my life and my doctrine

I want to raise a concern I had about the weekend. I’m not sure if I misread or misunderstood the vibe. If you were there, can you please let me know what your impressions were? If you were there and disagree with my impressions, please comment, so that others who read this don’t get my biased view.

My concern is that it felt very this-worldly. One of the reasons I thought this was the video interviews. I don’t want to spoil it for those going this weekend. So, if you are going and don’t want the surprise ruined, please stop reading now. Can I encourage you to read John 5 or Mark 10 instead, in preparation for the talks?

There were four interviews, one for each session. I can’t recall any of them mentioning Jesus. The first was cute, ie involved a small child. The child was asked about work, chores, earning money and the global financial crisis. Yet, for a weekend in which we’re not just thinking about work, but being Christians at work, the kid was never asked about Jesus. Also, if it’s a minister’s kid, and I think it was, chances are they’d be an incredible evangelist and present a great challenge to all of us sitting there.

The second looked fake and inauthentic, as in two guys pretending to be the people they were characterising. There was no depth of either character – one who worked in the fashion industry, one who worked for a charity. People were laughing at them, which I took to support my impression that they weren’t for real. Even if they were, it gave the impression that the one in charity work had a more fulfilling job than the one in the fashion industry. Yet if the fashion guy was a Christian and the charity worker not, then in God’s eyes the first one would be better off. However, the focus was on their jobs and the only comment afterward was mention of these ‘genuine’ people. (If they were genuine, then the jokes on me because it really didn’t look it.)

The third interview was very challenging. A non-Christian woman talking about her job and recognising the sadness of the industry she was a part of. Sure she wasn’t expected to have a Christian worldview, but it didn’t seem like she was even asked about things beyond work, study and her day to day life.

Lastly, and most disturbingly, was a guy who I presume was a Christian (He’s studying theology). He’s also working at making the world a better place. His challenge to a client was to spend a bit of money on an orphanage in a poor country in the world. For though your house and your car won’t love you, at least 60 kids somewhere in the world would. It was disappointing that an interview with a Christian guy didn’t challenge us to consider something beyond our times, this life or this world.

Maybe I’m getting old and grumpy and too uncool for school. I might have misunderstood the purpose of the video interviews. (There were other face-to-face interviews.) It’s just that I would have liked to have seen mentioned Jesus and his impact on those people, or questions that made them ponder about eternity.

Yesterday I wrote about my highlight from Engage conference, namely the preaching and teaching of William Taylor from John’s gospel.

I want to reflect on getting and reading the Sydney Morning Herald. This could be my old age, it could be my ignorance and/or I could be plain wrong. Most of all, I’m sure this will sound blatantly hypocritical. After spending the week being reminded of the importance of God’s word taught and spoken, it struck me that all our delegates were offered a copy of the SMH on Saturday morning. Don’t get me wrong, I love reading it. I check out the website most days. In fact I didn’t make enough of the opportunity to read it on a weekend without our children.

A slow start to a Saturday morning with a coffee and the paper is still my ideal Saturday morning. And yet I couldn’t help feeling a little unnerved inside. Part of me wanted to challenge the group from my church, in fact all of us there, who read their Bible before reading the paper? Or, if you’re not a morning person, which is to be expected in the target demographic, did you spend more time over the weekend reading the paper or your Bible?

What do you think? Is it fair to assess our attitudes by our reading habits? Is it fair to expect Christians to spend more time in God’s word than the daily newspaper?

I was at Engage conference last weekend and surprised even myself with how strongly I reacted, both positively and negatively to various aspects of the weekend. The next few posts will give me a chance to reflect on the weekend. I hope that if you were there you’ll comment and help me think through the weekend.

By way of introduction I’ve never been to Engage before. It is aimed at Christians in the workplace, generally on the younger side of things. ie not pre-retirement, but twenty and thirty somethings. I’d just come off the back of two full on days of a ministry development training conference where William Taylor and Mark Dever emphasised for me the importance of gospel ministry as God’s word is taught well, taught deeply and taught faithfully. The speakers at this year’s Engage conference were William Taylor and Matt Chandler.

The highlight of the weekend was hearing William Taylor. Sure, I’d heard the three talks only days before, but they were great. The key verse for this three talks was John 5.24:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.” (John 5:24 ESV)

I can now, without the aid of my notes, remember the things he was trying to teach us from John’s gospel.

Q: What on earth is God doing?
A: He’s doing what Jesus is doing?

Q: What on earth is Jesus doing?
A: He came to bring life now and judgment later.

Q: How is Jesus doing this?
A: Through his word.

It was a great reminder of the powerful message of the gospel. That without Christ all people are dead, condemned, helpless, blind, enslaved children of Satan. God, out of his love and mercy alone, acted to bring us life. And he does this powerfully through his word. That same word is what turned water into wine, fed a massive crowd, healed a paralysed man, healed  a man from a distance and raised Lazarus from the dead. When Jesus speaks, his word is powerful.

It is therefore of utmost importance that we continue to preach the gospel, the good news that Jesus offers life to those who are dead.

I wanted to give an update and reflect on the reading list I mentioned earlier.

I’ve almost finished the first book on my list, Green & Jackman, When God’s Voice is Heard. It’s been great to read Chappo’s chapter on preparing and giving evangelistic talks. If you’ve never read Setting Hearts on Fire, can I encourage you to do so. This chapter is similar in a lot of what it covers. Not surprisingly however, he covers in more detail the reasons for and the how to of what he proposes in the fuller book. One particularly nice thing about reading it is every now and then hearing Chappo’s voice in your head because he writes like he speaks.

I’m still struggling to get out of bed to read in the morning, but it’s worth it. By really struggling, I think it only happened once last week. Yet, whether foolishly or not, I set my alarm again and was up at 6am yesterday and today.  I’m reading through Proverbs, which is a very different experience to most other Bible reading I do. Also, I’m reading through Ephesians and then reading some of the corresponding parts of Peter O’Brien’s commentary. After a recent conversation with a mate from college days, I decided to give up reading through the introductory chapter and got stuck into the commentary on the text itself. Two days in and it’s going well, as in, I’m up to Eph 1.3.

One other thing I’m endeavouring to do is to keep up with Con Campbell’s blog posts about Galatians. These have been really helpful for me to learn more about Galatians and also to watch his method as he starts with the Greek and moves to how to preach. Thankfully they are in bite sized chunks.

Another five books to go and a 6am start tomorrow beckons.

Last week we started a bunch of training courses at church that are designed to be practically focussed as we live out our Christianity. I’ve got the opportunity to run one called “God’s Worldwide Mission”. There are a number of goals of the course:

• To remind us of the eternal plan of God to save a people for himself
• To drive us to prayerful dependence on God
• To inspire us to be more committed in our support of world mission
• To be creative in our care for link missionaries
• To empower you to be advocates for world mission at church

In the end I hope that those coming will be theologically informed regarding God’s plan of salvation throughout the world and throughout history. This should remind us of the privilege that God bothers to use us – weak and frail humans – in telling the world about the good news of his Son. Aware of the privilege, how can we best play our part in God’s plan? How can we support our link missionaries? Should we consider going ourselves?

This week we’ll be brainstorming about creative ways to support our CMS link missionaries. One benefit of living in the 21st century is the improved communication methods compared to when CMS started over 200 years ago in the UK. So, this week, in an endeavour to learn from one of our link missionaries how we can better support them, we’ll be doing it through a Skype video call.

I’d like to start brainstorming early. What are some ways you and/or your church have done to support link missionaries? What are some things you’ve heard done to help raise awareness in the regular attender of world mission?

Disclaimer: I’m a big fan of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) as is our church, which is why I particularly mention it. Would love to hear of ideas for supporting any missionary, with associations with any mission agency.