I have a strong passion for equipping ministries. My position on how these equipping ministries should be handled is extremely conservative. My position is also not one help by the popular American protestant churches at present. I'm not sure that my position would even agree very well with that of the church I currently attend. I don't even know if it would be accepted at any church in Manhattan—since I have not attended every church in Manhattan and because such things aren't necessarily readily apparent, I will withhold judgment.
My basic position is that held by some of the original reformers and that is that if we are to be effective ministers, we must preach the truth without compromise. This is the kind of ministry that led Paul to the passion that he should preach to an unreached, hostile mob that wanted to stone him. It is the kind of ministry that is so unpopular that Paul's fellows held him back. I won't say that Paul or his fellows were right in this particular instance because prudence is a good thing sometimes, but that Paul's passion was so strong to reach the lost that he was willing to risk it all. His preaching was so emphatic and offensive that men wanted him dead.
To elaborate: the message of Christ should be offensive to the unbeliever unless the Spirit of God is working in that unbeliever's life to transform them. I believe the church today is interest in trying to avoid the offensiveness of this message. The church wants to avoid presenting the aspects of God's holiness that are offensive and try to focus on God's love. This presentation of the gospel makes me ill because it is not the gospel, but only half the story. Telling half the story is what I consider to be lying.
The epidomy of this half-gospel movement is the "seeker sensitive" church movement. There is a strong pull for the church to focus on an unbelievers "felt needs" as a method to try and reach the believer's "unfelt needs" (i.e., the fact that they need to be "saved" to keep them from going to hell). I find this movement to be highly hypocritical and I don't really blame the folks on the #ksu IRC channel when they start ranting about "those f***ing Christian hypocrites." They are right. We are hypocrites if we're going to try and seduce unbelievers into our church by making them feel good and then trying to address their real needs without letting them know what we're doing. This is deception and manipulation.
What Christians should be doing is getting into the education business. In a day of information and a generation that is weary of false messages, we need to start telling the truth without restriction and without apology. We need Christians who know what the message is and are equipped to "in order to persuade some." We need Christians who are willing to accept that the message of Christ reaches those that God chooses and it's really not up to us to do anything more than present the message in full. Christians don't have the power to do more and God expects nothing less from us.
If the Christians can break free of the fetters of this present world and do this, we will see a revival such as we haven't seen in generations. Until Christians do this, the Church will descend into a new Dark Age of mediocrity and the rest of the world will sink with us.
I feel this passion has, to some extent, been renewed this weekend. I've been getting more and more discouraged during the past weeks about this. However, discussions with my father-in-law and his church's former associate pastor has left me feeling renewed. It was good to hear some of what these men face on different battlefronts, but with the same passion: that God's whole truth be proclaimed without shame. I pray that God can use me as a tool to equip those around me so that one day, whether months, years, decades, or centuries from now, God can use this truth to perform His revival. Amen.
hmm, well said.
hmm, well said.