Not for God’s Secrets

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

I was reading along in my Bible recently, and came across this verse:

“The Lord our God has secrets known to no one. We are not accountable for them, but we and our children are accountable forever for all that he has revealed to us, so that we may obey all the terms of these instructions.” (Deut 29:29)

It is a part of Moses’ final words to the people of Israel before he dies and they enter the Promised Land. It is a part of his final word reinforcing both the promises and the curses of the covenant God made with the people of Israel.

I have been thinking about this verse ever since I came across it. How cool is it that God does not require us to be responsible for everything! He has required only the things he has told us about! When I first read this verse, I was thinking about the questions that always come to mind in the face of suffering: Why, Lord?! It can be frustrating but it is also a mercy that this is one of God’s secret things. We are not in charge of the universe so we don’t have to worry about why. This could be a very difficult place however for someone in the face of apparently meaningless suffering. This is where our faith can hold us and give us peace. Because the Bible does reveal who God is, because his character is not a secret he has kept to himself, we can know that he is faithful and good and merciful and just and sovereign. In this knowledge, we can navigate the storms in our lives with confidence that God is in charge and whatever we are going through, he has a purpose for, and in this knowledge we can have peace and confidence.

But as I continued to think about this verse, it occurs to me that the most important thing that God has revealed for which we are accountable is that he sent his beloved Son to save us. Jesus said “you search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about me” (John 5:39). When Paul preached at Berea, we are told that the listeners examined the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so (Acts 17:11). We can have confidence that we will find the truth about Jesus there because that is the purpose of Scripture. So, according to this verse in Deuteronomy, what we are responsible for is knowing Jesus and, in knowing him, have eternal life. Thank you, Lord, that this is what you require of me!

We recently had a dust-up because claims have been made once again about the end of time and the return of Jesus and his judgment of the world. May 21 past without a ripple. I expect October 21 to do the same. Jesus said of his second coming, “of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the father alone” (Matthew 24: 36). Before he returned to the father, he reiterated the point, “is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority” (Acts 1:7). Jesus’ return is one of God’s secrets. Because of this assertion by Jesus, whenever I hear announcements about his return, I feel assured that whatever date is proposed is wrong! If we keep these things in mind, we will not be led astray by false prophets. We can stay on track with God’s intentions by paying attention to what he has revealed and not trying to figure out what he has decided to keep secret. This is the way to live at peace and in the confidence that God is in charge, and that the Lord of all the universe will do what is right and good and just.

The Bible in the World: Abolitionist, Contemporary and Future Perceptions

By Roy Ciampa, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

I just returned from the 2011 iteration of the Nida School of Translation Studies and the second residency of our new D.Min. track in Bible Translation, which took place in Misano Adriatico, Italy.

Faculty and Associates of the Nida School come from diverse places and perspectives with some coming from the field of Bible translation and others from the wider academic field of Translation Studies, with special affinity to Post-Colonial criticism and other ideological criticisms. For many people on one side (you can guess which one) the positive impact of the Bible in people’s lives and in society is perfectly obvious and the thought that Bible translation could contribute to injustice or oppression in the world is hard to believe. For many people on the other side (again, you can guess which one), it is obvious that the Bible and its translation have been part of oppressive imperialistic and colonizing powers and movements and that the Bible has shown itself to be a dangerous book with a problematical reception-history.

I think this is another of those instances where each side tends to be correct in what it affirms but reductionist in what it denies. That is, the Bible has led millions of people to peace, forgiveness, grace and hope, and have led to the establishment of hospitals, schools, orphanages, and innumerable charitable ministries around the world. And it has also been used through the centuries to support unjust and oppressive institutions, relationships and behaviors.

On the flight home from Italy I began reading Allen Dwight Callahan’s The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Although I’ve only read the first four chapters so far I can say I highly recommend it (for what I have read so far). But it has also provided a remarkable parallel to what I had just observed at the Nida School.

Callahan discusses the opposing positions of Frederick Douglass (whom I have mentioned in an earlier ETC post) and Henry Highland Garnet in a debate that took place in New York in 1849:

“Douglass and Garnet were both African Americans. Both had escaped slavery from Maryland’s Eastern Shore. But their respective experiences of slavery, literacy, and religion—and so their respective experiences of the Bible—were profoundly different, and those differences crystallized in diametrically opposed views of the Bible's liberating power…. Garnet saw the liberating power of the Bible as self-evident. It was so for him: he assumed it would be so for slaves in the South who might manage to read or have read to them a contraband copy of the holy scriptures that he knew so well” (page 22).

Callahan reminds us that “the abolitionists of the North and the planter class of the South read from the same Bible. Long before Lincoln, Douglass had learned that the Bible was the highest authority of American slavery and the strongest link in the chain of oppression and violence that warranted slavery as the sacred basis for the Christian culture of what would become the Confederacy” (23).

“Bitter experience had taught Douglass and other slaves and former slaves that the master class of the United States bore a whip in one hand and a Bible in the other. It was this Bible that Garnet and his colleagues were now proposing to send to the South” (23).

“Douglass anticipated that the Bibles sent to the South would become raw material for proslavery propaganda” since he “knew intimately what Garnet's limited experience with slavery could not teach: that the justice of the Bible was not self-evident. Douglass had begun to learn the Bible as a slave, and he knew that some people reading the Bible under the slave regime remained tone-deaf to its message of justice” (24).

The two former slaves held dramatically different perceptions of the Bible’s role in either combating or supporting injustice and oppression in ways that directly parallel perceptions found today (over 160 years later) among those who also see the Bible as naturally supporting one side or the other of this justice/injustice divide. So abolitionist and contemporary perceptions of the Bible are similarly divided. What will it take if future perceptions of the Bible are not to be similarly divided on this crucial point?

We who love the Bible cannot afford to be naïve about the fact that while it does and should do great good in people’s lives and in the world (including supporting battles against slavery, prejudice and other social evils) it has also been used to promote and/or justify oppressive relationships, institutions or cultural realities, including crusades, inquisition, slavery, apartheid, genocide, the abuse of women, children and minorities. It has been used to empower the powerful at the expense of the powerless.

How can we work to make sure that it serves as a weapon of justice rather than an accessory to injustice? Callahan points out that “none of Jesus’s words have been more influential—and more troublesome for the ideology of American slavery—than the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others what you would have them do unto you’ (Matt. 7:12). Simple observance of this simple principle would have rendered American slavery impossible” (35). Of course, the Golden Rule turns out to be a paraphrase of the command to love our neighbor as ourselves (found in Leviticus 19:18 and repeatedly cited by Jesus and his apostles [Matt. 5:43; 19:19; 22:39; Mark 12:31; Rom. 13:9; Gal. 5:14; Jas. 2:8]). So we are brought back again to Jesus’ own hermeneutic of love.

In his teaching On Christian Doctrine (1.36-37), Saint Augustine of Hippo stressed the importance of a hermeneutic of love. He argued that “[t]he fulfillment and end of scripture is the love of God and our neighbor.” Furthermore, “[t]hat interpretation of Scripture which builds us up in love is not perniciously deceptive nor mendacious, even though it be faulty…. Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought. If, on the other hand, a man draws a meaning from them that may be used for the building up of love, even though he does not happen upon the precise meaning which the author whom he reads intended to express in that place, his error is not pernicious, and he is wholly clear from the charge of deception.”

What if future generations could not look back (as I have just done with Callahan’s help) and continue to see that the same contradictory patterns continued through the 21^st century? What if the hermeneutic of Jesus, Augustine, abolitionists and others, a hermeneutic of love for God and neighbor might become so widely accepted that those that continue to interpret the Bible abusively would find themselves without any significant following due to a widespread awareness of such tragic abuse?

It is my prayer that God might bring that about and glorify himself through the church in that way… “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” (Ephesians 3:20-21; ESV)

Cutting through Time

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

Few writers capture the natural world better than John McPhee, and his 1971 book Encounters with the Archdruid is one of his best. In it, he tells the story of arch-conservationist David Brower meeting up in the field with, in turn, a mining expert, a developer, and the US head of dam-building. The last encounter involves a rafting trip down the Colorado River, which causes McPhee to reflect on one of his driving passions, geology. He is speaking of the layers of rock through which the Colorado has driven down through the millennia:

"The Tapeats Sandstone is the earliest rock from the Paleozoic Era, and beneath it the mind is drawn back to the center of things, the center of the canyon, the cutting plane, the Colorado. Flanked by its Bass Limestones, its Hotauta Conglomerates, its Vishnu Schists and Zoroaster Granites, it races in white water through a pre-Cambrian here and now. The river has worked its way down into the stillness of original time."

For some, the mere thought of process in creation, let alone the vast quantities of time needed for such processes to proceed, is enough to trigger floods of anxiety. Does this not threaten to take away the glory of God in creating the world?

Hardly. The thought of God taking his time to create is precisely what Genesis 1 is at pains to stress, however we might interpret the word “day” in the text. The fact that he might have taken more time than we expect to have brought the world into its present state simply gives us more space to contemplate his infinite majesty. Indeed, it’s hard to see how a stock phrase like “infinite majesty” can find any purchase in our minds apart from rooting it in the very large numbers provided for us by geologic time.

The point is not to pick at numbers: once we get past ten thousand years or so, we lose any meaningful existential connection to the figures. (It is like trying to measure the distance to the sun with a ruler – you are not going to get close, even if you stand on tip-toe.) The point is that the Bible invites us to think of the world as really old, and to think of God as even older than that.

There is something else at work here as well. God not only takes his time to create, he also creates a world with what Colin Gunton calls Selbständigkeit or a “proper independence”. This is not the absolute independence imagined by the atheists or Deists, but rather the meaningful existence of the creation as something other than God. This is best captured in Genesis in the account of the creation of plants: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so (Gen. 1:11).” God creates in the beginning; but he also (literally) sows the seed for the perpetuation of creation through the ages.

As we wander through God’s world then, or as we watch the Colorado wander along its course through the canyons, we should be alert both to the record of what he has done in the past, and the wonder of what he is still doing in the present. Only then will we develop the confidence that he is indeed willing and able to bring the promise of creation to its fulfillment in the ultimate future…however long he takes to do it.

The Residue of Another Day

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

When I came through the front door of the house the other day, Cec, my wife, hardly had to look up. She knew precisely what I had been doing that afternoon. I wore the residue of my day’s avocation like a woolly cloak. Although she hadn’t followed me step by step through the day, she knew with certainty my life had something to do with rich black dirt, back yard greenery, mulch and twigs , and…sweat. I had spent the entire day accumulating such, little by little. What to do with the excesses of the day? Off to the shower I went.

We talk a great deal these days about building lives of character, both in our churches but also in terms of a larger value-laden conversation we have with our culture. More times than not we speak of the enterprise in simple subjective terms as if character were a commodity that is manufactured solely from within ourselves. Like hardboiled New England farmers we think of character building as picking ourselves up by our bootstraps and “just doing it!”

Without diminishing our own initiative in living lives of integrity, I am increasingly thinking of character as an external phenomenon, as those things in life that cling to us. I used to meet regularly with a group of men on Wednesday mornings, and we used to talk often about the nature of temptation and the fact that none of us seem to get through a day without feeling the often-times grimy effects of the culture around us. How do we keep ourselves clean when our entire environment is so contaminated?

Indeed, in many respects, we are the sum total of the residue that clings to us. None of us—not even those of us who live between parsonage and pulpit—live outside the realm of our influences. And isn’t it the case that the influences that are least apparent to us are the most destructive spiritually? And we wonder why the Apostle Paul is so intent on disciplining us to put on the whole armor of God to combat the influences that so easily cling to us.

But, to speak of Christian character only in terms of the boot black that rubs off on us from our world is to look at one side of the story. What of the godly residue that we brush up against in the context of the influences God places in our lives each day? Can you name the five most influential individuals in your life, past and present? Who has God put in your life that has shaped you, one person, perhaps, who has altered your thinking and behavior in dramatic ways? Who has left a residue on your life? And, what character residue are others receiving from you as a result of your influence on their lives?

Because He Lives!

By Roy Ciampa, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

As we approach Easter Sunday my thoughts go to a few key passages about Christ’s resurrection and what it means for our own present and future.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ takes us to the heart of the gospel. It is the climactic event to which all four gospels lead us to look forward as we read along. And other New Testament authors also make it clear that Christ’s resurrection is at the heart of the gospel message. In Romans 1:2-4, Paul refers to “the gospel [God] promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding his Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord” (NIV). That Christ now reigns as “the Son of God in power” is established by his resurrection from the dead. The long-awaited time has finally arrived when, rather than being merely a bit player in the politics of the Ancient Near East as was the case throughout , God’s anointed Davidic king now reigns over all creation to bring righteousness, peace and joy to all those who recognize him for who he is. The resurrection of Christ is the promise of our future and that of creation as a whole, and gives meaning to our present life in the midst of the sufferings and challenges we face in this world. As Paul says in light of the resurrection in Romans 8:18, “our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”

Here are a few more thoughts on the meaning of Christ’s resurrection, mainly in light of Paul’s discussion of it in 1 Corinthians 15 and drawn from the new Pillar commentary on 1 Corinthians (Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner, The First Letter to the Corinthians [The Pillar New Testament Commentary; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010], pages 737-9):

For Paul, the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead is at the heart of the gospel message (1 Cor. 1-15), gives meaning to our life and service to Christ in this present age (vv. 16-19, 29-32) and serves as a fundamental basis for perseverance in Christ (v. 58). It also clarifies (as do some other NT texts) the relationship between protology and eschatology (the beginning and the end of the human story, vv. 24-28, 45-49) and the relationship between Christ’s experience of resurrection and glory/reign and God’s intentions for the rest of his people (vv. 20-28). The doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, more fully expounded here than in any other part of Scripture, makes it clear that God’s purpose has never been simply that of “saving souls” for a disembodied existence in heaven, as though creation itself was of merely temporal usefulness and significance. Creation turns out to be not simply the context in which God is working out his redemptive work, but reflects instead the breadth of God’s redemptive concern and plan. Physical, earthly and bodily existence have to do with the nature of creation as God made it and, in a completely redeemed and transformed version, are part of the nature of the context and existence that God has in mind for us and the rest of creation throughout eternity. Our life in this world matters, in part, because it turns out to be not merely a waiting room in which we pass our time until being invited into the rest of the building where we will really live. Our life in this world establishes the starting chapters for a story that will continue and flourish in radically new ways (and not merely begin for the first time) upon the resurrection of the dead.

As Oliver O’Donovan has argued (Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline of Evangelical Ethics, 13), “Christian ethics depends upon the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead”:

In proclaiming the resurrection of Christ, the apostles proclaimed also the resurrection of mankind in Christ; and in proclaiming the resurrection of mankind, they proclaimed the renewal of all creation with him. The resurrection of Christ in isolation from mankind would not be a gospel message. The resurrection of mankind apart from creation would be a gospel of a sort, but of a purely Gnostic and world-denying sort which is far from the gospel that the apostles actually preached.[1]

O’Donovan also points out (p. 56) that “[t]he resurrection of Christ, upon which Christian ethics is founded, vindicates the created order in this double sense: it redeems it and it transforms it.” The proclamation of the resurrection of Christ “directs us forward to the end of history which that particular and representative fate is universalized in the resurrection of mankind from the dead… (15:23). The sign that God has stood by his created order implies that his order, with mankind in its proper place within it, is to be totally restored at the last” (O’Donovan, 15). This message gives meaning and significance to this present life, making it clear that our “life on earth is important to God; he has given it its order; it matters that it should conform to the order he has given it. Once we have grasped that, we can understand too how this order requires of us both a denial of all that threatens to become disordered and a progress towards a life which goes beyond this order without negating it” (O’Donovan, 14-15).

Although I’m not a big fan of Gaither music, I can’t argue with their famous chorus. It is because He lives that I can face tomorrow without fear, and life at this present moment has meaning in light of the fact that He lives and holds the future.

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[1] O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 31. “The work of the Creator … is affirmed once and for all by this conclusion [i.e., the resurrection]. It might have been possible, we could say, before Christ rose from the dead, for someone to wonder whether creation was a lost cause. If the creature consistently acted to uncreate itself, and with itself to uncreate the rest of creation, did this not mean that God’s handiwork was flawed beyond hope of repair? It might have been possible before Christ rose from the dead to answer in good faith, Yes. Before God raised Jesus from the dead, the hope that we call ‘gnostic’, the hope of redemption from creation rather than for the redemption of creation, might have appeared to be the only possible hope. ‘But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead …’ (15:20). That fact rules out those other possibilities, for in the second Adam the first is rescued. The deviance of his will, its fateful leaning towards death, has not been allowed to uncreate what God created” (Resurrection and Moral Order, 14)

Bibleconomics?

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

Granted, Freakonomics it’s not. But the title is meant to raise the question – does the Bible have anything to do with Economics? My answer, as you probably expected, is yes…but how that should play out in pastoral ministry may be somewhat unexpected.

There are three basic approaches one finds with respect to economics in the American pulpit. In perhaps the majority of churches, economics is more or less ignored, apart from the occasional mention of the need to “help the poor” when the day’s Scripture reading makes that conclusion unavoidable. The second approach, more familiar in mainline churches, is to stress concern for the poor much more frequently, with “concern for the poor” generally defined as supporting left-ish economic policy. In reaction against this, one encounters churches which mount a robust defense of capitalism, often as part of a right-leaning political package.

The latter two approaches tend to rest on (at least) three assumptions: 1. The Bible engages with economic issues; 2. The Bible clearly encourages one approach to modern economic practice; 3. The Pastor’s job is to know the correct answer to point 2.

The first assumption, as I have already indicated, is a pretty good one. The Bible regularly addresses economic concerns, from the command to Adam and Eve to fill the earth and subdue it, right through to the kings bringing their glory into the New Jerusalem in Revelation (on the supposition that their “glory” includes the products of culture). It surfaces in obvious ways in the commands in Deuteronomy to permit gleaning, and in more subtle ways in places like Revelation 18, where “Babylon” is condemned for its luxurious self-indulgence and its exploitation of subject lands.

But the latter two assumptions are highly questionable. Let us start with point 2. The economic world of the Bible does of course have some connections with modern economies, but there are significant differences as well. A caricature may help make the point. We can imagine a toga-clad forebear of Scrooge McDuck swimming in a sea of gold coins as a paradigm for the ancient view of wealth. I have it, you don’t, and it’s all stashed away in my vault far from your prying hands. This is significantly different from a modern person with a stock portfolio, whose wealth is in fact active paying salaries, funding factory building, and doing all sorts of other things. This hardly frees the modern rich person from the need to be generous and self-sacrificial. But it does raise interesting questions as to how loving your neighbor works itself out in a complex global economy.

Assumption 3 is even more questionable. Unless you happen to have an especially handy pastor, you wouldn’t typically call upon them to fix your burst pipes. You would call a plumber. Why do we imagine it is any different with economics? The minister’s job is to orient people to the landscape of God’s word, not to imagine she can traverse every square foot herself. Rather than promulgate half-baked economic theories, pastors need to equip economists and business people and NGO activists to be the sorts of Christians who can use their unique abilities to further God’s kingdom.

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

A big God requires that we think big. Perhaps the reason our churches aren’t thriving is because we haven’t thought big enough? Right?

So, we set big goals for ourselves and our places of ministry, our churches. BHAG—Big Hairy Audacious Goals—is the current battle cry from a couple of years ago. Big Hairy Audacious Goals for prayer: (“It’s not enough for a few people to pray. Imagine what God could do if thousands of people prayed for the same thing at the same time, preferably at the same place?”). Big Hairy Audacious Goals for evangelism: (“Pick a number, any number; how many dare we save for Christ?”) Big Audacious Hairy Goals for missions: (“Dare we strategize campaigns that would encompass whole countries, even entire continents?”). Big Hairy Audacious Goals for churches: (“Big churches require big programs and big budgets designed to bulge our imaginations”). “We receive not because we ask not.”

To drive these goals, we, of course, need a vision. A neighborhood corner store kind of vision will not do. We need a mega-store, Wal Mart-Home-Depot kind of vision. We need an expansive vision, a great vision that matches the bigness of God. Dare I say, to truly honor God, we need a vision that explores the very frontiers of God’s providence in our lives? “If there is no vision, the people perish.”

And, of course, a big vision requires a certain type of leader. Big, thick, deep voices are required to not only think and articulate big, deep, expansive thoughts, but also provide the will to see these mega-visions through to their end. Leaders need to be out front—way out in front--of their organizations, calling their people to the kind of obedience required to fulfill these big visions. We need more big daydreamers, daydreamers for God’s glory.

In the midst of all of this mega-vision casting we hear a thin small voice: “God hates visionary dreaming.” Come again? A wisp of a voice it is, indeed, almost in auditable. Have we heard him right? The logic of the words run so counter to the current orthodoxy of obedience. There it is again: “God hates visionary dreaming.”

Allow me to put the words into context. Quoting from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's, Life Together,

God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.

Bonhoeffer's creaky, sixty-plus year old words about Christian community fall like a thud on the current evangelical landscape. They just do not add up in our current economics of obedience. The words sound downright counter-intuitive to what we know of the way God works in our lives and expects of us. But are they wrong?

Perhaps Bonhoeffer's words expose a growing theological presumption on our part, a presumption driven by a deficient understanding of who God is in the economy of His design for His world. As well intended as our big designs are on behalf of God and His Kingdom, are they not sometimes tainted ever so lightly with our own hubris? Does God need us to fulfill His Kingdom here on earth? Certainly. By an act of His grace, He has providentially written us into His grand redemptive story. But, does He really need us in the ways we often design for Him? I sometime think if God were somehow written out of the big plans we have for Him in fulfilling His Kingdom, it would take an uncomfortable amount of time for us to realize His absence. At the end of the day, our grand designs for God are wonderfully expendable.

Perhaps the net effect of our well-intended pandering for doing great things for God is that our big goals and big visions and big plans sometime overshadow the hard work of obedience. Cast our eyes back to the narrative of Scripture and Church History. What is the pattern we see? Do we really see the great imprint of God’s work in redemptive history as the product of well conceived, humanly orchestrated, BHAG plans? Not really. More times than not, God’s story is one of steadfast, obedient people being caught up and transformed by a divine plan that extends far beyond their own best intensions. It may be that God’s work is periodically manifest in dramatic fashion. More often than not, however, the work of God is an exercise in plain, hard obedience.

It is easy enough to throw out big numbers, make big promises, set a big strategy that get our juices flowing. And, we would think these are harmless. But are they? Doug Birdsall—Executive Director of Lausanne and our own Director of the J Christy Wilson Center for World Missions—has made the observation that one of the dangerous trends in the mission’s movement today involves many of the current mega-strategies going on in missions. On the surface, setting big goals for winning millions of souls for Christ appears to be the very thing that will excite our imaginations and incite our prayers. In reality, they have had the effect of diverting much needed attention and resources from the really hard work of life long missions efforts by so many faithful missions agencies.

But, finally, Bonhoeffer's words are mostly directed toward church leaders. Leadership is a delicate thing, isn’t it? Looking across the landscape of the church today, don’t we see enough examples of leadership blinded by ambition, but falsely camouflaged as faithfulness? This is not to say that Christian leaders with big, deep visions aren’t sincere, but, isn’t this the point? Sincerity is a dangerous gatekeeper to what is truthful and right. Our hearts are so vulnerable to our own self-deceptive ways.

What is the antidote to this self-deception for those of us in leadership roles in the Church? Contrary to what we would guess looking at the row upon rows of books on leadership located at not only Border’s but also our neighborhood Christian bookstore, the New Testament really speaks very little about being a good leader. There really is so little biblical evidence for the need for big visionary dreamers. The clarion call of the Gospels is all about being good followers. This is what Jesus asks of us, to be humble dreamers with enough sense to follow Him.