my life and my doctrine

Kevin de Young has written a great piece about the temptation for church to cushion us from our own sin and the need for salvation.

The temptation, subtle and strong in every preacher, is to preach to other people’s sins. And so our sermons rail on emergents or homosexuality or Richard Dawkins. … But the sin we should hear about most is our own. Just as the iniquity I should most disdain is mine.

He quotes John Miller (Outgrowing the Ingrown Church, p. 26):

Among conservatives and evangelicals, its [religious cushioning's] primary mission all too often is to function as a preaching station where Christians gather to hear the gospel preached to the unconverted, to be reassured that liberals are mistaken about God and hell, and renew one’s sense of well-being without have a serious encounter with the living God.

Pray for me, that I don’t succumb to this temptation.

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.

After my first six months of full time ministry, I’ve got lots of ideas and thoughts percolating in my head. I hope this blog will be an online diary for me to keep track of ideas, to self-reflect on my experiences and to be publically accountable. Maybe you can come along for the ride as I endeavour to watch my life and doctrine closely, and persevere in doing so. This in order to save myself, and possibly some readers also. (1 Tim 4:16)

And yes, this post is titled ‘Hello, world!’ because I used to work in IT, not because I couldn’t change the pre-installed first post.