The Gaslight Gospel

"Not One Iota..."

The great Salvation Army preacher, Samuel Brengle, once said:

"One of the outstanding ironies of history is the utter disregard of ranks and titles in the final judgments men pass on each other. The final estimate of men shows that history cares not an iota for the rank or title a man has borne, or the office he has held, but only the quality of his deeds and the character of his mind and heart."

It quotes like this that always drive me to questions the driving values of today's Evangelical movement that worships the Academy just as the world does. This is clearly demonstrated in how most churches appoint leaders. A seminary or Bible college degree doesn't qualify a man for ministry. It is Christ-like character,which can only be properly formed in the local church, that qualifies a man for true spiritual leadership.

Grizovic on Gospel Identities

My good friend Carl Grizovic Jr. has just finished a short series on Examining Our Identities which I thought was rather insightful. You can find them here:

• Examining Our Identities - Disciple
• Examining Our Identities - Family
• Examining Our Identities - Missionary

I'm actually gearing up to basically do the same series but constructed slightly different. Our church has moved away from explaining our mission in terms of core values towards communicating it through gospel identities. By gospel identities we mean who we are in Christ because of the gospel.

"Much, Not Many"

Brothers, only other fools are impressed by your book collection. Do yourself some good and listen to C.H. Spurgeon:

Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them, masticate and digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analyses of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride comes if hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be “much, not many.”

I never can read Baxter's The Reformed Pastor, Lewis' The Screwtape Letters, and Bonhoeffer's Life Together enough. They appear to be wells that have tapped in the never ending liquid of the river of life. So, what makes your "repeat reread list?"

What do WE mean by missional communities?

We have been recasting and redefining the vision of Seven Hills since the start of the year. We now are explaining our ministry like so:

"Seven Hills Church is a network of missional communities resolved to seeing the entire Greater Cincinnati Area transformed through the gospel of Jesus Christ."

This naturally leads to folks wanting us to expand on what we mean by missional communities. This has become all the more important since the phrase is being applied to many different ministry designs. So for the sake of clarity...

First, lets define what a "missional community" is NOT:

• It isn't just a "gathering" though we will gathering formally and informally throughout the week.
• It isn't a "small group" though it is smaller group of people (rarely larger than 20).
• It isn't a "bible study" though we do devote ourselves to studying and applying the Word of God to our lives.
• It isn't a "care group" though we will care and pastor each other in the gospel.
• It isn't a "social action group" though we will minister and love our neighborhoods in tangible ways that express the truth of the gospel.
• It isn't a "house church" though we will generally use our homes as base of operations.

Second, what is a missional community?

A missional community is a group of people who have covenanted with each other to live out their gospel identities as disciples, missionaries, and family in the neighborhood God has placed them with the oversight of the elders of church.

Hopefully, that is some help to those who have been asking questions. I've blogged on some helpful resources on missional communities here also. How can I clarify further?

Tozer Devotional

I want to recommend A.W. Tozer's "devotional." I read it every morning. Tozer wrote two Christian classics: The Pursuit of God and The Knowledge of the Holy. They both are excellent. Here is the Tozer quote I started my morning with today:

"The universal Church is the body of Christ, the bride of the Lamb, the habitation of God through the Spirit, the pillar and ground of the truth. The local church is a community of ransomed men, a minority group, a colony of heavenly souls dwelling apart on the earth, a division of soldiers on a foreign soil, a band of reapers, working under the direction of the Lord of the harvest, a flock of sheep following the Good Shepherd, a brotherhood of like-minded men, a visible representative of the Invisible God. It is most undesirable to conceive of our churches as Works, or Projects. If such words must be used, then let them be understood as referring to the earthly and legal aspect of things only. A true church is something supernatural and divine, and is in direct lineal descent from that first church at Jerusalem. Insofar as it is a church it is spiritual; its social aspect is secondary and may be imitated by any group regardless of its religious qualities or lack of them. The spiritual essence of a true church cannot be reproduced anywhere but in a company of renewed and inwardly united believers."

You can find his devotional here.

Relighting the Gaslight Gospel

I'm returning back to blogging fulltime (aka several post/podcast per week). I had some major life readjusting to do this past nine months that put blogging on the backburner for the most part. I've realized that my blog is a valuable asset that I can no longer ignore. So, I'll pick up my series on church planting Saturday and start a podcast the beginning of June. Until then enjoy this gem from A.W. Tozer:

"We must not imagine ourselves commissioned to make Christ acceptable to big business, the press, the world of sports or modern education. We are not diplomats but prophets, and our message is not a compromise but an ultimatum."

Marriage, Sex, & Children are a Trinity

I'm pro-children. I've come to believe that Scripture teaches that marriage, sex, and children are a trinity that belongs together. One shouldn't be separated from the other. Sex requires marriage, marriage requires sex, and children should, apart from the Lord closing the womb, be an eventual result of the two working together. This doesn't mean I'm against all forms of birth control across the board. This doesn't mean that I believe that large families are more godly. This doesn't mean that I believe sex is merely for procreation. It doesn't even mean that I believe that a married couple that doesn't have children is, in all cases, ungodly. What it does mean is that I believe that children are a God-given purpose of marriage and not just an option. My reasoning for this is multi-layered but Malachi 2:15 has a lot to do with it:

But did he not make them one, having a remnant of the Spirit? And why one? He seeks godly offspring. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let no one deal treacherously with the wife of his youth.

The reason I bring this up is that I ran across a post explaining why many Europeans refuse to reproduce and I found the answer there to be the same for many of the child-avoiding Christian counterparts. The post cites Bruce Thornton's book, Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow-Motion Suicide. In it Thornton explains why they aren't having children across the pond. He writes:

Children are expensive. They require you to sacrifice your time and your interests and your own comfort. If your highest good is pleasure, if your highest good is a sophisticated life, then children get in the way. Why would you spend so much money and so much energy on children if your highest good is simply material well-being? That's sort of the spiritual dimension of the problem.

Sadly, I have found that Christians often avoid having children for basically the same reasons. Children require death to self and a lowering or hindering of "a quality of life" for which they strive after. There is little place for children in Christianity when it preaches a gospel that is "me-centered" and materialistic. May God, through the preaching of the true gospel, deliver us from the fate of our Atlantic neighbors.

Principle-Driven Praise

I enjoyed reading the "key beliefs that drive our worship" found on The Good Shepherd Band MySpace page (they sound a lot like Arcade Fire). They are as follows:

• We believe that music used for worship should arise from the context of the local church and should be essentially pastoral: it should rebuke as well as encourage, it should teach as well as emote. Consumer driven worship has its finger more on the pulse of the pocketbook than the worshipper’s true spiritual condition. Consumerism is driven by the mantra “The customer is always right! Whatever the customer wants, the customer gets!” Apply that principle to preaching and you lose preaching. Apply it to worship and you get CCM.

• We believe that music used for worship is obligated to declare the whole council of God. It should lead people to praise God both for His “Yes” and for His “No”. Many great hymns throughout the ages do this, so you’ll often find us reworking the songs of previous centuries in addition to composing new ones of our own.

• We believe that music used for worship should be contextualized. It’s a hindrance to the gospel if we require that our neighbor step back in time a hundred or so years in order to understand our worship language, and so we try where we can to translate the past into the idioms of our day without sacrificing the integrity of the message. This is a difficult but vital work, similar to the Reformers translating the Scriptures from Latin into modern languages—what they called putting things into the "vulgar tongue."

• We believe that the affect, or “feel” of the music should be consistent with the essence of the lyrics. Words instruct our minds in the truth, and the music trains our emotions how to feel about it. Often what you’ll hear from us is very intense, very jubilant, very strong, very sad, etc. This gets us accused of being charismatic or promoting enthusiasm. That’s also what they accused Jonathan Edwards of, and we’re okay with that.

• Scripture instructs us to use our bodies in worship in various ways, and we believe that the church’s music should endeavor to insist on these actions when they are topically fitting. More than just singing along, it should regularly make you want to stand up, clap your hands, shout for joy, raise your hands, prostrate yourself, and yes, even dance. Therefore, the music one prefers while relaxing at home is not necessarily appropriate for corporate worship.

• We believe that worship music should be unashamedly masculine. This may be the hardest pill for people to swallow. Men should not have to check their sexuality at the door and only ever posture themselves as women in relation to God the Father. Not only is that disgusting, it’s unbiblical. The church corporate is the Bride of Christ, but we are to relate personally to God as sons to our Father. The absence of masculine worship lends itself to the absence of themes central to the Christian faith—warfare being an obvious example. Compare the content of worship songs today with that of the Psalter and you’ll start to see that something has gone horribly wrong.

Reforming and Being Reformed by Church Planting

Mike Edwards has started a series of post on what God has taught him about and through "church-planting." You can find the first on here: on a seed dying to live.

A Must Read Article on Pastoral Ministry

This post, Father-Hunger and Pastoral Ministry, is the best single thing I've ever read on pastoral ministry. I encourage all of you to read it and especially those who aspire to or already hold the office of pastor or elder. I personally know the author, Pastor Tim Bayly of Church of the Good Shepherd, and can witness to his diligence in practicing the sort of pastoral ministry of which he writes. Tim is a hidden treasure of wisdom and godliness tucked away in the university community of Bloomington, IN. All would benefit from reading his blog and listening to his sermons. You might of read an essay of his recently posted on Resurgence that received a decent amount of attention. There are very few men that could quote "imitate me as I imitate Christ" towards me without receiving a smirk of "are you serious" in return. Tim is one of those men. Pastor Bayly is everything I aspire to be as a pastor, father, and friend. I hope you will check his stuff out!