In 1893, journalist Junius Henri Browne said, “Law will be simplified. Lawyers will have diminished, and their fees will have been

vastly curtailed.” In 1900, C. M. Skinner, editor of the Brooklyn Daily

Eagle, said, “Teeth will disappear seventy-five years from now, because

the food of the future will be concentrated and made directly from

chemicals so that there will be no strain on the digestion or gums.” In

1963, the United States Secretary of Defense said, “The war in Vietnam

is going well and will succeed.”

Despite the propensity for error, it is vital for God’s people to lean

into the future with wisdom and flexibility, because just about anything

could happen tomorrow. So in the following pages, we will gaze through

seven portals into the days between now and the year 2025. I want to

stress that I am in no way condoning or promoting any of the trends I

will describe, since many of them are evil. But I am suggesting that if

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reformission takes hold, if God’s people can see tomorrow and

prepare for it today, some of the sinful things listed need not

occur.

population

● The roughly eighty million people born between 1977 and

1997 will have more money to spend than even their parents

did, making them the wealthiest generation in the history of

the United States.1

● Americans will continue to live longer than even the average all-time high of 77.2 years set in 2001, causing the

methods of everything from advertising to evangelism to

change in order to connect with older people. By 2030, over

half of the adults in the United States will be age fifty or

older and qualify for membership in the AARP.2

● By 2025, there will be as many senior citizens over the age

of sixty-five in America as there were African Americans in

2003.3

● The fifty million Americans born before 1945—called the

Builder generation because they created much of modernday America, or what Tom Brokaw called the Greatest Generation—were very thrifty with their money following the

Great Depression. They currently hold nearly two-thirds of

all the nation’s financial assets and will leave an estimated

$41 trillion to their children and grandchildren, minus the

6 percent they will leave to charities, including churches

and other ministries.4

● Members of future generations will be increasingly multiracial, a trend which will redefine traditionally accepted categories of race or will cause race to no longer be a defining

factor of a person’s identity.

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● The number of immigrants will increase to 13 percent of the

population. Hispanics will outnumber blacks by more than

three to two, “minorities” will account for 40 percent of the

population,5 and the number of Asians will double to 7 percent of the population.6

● Because of longer lifespans, immigration, and steady birth

rates, the U.S. population will increase by 25 percent to over

350 million people.7

family

● Homosexual couples will be permitted to legally marry,

likely after their relationships are first permitted as a civil

union or some other arrangement that would give same-sex

couples some of the same legal benefits as married couples.

● It will become increasingly common for homosexual

couples to have children through artificial insemination,

surrogate mothering, adoption, and foster care.

● After homosexual-marriage legislation, or some other

equivalent, has been passed, there will be a push for legalized polygamy in order to include bisexual people and their

multiple partners as legitimate families.

● It will become increasingly common for traditional gender

roles in the family to be reversed as many women become

the sole or primary breadwinner and their husbands stay

home to raise the children, leading to the further decline of

strong men.

● Parents who want to have only one or two children will

have “designer babies,” selecting the traits they prefer to

ensure that they get exactly what they want in a child.

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● As more mothers work, either because they want to or have

to, child-raising will be increasingly done by institutions

such as daycares and year-round schools.

health and medicine

● While people die of starvation in other nations, American

adults and children will continue eating themselves to

death as obesity rates and related health problems rise.

● Alternative medicines and organic foods will become more

mainstream as some Americans pursue alternatives to such

things as medication and surgery.

● Increasing numbers of younger Americans will wear a permanent fashion accessory such as a tattoo or a body piercing other than a pierced ear.

● Elective and cosmetic surgeries and procedures will become

increasingly common among both males and females in an

effort to give the appearance of healthiness.

● Drug use will increasingly be viewed as a sickness rather

than a crime, and as a result, it will be legalized, beginning

with marijuana, and the money spent to fight the drug war

will be reallocated to drug education, prevention, and treatment.

● Medical knowledge is currently doubling every eight years,

and the speed of change in the medical field in the near

future will be staggering.8

● Medical developments will outpace widespread public

opinion on the ethics of such things as genetic engineering,

cloning, DNA mapping, surrogate motherhood, infertility

solutions, selection of a child’s sex, use of fetal tissue, artificial organs, organ cloning, and life support.

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creation

● There will be increased legislation to expand the legal rights

of certain animals that are deemed close evolutionary

relatives of humans and therefore deserving of nearly the

same legal protections.

● Americans generate 4.3 pounds of trash per person each

day. Our overall waste stream has tripled since 1970, and

the Environmental Protection Agency states that by 2025,

70 percent of the nation’s 2,200 landfills will be full. This

development will result in legislation to mandate recycling

and environmentally conscious business practices,9 similar

to what has been enacted in Seattle, which now recycles

roughly half of its solid waste. 10

● Ecoterrorist groups seeking to protect everything from animals to land will proliferate and become more brazen.

technology

● Home entertainment will continue to flourish, making it

possible for technohermits to rarely ever leave home.

● Radio will experience its most radical transformation since

FM broadcasting began in 1946, as satellite radio will

increase the number of free and premium channels, much

like present-day cable-television channels.

● Internet gambling will pose for many gambling addicts an

irresistible temptation because of its immediacy and

anonymity and the difficulty of regulating it.

● Many businesses and some churches will be better known

by their web address than by their physical address.

● All phones will be mobile, and use of the traditional home

phone will cease.

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● Bills and tithes will be paid digitally through online banking and digital credit, making cash and checks virtually

obsolete.

● Churches will use their website as a new front door through

which visitors will pass before ever attending a church

event. People will even attend church virtually.

● Churches will create password-protected sections of their

websites, or different sites altogether, for their members to

chat online, share resources, exchange contact information,

connect with church leaders, and so on, and churches will

use e-mail chains in place of weekly printed bulletins.

● Technology will continue to reshape people in such a way

that their attention spans will be shorter and they will have

difficulty distinguishing truth and lies, and the deluge of

information will become so great that separating the useful

from the trivial will be laborious.

● The tsunami of information and services customized to

please individual people will create a culture of selfabsorbed, narcissistic people consumed with themselves

and unconcerned about serving other people.

sexuality

● Singleness will increase as more people postpone marriage,

experience divorce, or forego marriage altogether.

● Cohabitation will become increasingly common as more

people decide they don’t want to get married but still want

companionship and as more people want to test whether

they are compatible for marriage.

● Immodest dress will become more brazen, even among

young children (particularly girls), with undergarments

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appendix

and clothing styles that in previous generations would have

been common only among prostitutes.

● Pornography and the sex industry will continue to drive

and benefit from advances in technology and will push so

far into mainstream culture that it will no longer be considered dirty or taboo.

● Deviant sexuality such as pedophilia and bestiality will not

likely become more widely accepted but will become more

widely practiced through the increasing anonymity

afforded by technology.

● Championed for reducing everything from disease to

unwanted pregnancy to loneliness to sex crimes, technology

will provide new sexual opportunities such as lifelike robots

that function as sexual partners, and snugly fitting body

suits containing electronic units that allow people separated

by distance to have cybersex that feels like real sex.11

religion

● There will be an increase in ancient pagan practices, much

like those of the days of the Old Testament, made possible

by the ability to share information, build communities, and

create movements digitally.

● Demonic activity will rise and will increasingly be misdiagnosed as solely medical or psychological problems.

● Religious fanatics will increasingly resort to violence and

terrorism to punish those who oppose them and to protect

practices and ways of life they believe to be sacred.

● Mainline and liberal Protestant denominations will continue to slowly bleed to death.

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● God will continue to seek worshipers, and Jesus will continue to save people from Satan, sin, and death in miraculous ways.

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notes

Introduction: my personal reformission and the emerging

reformission movement

1. George Barna, “Unchurched Nation,” Moody Magazine (July–August 2003),

www.moodymagazine.com, accessed April 29, 2004.

2. The following discussion summarizes ideas from Lesslie Newbigin, The Open

Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,

1995), 153, and further expanded in the Gospel and Our Culture Network’s

book The Church between Gospel and Culture, ed. George Hunsberger (Grand

Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996).

Chapter 1. eat, drink, and be a merry missionary

1. 1 Corinthians 3:16–17; Ephesians 2:19–22.

Chapter 2. and now, the news

1. Acts 10, 15; Romans 14–15; 1 Corinthians 10:14–33.

Chapter 3. shotgun weddings to Jesus

1. Acts 13:13–52; 17:16–34; 28:17–28.

2. George Hunter, The Celtic Way of Evangelism: How Christianity Can Reach the

West . . . Again (Nashville: Abingdon, 2000).

3. James H. Gilmore and Joseph Pine II, The Experience Economy (Boston: Harvard Business School, 1999).

4. Romans 3:20–27; 5:19–21; 1 Corinthians 1:30; Titus 3:3–7.

5. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Com-

munity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 19.

6. Ibid., 66–67.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., 75–76.

9. Ibid.

10. Polly LaBarre, “How to Lead a Rich Life,” Fast Company, March 2003, 74.

11. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 102–5.

12. Ibid., 101.

13. Ibid., 102.

14. Ibid., 105.

15. www.bowlingalone.com.

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16. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 98, 100, 102–5.

17. www.bowlingalone.com.

18. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 112–13.

19. Ibid., 100.

20. Ibid., 150–51.

21. Ibid., 107.

22. Ibid.

Chapter 4. Elvis in Eden

1. Rodney Clapp, A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Chris-

tian Society (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1996), 74.

2. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis

(Boston: Beacon, 1989), 25–26.

3. Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Cul-

ture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 3.

4. Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Pop-

ular Culture (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 1989), 59–61, 90, 120.

5. Alvin Toeffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1991).

6. James H. Gilmore and Joseph Pine II, The Experience Economy (Boston:

Harvard Business School, 1999), 7–8.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., 8.

9. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of Ameri-

can Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 169.

10. “Americans Embrace Technologies That Bring Control to Their Lives,”

April 1, 2003. Retrieved November 18, 2003 from http://www.barna.org

/cgibin/PagePressRelease.asp?PressReleaseID=136&Reference=E&Key=

technology.

11. Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political

Struggles (New York: Basic, 2002).

Chapter 5. going to seminary at the grocery store

1. 1 John 2:15.

2. 1 John 2:17.

3. 1 John 3:1.

4. 1 John 3:13.

5. 1 John 4:1, 5.

6. James 1:27.

7. James 3:6.

8. James 4:4.

9. 1 Peter 2:11.

10. 2 Peter 1:4.

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11. 1 Corinthians 1:20–21.

12. Romans 1:18–32.

13. 1 Corinthians 1:27–28.

14. Colossians 2:8; 2:20–3:3.

15. Ephesians 2:2, 12.

16. Galatians 3:22; 4:3.

17. 1 Corinthians 11:32.

18. John 1:1–18.

19. 1 John 4:9.

20. 1 John 4:4; 5:4–5.

21. Romans 12:2.

22. 2 Corinthians 10:3–4.

23. 1 John 4:17.

24. Bob Welanetz, “The Impact of Generation Y on Mall Ownership and

Operations,” American Demographics (December 2002–January 2003),

insert between pages 52–53.

Chapter 6. the sin of light beer

1. Kenneth Gentry Jr., God Gave Wine (Lincoln, Calif.: Oakdown, 2001).

2. Ben Merkle, “Beer,” Credenda Agenda 11 (April 6, 2000), 2.

3. Ibid.

4. Isaiah 1:22.

5. Psalm 75:8.

6. Numbers 6:3.

7. Gentry, God Gave Wine, 3–6.

8. John 2:1–11; Matthew 11:19.

9. Romans 14:21; 1 Corinthians 10:31–32.

10. Hosea 2:8.

11. Matthew 11:19.

12. 1 Timothy 4:1–5.

13. 1 Corinthians 10:31.

14. 1 Samuel 1:14, 24; 25:18, 37; Joel 1:9, 10.

15. Psalm 104:14–15; Ecclesiastes 9:7; 10:19.

16. Joel 2:24; Isaiah 25:6; 27:2–6; Jeremiah 31:12; Hosea 2:22; Joel 3:18;

Amos 9:13–14.

17. Isaiah 16:10; Joel 1:5, 12.

18. Our church in Seattle partakes of communion every week and provides

both juice and wine to permit people to obey their conscience on the

matter.

19. Jim West, Drinking with Calvin and Luther (Lincoln, Calif.: Oakdown,

2003), 29.

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Chapter 7. postmodern pandemonium

1. Richard Cote, Re-visioning Mission: The Catholic Church and Culture in

Postmodern America (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 1996), 91.

2. Genesis 1:26–30; 9:1–2; 9:6–11; Psalm 8.

3. Huston Smith, Beyond the Postmodern Mind (Wheaton, Ill.: Theosophical, 1982).

4. Richard Rorty, interview by Michael Horton, “Truth, Evil, Redemption:

A Neo-Pragmatist Perspective,” Modern Reformation, July–August 2003,

www.modernreformation.org, accessed April 29, 2004.

5. Polly LaBarre,“How to Lead a Rich Life,” Fast Company, March 2003, 74.

6. John de Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor, Affluenza: The All-

Consuming Epidemic (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2001), 4.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., 13.

9. Ibid., 41.

10. Ibid., 14.

11. Ibid., 15.

12. Ibid., 13.

13. Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,

1996), 123–24.

Conclusion

1. Edward Cornish, “The Futurist Outlook 2001,” World Futures Society

(2000), 4.

2. Ibid., 7.

3. Alison Stein Wellner, “The Next Twenty-five Years,” American Demo-

graphics (April 2003), 25.

4. Michael J. Weiss, “Great Expectations,” American Demographics (May

2003), 27–35.

5. Jeffrey Passel, interviewed by Peter Fancese, “Consumers Today,” Amer-

ican Demographics (April 2003), 33. Passel worked with the Census

Bureau for fifteen years and is now a principal research associate at the

Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.

6. Wellner, “The Next Twenty-five Years,” 26.

7. Ibid., 28.

8. Marvin J. Cetron and Owen Davies, “Fifty Trends Now Changing the

World,” World Futures Society (2001), 16.

9. Ibid., 11–12.

10. Marvin J. Cetron and Owen Davies, “Trends Shaping the Future,” The

Futurist (January-February 2003), 40.

11. Edward Cornish, “The Cyber Future: Ninety-Three Ways Our Lives Will

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Document Outline

- Title page

- Copyright page

- Dedication

- Contents

- Acknowledgments

- Introduction: My personal reformission and the emerging reformission movement

- Part 1: Loving your lord through the gospel

- Chapter 1: Eat, drink, and be a merry missionary: Imitating the reformission of jesus

- Chapter 2: And now, the news: Shaping a reformission gospel

- Chapter 3: Shotgun weddings to jesus: Reformission evangelism

- Part 2: Loving your neighbor in the culture

- Chapter 4: Elvis in Eden: A reformission understanding of culture

- Chapter 5: Going to seminary at the grocery store: Connecting with culture in reformission

- Chapter 6: The sin of light beer: How syncretism and sectarianism undermine reformission

- Chapter 7: Postmodern pandemonium: Defeating the new demons

- Conclusion: From demons to dreams: Building a kingdom culture

- Postscript

- Appendix: Peering through portals into tomorrow

- Notes

- About the Publisher

- Share Your Thoughts

Table of Contents

acknowledgments

introduction:

part 1: loving your Lord through the gospel

1. eat, drink, and be a merry missionary:

2. and now, the news:

3. shotgun weddings to Jesus:

part 2: loving your neighbor in the culture

4. Elvis in Eden:

5. going to seminary at the grocery store:

6. the sin of light beer:

7. postmodern pandemonium:

conclusion:

postscript

appendix:

notes

about the publisher 209

share your thoughts 210

introduction

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