The Next Wave of Missions

Today's post is by a guest, and friend, Pastor Phil Stringer of Ravenswood Bible Baptist Church in Chicago.  It was released on Friday, Nov. 16th 2012.  It has to do with the recent election, but more importantly, with the responsibility of the Church, prior to and in response to it.

WHAT JUST HAPPENED?                                                                      The election of 2012!   On the evening of Nov 5, most of my friends went to sleep expecting a great wrong to be righted the next day. So did I.  We expected the American people to reject the economic blight of socialism, government by executive degree, abortion on demand at taxpayer expense, welfare systems that promote immorality, and gay marriage (among other problems).   By 8pm we were in shock as a slight majority of the American people (including 39% of evangelicals ) endorsed all those things.   Over the last few days we have been asking what happened.    There are some clear and important lessons to be learned. Yes, there are some things about  election strategy for the Republicans to learn.  You must focus on voter turnout and you cannot wait until October to fight back when you are attacked ( Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney all bragged about this strategy).  But there is a much bigger more obvious issue that has to be faced.   Urban America voted overwhelmingly for socialism and the new paganism, that is why Barack Obama, ( the ultimate spokesperson for the new paganism ) was re- elected president. However, suburban America voted for the conservative claims of the Republican party and rural America and small towns voted for traditional America in large numbers. There are a few scattered exceptions to this pattern but the pattern is more than 90% true. This is why the Republicans held onto the House of Representatives ( which represents the country on a geographical basis).   The country is overwhelmingly divided on a basis of the urban areas versus the rest of the country.  How did we ever get so divided?    In the 1960s and 1970s fundamental churches flooded out of our inner cities in America.  Bible churches, Bible Presbyterisns, Grace Brethren, Southern Baptists, and especially independent Baptists abandoned the inner cities for the easier experiences of the suburbs.  The city was too expensive , (especially property) and in the city you had to face racial issues that everyone wanted to avoid.  You couldn't build shiny new buildings and follow some of the church growth methods that you were expected to follow.  New converts often came with amazing amounts of baggage.  The urban areas were largely abandoned ( there were a few exceptions - Indianapolis, Oklahoma City, Dallas etc ) but the largest population centers were abandoned to paganism and liberalism. The new paganism got so bad that it made a Mormon and a Catholic look good to us.   There of course were a few bus ministries and chapels in the cities. Thank God for everyone who got saved in those ministries, I was saved as the result of an inner city bus ministry. However these ministries never influenced communities. It takes LOCAL churches and Christian schools to do that.  Since 1980, conservatives have tried to restore traditional America while ignoring the major population centers.  Evangelists have talked about revival while ignoring a majority of the people who live in the United States.  We are all now living with the results of moving most of our churches to the suburbs.                                                  THE NEXT GREAT WAVE of MISSIONS   There have been several waves of mission activity since the Great Awakening almost 300 years ago.  The most recent has been supporting national pastors and ministries. The next one had better be a wave of church and school planting in urban America.  This will take preachers with patience, realistic expectations and it will take a lot of outside support ( just as any mission field does in the early years). Our problems will not be solved politically. America was not founded on politics but on revival -  The Great Awakening.  It will not be restored by politics - if it is ever restored it will be restored by revival, evangelism, church planting and establishing Christian schools in our inner cities.   I can hear the critics saying that it is too late for our inner cities. They may be right but it is not too late for the individuals that we will reach in the process. Maybe, just maybe, the next great wave of missions could be as historic as some of the other waves have been. I am certain of one thing, if we do not return churches and schools to the inner city there is no hope for America.   Or course, if we continue to spend all our resources, energy and passion trying to destroy one another you can forecast the outcome easily. While we are fighting over the definitions of words, church politics and personal agendas our historic Christian culture is collapsing all around us. So far, we deserve no better.   We need our mission boards and Bible colleges to tackle this crisis, if they won't we may need a new mission board specifically for this time and challenge and new Bible colleges. We need pastors and churches with priorities and a burden.   One last wave of missions, attacking  the strongholds of the devil.  IS THERE ANYTHING BETTER TO DO. "Occupy until I come.   Pastor Phil Stringer, Ravenswood Baptist Church

Sunday follow-up for 11/18/24

In the message this morning I cited an article entitled Why I Love You, But Can’t Hang Out with You Anymore.

Click on the titled and it will take you there.  It comes courtesy of former-member from years ago (moved to Indianapolis), Rebecca (Ernst) Mexin, who put it on her facebook wall with this comment; "Ladies, this is an issue that has ruined numerous friendships of mine. I am honest with them, but I WILL NOT participate. This is a wonderful and challenging read! Thanks."

Read it and weep.


Remember that our Thanksgiving mid-week service is on Tuesday the 20th, not Wednesday the 21st.

And please remember to pray about renting our building on Sunday afternoons to Pastor Yoo and his congregation.

Another one bites the dust

If you are on facebook, you know how things show up on your wall.  Most of the time they aren't very interesting or funny, but occasionally they grab you - probably more often than I would like to admit.  I have plenty of "friends", because of all sorts of diverse interests, and I disagree with many of them about most things.  But it is from some of the ones I disagree with that the most interesting stuff comes from.

Anyway, this morning, a link was posted to a talk by Teresa MacBain on her transition from minister to atheist.  It is a very sad account of how she gradually became an atheist, after having been raised in the legalistic home of a fundamental Baptist pastor, becoming a Methodist pastrix, and eventually coming to reject the very idea of the existence of God.


If you are one of those people that tell yourself, or those who look up to you that the way to keep your faith when you have questions is to just work harder and throw yourself even more into religious activity, you really need to listen to this.  I hope it will help you to think again.

At around the 13:00 mark she begins to explain how she became confused trying to reconcile a very strong sense of "God's calling" to be a minister, despite the fact that she was a female, and the verses that taught clearly otherwise.  She even admits digging out any verses that might support women speaking in Church, and deliberately ignoring the ones that said otherwise.  But this produced doubt.  And since doubt is sin, she had been trained that the way to deal with sin was to throw yourself more into Christian service.

She immersed herself in Wesley for awhile, so she was influenced by his perfectionism, which was probably the last thing she needed to hear about that time.  Eventually she reaches the end of herself and discovers Bart Ehrman, who has nothing new to say - and all of what he does say was answered more than a century ago, and is being capably shot down today.  From there, the influences get progressively worse until she finally succumbed to unbelief.

There's more to the story, and you should hear it for yourself.  But she clearly never really got the gospel.  She never learned how to distinguish law and gospel, or how to read and interpret the Bible with a Christocentric Redemptive/Historical hermeneutic.  All she knew to do with it was what both liberals and fundygelicals all do alike - moralize and try drum up enthusiasm for more works righteousness.

Now she's an outspoken opponent of Christianity. Obviously, I don't endorse her position, but her story should be a lesson well taken by those who think that a repressive legalistic approach is the way to go.  The poor woman was so exhausted by the demands her religion she had imposed on her, so desperate to get off the treadmill, so tired of only getting "If you were right with God you wouldn't have those questions" as an excuse for an answer, she embraced becoming an atheist as her exit.  If she could only have a good reason to stop believing, she could stop working and being torn apart by her works-righteousness religion. 

She had never been taught how to come to grips with the harsh reality of being "simul Iustus, et Peccator" - at once justified and sinner, that she could walk before God in humble repentance continually and take her rest in the alien and imputed righteousness of Christ applied to her account that would have made her fully acceptable in the sight of God.  If only she had looked to the Reformation era confessions, or heard Rod Rosenbladt's lecture on "The Gospel for Those Broken By the Church" or read Horton's "Christless Christianity".  Things might have gone VERY differently.

But instead of hearing good news, she only got more not-so-good advice about what things she needed to do to prove to God that she loved Him, and having to bear the load of knowing they were never enough.  Except for Jesus, nobody's works were ever enough, and like Martin Luther, she came to hate God for just that reason, for demanding what she could never deliver. 

The saddest part is that it was not until she opened herself up to the atheist community that she felt unconditional love and acceptance, the very things that should have been in her life from the beginning, and were just as absent or falsified among the liberal Methodists as they were among the fundamental Baptists.  Love is always absent in any culture of works-righteousness, because those inevitably become cultures of comparison and judgmentalism.  "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another" (John 13:35), our LORD declared.  The only environment in which that can happen is one in which all involved are disabused of their delusions of righteousness and enough aware of the plague of their own hearts, the beams in their own eyes, that they have no interest or inclination in picking at the motes in the eyes of others.

I wonder how many "Christians"-come-Atheists were just wanting off the treadmill, desperate to be somewhere that they would not be constantly scrutinized and meddled with by ecclesiastical Barney Fifes that just had to make them conform to the man-made ideal.  What if somebody had given them the pure love of Christ, been honest with them, and accepted them as fellow-sinners in need of grace and forgiveness?

What are your children and your spouse, and the people you go to Church with getting from you?

 

Here's where the 2 Kingdom doctrine earns its keep.

I haven't been sure what to put in my first blog entry, because I would have liked for it to have been memorable.  Being the day after the re-election of BHO, today is certainly a memorable day.  And, today is the 31st anniversary of the day that my wife and I married.  We had no special plans, so thankfully the bad news will not be dampening an otherwise good time.  Besides, I've been nursing a fever and what I think is a head cold for about 24 hours, and just made it to the keyboard.  So all plans would have been cancelled anyway.

The Republicans somehow snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. More than half the country wants more of what they have been subjected to. They are too stupid to realize that the fruits of production will eventually run out and we will be as bad off as Greece with nobody there to send help.

It is going to take a while for me to come to grips with the now undeniable fact that we are living in a post-Christian, post free-enterprise, post Norman Rockwell America.  We have always been on the mission field, but now that will begin to come home in new and clearer ways.  I blame no-one, and everyone, including myself.  This wasn't Gore trying to steal it.  Obama had what he needed, which is still to my amazement. One friend remarked,

Well, y'all can laugh at me if you want, but I am in tears here. My heart is broken that our country has been reduced to this - that more citizens than not really do only care about "freebies". That more than half of our citizenry does not have the self respect to be interested in working, but in taking. That more than half our citizens are willing to relinquish their freedoms to suck at the teat of the federal government...

Indeed.  Nationally, I fear we are in for it economically, and religious freedom is going to be withering away rapidly.  Expect not only more stupid suicidal policies, but also expect more Katrinas more Sandys and more Benghazi, the last of which most Americans don't even seem to know about, let alone care. The country is probably sunk.  So much for the left-hand kingdom. Said a friend;

Time to face the facts.  A "Christian Worldview" lost last night to a godless, pro-death, pro-sodomy worldview.
That is the pulse of our nation. Our "Christian" nation. Can we please drop the fiction that the USA is Christian, or that Jesus somehow died for it?  Thanks!

I certainly have to agree with that assessment.  I've been coming to it for quite some time.

Thank God for the right-hand Kingdom.  If you aren't familiar with the "Two Kingdom" hermeneutic, I would suggest you learn what it is.  Briefly, it comprehends that in certain respects the Kingdom is already, and in others that it is not yet.  It is both at once.  And it also comprehends that the triune God is ruling over both the "City of Man" on the left hand, and over the "Kingdom of God" on the  right.   According to the doctrines of providence and decree, God rules over all, and whatever may be, it is by God's will and according to God's attributes of wisdom, benevolence, and power. 

If I was still a Semi-Pelagian decisionist American Evangelical, I don't know how I would be handling this, but it would not be pretty.  My comfort is in the Sovereign, Omnipotent, and Omnibenevolent ontological Trinity, and in the benefits of the gospel.  I would have always said as much, but I understand it much better now.

If "fixing it" was up to me, I would despair,  because I've learned that I cannot even fix me.  And us "fixing it with God's help" is just as ridiculous, since you cannot fix you either.  Do not make the mistake of thinking that more of your works are going to change anything.  What we need is for God to work among us, if we are not already abandoned.

For the time being, God has chosen to give the USA what it asked for, and I am somehow able to accept that.  While my fortunes, and those of my loved ones are tied to this once good country, there is more to this life of real value than is dependent upon the flow of oil or the rate of taxation.

As for the highly likely religious persecution now on its way - it is written into the "Affordable Health Care Act", I'm OK with that too.  Cut off my meds and refuse me treatment and I get a pass out of here.  The same goes for my children, who are also in the body of Christ.

One of my Lutheran friends posted this today by another friend of his;

"God is always giving sinners over to their sin in every age while yet preserving His church by His Word and gifts. Perhaps the lesson for Christians in America is that what matters most is still and always has been Christ crucified, Good News that isn't just for a spoiled, well-off middle class life of ease." --Pr. Mark Buetow

The same friend posted himself, 

I was thinking this morning, why do we deserve a good government? We've had the best and still killed more babies than Nazi Germany killed grown adults! We (as Christians) are a minority in a country that thinks it's good, but is one of the bloodiest in history.  We're worse than the Nazis and the Soviets. "A Christian Nation" indeed.

It does seem as though few things could be worse for us than what happened yesterday. But it may be the best thing for the gospel, for the Church, and for the family.  We're going to have to learn to rely on one another, trust one another, pull our own weight and share together.  And if that is the future of America, it may not be all that bad.