I was sitting in class yesterday, and the professor went off on a very interesting tangent that I think we as Christians must address.  My professor was sharing about the time that he was asked to speak for a Christian athletes event at a well-known Baptist college in town.  He came in and gave his presentation and then was invited by some students to stay after the meeting as they brought out a keg of beer.  This is a story that I have heard this professor share multiple times, but this time he added some additional commentary that was profound.  He said that he was shocked that Christian athletes were drinking.  He then went on to raise the point that since these are Christian athletes at a Christian school there should be something different about them than the athletes at a state school like the college I attend.  

This professor who, to my knowledge, has never claimed any religious identity at all knows that there should be something different about Christians.  There should be a defining mark in the lives of Christians with regard to what we participate in and do not participate in that should set us apart from the rest of the world.  This professor was watching for this mark of distinction and found none.  I think this is the reason this story keeps coming up.  People are watching so the question is are we representing Christ well in our actions, decisions, and lifestyles.

I had a few minutes of time to kill today at a local bookstore and wanted to pick up a book that I could read that I would not be tempted to buy.  I ended up selecting Your Best Life Now by Joel Osteen.  I was able in the few minutes I had to get through his first of seven steps for achieving the best life you could imagine.  Step number one is entitled: Enlarge Your Vision. 

I know that this book was not intended to be a theological work but when someone constantly refers to “God” there is clearly some ideas about the characteristics of this being that will in turn be communicated.  The “God” that Osteen describes I am assuming is intended to be the God of the Holy Bible considering the authors position as a pastor of a large Christian church.  I was not entirely sure that this was true, however, since Osteen found it convenient to not cite the chapter and verse of scripture when he quoted “God’s words.”  This is scary because the Bible could be used to justify many things when context is not an issue or concern. 

The picture of God that was gathered in the first step for achieving Your Best Life Now is a picture of God that is very different than the picture that the Bible presents when taken in context.  God was presented as someone who is waiting to bless you in whatever your dream is.  God is an ally that we can claim for success financially, physically, or emotionally.  Joel went on to recount stories of his personal experiences of being in a packed parking lot at a mall and claiming that God would provide him a parking spot on the front row and seeing it come to pass.  He went on to describe many other blessings and benefits that he has received due to having “the favor of God.”  Osteen’s God is not just a genie through which all blessings flow at the whim and imagination of one who holds His favor, but He is also a just God.  This justice is not justice that is presented in a biblical theology where God has a right to judge actions and motives based on His standards of right and wrong.  Osteen’s God’s justice is more like a big brother God who will watch the back of the favored ones and judge those who hurt them or get in their way.  This God should not be a God with a capital G like the God of the Bible, but rather should be a god with a little g since this is a deity created by the desires of man rather than coming from the revelation of the scripture of who God is and what He is like.  

Osteen goes on to address the topic of faith.  Faith in the first step to a better life is defined as faith in oneself and your ability to improve or succeed.  Faith is based not in the work of Jesus Christ, who somehow does not get noted at all for the first 50 pages of the pastor’s book, in His death, burial, and resurrection but rather in the work of imagining the possibilities of your future potential.  This faith is not a faith of scripture.  It is a faith of positive thoughts in positive dreams of a life empowered by a genie god who exists for your personal fulfillment.

The most scary thing to me about this theology that comes out not only in Osteen’s bestselling books but also in his frequent television broadcasts is that people are being sold a lie.  They are being convinced that God exists for them and them alone.  The God of scripture is a glorious and incomprehensible God who has the power to create, judge, and to do as He pleases.  All of creation is subject to Him not the other way around as prosperity preachers like Osteen would lead you to believe.  God is the one who is to be worshiped, glorified, and made much of.  It is not the other way around.  Let us not buy into smooth talk, perfect smiles, and bestselling books who present a god made in the image of and to fulfill the delights of men.

If you are a person who frequents Christian bookstores like myself, you may have noticed a new sign beside some specific titles in LifeWay Christian Stores.  This new sign reads as follows:

“READ WITH DISCERNMENT. This book may contain thoughts, ideas, or concepts that could be considered inconsistent with historical evangelical theology. Therefore, we encourage you to read it with extra discernment. For important background information and additional insight related to this book, please review the Author Briefing and related content at www.lifewaystores.com/readwithdiscernment “

This sign encourages Christian readers to read with their eyes open and through the lens of discerning truth for themselves.  This is a very wise statement and should, in my opinion, be handed out to everyone who purchases any book besides the Word of God from a Christian bookstore.  

These signs were, however, not placed next to all the books in the store but rather were placed strategically next to books by authors who are considered part of the Emergent Church including Donald Miller, Rob Bell, and Brian McLaren.  This is very interesting considering the many other books that also twist theology and minimize the Gospel.  I am not Emergent and do not embrace the idea of reforming the message of the Gospel, but I do think that LifeWay is going in a good direction by warning people to not be blind sheep that fall into the pit of bad theology.

On May 7th, 2008, a group of influential Christian leaders including Timothy George, OS Guiness, Rich Mouw, and Dallas Willard gathered together to define what it means to be an evangelical Christian.  The document that came out of this meeting is called The Evangelical Manifesto.  This document has had its critics and champions.  Some notable and well respected Christians have decided not to sign this document for various reasons.  Dr. Albert Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, did not sign due to its lack of a strong theology in defining evangelicals and their roles in society.  Dr. Ergun Caner, the President of Liberty University’s Seminary, did not sign the document either due to the minimizing of the influence that evangelicals can have through politics and political endeavors.  Hate it or love it, The Evangelical Manifesto has made some noteworthy points that should be discussed and has made, in my opinion, an overall excellent job at defining evangelicals and the Biblical role that we as evangelical Christians should play in the world around us.  

The first quotes that I want to pass along come from the section of the manifesto focusing on the fact that evangelicals have failed to live out what they have claimed to preach:

“We confess that we evangelicals have betrayed our beliefs by our own behavior.  All to often we have trumpeted the gospel of Jesus, but we have replaced biblical truths with therapeutic techniques, worship with entertainment, discipleship with growth in human potential, church growth with business entrepreneurialism, concern for the church and the local congregation with expressions of the faith that are churchless and little better than vapid spirituality, meeting real needs with pandering to felt needs, and mission principles with marketing precepts.  In the process we have become known for commercial, diluted, and feel-good gospels of health, wealth, human potential, and religious happy talk, each of which is indistinguishable from the passing fashions of the surrounding world.” - p. 11

The manifesto states above that we have taken the message of the gospel, which we have been called to embrace personally first and foremost and then to embody to the world, and have exchanged it for false gospels which come in many forms.  This is so true and convicting at the same time.  The manifesto then goes on to address the spiritual condition that many evangelicals find themselves:

“All to often we have traced our roots to powerful movements of spiritual revival and reformation, but we ourselves are often atheists unawares, secularists in practice who live in a world without windows to the supernatural, and often carry our Christian lives in a manner that has little operational need for God.” - p. 12

Our false gospels that we have created leave no need for the true gospel.  If our whole spiritual lives are based on our own good works and performance or spiritual activities, we have no need for God because we have our acts together.  

The manifesto then goes on to describe what a holistic discipleship of embracing and embodying the gospel would look like in today’s world:

“We call for a more complete understanding of discipleship that applies faith with integrity to every calling and sphere of life, the secular as well as the spiritual, and the physical as well as the religious; and that thinks wider than politics in contributing to the arts, the sciences, the media, and the creation of culture in all its variety.” - p. 14

This is the call made by The Evangelical Manifesto to embrace and embody a holistic gospel that impacts culture through contributing in all spheres of life driven by a Christ-centered worldview. 

Last night I finally got a chance to go and see Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. This is a documentary that I had been wanting to see ever since I saw the trailer.  For those unfamiliar with the movie, Expelled presents the story of how the scientific world of academia is leading people who have come to this conclusion that biological evolution might not be the only answer to the questions of biology and origins to be expelled from their jobs and places of influence.  This new movement is called intelligent design (ID).  ID is different from creationism in that ID only suggests that there is some form of intelligent force that was involved in the origins of the universe.  A creationist would take the concept of ID one step further in stating that this intelligent force was God.  Due to this focus on the expulsion of individuals who are opposing the status quo of darwinism, Expelled has a very political and sociological message.  It does not deal with the scientific evidence or seek to answer the question of whether darwinism or ID is the true and factually based ideology.  The movie just focuses on the suppression of the freedom of speech that the ID proponents are said to be experiencing.

There were some good points that the movie made, but overall, I was greatly disappointed.  I was excited to see the interviews that had been seen in the previews with radical atheist, Dr. Richard Dawkins, and some prominent Christian apologists including Dr. John Lennox and Alister McGrath. The movie interviews presented the fact very clearly that this is not merely a discussion of scientific theories but that each side represents its own worldview.  This was a good point to make in that all scientists no matter how “objective” and “open minded” they claim to be come to the table with certain biases and preconceived notions from their own personal worldviews. This helps to clear up the perspective that scientists so often seek to present that they are completely unbiased when they came to their own view of evolution while the ID proponents came to their decision in favor of ID only due to their own personal biases against evolution.  This was a very good point made by the film.  

Another interesting item presented in the film came from Ben Stein’s question of: If their is not an intelligent designing force that began the universe, then how do you suppose that the universe came into being?  Two of the scientists responded to this question specifically with an answer besides the common one of having “no idea.”  One of these proposed that life formed from a chemical reaction that took place on the back of a crystal that sparked life as we know it.  The second, Dr. Richard Dawkins, attempted to explain his theory of origins.  In this theory, he proposes that there is a possibility that life was brought to the earth from life that existed on another planet in our solar system.  This is a theory that sounds very much like aliens but is presented in a very scientific sounding fashion that makes this odd theory seem more intellectually feasible.  Ben Stein then presents these theories as absurd in comparison to the theory of ID.  These theories were clearly minimized and not given much credence in the film, but personally, I do not believe that these theories are any more than creative attempts to avoid acknowledging the clear signs of an intelligent designer in the world around us.

The movie, despite these interesting interviews, present something that hurt the position of the movie in an attempt at an easy shot against the evolutionist camp. The perfect atrocity to blame on an opposing ideology is the holocaust.  The horrible slaughter of many lives overseen by Hitler and the Nazi regime is the nail in the coffin to an opposing ideologies camp.  This was the attempt made by Expelled - an attempt to blame Hitler’s motivation for the holocaust on the philosophy of darwinism.  Human directed natural selection could be seen as an extreme result of this philosophy being fully embraced but the fact that this was the driving factor is hard to prove.  It could also be said that Hitler used the religious convictions of the Christians to turn them against the Jews in the holocaust due to the fact that the Jews are the people who murdered Jesus.  This argument was not appropriate due to the fact that the intentions of Hitler in his leadership of the Nazi regime cannot be specifically pinpointed to a specific ideology since many ideologies could be taken to extremes (in the case of darwinism) or out of context (in the case of Christianity) to attempt to justify the holocaust in the minds of the Nazi people.  Expelled did not just present this idea as a possibility but desired to drive it home as fact through some random interviews along with a step-by-step journey down the halls to a gas chamber of a death camp.  This was the primary argument that evolution needs to be stopped.  

This movie that began arguing for a free exchange of ideas in the scientific community ended with a call to stop the spread of the darwinism due to the fact that it was the cause of the holocaust.  I think that this is a step that is to far to take.  This movie began with a worthy premise but ended with a cheap shot in order to take advantage of unthinking minds.  All this to say, I am not a darwinist but rather a proponent of not only ID but of a Creator who spoke the world into existence and formed humans from the dust of the earth and breathed into them the very breath of life.  I do not think that Expelled did an adequate job addressing the topic that it set out to address and ended up taking cheap shots in the process.  

So if you saw the movie, what do you think? 

Today, we will look at the second conversation that is going on.  This is the conversation of the church and Christian thinkers.  This group is asking questions like:

• What does it mean to be a Christian today?
• What is the gospel?
• What does it look like to impact the world around us?
• What is the church’s role in society?

These are questions that all different corners of Christianity are trying to answer.  From Joel Osteen to Rob Bell to John Piper, all of these leaders have insight and ideas that fuel this discussion.

This discussion focuses around the church. not the church as in your church or your denominational affiliation.  This is a discussion for the global Body of Christ.  This means that we should be willing to listen to people’s perspectives that are different than ours to gain further insight into what outreach and evangelism looks like in a post-modern and post-Christian culture.

An unaware and disconnected church is limited in its impact for the gospel and glory of Jesus Christ in all nations.  We need to not limit ourselves but rather open our ears to the conversation at hand.

We live in a world of conversations that circulate around us.  There are two primary types of conversations that we need to seek to engage in as Christians.  Failure to engage in these conversations is something that leads Christians to becoming disconnected with the issues and questions that are being raised by many different people who are longing to have these questions addressed.

The first discussion that is going on is one of the culture.  This is a discussion that comes out a lot in politics and news.  These are conversations that have been sparked by everyone from political candidates to scientists to other news makers.  These are conversations that revolve around the following questions:

• What is wrong with the world?
• What can we do about it?
• What role, if any, does religion have in society?

These are the questions that we see being asked by people like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain.  They are looking to see how the role of a president looks in addressing these big questions from a national standpoint of America as a world power. 

The religion question is being asked by radical atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, but the discussion does not stop with just the academic individuals that write New York Time’s bestsellers.  It goes on to include fictional books such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. 

We as Christians need to be reading these books and listening to the ideas of these politicians in order that we may be culturally aware of what the world around us is listening to.  This helps us to be able to more clearly speak the Gospel and the Christian world view into the culture around us.  The answer to all of the world’s questions is Jesus Christ.  We have the answer to the hurts of the world.  We need to be actively engaged in conversations to talk Jesus into the culture around us. 

We will look at the second question tomorrow.

The last post for each month is going to be a newsworthy discussion topics that have been highly discussed in the blog world that I want to present my perspective on and link to other bloggers perspectives on.

Pew Forum Study on Religion and Public Life

There was a study released this month by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life that has yeilded a lot of discussion in response to its findings.  The study has found that people who were involved in a faith of some kind as children drift away from their faith and then may return to it when they have kids for the purpose of having their children grow up with faith.  The study also finds that people are seeking a more personal and less organized faith.  This is a mindset held by parents that faith is an essential aspect of childhood but is not something that impacts all aspects of life.  Faith and religion is then seen in the minds of parents as a good place to form morality and make you a good person, but it is not something that is of any use beyond the forming and developmental stages of childhood. 

In the New York Times article on the subject Professor Stephen Prothro, the chairman of the religion department at Boston University notes that “mega-churches succeed not because they are mega but because they have smaller ministries inside.”  People are seeking a faith that has no accountability which would be found in the community of a church because they do not want to be expected to live at a certain standard.  The church has become so consumerised that the gospel has become something that is your personal experience with Jesus without community and embracing a lifestyle led by the Spirit and the Great Commission.

The heart of the gospel has become lost in the American church.  Jesus has been presented as someone less than Lord.  Therefore, Christians are leaving the church and switching religions because they never had a relationship with Jesus Christ seeking after Him and pursuing Him for who He is not what he can do for them.  May God raise up His church to clearly proclaim the holistic gospel that impacts all areas of life so that His name and glory can be proclaimed in all nations!

Related Links:

“Americas Changing Religious Landscape” by Dr. Albert Mohler- This is a good article by the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky
New York Times’ Article “Americans Change Faiths at Rising Rate, Report Finds”- This article does a good job breaking down the research findings.
Pew Forum Study on Religion and Public Life- This is the entire report.
“The Religion Shift in America” from ChurchRelevance.com- This is a good percentage breakdown of the research findings.

The third and final essential element for the church to impact the culture is community.  Community is what holds the church together.  It is people gathered together in order to chase after Jesus Christ and to hold each other accountable for personal holiness and being intentional to reach out to others. The early church is shown in Acts 2: 42-47 pursuing Jesus together in the context of community. 

Community is not just important in that it unites the church on mission and personal accountability, but it is also attractive to people who do not know Jesus.  A group of people that love each other and care for each other really stands out as different and attractive in our culture that is full of divisions.  This is something that people will be drawn to, and if our community is open and caring to people who are not part of the community, this makes them desire to be a part even more. 

A church that love and cares for others and pursues accountability will shine brightly to the culture around them.  My hope and prayer is that God would raise up churches focused on the gospel and proclaiming it in the context of mission through the encouragement and accountability of a biblical community!

We have not been called to just sit on this glorious news of freedom from sin and victory in Christ that is given in the gospel.  This leads us to the second essential of being the church in culture - mission.  Jesus left His followers with a mission which we have been exploring all month to “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28: 19 ESV).  This should be the all-consuming passion and drive for all believers. 

I want to note that the call is to make disciples.  Disciples are Christ-followers who have placed their faith in Jesus Christ and His finished work on the cross.  There is a tendency in today’s Christian environment to lose site of declaring this good news and to instead make the focus of our mission secondary issues such as social justice.  These secondary issues are not negative things to do in and of themselves, but that is not the primary mission.  Jesus came to earth and lived for about thirty years on the earth before His death on the cross and resurrection.  During that time, He could have solved all of the issues with world hunger, cured everyone from all their diseases, and stopped the injustice of slavery.  The very intersting thing is that He did not.  So, does this mean that Jesus does not care about these issues that are pressing and cause pain and heartache for so many?  No, He does care because we see Jesus meeting many people’s needs such as these.  He is however focused on a single mission - to die on the cross and rise from the dead for sin.  Jesus knew that everything is at its root a spiritual issue due to the fact that all social justice issues are ultimately a result of sin and the fall.  We cannot merely address the symptoms and miss the disease itself.  Jesus understood this.

We need to never remove the proclamation of the gospel from missions.  We should also seek to show the love of Jesus to people by getting involved in social justice and other issues involving hurting people, but this should never be done without presenting the gospel. 

Our mission calls us to be gospel-centered and intentional to share Jesus with others and also to show love and grace to others in Jesus’ name.