Enchanted Community

BLOG 8/26/13. “I FORGOT THE MESSAGE!”

Several years back, the New Yorker magazine included, what I considered, at riotously funny cartoon, which I had posted on my wall for years. It showed the original Marathoner, Phidippides, coming exhausted before the elders of Athens (after his 25 mile run from the Battle of Marathon to Athens to announce their victory) with this woebegone look on his face, and confessing: “I forgot the message!”

I frequently attend churches of all sorts, and become acquainted with them, read their literature, become friends with their participants. Institutional Christianity is a huge industry, owning billions of dollars worth of property, and employing untold numbers of church professionals. In many of those churches there is so much that is commendable, and seldom anything said or confessed with which one could take issue. It is all quite polite, religious, couched in traditional church jargon … but something is missing, something is wrong, and it takes a while to digest what that is.

What is missing is any compelling and passionate focus on the central and profound and transformational message and mission of Jesus Christ—his life, death, and resurrection—his call to become his followers who are formed by his teachings and engaged in his mission. The overriding impression is a consumer version of religion and a focus on its institutional life, but not on a community “formed around a crucified savior.”[1] The invitation is to join the church and to get involved in all of its wonderful activities.

But such consumer oriented and institutional focused religious Christianity tends to dilute, or displace, or forget the true message of, and heartfelt passion for, Jesus Christ. And such a community has no real moral force, because it has no true foundations other than its individualistic focus, its emphasis on our happiness and fulfillment.

Like the humorous portrayal of Phidippides in the cartoon, such churches have forgotten the message as well as the mission of Jesus and his church.

And what may even more tragic is that so many wonderful people who populate such prestigious church institutions don’t even notice this drift back into something other than true Christianity. God calls his people out of the dominion of darkness and into the dominion of his dear Son. Yet when that calling becomes only a calling into a religious society, then the drift is back into the dominion of Satan, of darkness.

Which is why so much of the church in North America is itself a mission field, and realistically, is unevangelized. It has forgotten its very reason for being. “Joining the church” is not our message, nor is the institution, nor is religion. The message is Jesus—he’s what it’s all about.

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[1] Cf. Stanley Haeurwas, The Peaceable Kingdom, p. 12. (University of Notre Dame, 1983)

BLOG 8/21/13. BACK TO BASICS: WORSHIP AND ADORATION

“Worship is the submission of all our nature to God.  It is the quickening of the conscience by his holiness, the nourishment of the mind with his truth; the purification of imagination by his hs beauty; the opening of the heart to his love; the surrender of  will to his purpose … and all this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable.” (Archbishop William Temple)

“Worship is entering into God’s passion for the world, his creation, his great design to make all thing new, in and through Christ.” (Robert Henderson)

‘And if there were a higher stage than all it would be adoration—when we do not think of favors or mercies to us or ours at all, but at the perfection and glory of the Lord. We feel to his holy name what the true artist feels toward any unspeakable beauty. As Wordsworth says: I gazed and gazed, and did not wish her mine.” (P. T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer, p. 43)

“Whether I am chopping cotton in Mississippi, or guest in the Oval Office, I have to remember that I am the glory of God.” (John M. Perkins, civil rights leader, Christian Community Development founder, and evangelist – from a personal conversation)

Worship is what we are made for, or as the classic Westminster Catechism states it: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

Yes, back to basics so easily displaced by lesser activities.

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BLOG 8/17/13: WE, FOLLOWERS OF CHRIST, HAVE A DREAM, AND MORE THAN A DREAM, BUT IT IS ALWAYS UNDER ATTACK

This week the nation will be revisiting that unforgettable moment called ‘The March on Washington’ and on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s soaring oratory when he dreamed of a day when justice would “roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Those of us who are followers/disciples of Christ know that such a day is more than a dream, but an eschatological certainty, and we pray for it every time we pray: “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth.”

The problem comes, however, when what is ostensibly ‘the church’ is formed by a subverted and truncated and widely accepted reduction of Christ’s message that creates for itself a comfortable gospel that has so aptly been designated by Bonhoeffer as religious Christianity, or: faith without repentance, which heralds the comforting promises of the gospel, but does so without mentioning the demands of the gospel. Such a distortion populates the church with large masses of unconverted believes … that’s what I said: unconverted believers. Such are those church members who are not formed by the radical claims of message of Christ and the mission of Christ.

But the fulfillment of Christ’s Kingdom announcement begins when ordinary folk are called to come through the narrow gate of repentance and faith to the Savior, Jesus Christ, who then begins the transformation of their lives into New Creation persons, who become the incarnation of his own divine nature. We are called, Peter tells us, to his own glory and excellence, and given promises that through them we might become partakers of the divine nature—a whole different humanity (II Peter 1:3-4). In that new humanity in Christ our lives are radically (sometimes painfully) transformed to epitomize God’s great love and grace toward broken folk, as well as justice and righteousness and peacemaking and the stewardship of creation, and love for neighbors and for enemies, i.e., lives that are visible to those around us in the daily vicissitudes of life.

But the Satanic ploy is to take the church captive to a systemic darkness that redefines the gospel into a comfortable ‘spirituality’ that is replete with sociable church activities and other such counterfeits, and then to pass that off as the real thing. The church then becomes ‘saltless salt.’ The Satanic ploy goes on to produce ‘church professionals’ to expedite this subversion into the church institution. It creates a religious Christianity that is no threat to the dominion of darkness, and whose participants remain too often unconverted, and so still the spiritual inhabitants of the dominion of darkness. And hardly anyone notices.

Our Founder’s invitation to the Kingdom of God, to repentance and faith, as the entrance into that eschatological reality(I love that word: check it out on your Google), is for every single follower to be a contagious agent of that thrilling and transforming reality of Jesus Christ and his New Creation. It was never, never to create stagnant pools of religious Christianity that are at home with the culture of darkness, and the spiritual captives of that darkness.

No, but please note: that same New Creation is transforming, thrilling, demanding, and often dangerous (it can cost you your life!). At the same times, such lives and their influence and presence are a sweet savour of Christ unto God, and are those who wear upon whose feet: “the readiness of the gospel of peace.”

We also have a dream and a mission: “Keep your conduct among the Gentiles (i.e., spiritually confused god-seekers) honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation” (I Peter 2:12). Yes! Thy kingdom come!

BLOG 8/15/13. DISCIPLE-MAKING: WHERE WOULD YOU FIND A MODEL OF JESUS TODAY IN FLESH AND BLOOD THAT CAPTURED YOUR ATTENTION?

There’s a lot of ‘Jesus talk’ floating around in some circles that all seems pretty empty, and sort of unreal. Jesus was a real human being that created enormous curiosity in his day because there was something about him that spoke to some of the deepest longings of the human heart in a way that provoked the curiosity of throngs of people. My question would be: Where would one look today to find a model of Jesus and his teachings? Where would one find a flesh and blood example of a person who exhibited God’s New Creation in Christ?

Where would such a model come from? How would such a model be formed?

For starts, let’s go back to Jesus. When he first appeared on the back roads of Galilee preaching and teaching a message that, if true, had incredible consequences—something about God’s Kingdom being inaugurated here and now on this human scene—some of the folk hearing him got curious and began ‘sniffing him out.’ They asked him some clumsy questions, such as: “Where are you staying?” Jesus sensed this initial curiosity and responded: “Come and see.”  First principle of disciple-making: make oneself available hospitably, lovingly, sensitively, and with authentic good nature.

An essential component of Jesus’ own disciple-making ministry was his warm invitation to such inquirers to ‘hang-out’ with him. He didn’t isolate himself (except occasionally for seasons of prayer). He would say to those curious: “Come spend time with me and we can talk.” And the more they responded to his person and his teachings, then the more intense and informative and intimate became his relationship to them. Those followers began to see and understand and respond to his message and his mission.

At one level, Jesus primary mission from God was consummated in his cross and resurrection, but at another level his primary mission was that of investing himself in the twelve so that he would ultimately be able to say to them: “As the Father has sent me, so am I now sending you,” and they would know what he was talking about. And at the very end of his time on earth he would give to them (to his church) the basic and primary mandate: “Go to every conceivable people group in the whole world and do to them what I have done to you: make disciples, teach them to observe all that I have commanded you, and be assured that I am always with you.”

Disciples are those formed by Jesus, by his life, by his death and by his resurrection, by his teachings of the Kingdom of God, i.e., about God’s design for his New Creation.

His call is suffused with the intent to create curiosity and inquiry about God and about God’s love for his creation in Christ, and what that looks like right here in the ‘stink and stuff’ of this human scene. It is not a bout religion, or otherworldly spirituality at all.

Jesus’ call to disciplemaking is a call to us to make ourselves available in all warmth and humility and authenticity and thoughtfulness to those around us—in order that they may see in us models of Jesus and become curious! It is a call to spend such significant time with others that we actually reproduce ourselves in them as Christ is reproduced in us (cf. I Corinthians 11:1). Let them get close and ask the questions, and voice their arguments. It’s all part of the process.

Any person who professes to be a believer in Christ, or any community that professes to be a church … and does not have this disciple-making mandate, this formation by the message and mission of Christ as a compelling priority lacks integrity, misses the message, and will leave others without wholesome and contagious models of Jesus in this present scene (and there are a lot of folk, and a lot of churches that have drifted away from this priority, alas!)

BLOG. 8/12/13: ‘SEARS-ROEBUCK’ CHURCHES IN AN ‘AMAZON’ CULTURE

Anyone growing up in the 1930s, and in the Great Depression, when I did, remembers that no home was without the annual Sears-Roebuck Catalog, when that company was the giant mail-order behemoth of this country. Families took turns surfing the catalog for almost any commodity conceivable: clothes, toys, hardware, housewares, and even packaged home building kits. Today Sears-Roebuck is a dying memory, as even its attempts at mall stores struggle to survive. Who even remembers?

In recent years onto the scene comes Jeff Bezos who conceives of an on-line merchandising instrument now so dominant in the industry, known as Amazon.com. Jeff Bezos is not only a visionary, but also something of a creative genius, and this has made him not only a living legend but also a billionaire. Why raise this account? OK, I rather ponder how Jeff Bezos, or his type of prophetic genius, would advise the vast number of struggling church institutions in North America if he had some kind of forum with which to do this. Here is this vast array of church institutions with their imposing (and expensive to maintain) church buildings trying to preserve their continuance while inhabited by a diminishing number of church-ified laity, who still like to go to church meetings … but are not motivated to, or equipped for, their daily engagements in contagious discipleship within this post-Christian North American culture.

If one is to believe the existing sociological studies, the Boomer Generation is the last generation who have a great affection for such church institutions, and they begin to turn 75 in 20/20. By that date over 50% of the population will be under fifty years of age, what with the very large Millennial and iY generations becoming the majority—and these are the generations created within the digital culture of the day. This is the ‘Amazon culture’ that has instant access to everything, and that is not all that impressed with the icons of the past, which includes the venerable church institutions.

Jesus didn’t leave us in much doubt as to what our agenda was to be. It was he who gave a final mandate to his followers to—don’t hurry past this mindlessly—“Go and make disciples … teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” It was he who told his followers: “As the Father has sent me, even so do I send you.” It was he who taught that those were truly his disciples who were building upon the solid rock. They were those who remembered his agenda, had his teachings and observed them. But those obvious priorities of Jesus to his church have become, somehow, lost in the phenomenon of the institutions of ‘religious Christianity’ (to borrow Dietrich Bohnoeffer’s description again), and the idols that these institutions and their building have become.

The church itself has become a mission field! So much of the traditional church populace remains ‘religious’ but essentially un-evangelized.

So, back to the question: What form would the community of the Kingdom of God (the church) need to take to incarnate the gospel in the 20/20, or iY generational culture, and beyond? How to conceive a church, and the form of the church, where our relationship with other believers in Christ is determined by our mutual mission and message as given by Jesus Christ? Who are the prophets of the day (the ‘ecclesiastical Jeff Bezos’ counterparts) within the Christian community?

And what do we do with all of those moribund, and incredibly expensive church institutions and their archaic buildings?

I’d love to hear your responses

BLOG 8//8/13. ASLAN: “OF COURSE HE ISN’T SAFE. BUT HE’S GOOD.”

The dilemma before the Christian church and its mission here in the 21^st century has two major issues before it: 1) the issue of the content of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and 2) the communal form which that content takes—both huge topics. Let me deal with the content in this Blog.

I keep on my wall a graphic of a lion with the inscription: “Aslan is not a tame lion”. This, of course, comes from C. S. Lewis’ classic children’s stories: The Chronicles of Narnia. The Pevensie children have accidentally stumbled into a whole new world, known as Narnia, and began hearing about some awesome figure known as Aslan. They are not sure what to make of what they are hearing, or imagining what that figure means to them. When they discover that Aslan is a lion, one of them asks Mrs. Beaver: “Then he isn’t safe?”To which she replies:“Who said anything about being safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” Aslan, for those of you who have never read these remarkable classics, is the Jesus figure in the stories. Aslan comes from a far country to re-establish his rightful reign in a scene that has been taken captive by a wicked personality known as the White Witch.

To put it right up front, and quite baldly, so much of the very visible church scene in our culture has quite successfully tamed the Lion, they have declawed him, pulled his teeth, and rendered him neutral in a version of the gospel that quite successfully ignores the radical, and culturally transforming, and subversive, and controversial, and counter-cultural content of what is, ostensibly, their own message and content.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is never safe. It actually promises controversy, and suffering, and trials, and costliness. Yet it is redemptive and infinitely good. But you’d never know that listening to the proclamation from the pulpits of a vast number of prominent and prestigious church institutions. They substitute (what has frequently been described as) moralistic/motivational and therapeutic deism, i.e., Jesus can make you more content, more emotionally secure, more guilt free, and ultimately take you to heaven. No mention of the demands. No reference to: “If anyone will come after me, let him take up his cross and follow me.” No church professional would dare tell a potential member that if we are to reign with Christ, then we must suffer with him.

In one of the fascinating, and a bit enigmatic, statements of Jesus is in his Sermon on the Mount is this: “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way easy that leads to destruction, and those who go in by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matthew 7:13-14). Bonhoeffer termed such popular religion as one that preaches faith without repentance—it does not require that we necessarily forsake the patterns and values and lifestyle of the dominion of darkness. It only focuses on the promises. Or, the late John R. W. Stott taught us that we have not preached the gospel unless we have preached, not only its promises, but also its demands.

So we’re back to Aslan as not being safe. Our gospel is not safe (but it is good), but all too much of the church, and all too many of its teachers, have reduced it to being a safe, culturally conformed religion, i.e., the wide gate. They have, in essence, declawed Aslan and pulled his teeth. The content of Jesus’ teachings that render us aliens and exiles in this world always stand “in missionary confrontation” with the world, and is never tame or safe. Read your New Testament! The gate is narrow and demands radical repentance.

BLOG 8/5/13. QUESTION: ARE CHURCH BUILDINGS AN IMPEDIMENT TO MISSION?

One can get in real trouble challenging the sheer idolatry with which many church folk hold their church buildings, alas! In their minds the church is identified by its building (its memories, stained glass windows, etc.), and to question that sacrosanct place is tantamount to questioning God! Remember that Stephen got stoned for telling the Jewish folk in Jerusalem that God did not dwell in temples made with hands.

My recollection is that is was Howard Snyder (in his splendid book The Problem of Wineskins), who offered: that if you want to know how really ‘strong’ your church is, then, sell your church buildings. Such a proposal is likely to draw instant dismissal, if not contempt if offered. Or there is the fascinating episode in Buenos Aires at a time of serious and oppressive political turmoil, and the church became something of focus of the opposition, that Pastor Juan Carlos Ortiz did a pre-emptive move and had all of his very large congregation move for a season into house churches, just peradventure the state should seize their large church building. What happened, by the way, was that the church became more vigorous, and the giving to it increased over that period, because the believers came to know each other, and could discuss their mission in that context, as they had not been able in the vast Assemblies of God congregation when they were all together.

My involvement with a rather large number of churches that I have known in my 60 years of leadership has revealed to me that many of them had long since ceased to be formed by the gospel of the Kingdom of God (i.e., the primary New Testament message), if, indeed, they even remembered what it was. They had long since ceased to be any kind of a dynamic factor in the Mission of God (the missio dei).

It is also a proven fact that new church plants are much more likely to come together around an informed sense of their mission, and of the message. A place of meeting is strategic to their mission, but quite secondary. But as soon as that new church community comes together and begins to prove fruitful, there is the subtle temptation (satanic wile?) to secure their communal life with permanence by investing in buildings (which has given a lot of good architects a lot of business!) and institutional form. And once they have accomplished that, then the tendency is to become quite idolatrous about that place, that building, and that institution. Its purpose is no longer to engage in the costly obedience of the church’s mission, but to attract members to participate in their institution. But, again, such institutions and attractions tend to have little (if anything) to do with me mission of God, or the gospel of the Kingdom of God.

So back to Howard Snyder’s comment: If you want to know how really strong your church is, sell the building and focus again on the reality of Kingdom/New Creation community, the mission of God, and the gospel of the Kingdom of God. Certainly it will shake things up, but that’s not all bad.

Then, it might be worth looking down the road and realizing that the last traditionalist generation (the Boomers) will be turning 75 in about 20/20. The younger generations are not all that taken with such institutions, rather they want relationships, authenticity of message and mission. They may be the generation to deliver us from this colossal distraction with church buildings.

I’d love to hear your positive and negative responses. And if you find these Blogs provocative, why not invite your friends to subscribe?

BLOG 8/1/13. WHY MILLENNIALS (AND OTHERS?) ARE LEAVING THE CHURCH

There has been a spate of Blogs and journal articles of late on why the Millennial generation is leaving the church. Actually, they aren’t saying much that is new. There have been articles and books now for ten years on the unique factors that define (generically) this emerging generation (and even more the iY (or 20/20) generation which follows. The recent articles have been good as far as they go, but, for my money, they are still not an adequate response. The articles tend to focus on response to worship styles, and such.

I think maybe we need to go a bit deeper. The Millennials are, as we know, products of a digital culture, and all of that. But more, they are not idolatrous about church institutions, they don’t know any better that to ask telling questions about the what and why of what goes on in church gatherings—including what is called: “worship”—and we know that they are also relational, and they learn interactively. So to participate in a worship service in which they have no occasion to ask why we are doing these things, or what they mean, or where they came from leaves them a bit frustrated. This not to mention, that worship services can be a confederation of religious strangers in which I don’t really know or have occasion to relate to the people around me, which can also be a bit unreal.

One of the blogs mentions that many millennials are drawn to the more classic Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox worship because of their depth. Again, however, that leaves some loose ends having to do with origins and meaning.

The classic form, or progression, of worship as we have it in the Roman Catholic mass, and which also comes down to us in many of the Protestant traditions, has its roots fairly early in church history. Its origin is in the episode in Isaiah 6, in which Isaiah was somewhere when he had this overwhelming vision of the holy God, which absolutely blew him away, and ultimately transformed his life and his life’s calling—and that is significant for us to remember. Isaiah didn’t run out and tell folk that he had experienced a wonderful mystical moment. Not at all. What the vision of the thrice-holy God with seraphim flying about calling: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory” did to Isaiah was to make him realize how unclean and incomplete and without ultimate purpose was his life. So he fell on his face in broken-hearted confession of his uncleanness before such a God. Then God in mercy sent an angel with a live coal off the altar and touched his lips and declared him clean. Thereupon, the Holy God gives an invitation: “Whom shall I send, who will go for us?” to which Isaiah responds: “Here am I. Send me” … without even asking what he was being sent to do! It is then that God commissions Isaiah to the mission of being his prophetic voice to his fellow religious kinfolk in Israel, who had forgotten why they had been called by God in the first place.

First, notice the progression: 1) Adoration, 2) Confession, 3) Absolution, 4) Invitation, and 5) Instruction for mission. That is the progression of the classic worship service to this day.

Further, note that Isaiah was not a ‘religious’ or a priest, or a clergy. Tradition has it that he was of royal blood and part of the family of the very monarchy he was called to challenge, along with the Israelite people. Isaiah was a layman. His worship called him to missionary/prophetic engagement and obedience. The instruction equipped him for long years of faithful engagement as an instrument of God’s revelation to his people.

If our experience (Millennials, or anyone else) is not that kind of transformational encounter with God in our worship services, something is profoundly missing, and one might be excused for leaving such an ostensible church with its questionable worship.  Worship is to be an encounter with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ that produces change, obedience, and faithful mission in our 24/7 lives and the “light of the world.”

Got it? [Feed back your comments, if you will.]

BLOG 7/29/13. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU’RE GOING NOWHERE?      

There’s a whimsical (I guess that’s the word) old saying: “Blessed are they who are going nowhere for they shall probably arrive.” I think of that often in conversation with folk inside of the Christian community, when I ask them what the goal and purpose of their Christian life might be? Predictably they will respond with sort of ‘nowhere’ answers about being a better Christian, or being more faithful in their church membership, or maybe even an honest answer about not being really sure what their ultimate goal is (except, maybe, to go to heaven when they die).

It is a known fact that goal-oriented people are more motivated, more hopeful, more creative, and more optimistic than most others. It is also a solid Biblical fact that Jesus and the apostles did not overlook this necessity. Jesus would teach that we much “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,” which teaching then requires that we have a very clear grasp on what the kingdom of God and the disciplines of seeking such look like.

I have always been fascinated about one of the most misused texts in the New Testament in which Paul will tell us very pointedly that the purpose of our calling by God is in order that we be conformed to the image of his Son. The common mistake is to isolate Romans 8:28 from the rest and leave it an incomplete thought. Get this:

“And we know that for all those who love God all things work together for good, [which saying, when isolated, misses the point of what follows] for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called, he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified” (Romans 8:28-30).

That is one loaded statement with all kinds of consequences. God’s purpose in calling us to faith is in order to recreate us into the image of his Son, Jesus. Then he calls us and justifies us, and then enables us to be the “radiant display of the divine nature”—or glorified. Paul fleshes this out in a couple of other passages, such as when (in Ephesians 4:24) he calls us to put on “the new self” created after the likeness of God, a) in true righteousness (kingdom-shaped behavior) and b) holiness (in harmony with the Trinitarian community). Then, in Colossians 3:10 he gives us another dimension of God’s purpose in our calling and new creation when he says to us that we are also to be renewed in knowledge after the image of the creator (we’re actually to think and know like God).

God’s sons and daughters have, as their ultimate purpose, to be recreated into the DNA of God, as incarnated before us in his Son, Jesus (maybe imperfectly and provisionally, but all the same ….). That should get our attention, and get our juices flowing.

This is not religion or spirituality—this is the divine purpose in creating us and all things new in the here and now. We are to be the walking, talking, thinking, behaving, exhibitions of God’s new creation in Christ, and this is all made immediate and practical by the empowering of the Spirit.

What is our goal as Christians? It is to be the incarnation of God’s kingdom people in our character and relationships 24/7. That’s our goal and our mission: the glory of God in us. Here and now.

Please feel free to feed back comments. This is a great subject and worth pursuing.

BLOG 7/25/13. (CONT) ‘PEW ZOMBIES’ OR INTERACTIVE LEARNERS

My last blog had to do with the all-too-common phenomenon of passive church folk, for whom the raison d’ètre, the purpose of the teaching formation of the church, seems to be a matter of indifference. The question: How is what takes place in the community’s gatherings for worship and nurture related to me and my understanding of my role as a disciple of Jesus?

The question gets a more intense when one asks the question about how does the ‘preacher,’ the person who occupies the pulpit, see his/her role in equipping the community for their God-given mission in the 24/7 week that is to follow? How does what takes place in that teaching time (which we entitle sermons) cause the Word of Christ to “dwell richly” (Colossians 3:16) among the participants of the community so that they can “teach and admonish one another in all wisdom?”
And given the interactive character of the emerging generations (mentioned in my last Blog), how do I respond, verbalize misunderstandings, ask questions, challenge interpretations, or seek clarification? Where do I go to engage my teacher in conversation, seek examples, press him/her on specifics, discern the implications of the text within realities of my life?

It means that the church’s pastor-teachers (one specific gift mentioned in Ephesians 4) are those engaged with the persons whom they are seeking to bring to maturity in Christ, seeking to enable them to function without “being blown about with every wind of teaching.” But we have too often created a depersonalized preacher, who preaches ‘sermons’ … but to what end? I think it was the whimsical Martin Marty (who spent his life in theological education) who once observed that too many preachers of his experience were always preaching sermons to please a professor of preaching from their seminary days, whom they hadn’t seen in fifteen years!

It takes deliberateness, to create a matrix in which the preacher can be in honest and dynamic and interactive communication with those committed to his/her charge. In Paul’s experience in Ephesus, it seems that he not only taught in public, but also from house to house. It would be the house-to-house component, or the church-around-the-table component where the teaching pastor is in friendly and honest give-and-take with the believers for whom he/she is responsible, that would keep it all quite real and effective. For a preacher only to ‘hang-out’ with clergy friends, or with the ‘clergy-seminary subculture’ is a sure path into ineffectiveness. Does your preacher, your pastor-teacher, your teaching-shepherd have such a means of engagement with the people of God?

Two brief examples from my experience (as a pastor-teacher): When the late Bruce Larson (as I got the verbal report), who was a larger then life and a very ‘people oriented’ guy, was asked to accept a call to the large University Presbyterian Church of Seattle, he agreed to come but upon the willingness of the pulpit nominating committee to continue to meet with him weekly to hold him accountable, and in communication with the large congregation to whom he would be preaching. The church over the years referred to this group humorously as “Bruce and the Seven Dwarfs.” He was a most effective communicator.

In my experience, for a season, a hugely helpful episode was when about ten of my very honest and hungry friends beseeched me to meet with them for Bible study at a time when I was ‘maxed-out’ with meetings. I agreed only if they would work on my sermon text with me, be brutally honest with me, help me, and evaluate the sermons that came from this. They rose to the occasion, and it became a significant factor in more effective teaching for me.

There are many ways to accomplish this, but it must be in some dynamic interaction with the real folk we are seeking to grow into maturity. (To be continued …).