Word, Spirit, Gospel and Mission (Part 4)
Donald A. McGavran (1897-1990) was born in India as a son and grandson of American missionaries. He served as a missionary in India for thirty years, then returned to the United States and in 1965 became the first dean of Fuller Seminary’s School of World Mission. McGavran is known as the founder of the Church Growth movement. His scholarly yet practical writings on the subject are interesting and provocative. Rick Warren, the author of The Purpose Driven Life, cites McGavran as one of his biggest influences. The Church Growth movement has many supporters and critics. I have some opinions about this movement, but I will not discuss them here. This is a purpose-driven article. My purpose in bringing up Donald McGavran is to talk about his observations of 20th century mission agencies in India.
McGavran noticed that some agencies were successful at making converts, but others were stagnant and barely growing. He set out to discover why. After careful observation, he found that the stagnant agencies exhibited some common features. He called their strategy a “mission station” approach. A mission station resembled a North American or European church. Western values and customs were on display, giving the church a decidedly non-Indian look and feel. Converts of these missionaries had powerful conversion experiences, but the converts were few and far between. In The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, missiologist Lesslie Newbigin explains why (p. 122):
Word, Spirit, Gospel and Mission (Part 3)
From the perspective of the early Christians at the Jerusalem Council, it is understandable that many of them would think that Gentiles should be circumcised before being admitted to the Church. If we erase from our Bibles everything after Acts chapter 14, the scriptural case for circumcision becomes very strong. Here are some arguments in favor of circumcision.
First, circumcision of males was the definitive sign of being counted among God’s people. Hebrews who refused to be circumcised were no longer Hebrew (Gen 17:4). And throughout the Old Testament, the term “uncircumcised” is used as a synonym for ungodly (see, for example, 1Sa 17:16). Uncircumcised men could not enter the temple, nor could they eat the Passover (Ex 12:48). The Passover depicts salvation and deliverance. The fact that the Passover lamb – a powerful symbol of the crucified Jesus – could not be eaten by uncircumcised men suggests that circumcision may still be applicable under the New Covenant.
Word, Spirit, Gospel and Mission (Part 2)
It happened about two decades — only half a generation — after the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Church was facing an identity crisis that threatened to tear the body apart. Some were claiming that God was leading them in an unprecedented and radically new direction. Others were saying that it could not be, because that direction violated the clear, absolute commands of the Bible. Tensions had been flaring for several years. The conflict exploded about 50 A.D., and the top leaders of the Church gathered in Jerusalem to weigh the arguments and render a decision.
Word, Spirit, Gospel and Mission (Part 1)
Here is a statement that you might endorse: “The Bible is the authoritative word of God. Refusing to obey God’s word in the Bible is an act of disobedience against God.”
Personally, I believe that statement. And I’ll venture to guess that you do as well.
But now consider this one: “The Holy Spirit is fully God. Refusing to follow the leading of the Spirit is an act of disobedience against God.”
Questions For The Next General Director
A new General Director of UBF is going to be elected this year. If I had the opportunity to interview candidates ahead of time, these are some of the questions that I would ask.
These are genuine questions for which I do not yet have answers. I hope that these do not sound like leading questions. A leading question is a question that presupposes what the correct answer should be. Of course, I do have some opinions of my own about how I would answer them. But I am willing to keep an open mind, and I am ready to hear the opinions of others and be swayed by them. I do not think that any of these questions has a single, correct answer, and I don’t expect everyone to agree with one another or with me. But I believe that the leaders of an organization like ours ought to be willing to consider and discuss hard questions like these. Or at least let us know where they stand.
Evangelism and the Gift of Missionary (Part 2)
In Acts of the Holy Spirit (2000), C. Peter Wagner offers an intriguing discussion of the conflict that arose in the Jerusalem church at the beginning of Acts chapter 6. At that time, the church was a mixture of Hebraic Jews, who were natives of Palestine, and Hellenistic Jews from various parts of the Roman Empire. The cultural differences between these groups were significant. Hebraic Jews spoke Aramaic as their first language, whereas Hellenistic Jews spoke Greek. Hebraic Jews were accustomed to living in an all-Jewish society where strict keeping of Jewish law was the social norm. Hellenistic Jews, on the other hand, were accustomed to mingling with Gentiles and were naturally more accommodating of non-Jewish lifestyles.
The tensions between these groups surfaced at the beginning of Acts chapter 6, when Hellenistic Jews pointed out that Hebraic widows were being taken care of by the church, but the Hellenistic widows were not. Acts 6:1 (NIV 2010) reads:
Evangelism and the Gift of Missionary (Part 1)
Last week, as I was returning from Australia, I began to read Acts of the Holy Spirit by C. Peter Wagner (2000). The author is a former professor of Church Growth at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he served on the faculty for nearly thirty years. (Notable graduates of Fuller include Bill Bright, Rick Warren, John Piper and Rob Bell.)
Wagner’s book is a chapter-by-chapter commentary on the book of Acts with two special twists. First, he places strong emphasis on the supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit, discussing the extent to which these gifts are present in the Church today. Second, he deals extensively with issues of contextualization – the challenges faced by missionaries as they bring the good news of Jesus Christ into human cultures radically different from their own.
Is 0.3 Percent Enough?
At last weekend’s Harvest Festival in College Park, Maryland, my friend David Kim gave a lively and colorful presentation titled “Fruitful Fishing and One-to-One Bible Study.” His talk really made me think.
In the middle of the talk, he presented statistics reported by a New York missionary in 2005. At the beginning of the fall semester, 300 students were contacted to see if they would be interested in Bible study. Three students (1.0%) actually came to a Bible study, and one student (0.3%) eventually participated in discipleship training.
Statistics don’t lie, but they can be interpreted in many different ways. Here are two opposing narratives that can be built around that figure of 0.3 percent.
Rebirth in Eau Claire
In the summer of the year 2000, God led my family to the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, where we are currently carrying out our mission work. Eau Claire is a small city of 60,000 people, and the university has about 10,500 students. The campus is like the Garden of Eden, with a river surrounded by trees flowing through the middle. Many of the students are filled with spiritual desire, and there are several very active and fruitful Christian ministries on campus.
We worked hard in serving students with a vision to build a fruitful house-church ministry that would please God. After doing this for about eight years, the ministry grew to the point where we had five couples faithfully attending the worship service, along with a few American and international students.
But rather than taking pride in outward success, the Lord wanted to purify and sanctify our hearts.
Idolizing Mission?
Reading through the history of the Israelites in the Old Testament has always been a frustrating experience for me. Here’s the reason: The #1 sin that appears in every chapter of Israel’s history is the sin of idolatry. My spontaneous thoughts were: “It’s as simple as this: ‘You shall not have other gods before me!’ Why on earth didn’t they get it? Couldn’t they just NOT bow down before golden calves and Baals and Asherahs? How could they be so ludicrously dim-witted?!?” It took me a long time to appreciate the repetitiveness of the tragic history of God’s chosen people. By dismissing their idolatry as plain stupidity — a stupidity that was beyond the reach of any help — I missed a crucial point that the OT seems to convey.
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