Pulling a Sting

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

When he said it, not many of us really thought that much about it at first. In fact, it sounded a bit odd. We were all sitting around the Ockenga conference table—the thirteen of us as we do every month at our Pastors Roundtable—and one of our group told us very innocently that the thing that finally was bringing his congregation back to life was his fledgling little Junior High ministry.

This pastor had been racking his brain for years, trying to motivate his church toward some sense of vitality. He had given his congregation the big vision talk, followed quickly by the even bigger envisioning process, leading to the development of a vision statement. He had read all of the books. He had preached all the sermons about perishing without a vision. Nothing seemed to pry his congregation from the grips of years of lethargy. Nothing…nothing seemed to be working.

And then, out of no where, with hardly a strategy in mind and certainly beyond the scope of his own best intentions, the right volunteer couples from his little church in Maine, with the right giftedness and sincerity in their hearts, connected with the right junior high students. And it was this that brought new life as families began to be attracted to his little church. Broadsided with the simple and unintended! Imagine that; the life and vitality of a church resting on the narrow shoulders and low riding jeans of a group of adolescents. The church took off.

In subsequent conversations with this and other Pastor Roundtable groups, similar stories began to surface. In another of our New England churches whose pastor had a cup of coffee on a pro sports team, the church’s sports ministry to the community became the place of new growth and excitement for the congregation. For another pastor, it was their children’s ministry. Imagine a church whose annual summer focus on Vacation Bible School became the spark that has brought genuine excitement to the entire congregation the year round.

I wonder sometimes if we miss the forest through the trees for those of us who are committed to breathing new life into our places of ministry. With our best intentions in tow, we place five thousand pounds of vision and strategy down on a five hundred pound church. It is utterly crushing.

I admit it. I have done the same thing periodically when asked to do church consulting. Frankly, it is not that difficult to diagnose the problems within most churches. The real difficulty lies in churches having the resources and the will to respond to the solutions offered. The economics of the situation work like this: The smaller the church, the bigger the problems to be solved. But, alas, the smaller the church, the less resources there are to respond effectively to proposed solutions. The solutions sometimes almost become more onerous than the problems.

To be considered healthy, why must every church have a thriving small group ministry and thriving youth ministry and thriving evangelism ministry and thriving hospitality ministry and a thriving community outreach ministry and so on…? Rather, what if we looked at our churches more organically than systematically? It takes some investigative work, but where is the place—sometimes ever so small—of vitality in your church? Where is there evidence that God is working, and how can we come along side of that place(s) where He has decided to work uniquely in your setting? Where is the thin thread in your church that, if pulled, could unravel into whole new possibilities for your church?

I am convinced that every church has these areas, sometimes in the most surprising of places. As one pastor of a church that is filled with the currently perceived deadly demographic of elderly people told me the other day, the point of excitement currently in his church is a small group of his elderly couples that have found new excitement in their faith. The fragrance of their newfound excitement has wafted across the rest of the church. Go figure, old people and junior high kids: places where God is doing His best work in His church. There must be a God.

Watch Your Language

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

Most readers of this piece will already know that the word “theology” consists of the Greek words for “God” (Theo’s) and “word/speech/account” ((logos). What we sometimes forget is that this logos is our account of God, and not God’s account of himself. Theology walks down the path of human language. Trouble, as it often does, lies on either side of this path.

On the one side, we may be tempted to despair that we can say anything meaningful at all about God. This sentiment has been around for ages, but it is particularly popular in the modern non-Christian world. All our words about God, to cite the popular fable, are just the gropings of blind men describing an elephant. (The twist, of course, is that the enlightened tale-teller knows it’s an elephant – but this never seems to get noted.) Christians, who have experienced God’s Word in the deeds and words of Jesus the Messiah, can steer clear of that danger pretty easily.

The other trap is one to which evangelicals are perhaps more prone; and that is imagining that our language about God is simple and exhaustive, and thus – unlike all other human speech -- needs no qualifications. Indeed, for some people the search for just this kind of unequivocal speech about God constitutes the essence of the theological task.

The first sign that God himself does not seem to endorse this sort of talk comes from the nature of Scripture itself. If the goal of theology is to give a perfectly straightforward, reasonable account of God, we have to admit the Bible does a pretty poor job of it. We have compilations of stories from a distant place in a strange language, none of which explain themselves very much. We have commandments which are rather more straightforward…but while some of them make instant sense (“don’t mislead a blind man on the path”), others remain obscure (“don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk”). Even the clearest summary statements about God can raise some questions even as they answer others: “The Lord, the Lord, compassionate and gracious, showing mercy to thousands and judgment to threes…” So, yes, he is more merciful than judgmental: but how does he decide when to be which?

In response to this we often try to be clearer than Scripture itself. “The most important thing to know about God”, some will assert, “is that he pursues his own glory.” Now, there are any number of Scripture passages that back up this assertion, and thus every Christian ought to heartily affirm it. But as soon as we put the thought into a specific language, and speak it to actual people, problems arise. To take the most pressing one: the idiom “to seek one’s own glory” in modern English carries overwhelmingly negative connotations. The bare statement, “God seeks his own glory”, is in danger of painting a portrait of God as a megalomaniacal dictator, the Kim Jong-Il of a cosmic North Korean kingdom. Surely we must do better than that.

But what can we do? We can’t simply shrink back and refuse to speak about God. He has said and done too much in our presence to make that a viable option. We have to speak. But if we take the Scripture as our guide, we will be liberated to speak of him in a fully human language comfortable with paradox and qualifications. We will be happy to let God’s speech about himself provide the model for our speech about him.

We will also embrace stories as meaningful forms of theological discourse, not mere tales to be moralized or theologized before they are of any use. To return to our example of “God seeking his own glory”: we could rightly devote an entire tome to explaining that God’s pursuit of his own glory is a world away from our pursuit of our own glory, that his pursuit involves embracing those lower than himself rather than annihilating them. Those would hardly be wasted words.

But we could also simply read the story of the crucified Messiah, “lifted up” upon the cross, and see it all in a moment.

Gender: Creation or Construction?

By Maria Boccia, PhD
Professor of Pastoral Counseling and Psychology
Director of Graduate Programs in Counseling Charlotte campus

I am taking a break from grading my students’ “theology of sexuality” final research papers from the sexuality courses I taught this spring and summer at Gordon Conwell. Foundational to their theology is the Genesis account of our creation. It is very obvious from even the most superficial reading of Genesis 1 and 2 that our maleness and femaleness are a part of God’s act of our creation. Human beings are male and female, designed and created so by God. We as Christians tend to see this as so foundational as to be beyond question. Any small or great deviation from this fundamental dichotomy is presumed by us to be something gone wrong. We live, however, in a radically changing culture in which postmodern, deconstructionist interpreters are gaining ground in presenting gender as a social construction.

The argument for the social construction of gender asserts that gender and sexuality do not exist as unique, dichotomous, biological entities. Rather, culture, or rather the dominant voices in society, use language and power to create these ideas of gender and sexuality. These ideas, they then argue, are used to suppress and persecute those who do not conform to these socially constructed definitions. Many of the writers arguing for the social constructionist view are homosexual or in some other way a part of the LGBTQ community. One of my students pointed out that “Michel Foucault . . . was the first to question the ideas of gender and sexual identity. He himself was a practicing homosexual but refused to identify himself as homosexual or as a specific gender. He questioned the commonly held ideas of a static gender and bimorphous sexuality. He preferred the idea that people can self-associate with a specific gender if they so please, as long as they realized that gender is a culturally conditioned idea and generally arbitrary.” Foucault, you may recall, is also the philosopher responsible for the beginnings of postmodernism philosophy as well.

Another student read and reviewed a recent publication by Inter-Varsity Press by Jenell Paris, The End of Sexual Identity (2011). Her review of this book, slightly edited, says:

Evangelicals need more thoughtful and informed writing on the area of gender and sexuality, but Paris’ work is not one that proves helpful to believers. A trained anthropologist, Paris’ main crux of her work is a dismissal of the traditional personal identifiers of sex like heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual. She says instead to reject any sexual orientation label and live as an un-sexually oriented person. She purports that sexual orientation language is falsely stigmatizing and isolating to those who are given sexual orientation labels. . . Paris’ disregard for sexual identifying language is on the cusp of full-fledged identification with queer theory’s central position, namely that gender is culturally constructed and arbitrary. The beginning of Paris’ book is basically affirming the idea that sexuality is culturally conditioned to the point where gender is only cultural and thus arbitrary. . . . What Paris desire to do – make sexual orientation not the ultimate thing – is a reasonable endeavor, but the means by which she attempts to do it – by disregarding sexual identity language markers – is caustic to her eventual goal. . . . she is on the precipice of queer theory, and she needs to move back into a more bibliocentric and theological understanding of language.

It was not very long ago that I would have said that the distinction regarding sex and gender is clear between a Christian and non-Christian worldview: God created us male and female, Period. Yet, here is a book published by Inter-Varsity Press almost fully affirming Queer Theory regarding sex and gender: Sex and gender are arbitrary. We need to abandon the words.

My colleagues on the faculty and I were recently discussing the importance of theology and doing theology. We believe that not only do professional, vocational pastors and ministers need to be grounded in theology, but every member of the church, everyone seated in a pew or chair, needs to “always be ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence” (1 Peter 3:15). Leaders, especially, are admonished to be “ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction, for the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance with their own desires and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths” (2 Timothy 4:2).

When we think “Gospel,” we tend to think of the good news that God became flesh and dwelt among us, and died on the cross, rising again from the dead, to redeem us from our sins and give us eternal life. But the gospel is bigger than that. It is encompassing. It defines a world view that touches every aspect of our lives. We need to be salt and light in every corner of the world, to bring God’s truth into every dark place. This issue may appear philosophical and esoteric, however, it will trickle down in very practical ways. Indeed, it has already trickled down to shape our culture’s view to the point of endorsing practices such as gay “marriage,” which is wholly contrary to the teaching of Scripture on sex and marriage. In Ezekiel, God tells the prophet that the watchman is called upon to warn the people of coming judgment. If the watchman fails to do this, he too is held accountable and subject to the same judgment. We are called to warn. We need to speak truth to our generation. For their sakes and ours.

Thanking God for Friends from Seminary

By Roy Ciampa, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

They were the first couple that Marcelle and I met when we arrived at seminary back in 1982, and we quickly became the best of friends. To avoid referring to them as “they” or “them” let’s call them “Keith” and “Rebeccah”… Keith and I had many classes together and talked through all kinds of subjects. He and Rebeccah introduced us to music we hadn’t been familiar with but liked right away and that has been a part of our lives ever since. They also taught us some card games and, as poor seminary students, much of our leisure and entertainment time in seminary was spent playing cards together as two couples and talking into the night. We also went camping together (at the foot of the Maroon Bells ) and enjoyed great times of fellowship.

We wouldn’t be where we are today were it not for the influence of Keith and Rebeccah, and others like them, in our lives. Keith saw me as a seminary professor long before I could ever see myself that way. He became the president of the student body and appointed or recommended me to serve as the student representative on the seminary’s Faculty Affairs Committee, which gave me the opportunity to get to know faculty members and see how they conducted some of their business and to imagine what it might be like to be in their shoes someday. When Carl F. H. Henry came to campus it was Keith who arranged for the two of us to have a private meeting with him, during which Keith referred to me as the “theologian” of the student body. It was a title I didn’t deserve, by any means, but it reflected Keith’s perception of my gifts (and calling), one that would later be confirmed by others and within myself. To this day I don’t remember a bit of what we talked about with Dr. Henry, but I’ve never forgotten the complement paid to me by my friend and what it said about his view of my potential!

Keith has been a faithful pastor since our days in seminary. He’s now pastoring a church in Arizona. Marcelle and I just enjoyed a wonderful visit from Keith and Rebeccah. They took the time to come and spend a few days visiting and catching up with us. We walked the freedom trail in Boston, visited Salem, attended church together, discussed the Bible, theology, ethics, philosophies of ministry, ministry challenges, family issues and many other things. We also enjoyed evenings with long card games and deep conversations into the late hours. He and Rebeccah continue to be an encouragement to us and models for us of faithful ministry in both good and very challenging circumstances. I thank God for them and the roles they have played in our lives.

Do you remember particular friends from college or seminary that have encouraged you, or helped you identify your gifts or who played key roles in shaping your vision for your future ministry? Was there someone (or more than one person) without whom you don’t know how you would have gotten through, or that you feel made a significant contribution to your understanding of God’s call on your life? If you haven’t been in touch with that person for a while, or haven’t expressed your appreciation for them recently, perhaps you should think about giving them a call or writing them a note. And perhaps you might even think about planning a way to get together again for a few days to renew that friendship, and see if you don’t both benefit from the truth expressed so well in Proverbs 27:17: ^“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another” (NIV).