This morning I had the opportunity to go with a friend of mine from church to downtown Birmingham to minister to some homeless guys.  My friend has a ministry where he meets a group of guys downtown on Sunday mornings early in order to feed, encourage, and pray for them.  I had heard stories from him about the cool things that God is doing through this ministry so I decided to come check it out.

To be honest, I was kind of worried about going.  This was definitely a big step out of my comfort zone of ministering to students through small groups and preaching the Word.  The nervousness gave way to comfort and enjoyment when I arrived downtown.  The hospitality and openness of these guys to share their hearts, stories, and lives with me really blew me away.

I was struck with sorrow after hearing the stories of the journey which led these men to the streets. These were people who had been abandoned by the family and friends which cared about them prior to their struggles financially or with some form of addiction that led them to the streets.  They had been abandoned by the ones they loved and some of them had lived driven by a controlling addiction which took from them everything that they had.  These were genuinely broken people in desperate need of the love and gospel of Jesus Christ.

It was refreshing to minister to broken people who are so appreciative of your willingness to spend some time with them to hear their stories.  I feel like if Jesus lived in Birmingham He would be found not in the megachurch pulpit but sitting on the edge of the fountain in Five Points South loving on the broken.  My prayer is that God would break my heart and the hearts of His church to get out of our comfort zones and love the broken.

Tonight Passion Atlanta finished with a session almost entirely focused on worship and anticipation for the Passion World Tour.  It is encouraging to see Passion seeking to take the Gospel to the nations.  I feel like they are in touch with God’s global mission.  I am greatly encouraged by this weekend and look forward to coming back to a Passion event again sometime soon.

So, I committed several months ago to go on a mission trip in 2008 to be able to take a small part in what God is doing in the nations.  I started out this year planning on going with the Escape Student Ministry group at Lakeside Baptist Church to Brazil.  This was going to be an awesome trip where I would get to minister globally alongside my brother.  I was all pumped and ready to attempt learn some Portuguese and jump on a plane to minister, but God had other plans. 

After checking into the scheduling aspects of work with regards to this early summer trip, I learned that I would not be able to go.  I totally understand the reasons behind this decision and can see God’s hand at work in this call.  God wanted me to wait on Him and His timing for something that would be something that would stretch me out of my comfort zone. 

So, I have been in a time of waiting over the last few months to see what doors God would open up.  It is hard to wait, but God remains faithful despite our waiting.

Today, God has opened up a really awesome door.  I am going to be able to go with a group from work to Lima, Peru for a few days the end of December into early January.  We are going to be serving and ministering at an orphanage outside of Lima.  I am really excited about the opportunity to go to a country that I have never been to and to show the love of Christ to orphans who have no one to love them.

I am really excited to see what God is going to do as He stretches me and allows me to play a very small part in His global mission.  Please be in prayer for me already as I prepare to go and show the love of Jesus Christ to the least of these.

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.

Francis Chan is the pastor at Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley, California.  I first heard of Francis at the Passion 2007 Conference in Atlanta, Georgia last year where he was a speaker in one of the sessions.  Francis is a great communicator of God’s Word and has a passion for the nations.  He is very real and authentic when he speaks.  There was a time a few years ago when Francis felt lead to take a break from his church to evaluate if he was where God wanted him to be.  The thing that has impressed me most, however, about Francis and his ministry is the financial plan for Cornerstone this year.  The church, under Francis’s leadership, is restructuring themselves so that they can run off of 50% of their income.  This will allow the church to give 50% of its incoming offerings to missions and the least of these.  This new restructuring is not just changing the amount of staff at the church and the priorities of the church.  It is causing them to totally change their mindset on building new projects as a church.  Instead of building a massive mega-church building, the church is building an outdoor meeting facility in order to save money and resources for the purpose of being able to give more away.  This is a huge shift.  We so often think that church is about us and what we can get while Francis is calling his church to see how much they can give.  This is a mindset change that I believe that we as an American church need to get our hearts wrapped around.

As we looked at yesterday, the issue of the church engaging culture begins with Jesus’ call to “go and make disciples.”  The book of Acts contains the narrative of the first group of Christ-followers seeking to fulfill this call.  You see the apostles as primary players throughout the course of this book in addition to the Jewish religious leader turned Christ-follower, Paul.  The scriptural example of Christians engaging culture is through missions movements to go and tell the message of Jesus to the ends of the earth.  I want to focus on a particular message given by Paul which presents a very interesting way that the church can engage the culture - contextualization.  This is a very modern term that means that, as we will see in the passage to follow, Paul took the language and terminology of the culture and used it to point the people to Jesus.  The passage where this is seen is Acts 17: 22-31 (ESV):

“So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: ‘Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious.  For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown this I proclaim to you.  The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’, as even some of your poets have said, ‘For we are his offspring.’ Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man.  The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

It is very interesting how Paul looks around the culture that he is in, sees an idol to an unknown god, preaches a sermon quoting several poets and thinkers of the day (see bold text above), and then ties it all back into Jesus.  This is the idea of contextualization.  This is a form of cultural engagement that is very practical not only in Paul’s time and culture but ours as well.  We can so easily engage in discussions on movies, television, books, music, and news and bring the conversation around to presenting Christ.  We do not have any altars to unknown gods in our cities, but we do encounter many people each day who are living their lives totally unknowing where they can find purpose, meaning, and satisfaction.  Jesus is the answer to the cries of the heart of every man.  The question is: Will we keep our eyes open to cultural doors that can be opened to the gospel?

This morning, I went to the second week of our Tuesday morning prayer times at the Church at Brook Hills.  As a congregation under the leadership of Dr. David Platt, we have adopted a mission of global evangelism.  Everything that we seek to do as a church is intended to bring glory to God and to lead the nations of the world to worship God.  Over the past few weeks, we have been looking at despiration and seeking after God both personally and as a congregation.  This morning was a step further in this direction.  It was such a blessing to gather together with others in seeking God both to increase a passion for Him in us personally but also to spur us on to display His holiness and great glory to the nations.  As Dr. Platt so often says, our prayer is “God, give us the nations in a way that only you can get the glory!”  I am excited to see what God can do in and through a congregation of people who will seek his face and glory in order to reach those who do not know the name of Jesus!  My prayer is that God would open each one of our eyes to see what He desires to do in the nations through His bride - the church.  I want to be a part in what God is doing for His glory and fame alone!

I had the opportunity earlier this week to go visit a ministry in an inner-city neighborhood of Birmingham, Alabama.  This was a ministry that does many things to help the people of this neighborhood, but the main focus of the area of the ministry which we were partnering with was tutoring students after school.  These students ranged from early elementary through high school students.  These kids did not have anyone in their families that could help them with their homework and answer questions about basic subjects.  This was really eye opening to me.  When you grow up in a relatively well-to-do suburb of a medium sized city with parents who both have college degrees, you seem to assume that everyone’s situation is similar to your own since all of your friend’s families had similar situations.  I was really saddened and shocked at what I discovered on the trip across town.  The saddest part which impacted me the most, however, was not the people or the situation itself but rather a box that I saw in the corner of the donation room.  It was a box from a mega-church in the suburbs that is very well known.  The box was filled with tons of toys for the kids, but these toys were not what you would expect.  These toys were not something that any of the mega-church’s kids would ever play with because they were ragged and dirty.  They were the trash of the mega-church kids, but instead of giving them to the garbage man, they decided to give them to the poor kids to which this ministry seeks to impact.  The box was filled to the brim with these toys with a note on the front saying “Love, The Mega-Church.”  Is this truly love?  Do any one of us show our love for someone else by giving them our trash?  This was so sad and convicting to me at the same time.  The church that has it all and can give it all gives something that costs them nothing.  This is so often how each one of us, myself included, views giving to others.  We are called to be the hands and feet of Jesus in all areas of our lives including giving to the “least of these” as Jesus called us to in the Sermon on the Mount.  My hope and prayer is that we would embrace not just the proclamation of the gospel, but the giving of the gospel so that all may taste the goodness of Jesus Christ through our lives.  We are blessed as Abraham was to in turn be a blessing to the nations!  Let us bless well for the glory of our Savior!

Steve Saint, the son of missionary martyr, Nate Saint, brings some fresh ideas that can not only be used the field of international missions but in any place of ministry in The Great Omission.  The premise of the book is that we have left a crucial part out of our methods of missions and church planting.  The omission that we have been leaving out is discipleship and empowering others to minister.  Steve proposes the idea that missionaries should be launchers and catalysts that empower and disciple local believers to be the ones who continue in evangelism and ministry.  A missionary should go to a people group or a place that has never heard the Good News of the grace of  Jesus Christ and share that Good News and then empower the new believers to communicate that message to others.  The missionary should not stay permanently in that place in order to run and facilitate that church, but they should move on to another people group and start the process over again.  Steve’s book builds an outline of what this idea looks like by sharing about what God has done in this area with the Waodani tribe in the Ecuadorian Amazon.  I think that Steve is onto something that we not only fail to do in international missions but also in America.  The church as a whole fails to disciple and empower believers to go out and reach others with the Good News.  This book does an excellent job of raising questions about the great omission not only in international missions but in the American church.

I have been reading a lot recently about the Kingdom theology that is embraced and highly promoted by Brian McLaren and our other brothers and sisters in Christ that see themselves as emergent.  I have been struggling with this theology about a view of Jesus based strongly out of His Sermon on the Mount where He sets up this mindset of an upside down world.  Jesus comes on the scene in Matthew 5 with what most people today would call the Beatitudes.  He stands up in front of a crowd to make His first statements to these people who are trying to figure out who He is and what He is about and totally rips apart the cultural status quo of the listeners.  Jesus looks at the nobodies and says that they are the ones who are truly blessed.  This must totally shock the listeners as it shocks us today as modern readers of the text.  This is a God who is all about the nobodies.  I think that He is about the nobodies so much because the somebodies do not feel like they need Him.  He comes on this planet and makes the nobodies somebodies in Him.  He reaches out to those who no one else even acknowledges or sees any value in.  This is the upside-down God of scripture.  He is not a God of the pious and successful people who have it all together, but He desires to be the God of the helpless and hopeless and shine His glory in the darkness of their situation.  Following in light of this view, Brian McLaren goes on to present an ideology in order to answer the question that if this is what Jesus is about, how can we live this out in a practical way to the least of these in our world.  This is the heartbeat of a life lived not for my own desires, but it is a life lived in order to give a touch of love and a touch of grace to every person who we come into contact with.  It is a lifestyle of showing the priority of Jesus in loving those who have never felt love, listening to those who have never had a friend, and living a life where we not only receive grace from Jesus but we go on to give grace to others.