Builders

As a seasoned pioneer missionary with twenty five years of church planting and upwards of fifteen thousand ministry miles under his belt, the apostle Paul unveils his crowning strategy for Spain in his letter to the Romans. As far as first century Roman Empire dwellers were concerned, Spain was the western “ends of the earth” (India to the east), and therefore the eschatological fulfillment of God’s pursuit of his glory (Is 66.19).

He writes: “I no longer have any room for work in these regions...I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain, and to be helped on my journey there by you” (Rom 15.23-24).

There is an explicit and implicit charge in these matter-of-fact logistical plans for the first century Roman church and twenty-first century American church. Paul betrays a twofold stratus of commission calling. Explicitly, Paul highlights the calling of “foundation layers” such as himself - men and women commissioned to preach the gospel where it has yet to be heard.

This is Paul’s calling. And as a man duly called he expects “help,” propempo, the NT technical term for missionary support - funding, lodging, travel, regional coworkers, etc. Its Paul’s calling but the church’s task. Spain is Rome’s opportunity.

But there’s also an implicit charge. There is work to be done by “builders,” those Christians left behind. By this point, Paul has scarcely sprinkled the eastern Mediterranean world with a handful of fledgling house churches in major metropolises.

Take the church in Corinth for example. As far as we can tell several house churches of fifty plus believers constituted Paul’s plan for Greece. After that he felt claustrophobic in the region to know that one solitary city had that many Christians. There was no room for him to work.

The implicit charge is that members of these house churches build. They take Paul’s meager eighteen months of planting (Corinth) and begin to water. They organize themselves into a healthy church; care for their members; preach the Word, disciple, serve the Supper, guard the gospel; reach out to neighbors and coworkers with the good news; and begin thinking about multiplication in Greece.

This is the builder’s call, no less than the pioneer foundation layer. I suspect for all his gifts, Paul would have made a lousy builder. That’s probably why far from disparaging Christian builders in Rome, he greets them with reverent admiration in the following chapter.

Newbigin's Take on Mission

Lesslie Newbigin, village evangelist in India, takes his cue on the church's mission from the Gospels and Acts. In these five narrative accounts there is an "indissoluble nexus between deeds and words". Miraculous deeds perk curiosity of a new reality which is then explicitly stated in word. Preaching without these deeds is about as unhelpful as answering questions that aren't being asked. But where these deeds are present, questions abound concerning the new plausibility structure of which they are a part, and gospel proclamation answers those very questions.

The point here is not to prove every word was accompanied by a miraculous deed, but that such deeds prompted right questions to which the gospel could respond.

The Church inherits this mantle of powerful witness inasmuch as she marries deed and word. The Kingdom of God is not an abstract reality but a Person who we have encountered and whose new creation we have a forestaste in the Spirit. "To set word and deed, preaching and action, against each other is absurd. The central reality is neither word nor act, but the total life of a community enabled by the Spirit to live in Christ, sharing his passion and the power of his resurrection."

How do our lifestyles reflect a new reality? How do we proclaim "Jesus is risen" not just on Easter Sunday but in the company we keep at our table? In the hurt we mend? By the injustices we confront? Through aspirations for our children?

Sadly so much of our lives play out the script of this present reality. No wonder nobody's asking.

Response to Chris Little's "What Makes Missions Christian?"

This is my abbreviated response to Chris Little over his article "What Makes Mission Christian?" in the most recent issue of International Journal of Frontier Missions (ijfm.org):

First, it does sound like you were “set up” in this issue and that is not right. At the same time I was taken aback by much of your language aimed at the opposition. You warned of the “horizontalization in mission” (67) and urged “recovering the doxological theme in mission” (69), reminding us that “mission is not undertaken for the welfare and glory of man” (70). Are you really willing to assert that “there is nothing particularly Christian about humanitarian work” (68)? That Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates are indistinguishable from Compassion and World Vision? Furthermore you drew several hard, fast lines between holism and a host of evangelical boogey-men: liberalism, Liberation Theology, annihilationism, inclusivism, and rice Christianity. I’m sure you could point to holistic ministries in each camp but to resort to over-generalized name calling is unfair, unhelpful, and will certainly break down lines of communication.

Second, and more to the point of the actual argument, I am uncomfortable about your portraits of Jesus and Paul. What do you really make of the nature of Jesus’ work? We cannot get around the fact that his miracles are almost entirely centered on restoring bodies. To try and distance him from that central, prophecy-fulfilling work is in danger of making his miracles into arbitrary magic tricks exclusively meant to draw crowds to hear his words – as if pulling a rabbit from his kippah would have worked just as well. As a side note, that brought out two interesting comments in your article. The first is that Jesus never did a miracle which did not lead to words. In reality, wherever you find a couple of paragraphs of black print together in the Gospels it’s usually Jesus doing without saying. The second statement was that ‘poor’ is not “simply a socio-economic term” (69). Granted poor, deaf, blind, dumb can all have spiritual meanings, they also have very literal, very powerful meanings as well including the Isaiah prophecy you referenced (Lk 4:18-19) which was literally being fulfilled by Jesus (Lk 7:21-23). We can safely assume literal poverty was what their money bag was for. I am not trying to play Jesus’ works off his words but simply saying the picture is far more complex than either side has a tendency of painting it.

Briefly on Paul, it is not true that he “seems purposefully to have avoided…personal charity” (67). He made much of his humanitarian aid to Jerusalem (Ac 24:17; Rom 15:25ff; 1 Cor 16:1-3; 2 Cor 8:1-4; 9:1-2, 12). Very interestingly, when he goes to compare his gospel with the apostles the thing James, Peter, and John challenge him on is not Romans Road but to “remember the poor”, which he is quick to assert is the “very thing I was eager to do” (Gal 2:10). Of course, Paul’s calling and gifting distinguished him from the Stephen, Cornelius, Lydia, James, and Lukes of the NT but we cannot make the case that he did not capture God’s concern for the poor nor consider it fundamental to his mission – he did.

Third, (and I hate to use an over-played word you are probably exhausted of hearing) I am afraid that this might lead to a reductionistic view of mission (at least I didn’t say Platonic, Gnostic, or post-Enlightenment). True mission has always been more but certainly never less than answering the question of how one gets saved. At its best, mission must entail the full council of Christ, the message of resurrection and reconciliation, and planting communities who live as a powerful, subversive force here and now in light of the resurrection. It should come as a shock to our over-programmed senses that the only two formal offices in an institution bent on reaching the world are elders and deacons. How can we make mission any less than that?

Honestly I think prioritism is a bad question that has generated a hopeless debate. I would liken it to asking, Which is more important, evangelism or holiness? Or evangelism or theological education for that matter? You might be able to make a great case for one or the other but you are not going to be happy with the results. True, giving someone a loaf of bread is not the same as sharing the gospel (as George Verwer reportedly said), but sharing the gospel is not the same as giving a loaf of bread. Both neglectful Christians are disobedient.

At the end of the day I don’t have a problem with a clarion call to include the gospel at the forefront of all endeavors. It’s our lifeblood. But the way there cannot be through denigrating something so dear and so oft-repeated throughout the Scriptures.

Wholism and Prioritism: Rather Gnosticism, Materialism, and Wholism

"Perhaps we all awaited a resurrection." Housekeeping

The light of the eyes rejoices the heart,
and good news refreshes the bones. Pr. 15:30 ESV

“A twinkle in the eye means joy in the heart,
and good news makes you feel fit as a fiddle”. MSG

Where does the body end and the spirit begin? This is not a new discussion. There are many many ways of looking at this. Does the ministry of preaching (word) have a greater seat in the Kingdom than feeding and clothing (deeds)? Are practical works a means to an end? Or are they an end in themselves? I think some more fundamental questions must be asked to answer these questions about wholism and prioritism.

These are not merely questions about practice but about the Gospel that we preach. Peter Leithart’s Against Christianity's, whole thesis is this point, the Christian Gospel is not a set of truths, propositions, or statements that people affirm, that would be Christianity. The Gospel is, as N.T. Wright says, “Jesus is Lord, and one day every knee shall bow..." Therefore Leithart can say that the Gospel is economics, art, and anything else. Not merely something that you can extract principles about economics from. The Gospel is a redemptive and healing work to all things.

When someone says that the preaching of the Gospel is prioritized over ministry of deeds, what they are saying is that the Gospel is a set of truths orally communicated that people must know, we feed people so that they might be alive long enough to pray the sinners prayer and await the rapture.  I am personally confused that the same people who fight for a literal and historical account of the Bible seem to see only the spiritual world ahead of us.

(Enter Leithart stage left)

If Leithart is correct, then we need a new vocabulary. Christianity, and it’s red headed step child prioritism, are more correctly known as Gnosticism. The Gospel is wholistic; everything on this earth will be made new by the resurrection of Christ. What then are we preaching? Did Christ appear as a spirit? Was his body or his spirit crucified? We do not want to run to the other extreme of materialism. Rather the whole Gospel must be preached to the whole person.

To return to the objection at the beginning, what is at stake is not where does money go? To the pastor or to the shovels to dig the well? The questions are:

How do we see God working?
What kind of Kingdom is coming?
What kind of Kingdom are we proclaiming?
What kind of King do we serve?