Archive April 2008
The Buzz
I love it when people buzz about making disciples of Jesus Christ. Making disciples is our mission and my personal passion. Yesterday I shared some neat things that happened recently. Directions is in its second printing, has been released in Spanish, is under consideration to be printed and distributed in the southern cone of South America and is about to be translated into three or more of the languages of India and of the Kurds. This is my report from the last two weeks.
Yesterday someone asked if people were buzzing about making disciples, if this is really the passion of the church. Here’s what has come to me just this week. I got an email from a lady who is using Directions to teach a group of ladies at a nursing home. She is so excited that this tool is able to be understood by those who are well advanced in years. Every so often, I see some of our students at a local coffee house using Directions to make their way through the discipleship process. We just spanned the generation gap there!
Just this morning I was in the same coffee house where I meet weekly with my disciple, a Korean brother in our church. He is so excited about what he is learning and how he is growing he can barely contain himself. He gave me example after example of how what he is learning is changing his life, and he has been a believer for many years. As he left and I remained there to read for a bit, a lady from our church came in and was buzzing about how Directions is enabling her to do a better job of making disciples. Back in the office I got an email from a lady who has just taken over a Sunday School class at the retirement towers next door to the church and is excited to use Directions to move her entire class through the discipleship process.
Not much later I got another email from a missionary in Italy who captured a passion for making disciples form us and is getting incredible response from his Italian disciples. He is interested in translating Directions in to Italian. Next, an email from India. Some Latin American missionaries had identified lack of understanding and training in making disciples to be one of the greatest needs of the ministry in their area. They are asking for a team from our church and perhaps others to come and train leaders in their area. They will benefit from one of the translations I mentioned above.
Still another email from some former members who now have a jail ministry in southern Missouri. They report that since using the new material, Directions, their ministry is exploding. They just wanted to share their excitement. Sunday morning the wife of one of our pastors was buzzing about the class her husband teaches and how people are getting connected with God and the church and getting plugged in to the Directions study.
I don’t want to sound repetitious, but I got a comment on this blog from some missionaries in language school in Costa Rica. They have been sharing Directions with fellow students and report that many of them are very interested in learning more. One of their teachers has just become a follower of Christ and the wife is going to take this teacher through the Directions study.
This morning I was speaking with one of our pastors about a gentleman who was baptized Sunday and surprised his wife. It was a beautiful thing! This pastor has agree to take this man through the Directions study to set him on the pathway of being a disciple of Jesus Christ. Motivated by her husband’s example, his wife is going to go through the same study with the pastor’s wife. They are both very motivated to grow as disciples of Jesus Christ. Very cool!
After I finished teaching the Spanish Bible study tonight a lady stopped me in my office and was highly motivated by her experience discipling a new believer, a very competent woman who had no Bible background, but is “getting it” thanks to Directions. At the same time, she is working with another woman who did not complete the previous lessons we used, but is now motivated to continue her growth as a disciple of Jesus Christ.
This is what has been happening this week, and it’s only Wednesday! This has not been an unusual week. I am constantly hearing the buzz about people who are figuring out what making disciples is all about. The scary thing from a human standpoint is that the Directions study is so flexible. There is no “one” of “official” way to do it. This means we can’t “control” it or even be completely accurate about measuring it. Great! We just have to trust the Holy Spirit to do his work. One-on-one, small group, class, individually — people are getting buzzed about using all means available to make disciples of Jesus Christ. I love it when the Holy Spirit is at work and no one can take the credit.
Have you caught the buzz?
New Directions for Directions
A couple of years ago I had a burden to write a new tool for laying a biblical foundation in the lives of disciples of Jesus Christ. We had been using the same material for almost 20 years and, while it had served us well, I was concerned to provide something that was more comprehensive in content, more interactive in engaging the student, and more flexible in use whether one-on-one, small groups, classes or individual study. The result was called Directions. The initial printing was gone in less than a year and we are into the second printing. Last year it came out in Spanish.
In order to be flexible, the material had to be as free as possible of culturally specific illustrations. I wanted no scripture verses written out so the the student would be forced to open his or her Bible to answer the interactive questions and assignments, building a dependency on the Bible and not on any other book. I was careful to compare several languages and Bible translations in each reference used to be certain the right answers could be found in any language or version.
The responses to this point have been gratifying and I am thankful for the many encouraging reports I have been receiving. At the moment, I am going through this study with a Korean brother and we are having a great time!
These past couple of weeks it seems that Directions has been bumped into warp speed. While in Argentina I took a copy as a hospitality gift for my Swiss missionary friend. He loved it! During our conference with his leadership team he shared it with the entire group and many of them got very excited. Right now, they are investigating the possibility of printing and distributing it in the southern cone of South America.
I had another copy to give to a friend in Buenos Aires. Still another friend had come from States to meet with us about mission opportunities. He saw it and also wanted it. He is ready to have Directions translated in several languages in India. Already, Directions is being translated into some other languages, too.
The really neat feature about all of this is that none of this was planned. This is just something God is doing though the natural path of relationships. If I remember correctly, that’s what discipleship is all about.
The God of Order
Evangelical Christians in the West love to loosely paraphrase 1 Corinthians 14:33, especially those who are of a Calvinistic slant, and remind folks that “God is a God of order, not confusion.” We usually say this in heated conversations when someone has dared to not accept blindly our neatly structured, logical arguments that make perfect sense to us. Or, we might say this before or after making what we consider to be a profound point, as if this punctuation mark gives automatic acceptance and veracity to what we are saying.
“I just don’t think things are as neat and tidy as you make them appear,” someone says to us.
“Well” we respond, stretching to add an extra half inch or so to our frame as we stand erect in pious propriety, “you need to understand that God is a God of order, and when you know how to rightly divide the word of truth, even a child can see the logic, order and structure of God’s truth just as I am explaining to you.”
I find it interesting that we play this “God is a God of order” card so quickly as though everyone knows this and agrees, when there is not a single verse in the Bible that directly says that God is a God of order. Those of us who cling to the purity, inspiration and preservation of every word of Scripture quickly become masters of paraphrase, dynamic equivalence and implication when discussing the sacred doctrine of the God of order. And, to top things off, we do so by pulling and twisting scripture out of proper context. I know this because I’ve done it myself!
Now, those of you who may still be stuck in the pious propriety mode, calm down! I am certainly not suggesting that God is not a God of order and all that. Many who have ventured into the sphere of natural theology have established the intentionality of design in the universe, though we are far from understanding the totality of the design. I’m just trying to make us think before we toss around clichés, and hold us accountable to honesty and integrity as we deal with the sacred scriptures entrusted to us.
The basic foundational truths we all hold dear are clear enough for a child to understand. These truths are evident and applicable in any culture and language on the planet. Yet God is so much bigger than we are that there is still much that we cannot mentally grasp much less control. There are divine concepts far beyond our comprehension.
So what does the Bible really say?
For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints. 1 Corinthians 14:33
Clearly, God is not the author of confusion. But, it does not say he is the God of order, rather of peace. And, the context is not cosmology but the the confusion of the Corinthian church where the immature understanding of spiritual gifts had made their worship times together a chaos. Considering the context and what the scripture does not say, we should perhaps be a bit more circumspect as we borrow this verse from it proper context to make a point.
Now, check out this photo from the Hubble telescope. This is what got me thinking along these lines.
This is a picture of two galaxies colliding. You can see a higher definition picture here, and you can also learn more about this spectacular cosmic collision. So, there you have it. Pure order and structure. Right where we can get up on our little soap boxes and expound all about it. I’m thinking this looks somewhat like what’s left of one of my very orderly, logical and structured sermon outlines after the Holy Spirit gets hold of it!
Make no mistake. God obviously has an ordered and structured purpose in this collision that appears anything but neat and orderly to us. This is my point. God has it all under control, yet we are kidding ourselves if we think we understand it all. I wonder if this is a good illustration of cultures in collision — messy, painful, confusing to us — yet God always is at work accomplishing his purposes.
Think of possible galaxy collisions of culture in our world — Islam and Christianity, mixed marriages from totally different cultures, missionaries struggling to navigate what is to them a strange and resistant culture, clash of old sin nature and new nature in Christ, or the generational collision of what type of music we are going to sing when the church comes together in one place. These are all real and serious issues that often leave us confounded. Hopefully, seeing the bigger macro view of the universe will encourage us to trust in God even when life at times seems like a train wreck or galaxies in collision. God is always God.
Instruction Manual Follow Up
I have been reading a fascinating book about a amazing man named Mazhar. He is a leading literary figure in the Arab world and a follower of Jesus Christ. I truly believe that one day history will look on him as the apostle to Muslim Arabs. This book and the story of his life is not a book that pits Muslims against Christians, or shows how to convince Muslims to trust Christ. It is a book that will shake you, stretch you and confront you with Jesus of history and the Bible in his Middle Eastern cultural context. I have had the joy of spending some time with Mazhar and can confirm that his love for God is passionate and contagious.
This book, Pilgrims of Christ on the Muslim Road: Exploring a New Path Between Two Faiths is written by Paul-Gordon Chandler, an American Episcopal priest serving in the Middle East. It has just come off the press and you can get it here.
Mazhar is a master story teller and there is a section that shares some of his parables and analogies. I was just reading this tonight after having posted yesterday about instruction manuals. I thought you might enjoy this excerpt.
Once there was a Bedouin (desert dweller) that wandered into a city in Saudi Arabia. As he walked the city streets, in the window of a shop he saw a black box with moving pictures on it (a television). The television screen was at that time showing the tremendous beauty and variety of life below the ocean’s surface. The Bedouin, who had never seen the underwater world, stood in wonder and amazement. Desiring to show his fellow Bedouins in the desert this phenomenon, he bought a television, and together with the detailed instruction book, headed back to the desert. After following all the directions in the instruction book,he gathered everyone to his tent and told them about what they would see. However, when he pushed the ON button, nothing happened. They waited one day, two days, but the images never came onto the screen. Why? Because there is no electricity, or power, in the desert. Religion can be like following a detailed instruction book — it can mean nothing without personal faith, the “power” behind it. The book doesn’t give life.
Please don’t misunderstand. I am not saying we should not diligently study the Bible. I am not saying that the younger generation merely wants instant gratification and is not willing to study God’s word to mastery. To the contrary! I believe the current generation of youth is among the most spiritually oriented in a long time. I am simply saying that we often use analogies and language that leave them as clueless as our Bedouin friend above. The issue is how to connect them to truth and to the living God.
Those of us who are older often forget that when we “type” something, anyone born after 1985 or so in the United States has probably never seen a typewriter except in a picture, movie or museum. To say the Bible is an instruction manual is a great illustration for those who really know what that is and can relate to it. Those who fly the most sophisticated military jets today are those who grew up on video games, not those who grew up perusing instruction manuals. There was nothing wrong with our old time illustrations; it’s just that it’s new time.
Tired of Politics Yet?
Here’s something I heard while in Argentina recently. Why do people hate politicians?
Here’s the problem, my friend said. Why do people hate Christians?
The most ironic feature of the Ghandi quote above is the amazing Christ-like nature of his own life. He devoured the New Testament, particularly the Gospels and the Sermon on the Mount. In the introduction to the book Pilgrims of Christ on the Muslim Road that I mentioned recently, author Paul-Gordon Chandler said,
“A self-proclaimed Hindu, Ghandi was captivated by the person and message of Christ, resulting in even being called by some one of the most Christ-like men in history. Even missionaries in India would sit at his feet, seeking to learn what it meant to live like Christ within the Indian context.“
Chandler mentions this in his book because it was the example and writings of Gandhi that brought Syrian Muslim, Mazar Mallouhi to become a follower of Jesus Christ. As Chandler quotes Mazahr, he was fascinated to see how “Gandhi took Christian principles without Christ against a Christian nation [England] without Christian principles and won the battle.”
Just imagine what could happen and how many people could be reached with the good news of Jesus Christ if more Christians lived like Christ!
By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. John 13:35