This morning members and associates of APWM, accompanied by guests from Vanuatu, were guests of Epping Presbyterian Church (Sydney).
We were encouraged by both the 9.00am and 10.30am services, at which we heard sermons from Matthew Oates on Hosea 13/14 and Russell Smidt on Joel 3, respectively. The early service featured contemporary songs and the later one older songs, with both congregations in good voice, ably supported by musicians and others.
Afterward Epping provided us with lunch, at which Rev Kalorongo Ova, Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Vanuatu brought greetings to us and told us something of the church’s current situation. Then Rev. Kalorongo was joined by his wife Rose, along with PWMU Vanuatu President Mrs Leifai Chilia and the PWMU General Secretary Mrs Cyrilline Bani in singing a song for us.
It was lovely to watch the former Vanuatuans present quietly adding their voices to the praise.

Today at MGPC at lunch and presentation were held to mark the 100th anniversary of WEC International.
Marking a century of work that was commenced by notable cricketer C.T. Studd, today we heard about the compelling present and future needs for cross cultural Gospel work.
Speakers today were Helga and Jenny, both of whom shared perspectives gleaned from decades of service.
Though it was time of giving thanks for past fruitfulness, we were challenged about the situation of Syria, among others.
This was so timely because only last night the eldership of MGPC determined to initiate some form of appeal for emergency aid for the persecuted church in Syria.
Today’s presentations only served to confirm the need for this course of action.
Thanks to John, Una and others for organising this wonderful function, and thanks to Helga and Jenny for blessing us with their presence.

Jenny from WEC

Helga from WEC

David Cook (Moderator-General, Presbyterian Church of Australia) writes about recent visits to Presbyterian schools and offers words of encouragement and challenge about communicating the Gospel to new generations.

The rock band, Daft Punk released their much anticipated album, Random Access Memories, in May 2013 at the 79th Annual Wee Waa Show. It seemed so out of place, apparently that was the point, the promoters wanted to stress the disorientation of it all, a world wide rock release in a small farming town.
Every preacher knows that the biggest battle he faces is the battle against disorientation.
Let me explain: people expect hymns, Bible readings, prayers and preaching in church, but once they hit the street they move to the “real” world and leave all that they have heard behind. Real truth is lost in the disorientation of the world outside.
One book on preaching calls this the problem of WACO – “works at church only”.
This year I have been spending some time preaching evangelistically in church schools of the Anglican and Presbyterian variety, both for boys and girls.
I believe disorientation is a particular problem in these.
The prevailing culture of the school may be secular, humanistic, feministic, deistic and then chapel is plonked in the middle of it all – like a rock album’s release at the Wee Waa Show.
The first visits I made after becoming Moderator General were to Principals of our Presbyterian schools in Melbourne and Sydney. I wanted to encourage, challenge and just get the feel of the place, the vibe, if you like.
It’s a question that we have been debating for decades, ought we keep these schools, on their expensive lands, if they are only going to be centres of elitism and privilege and actually encourage the conviction that the Christian gospel has nothing to do with living life realistically.
We need to pray for Boards of Schools and pray for Principals to be men and women of strong commitment to Christ, pray that in the most important matter of staff appointments, vital, dynamic, Spirit-filled Christian believers will be appointed. Pray that such teachers will make themselves available.
And recognize the great work being done by chaplains and Christian studies teachers and look for ways of encouraging them and helping them. One senior teacher at one of the schools told me: “If you can teach Christian studies you can teach anything”. The problem of disorientation will only be overcome by teachers and staff who have bridged the world of the Bible to their day to day lives and live each day as followers of Christ, practitioners of the Christian gospel.
I have made an emphasis of my three year term, Psalm 78:5-8 – we must teach the next generation so that they will know God’s words, trust in Him and obey Him and not repeat the mistakes of our generation.
Our schools provide a wonderful facility for us to do that and so to honour the God of trans generational concerns.
Let us pray and actively support this front line missionary activity in our own backyard, and give particular attention to the presentation of the reports of our schools to our State Assemblies.

David Cook

Source

Saw lots and lots of friends in Sydney this past week, including Rev Bill Lutton.
Bill and Jenny are currently serving in Kingaroy, Qld. When they visited Mount Gambier some years ago (when Bill was director of APWM) he introduced us to the wonderful song From The Sun’s Rising.
A great song of sending, and a song with Gospel intent for the nations from Graham Kendrick.
We’ve sung it over the years since.
Thanks, Bill.

The lyrics:
1.
From the sun’s rising
Unto the sun’s setting
Jesus our Lord
Shall be great in the earth
And all earth’s kingdoms
Shall be his dominion
All of creation
Shall sing of his worth
Refrain.
Let every heart, every voice
Every tongue join with spirits ablaze
One in his love, we will circle the world
With the song of his praise
O, let all his people rejoice
And let all the earth hear his voice!
2.
To every tongue, tribe
And nation he sends us
To make disciples
To teach and baptise
For all authority
To him is given
Now as his witnesses
We shall arise
Refrain.
3.
Come let us join with
The church from all nations
Cross every border
Throw wide every door
Workers with him
As he gathers his harvest
’til earth’s far corners
Our Saviour adore
Refrain.

Graham Kendrick
Copyright © 1988 Make Way Music,
http://www.grahamkendrick.co.uk

Here’s an album track of the song.

Bonus: Sri Lankan combined school’s choir rendition.

Thanks to Ray Ortlund for posting this quote from Lesslie Newbigin:

“There has been a long tradition which sees the mission of the Church primarily as obedience to a command. It has been customary to speak of ‘the missionary mandate.’ This way of putting the matter is certainly not without justification, and yet it seems to me that it misses the point. It tends to make mission a burden rather than a joy, to make it part of the law rather than part of the gospel. If one looks at the New Testament evidence one gets another impression. Mission begins with a kind of explosion of joy. The news that the rejected and crucified Jesus is alive is something that cannot possibly be suppressed. It must be told. Who could be silent about such a fact? The mission of the Church in the pages of the New Testament is more like the fallout from a vast explosion, a radioactive fallout which is not lethal but life-giving.”

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids, 1989), page 116.

Just a brief note as we prepare for day two.
As they say in the classics ‘he wrote the book.’
The ground covered in Keller’s talks yesterday focussed on the latter content of Center Church.
Of interest were:
His observations on institutions and movements and their differences, strengths and limitations.
Gospel work needs the best of both: the structure and accountability of an institution and the focus and flexibility of a movement.
Revival being a time when sleepy Christians awake, where nominal Christians become born-again (and know it), and when unbelievers come along to see and hear what’s happening (and get impacted by the Gospel).
The imperative for different denominations to retain their strengths and distinctives, but be open to learning from the strengths of others without defensiveness.
The need to pastor and lead in a way that helps people be Christians all the time, not just on weekends and evenings.
How evangelism, integration of faith and work, deeds of justice and mercy need to be integrated into gathered church life and discipleship. Helping Christians think about how their work places and vocations can be kingdom work.
The recognition that institutions can lose their first love and come to exist for their own sake, and that movements can lose their first love and come to exist for the sake of those they once sought to impact for the Gospel.

The fact that Jesus is raised from the grave, and that truth defines our identity, not our desires, relationships, or the way we’re perceived by others.

Some grabs from yesterday.
Contextualisation: Bringing the changeless message of the Gospel to address the particular cultural situation of the audience.
Sermon introductions: ‘Open up your Bibles to …’ is also a contextualised approach to a felt need of an audience.
No one presentation can transcend all cultures.
What steps do we take to locate/stay in touch with the context of our locality?

On marriage and ministry (in conversation from Kathy and Tim Keller):
If you have an unhealthy marriage, how can you have a healthy ministry? The Gospel of Christ is clouded if it’s not being exercised at home.
Ministry marriages fall apart: how does it happen? – getting busy for the Lord, getting hollow in life. Something comes along to fill the hole.
Over the long journey sexual chemistry will not be consistent.
Friendship can be. It needs to be continually renewed and remembered.
Culture tells us when you lose sight of it you move on.
Every relationship gets old.
You have to learn to reinvigorate and renew them.
Put new meaning in the physical and non-physical aspects of relationships.
Possible quote of the day: ‘Sometimes it’s just meat and potatoes sex.’ (from Kathy Keller)

Missional conversation: not about changing the topic to the Gospel, but bringing the Gospel to bear on every topic.

And Chris Siriweera wanted me to include this photo of him, to prove that he was here.

Michael Milton cites this stirring observation by David Livingstone about his labours in Africa.
These words are a challenge and an invitation that rings across the generations:

“People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay? Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word in such a view and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger now and then with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause and cause the spirit to waver and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.”
Dr David Livingstone in his Lectures to Students at Cambridge University on 4 December 1857.

There’s a list of references for further reading at Milton’s blog.

I linked to the first part of this series a couple of weeks ago.
In parts 2 and 3 Skye Jethani expands on his observation of church as destination instead of vehicle.

Here’s the link to part 2 “The church can learn an important lesson from this delusion: Relevance backfires when it overshadows your uniqueness.”

And in part 3 “Large ships trade flexibility for efficiency. The same is true for megachurches. One example occurred in 2005 when Christmas fell on a Sunday. Large churches across the country announced they would not have Sunday worship services on Christmas Day while most smaller churches remained opened.”

Interesting thoughts as a trend in churches seems to toward smaller congregations with simpler program structures.
Everything old is new again.

This article from Gospel Coalition Australia challenges a perception that seeing our own localities as mission fields fulfils the local church’s obligation to partner in global mission.
From the post:

We are not saying that Australia doesn’t need Gospel mission – it does. We are not saying that local Gospel believers don’t need to constantly sharpen their local mission focus and practice – they do. We are not saying that local pastors aren’t worth praying for and that their sacrifices in ministry aren’t worth noticing – they are. But something happens when we take the word, “mission”, and strip it of the recent and powerful historical connection it has had to “world mission”, or “cross-cultural mission”. We can inadvertently become myopic and xenophobic. We can forget that the mission of God has a global, cross-cultural, every tribe and tongue and people and nation perspective. We can too easily frame our preference for mission according to our priorities instead of constantly attending to the way God sees his Church or mission in his whole wide world. We can forget that the biblical mandate is not to reach as many people as we can, as resource-efficiently or as cost-effectively as we can. No, it is rather, that we go and proclaim the glorious message of the Gospel to all peoples. Go … to All.

Read the whole post here.

With Usain Bolt’s inspiring third win in the Olympic 100 meter race, a lot of people (especially Christians) might remember the film Chariots Of Fire and the words attributed to Eric Liddell “God made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure.”
Albert Mohler writes that these words were a creation of the film’s writer and that Liddell’s actual sentiments were that “God made him for China”.
Liddell would begin and end his life in China, serving the Gospel until his final days.
Sometimes when you find out that a person never said a famous quote attributed to them it’s a bit deflating.
In this case it’s actually better than the original.

Read Mohler’s post here.

Christianity flourishes at the margins, not when it controls.
Jared Wilson:

Christian mission has always thrived by surging in the margins and under the radar. When we somehow get into positions of power, the wheels always come off. This is pretty much the way it’s always been. I once heard Steve Brown relate this story on the radio: “A Muslim scholar once said to a Christian, ‘I cannot find anywhere in the Qur’an that it teaches Muslims how to be a minority presence in the world. And I cannot find anywhere in the New Testament where it teaches Christians how to be a majority presence in the world.’”
Indeed, as Christianity spread throughout the first few centuries as a persecuted minority people, the conversion of Constantine paved the way for its becoming the official state religion of the Roman Empire by the end of the fourth century. That’s quite a turnaround for some backwater sect splintering off an oppressed Palestinian Judaism. But as my old religion professor in college, M. B. Jackson, used to say, “When everyone’s a Christian, no one is.” And once Christianity became the official religion, the church lost its prophetic voice and its vibrancy.

Read the whole post here.

Zac Hicks on corporate worship as true mission activity, perhaps in contrast to being evangelistic activity.

The symbiotic relationship between worship and mission means, first of all, that it would be unthinkable to ever replace corporate, gathered worship with missional acts of evangelism and community service, just as it would be unthinkable to remove a heart and simply tie the remaining veins and arteries together. Missional momentum halts when the heart of worship is removed. Second, if your church is struggling to be a truly missional body, worship must be a very real place of examination. Is the gospel clear and present in worship, or is it crowded out by other things? Ironically, our quest for a more evangelistic worship service, friendly and easy to swallow for non-Christians, has often muted the gospel in worship, rendering the service impotent of missional, transformative power. While we should always strive for worship to be intelligible and understandable to non-Christians, nothing short of prizing the gospel and making much of Jesus will create the kind of awe-inspiring zeal in the church that causes the watching world to cry, “God is really among you!” (1 Corinthians 14:25).

The Worship Pastor, Zac Hicks, Zondervan, 2016, pg 100.

Sam Kim writes about the social media fueled anxiety that seems to be eating away at younger generations.

Courtesy of Ed Stetzer’s blog:

In a culture based on shame and superficiality, the elephant in the room, which is the pressure to be amazing, is always staring directly at us.
If we truly want to win the hearts of the next generation with the gospel, we must help reclaim their identity as the beloved, because only perfect love can cast out fear.

Read the whole post here.

Daniel Darling on church being a snapshot of God’s grace and not homogeneous unit management principles:

Sometimes, in our quest to create cutting-edge churches, we sacrifice our long-term futures for short-term benefits. I’ve often felt this way as I’ve walked into vibrant, well-known churches or as I attend popular evangelical conferences. It seems that we are often creating a church for the young, hip, and sexy. It’s as if we want our message to the world to be something like, “See, church is the place where the cool people gather on Sunday.”
But the kingdom of God takes the opposite approach.
Jesus said it is the poor, the downtrodden, and the marginalized who have a prominent place in the kingdom of God (Matt. 5:3, 20:16). Paul reminded his churches of the shocking ordinariness of God’s people (1 Cor. 1:26). James scolded those in the church of Jerusalem for their tendency to favor the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the poor (James 2:1-13).
Do our congregations look like outposts of this radical kingdom? Do people enter our congregations and wonder to themselves, How did these disparate people get here? What possible thread unites people so vastly separated by age, race, political affiliation, and class? Why is it that old and young, black and white, disabled and able-bodied, rich and poor, prominent and anonymous gather together every Sunday?

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Mez McConnell reflects on Jesus observation about wealth being an obstruction to entering the kingdom of God and the implications of that for evangelism and church planting:

The Danger of Wealth
Jesus said it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, right? What he’s saying is this: When you’ve got money, when you’ve got material wealth, when you’ve got comfort, you feel invincible. You feel like you don’t need God. You don’t feel—at least in your outward portrayal—a spiritual need.
And so people become very hard, very bitter, very intellectually opposed to gospel truths. Whereas in less privileged communities, people are not necessarily happy, but they are more likely to admit they’re sinful, to admit that their lives aren’t perfect, to admit there’s a problem.
People in poor or ethically deprived communities are very supernaturalistic, so you meet very few atheists in such communities. These people’s problems aren’t necessarily with God (although they can be), but with the concept of church. People in that community see the church as a middle-class intellectual institution—which it largely is—and so apologetically, that’s the battle we’re fighting.
I think people in rich communities—with two cars on the drive, a nice house, and a full bank balance—in many ways are much harder to reach because all that wealth and comfort makes them think that they’re invincible. It may make them think that they don’t need anything outside of themselves. I often say that in many ways, my friends who work, reach, and plant in these communities are in very, very hard places.

source

Gary Millar reflects that in contemporary culture, making the idea that a local church is ‘just like you’ as central to its efforts to reach out into the community is no longer effective.
His conclusion:

Ultimately, the gospel itself is the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) of Christianity. God in Christ has made it possible through Jesus’ death and resurrection for people like us to know and enjoy him forever, as part of his family. I suspect that we need to throw ourselves into, not just proclaiming the gospel, but also demonstrating its implications with fresh enthusiasm. Because of the gospel, church really is different kind of community. Through the gospel, we have been reborn into a community marked by love, joy, peace and hope. The gospel announces that in Christ we really aren’t just like everyone else, but have been brought from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. Perhaps it’s time to start proclaiming that with a renewed confidence. Because that really does set us apart from the ‘competition’.

Read the whole post at Gospel Coalition Australia.

Mez McConnell writes frankly about a Christian culture that won’t invest in reaching hard places, but encourages people and churches to spend money based on sentiment or experience for little real return.
From his post.

Let’s not think too deeply about the fact that the Western evangelical money machine basically runs the most sophisticated and expensive 4D-real-life-experience/babysitting service in the world and then passes it off as legitimate short term missions and poverty alleviation. Agencies will spend millions on flashy and emotive videos in an effort to persuade people to give their lives to the cause of world missions. I know. At 20schemes we are desperate for gospel workers, male and female, to come to our land and share the good news of Jesus. Desperate. I could quote all the stats showing our need over and against another country’s need or another agency’s work. I could post the links right here to powerful videos of lives transformed by the gospel and then make the ask to join us on our exciting adventure into the future. But I’m tired of that. And you know what…so are you. So, my challenge to you is this—forget the idea, spoon-fed to the younger generations since birth, that you’re the future of your local church and the global church. You’re not. Jesus is. The best thing you can do for the kingdom this year is to knuckle down wherever God has you now. Ask your pastor and the elders how you can better serve them and your local congregation. Go out and find that John in your community. You’ll probably find them in the areas of your town that you would usually avoid, struggling away, invisible among all the bells and whistles of modern evangelicalism. If you’re really wanting to serve the least of these, go and do a free internship there. Serve him and that community in anonymity. Turn your iPhone off. Don’t tweet about it. Keep off Instagram.

Read the whole article at 20schemes.

The beginning of Gospel proclamation was not eye-witnesses trying to convince those who had not seen, but one group of eye-witnesses seeking to help other eye-witnesses understand what they all had seen. Even as Gospel proclamation continued on it was grounded in events that had happened and been seen and experienced.
From Dale Ralph Davis:

What does one make of all that? These were things that the early preachers of the gospel said and preached as eyewitnesses, as men who had been there. Here’s the crucial point: when they were preaching these things, they were preaching to other eyewitnesses, and they were often preaching to a lot of hostile eyewitnesses. If what the preachers were saying was not true, those hostile eyewitnesses would have exposed it as a fraud in the first century and you would never have heard of Christianity. Why didn’t that happen? Because even the hostile hearers could not dispute the truth and accuracy of what these original evangelists were proclaiming. When you preach in front of hostile hearers, you have to be careful with your facts. So, if you resist the gospel, do not claim that there is not enough evidence. There is evidence for you to deal with.

Dale Ralph Davis, True Words For Tough Times, EP Books, 2013, pg 69.