The need or lack thereof for church “vision” statements has the potential for being a controversial topic. I’ll confess that I’m a bit allergic to them myself. You’ll be hard pressed to find one on our website and I think I would have difficulty articulating one. What I can point to is our governing documents, particularly our Church Covenant. We remind ourselves of it on first Sunday of every month before taking the Lord’s Supper. Our “vision”, therefore, is to live in accordance with the articles of that covenant.
Okay, someone could argue that’s a bit unfair. The covenant doesn’t rightly meet the terms and conditions of a traditionally-defined “vision statement”. Furthermore, it fails to answer the question of what’s so wrong with a vision statement? In response, let me point you to an blog post by Richard Phillips to better answer that question. He has “Some Thoughts on Church ‘Visions’ “ that are well worth reading. Here’s his conclusion (emphasis added):
Church visioning is a powerful tool that can help make leaders much more effective. But since it necessarily focuses on things man can achieve, it has a dangerous tendency to secularize the church. Therefore, in my opinion, church visioning is probably a good idea only for churches that are strongly established with an ordinary means of grace emphasis, but who need to pay more attention to their missional context. Also, I would suggest that a visioning process should be conducted only periodically so as to set some longer term trajectories for ministry aspirations. The document should be kept ready so as to offer its analysis to future decision-making (hiring decisions, budget priorities, etc.), and then the church should continue to focus on its God-given mission of serving the Kingdom of Christ through the God-given strategy of Word, sacrament, and prayer, with biblically-defined elders and pastors serving a biblically-shaped church. (See 2 Cor. 10:3-4, and 1 Cor. 1:21-2:2).
If you are a leader in your church and thinking about reforming then this may be a conversation worth having with other leaders.
In order to mix up the format of our blog a little bit, we’re starting a short series of e-interviews with our elders. Here is the format: For the next few weeks, I will be posting a short (10-14 Q&As) e-interview between an elder and myself. The topics will be something related to that elder’s life-experience but relevant to our congregation, aspiring pastors, and/or the larger evangelical world. The topics range from aspiring pastors and the Ph.D, homeschooling, family stewardship while in seminary, and others. Check back later this week for the first interview with Aaron Menikoff on “Aspiring pastors and the pursuit of the Ph.D.”
In my previous post, I described the secretive nature of false teachers. I concluded by asking how you equip yourself and your church so that you aren’t lured away by their deceptive ploys. I want to answer that question by framing it with Paul’s exhortation to Timothy from 1 Tim. 4:16 - “Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.”
(In reverse order) Notice, first, that Paul says to “keep a close watch…on the teaching.” Unfortunately, when you ask many Christians, “What is the gospel?”, you receive a piecemealed answer. There is a little truth here and a little truth there but often no coherent framework or biblical story line that summarizes the good news. For example, we are told Jesus died on the cross for sins but there is no explanation of sin or its penalty. If there is, it’s often limited to whether or not we’ve obeyed a moral law. I could go on with examples. Nonetheless, this type of limited understanding and presentation is problematic, and here’s why.
Think of your understanding of the gospel as a sieve. The tighter meshed it is the better it is for sifting out impurities. The wider the mesh the more impurities will fall through. Thus, a piecemealed understanding of the gospel is like a sieve with a minimal number of crossed wires and a weak frame. It’s not going to do alot of good in sorting out what is true from what is false, especially when fallacies come cleverly disguised. Our lives should be spent adding to and tightening the mesh. But many of us don’t even have a sturdy frame. And for the sake of space, let me give you the one Greg mentioned Sunday: God, man, Christ, response. Learn to summarize, present, and assess the gospel with those markers. (Here is a nice summary.)
Second, Paul instructs Timothy to watch his life. In all honesty, right doctrine isn’t half as difficult as right living. As we, however, examine Scripture we find over and over again that right belief is always coupled with right living. The latter always indicates and reinforces the validity of the former. In a few verses prior, Paul said, “(T)rain yourself for godliness; for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance…Command and teach these things…set the example” (vv. 7-9, 11-12). Later on he wrote, “Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness” (1 Tim. 6:11). Whereas if you read about false teachers, you’ll find, though not always, their identity is manifested by their ungodly behavior (1 Tim. 6:3-5).
Our new Christianity Matters course - Contemporary Issues in Christian Theology, a.k.a Hot Topics - started a couple of weeks ago. There has been one theme come up briefly in both the “Introduction” that I taught and “Emergent Theology: The Gospel” which Greg taught yesterday. And I think it’s worth mentioning here: False gospels come really well-marketed and well-packaged. Those that knowingly or, because of sin’s deceptive power, unknowingly seek to change, deny, pervert, or revolutionize ” the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3) sell their false teaching with attractive and creative marketing ploys. They use commonly shared and agreed upon language and tag lines. Their doctrine is presented as having timeless, biblical fidelity coupled with contemporary contextualization. They seem to be genuinely concerned for their targeted audience’s life-questions and well-being.
And yet we shouldn’t be surprised by such deceptive means because Scripture forewarns us of their secretive nature in promoting false teaching and ungodly behavior. For example, 2 Peter 2:1 says, “But false prophets…will secretly bring in destructive heresies, denying the Master who brought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction.” Similarly, Jude wrote, “For certain people have crept in unnoticed…ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (Jude 4). Paul exhorted Timothy to “Keep a close watch on your (life) and on the teaching” (1 Tim. 4:12) and to “fight the good fight of faith” (1 Tim. 6:12) because false teachers were teaching a “different doctrine” (1 Tim. 1:3, 6:3). Furthermore, Christ is the good Shepherd and we are his sheep, but Jesus warned that “false prophets (will) come in sheep’s clothing” (Matt. 7:15). And on the “Last Day…many will come in (Jesus’) name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and they will lead many astray” (Matt. 24:5).
In summary, they come cleverly disguised as God’s people. They are easily mistaken as being in the church. They don’t have obnoxious neon lights and sing corny jingles announcing their false identity. Furthermore, they come under the pretense of teaching God’s true revelation. Their doctrine has vague undefined similarity to the truth. And yet when it’s all stripped away you find something completely different. You find wolves leading themselves and their hearers to certain destruction. So what do you do? How do you equip yourself and your church to not be deceived and lured away by well-marketed and well-packaged false gospels? That’s what I’ll answer next.
On Wednesday night during our Members’ Meeting, Kurt gave an Elders’ Report on how to pray for Third during 2008. His points and explanation were marked by humility, biblical fidelity, spiritual maturity, and pastoral oversight. (I have to brag on our new pastor a little bit.) I’ve had a number of conversations with members whom were thoroughly encouraged and challenged by the following points. I encourage our readers to take these and apply them to their church.
1) Spirit-filled teaching and reception of God’s Word.
2) Conversions through the ministry of our church. “We don’t want to just shuffle the Kingdom of God. We want to see it grow.”
3) Purity and unity in our corporate life.
That quote will surely get some attention. I thought I might just as well get everyone into a fevered pitch over music before Sunday’s XM class on God and Music. In all fairness, we are not going to talk about church music. I know that will disappoint some of you. We are going to try to talk about music in general, a theology of music, and then the classic Francis Schaeffer question “How shall we then live?”. There will be implications about church music, but that won’t be our primary objective.
In preparation for Sunday, I’m rereading a book by Erik Routley entitled Church Music and Theology. The first time I read the quote (post’s title) I found it humorous. While Routley makes some valid points about using music to manipulate, etc., he had his own issues too.
In my previous