Category Archives: Discipleship

Hearts and minds on fire

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by Jeff Gissing | @jeffgissing

Lauren Winner is interviewed at Comment, a journal of Cardus (a think tank dedicated to the renewal of North American social architecture). It’s an interview that’s worth reading. I’ll pull out some highlights below. Thanks to Andy Byers (@Byers_Andy) for the link.

Two Qualities of a minister…

 I teach future pastors at a divinity school because I believe that thinking well matters—I want my students’ future congregations to be guided by pastors who know how to think clearly, think well about (among other things) theology, politics, and history.

-Lauren F. Winner

Two qualities ought to be present and mutually-reinforcing in a minister: vital piety and a well-formed mind.

Parts of the church have elevated piety and made it to stand alone. A heart of fire is enough for these people, and they do not trust the mind. Others have emphasized the life of the mind and have come to distrust the heart.

In reality the two must go together–a heart burning with love to God and others as well as a keen mind with which one worships God and seeks to know God through His self-disclosure in Scripture. 

Five books you should read…

Reading is indispensable for those in leadership, especially for those whose leadership is in the church. Guiding a community of people is a complicated task at the best of times, especially when that group of people are “strangers and aliens” in the midst of a culture that no longer (if it ever really did) understands its story in the story of God.

The minister has an essential task of being rooted in the redemptive history of God and, at the same time, interpret and apply that story to a people who are also located in the world (which has a competing story). It’s impossible to do either of these things without reading. The Biblical world requires both knowledge and understanding. The contemporary world also requires hermeneutical skill and tools. The minister is, as John Stott’s book puts it, between two worlds.

In what ways do you think it important for ministers to be trained?

When calendars collide

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by Jeff Gissing | @jeffgissing

When secular and ecclesiastical calendars collide, the secular calendar always wins. At least, it seems that way to me. Christmas on a Sunday? Let’s cancel church–Christmas is a time for family, right? Pentecost on Memorial Day weekend? Time to head to the beach. Observing this little fact over the years suggests that culture is more deeply shaping many American Christians than the story of the Church.

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Pentecost celebrates the church’s coming into being as recounted in Acts 2. The giving of the Holy Spirit is no small part of the story of the Church and it’s no small part of the story of individual Christians. That we are so immune or ignorant of the Spirit’s work in our own lives is, again, testimony to the ill health of the Christian community.

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Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with secular holidays such as Memorial Day. As a Reformed Christians I have no problem observing the sacrifice of members of the Armed Forces who have given their lives in the defense of the nation. The military is an extension of the civil authority and therefore is to be respected.

Further, I don’t have a great deal of problem with a sense of allegiance to or respect for one’s nation. After all, we’re all born somewhere and as part of some people. It seems to me that love of neighbor begins with love of one’s fellow countrymen. It should be remembered, of course, that love of country and allegiance to the flag (or the crown) has its limits.

There is a prior or more ultimate allegiance for the Christian–Christ himself and His bride, the church. We shouldn’t forget how radical a statement that can be. After all, imagine such words coming from the mouth of a Muslim. Some of us might feel somewhat different in that instance.

What I long for is a day when the evangelical church is marked by a growing sense of its on-going participation in the story of Christ as marked by the church calendar. What I hope for is the sense that above and before all other commitments is a commitment to a local group of believers who live in intentional accord with the testimony in the book of Acts (2.42):

And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

I get excited envisioning a day in which when two calendars collide, the church calendar wins.

Don Quixote de la Vanderbilt

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by Jeff Gissing | @jeffgissing

They’re tilting at windmills again! Thirteen campus ministries are continuing their attempt to get Vanderbilt to reverse its decision to implement an all-comers policy for determining qualification to lead a student organization. As I understand it, the policy prohibits religious groups from using religious criteria to select their leaders. It has effectively revoked university recognition for more than ten student groups.

The saga continued this week with the publication of an Open Letter to the university. Personally, I have never seen the point of Open Letters (but that’s just me). Here it is:

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It is challenging to believe that university will reverse itself based on this letter. Parents, alumni, and donors of the university have expressed concern over the policy–to now avail. The Tennessee legislature passed a bill threatening state funding to the university. They had their bluff called by the university aided by the Governor who (not unreasonably) vetoed the bill.

Do InterVarsity, et al, really believe that they can prevail against an institution with the money, influence, and time that Vanderbilt enjoys (the university has the money and influence to outlast a protest movement)?

I haven’t the faintest idea. However, I do know a couple of things.

  • First, it is never wrong to fight for what is right though it may cost a great deal.
  • Second, truth is stronger that falsehood. Regardless of the outcome truth will, in the end, prevail.
  • Third, the Christian God specializes in using the marginal to overcome the powerful, using folly to outsmart the wise, and using the weak to defat the strong.

I guess that means that, in the end, the Don Quixotes of Vanderbilt have more going for them than one might think.

Embracing our post-Christendom future

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by Jeff Gissing | @jeffgissing

We are living in a post-Christendom era–a time in which the influence of the Christian church has become significantly diminished. Post-Christendom is not post-Christian. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is as powerful as it ever was, but it’s transformative work will take place despite resistance rather than with the support of society.

Opinions differ on where we are in the process of decline, but most agree that the age of a “Christian America” has come and gone. To the extent that America is Christian that Christian faith is increasingly more akin to moral therapeutic deism described by sociologist Christian Smith.

I recently read two articles that are worthy of your time:

  • On The Telegraph blog Tim Stanley argues: “…It’s perfectly possible to be a Christian within a society that regulates or proscribes religious practices. The Christians in classical Rome or the Catholics in communist Poland proved that.” However, removing the influence of Christianity from a culture creates an undesirable alternative: “A society that has no moral point of reference beyond the reason of the individual (and who, in their right mind, would trust that?), or the ever shifting law of the land, is bound towards selfishness and tyranny.”
  • Timothy Tennent of Asbury Theological Seminary notes that we have a huge opportunity afforded by this post-Christendom period. That is the chance to recover a robust Christianity “finally set free from the domesticating influence of Christendom.” We’re not there yet. Tennent describes our depressing current reality: “We have retreated so far from biblical Christianity you can almost hear the Christian oxygen being sucked out of the culture at every turn.  The church has become one of the most vacuous spaces of all.”

It’s an exciting and alarming time to be a Christian, especially a Christian in ministry leadership. While I do not know what the future holds, I know the God who holds the future.

Ayn Rand or Simone de Beauvoir?

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Tom Stork at the Distributist Review outlines the internal contradictions that exist within the two main political groupings in our society: conservatives and liberals.

In short, liberals are aware of the danger of the unrestrained pursuit of wealth and are willing to employ the power of the state to ensure that wealth benefits the common good. However, when it comes to sexual ethics, the left advocates a laissez-faire attitude that totally ignores the harm to the common good that arises from unrestrained sexual appetite.

In similar fashion, the right is very aware of the detrimental effects of unrestrained pursuit of sexual pleasure but almost oblivious to the same danger that arises from the unrestrained pursuit of wealth.

Conservatives quite rightly point to the stabilizing influence of intact families and to the many benefits such families bring to the whole social fabric. They rightly are concerned that the selfish pursuit of individual pleasure harms others, such as children and abandoned spouses, as well as society as a whole. They likewise realize that when society allows free play to the passion for unrestrained sexual pleasure, people in general will begin to look at every relationship and transaction with solely an eye for their own personal pleasure. The desire for erotic satisfaction tends to color the whole of the life of society.

When it comes to the acquisition of wealth, an entirely different view exists:

Individuals want to get rich, only envious liberals and socialists want to prevent this. No matter how much the unrestrained pursuit of wealth may harm the common good, none of this matters. The effects of wage stagnation on marriages and families, the devastation of neighborhoods and cities by companies moving abroad simply in order to get the highest return on their investment with no regard for society—none of this matters. From being zealous for the common good and ready to place all manner of restraints on human conduct in the sexual realm, conservatives run to the other extreme and embrace a policy of laissez-faire when it comes to money. They even invent an ideology that pretends that the pursuit of private wealth somehow redounds to the benefit of all, despite much experience showing the falsity of this. It is hard to understand how conservatives do not see, or profess not to see, that the unrestrained and anti-social pursuit of money can do as much harm to the social fabric as the unrestrained pursuit of sexual pleasure. But conservatives do not see this. A disordered notion of freedom constitutes almost their entire approach to economic morality.

This contradiction is one of the reasons that I find it incredibly difficult to give my vote to either party. In reality, both of these political groupings represent values that I find to be profoundly at odds with both the teachings of Christ, the testimony of Scripture, and the reflections of the Church on ethical matters.

It is possible that, for the first time since I have been eligible to vote, I may this year refrain from doing so as a form of protest. It is difficult to cast a ballot and thereby affirm either the twisted machinations of a party obsessed with the devilish teaching of Ayn Rand or to a party so committed to sexual libertinism that it is willing to harm the very most vulnerable of those among us. What will it be? Will you choose Ayn Rand or Simone de Beauvoir?

What do you think? How do you reconcile the inherent tension in voting?