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CHRISTMAS GIFTS FOR JESUS!

December 21, 2007

“And when they had come into the house, they saw the young child, and fell down and worshipped Him. And when they had opened their treasures, they presented gifts to Him: gold, frankincense, and myrrh” (Matt. 2:11).

After all, we are celebrating the birthday of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. All the gift buying and gift receiving has a very materialistic feel to it. What if we were presenting our gifts to Jesus? Would they consist of flat screen TVs or video games? Would our gifts be a brightly wrapped treasure that will have very little lasting value, or would we present to Him something much more in line with His nature and His purposes?

I’m sure you have your Christmas Sunday sermon all prepared — but what if you added a little segment to it that said, If I could offer to Jesus Christ anything this Christmas, it would be …..

My list would include:

.. An end to the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and our young men and women home safely.

.. A concentrated effort by the North American church to do all we could to eliminate hunger and poverty throughout the world (We could if we would.).

.. A return to biblical literacy by the believers. A resolve to live by the truth of God’s Word — not just hear it, but do it!

.. Not one more North American pastor be accused of immorality7y and/or suspicion of inappropriate use of the church’s money.

.. An end to the ravenous appetite of the American people to set up spoiled, inconsiderate young ladies as role models just because they are rich and famous.

.. A return to “real evangelism” — and a desperation for revival in the local church. An urgency for the lost to be found.

.. A desire on the part of every pastor to see progress in their assignments, and a willingness to pay the price for it.

.. Peace in every clergy family, and for every pastor to be validated and every pastor’s spouse to feel appreciated, and for every pastor’s child to understand their situation.

.. For the 2008 presidential election to concentrate on issues that matter rather than personality or image.

.. And a gift of myself to our Lord to live my life in such a way that He would be pleased and glorified.

Merry Christmas, my colleague, from all of us! Remember, be blessed and be a blessing. —HBL

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Posted by holyman

Crusades and personal witnessing are no longer the cutting edge of evangelism.

September 27, 2007

Go and Plant Churches of All Peoples

Fifty years ago, if you said evangelism in a word-association game, you would probably get back Billy Graham. Crusade evangelism dominated the American church’s ideas about reaching out. When First Baptist Church members decided to share the gospel with their neighbors, they looked to see which evangelist could come to town.

Thirty years ago, crusades began to wane, and personal evangelism came to dominate our thoughts. A church that wanted to reach out would typically offer a class on how to use the “Four Spiritual Laws” or Evangelism Explosion to witness to friends and strangers.

Crusades haven’t disappeared, and churches still teach personal witness. But today, church planting is the default mode for evangelism. Go to any evangelical denomination, ask them what they are doing to grow, and they will refer you to the church-planting office. I have talked to Southern Baptists, General Conference Baptists, the Evangelical Free Church, the Assemblies of God, the Foursquare Church, the Acts 29 network, and a variety of independent practitioners and observers. I quit going to more because they all said the same thing: “We’re excited and committed to church planting. It’s the cutting edge.”

Many Motivations

Frustration with other methodologies has something to do with this trend. Despite many tales of triumph and huge resources mobilized—think of the “Here’s Life America” campaign—it’s hard to trace an overall difference. “North America is the only continent in the world where the church is not growing,” says Eric Ramsey of the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board (NAMB).

Biblical rethinking also fuels the conviction that church planting is the ideal way to fulfill Jesus’ Great Commission. “It’s apparent in the Great Commission that we are to make disciples through the avenue of churches,” says Scott Thomas of the Acts 29 Network, a church-planting organization affiliated with Seattle’s Mars Hill Church. “The whole Book of Acts offers that model.”

Acts 29 churches view planting as essential to the nature of the church. They expect that at least 10 percent of every offering—including a church’s first offering—will go toward church planting. They join an increasing number of church leaders who see Western individualism as sub-Christian. Aren’t disciples made in the context of community?

Perhaps most important, studies show a consistent difference between old and new churches. George Hunter of Asbury Theological Seminary says, “Churches after 15 years typically plateau. After 35 years, they typically can’t even replace those [members] they lose. New congregations reach a lot more pre-Christian people.” Those who study churches say established congregations tend to turn inward, no matter how hard they try to resist the trend. But new churches must look outward to survive. Richard Harris, vice president of NAMB’s church-planting group, says that established SBC churches report 3.4 baptisms per 100 resident members, whereas new churches average 11.7. It’s not hard to conclude that more new churches would lead more people to Christ.

Gary Rohrmayer, director of church planting for the Midwest Baptist Conference, told me of a 1,200-member church that planted a church. The new church quickly grew to 200, but in the same time period, the 1,200-member church grew to 1,600. Seeing that the established church had actually added more members, leaders wondered whether they should put their resources into expanding their own ministry instead of planting another church. When asked how many adult converts they had seen in that period, however, they named eight. The new church had about 100. “You [tell] me whether you should start another church or not,” Rohrmayer says.

Tough Calling

No denomination invests more in church planting than the Southern Baptist Convention. America’s largest Protestant body wants to double its number of congregations in the next 20 years, to 100,000. Richard Harris says they have been starting four churches a day, but they need to increase that number to eight or ten.

These are not your father’s Southern Baptist churches. I attended an “opportunity tour” in San Francisco’s East Bay. Upwards of 60 church leaders from throughout the country boarded vans to see where the East Bay Baptist Association needed help starting churches. My tour began in the Canal District of San Rafael, where a recent seminary graduate, Marian Engelland, is trying to establish a church among Guatemalan immigrants in low-income apartments. From there we hopped across the bay to San Pablo, where a huge African American preacher named Port Wilburn leads a team trying to re-launch a struggling inner-city church and re-envision it to reach a new middle-class housing development. Then we had lunch with 18 Chinese pastors in Oakland’s Chinatown, where the SBC wants to start a church among restaurant workers who typically work Sunday mornings and need to meet late at night. Finally, we traveled to Fremont, where another recent seminary graduate reaches out to the 60,000 Afghan immigrants in the area.

Sixty percent of the SBC’s new churches focus on ethnic minorities. “They are quite cutting edge,” Wheaton College’s Scott Moreau says of SBC church planters. “You can plant a church that looks like a mosque.” Still, other East Bay tours looked at plans to start churches in elite Anglo neighborhoods and one aiming to become a regional seeker-sensitive church at Jack London Square, a cultural gathering spot near downtown Oakland.

Lyman Alexander, the East Bay’s director of missions, says they hope to add ten new churches a year and double the East Bay association. “Money is the biggest hindrance, because it is so expensive to live here,” Alexander says. “People come and look at the cost of living, and they say, ‘I’ll starve.’ God definitely has to call them here.”

Niche Audiences

In years past, evangelism didn’t necessarily motivate church planting. Southern Baptists, for example, planted churches as they moved out of the South, taking the comforts of home with them. Methodists started churches in the suburbs that attracted their upwardly mobile church members who migrated out of the inner city. Such churches still get planted, but their number has declined along with denominational loyalty.

Today’s church plants often target immigrants, which means adjusting church traditions to diverse ethnic cultures. “Any denomination that has an aggressive church-planting program and doesn’t have a bias toward the white community will be largely ethnic,” says David Ripley, who leads ethnic ministries at the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, Illinois. “If we are challenging people to reach their neighbors, the reality is that the neighborhood is changing.” As an example, he notes that 25 languages are spoken at Wheaton North High School, formerly dominated by WASP students.

So-called emerging churches also plant churches, since the kind of ministry they espouse doesn’t exist in traditional bodies. “Looking at churches today, are they likely to reach the next generation for Christ?” asks Eddie Gibbs of Fuller Theological Seminary. “So many of our churches are the product of Christendom: Open the door and let them come in.”

Many emerging churches prefer the term missional, and though it’s a hard term to pin down precisely, its affinity with missionary captures an adventurous, unconventional, and non-institutional spirit that focuses outward. Their audience may be largely Anglo, but it knows as little about Christianity as Thai Buddhist immigrants.

Church plants also frequently arise out of the seeker-sensitive models pioneered by churches like Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois. “When they say they are reaching the unchurched, often they are reaching the de-churched,” Gibbs says. Many Americans have family memories of church as an important place for spiritual development and comfort, but they have lost their connection to it. Church plants can offer a smaller, more relational, or less conventional approach that lures them back. Church planters may refer to this as an “attractional” ministry, as distinct from missional.

Insights from Overseas

So church planting actually involves quite different strategies for evangelism: immigrant, missional, and attractional, for a start. Some are launched by pioneer missionaries, sent out into new territory or toward a new target group. Others grow from cuttings. A team of 100 or more deliberately leave a mother church to start a new one. Sometimes, large churches start satellite operations that gradually grow independent. Or multiple congregations inhabit the same building, reaching out to different audiences. The many strategies help church planters reach diverse audiences, from Cambodian immigrants to latte-sipping, rap-listening hipsters in a Southern California beach community.

Church planters in all these environments see America as a mission field. The missionary surge that took the gospel from America and Europe to Africa, Asia, and South America is now washing back over the West. Lesslie Newbigin predicted it decades ago. On returning to England from a lifetime of missions in India, he wrote that the greatest missionary challenge in the world was the West.

Church-planting insights learned on the mission field have penetrated American church leaders, partly because they know how churches in the developing world have grown. Success-oriented Americans love to hear stories from Africa and China. Developing-world churches, once treated with patriarchal condescension, have a new status. Missionary thinking has a new status, too.

Church planting is a missionary approach, typical of the apostle Paul and of most missionaries since. Where there is no church, you have to plant a church. You have to find ways to penetrate the culture with the gospel, and then you have to provide a secure place for disciples to grow and to explore their new identity. A short while ago, we didn’t think this way in North America. Now we do.

Furthermore, missionaries become attuned to social barriers that keep the gospel from reaching everybody—barriers of religion, language, tribe, caste, and socioeconomic status. A church may thrive among one group and miss a neighboring group entirely. You have to target each group separately, or you won’t reach everybody. Missionaries who go overseas learn to think sociologically because they stand outside the culture looking in. That same sociological perspective has penetrated church planting at home.

Planters Persevere

Despite what some say, the United States is not a post-Christian nation. It’s more half Christian and half post-Christian, trying to make up its mind. A sizeable share of Americans describe themselves as Bible-believing Christians. In many places and contexts you can still reach people simply by opening the doors and offering a worship service.

There are also places and contexts where Buddhism is better understood and more admired than Christianity. Pockets of Sonoma County, California, where I live, certainly fit the description. It’s deep-blue America, defined by organic veggies, fine wines, and high tech.

“Sonoma County is a tough nut,” church-planting pastor Dan Boyd of Hope Chapel told me. “America is a tough nut. We’ve seen it all and done it all. In America, we don’t need God.”

Sonoma County has many fine, well-established churches that preach the gospel and welcome any and all. By and large, though, they don’t reach the post-Christian pockets. Most don’t really try. They have enough to do just meeting the pastoral needs of people already in their care.

The church plants try hard to reach those pockets. In my years living here, I’ve seen many new churches pop up like mushrooms after a rain, and just as suddenly disappear. They meet in schools and industrial parks, struggling to get their numbers above 100. Though nobody keeps an exact tally, it seems safe to say that the majority of attempts fail. It doesn’t help that available land for church buildings hardly exists, and desirable meeting places are scarce. Also, because housing is so expensive, the population isn’t growing fast, least of all with the young families that typically populate growing churches. “You don’t have the demographics working for you,” Presbyterian church-planting pastor Jeff Johnson says. Finally, as church-planting pastor Adam Peacock told me, “People [in Sonoma County] are indifferent to the church at best, and sometimes adversarial.”

That’s missions. It is not easy. Many first-term missionaries give up and go home. Only the entrepreneurial, independent, and stubborn personalities who want so badly to plant churches stick with it. Nonetheless, a church that seeks to obey the Great Commission will keep sending out missionaries. And missionaries plant churches—even when they never leave home.

Tim Stafford is a Christianity Todey senior writer.

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Planting Seeds

June 25, 2007

Isaiah 40:28-31The eagle is a symbol used many times in Scripture, in fact, it is mentioned 38 times throughout the Bible. We can learn some important lessons from this majestic creation of God. Eagles have a wing span of 2 meters and are around 90 cm. tall. The eagle mates for life and use the same nest for life. This nest is built in a safe place, often on the ledge of a sharp cliff. It is built to last and the largest nest reported is 9 ½ feet wide and 20 feet deep.

When the babies are born, both parents assume responsibility for their care. They are gentle parents, sitting on the eggs for one month. The parents bring food up to the nest and feed them small pieces of meat. Within 45 days they can weigh nearly 40 times their birth weight. At three months they get special feathers for flying and a new learning experience begins. The mother eagle flies into the nest and begins to thrash around causing a great commotion. Eventually one of the babies will fall out of the nest and begin heading for the earth below. Never having used his wings before, he’s not really sure what to do, but does do lots of flapping while heading straight down! Just before the baby hits the ground, the mother eagle flies underneath in order to ‘catch’ the baby on her powerful wings and she flies him safely back to the nest. This continues on day after day until all the babies learn to fly.

There are two verses in scripture that actually mention this routine of the eagle. In Deuteronomy 32:10,11 Moses reminds the children of Israel how God cared for them and guarded them just “like an eagle that stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them on its pinions.” Again in Exodus 19:4 God says that “He will carry the children of Israel on eagles’ wings”.

We can get very comfortable in our ‘nest’. Perhaps that could be our way of doing things, our way of thinking, our opinions, our way of living life. Then when God comes and ’stirs up our nest’ we get upset. We don’t always identify this as a growing experience. Sometimes if we were really honest, we really don’t want to grow. We get very complacent and satisfied with where we are and any interruptions are viewed as negative. But God wants us to fly – to become all that He intends us to become. He never stirs up our nest without good reason!

The eagle can see a rabbit two miles away. It can soar up to two miles above the ground and can fly at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour. They have a separate eyelid which slides across the eye sideways in order to keep the eye clean and free from dust as they fly. Their bones are hollow and therefore light of frame. Their frame has cross ribs like steel bars in sky scrapers. The eagle has 7000 feathers. The back feathers are as long as the head feathers. Their beak is black until age of 3 years and then turns golden.

When eagles are about 30 years old they go through a renewal process. They find a secret place high in the mountains and begin to claw at their face and tear out the feathers that have been damaged over the years. As a result, it bleeds badly. But this is necessary for the eagle in order to renew its strength. If it did not do this it would not be able to live to its normal 60 years of age.

Psalms 103:5 says “who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagles.” A time of renewal is necessary for every child of God. A time when we get rid of what is weighing us down, holding us back, aging us spiritually. A time to give up the sinful habits, to give in to the Holy Spirit in whatever way He is convicting us. We need to do this even to the point of renewal with pain! Some things we hold on to so tightly that to let go, actually causes us pain. But in order to have the long, powerful, useful spiritual life that God plans for us, we need to do that. It will renew our spiritual youthfulness.

When the eagle is free to soar in God’s creation, they are the cleanest of birds. They were created to be free and to soar to great heights. They were not meant to remain close to the earth in the lowlands. They were created to soar. When eagles are held in captivity, they become one of the dirtiest birds.

God has created us to remain pure and holy and conformed to his image. Don’t allow the freedom we are to experience in Him, to be compromised by spending too much time in worldly thinking, activities, mindsets. Remain clean!

Eagles do not fly like other birds, they don’t flap their wings but rather soar. Flapping their wings would use incredible amounts of their own strength and endurance and they would require so much more food as fuel if they didn’t soar. Instead they sit on a high ledge and wait for the right wind currents to come. When the time is right, they take off and soar upward. Effortlessly, because they have waited for the right time. There is a special ‘up going’ wind, that they ride as it circles higher and higher toward the sky.

What a lesson for God’s children to learn. How often do we waste strength by jumping out too soon and ‘flapping our wings’, instead of waiting for God’s timing. Waiting is not a popular concept in these days of instant everything! But when we wait on the Lord – wait for His timing – wait for His answers – wait for His direction, then we can soar to new heights and fly to new places.

“Those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength; they will soar on wings like eagles: they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not faint.”

by Linda Ozirney

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Posted by holyman

Exemplary leadership

May 17, 2007

“Encourage your people…correcting them when necessary.” Titus 2:15 TLB

It’s hard to lead others further than you’ve gone yourself, especially when you’re more concerned about their reaction than keeping the team on course. Does that mean setting yourself up as “the be-all and end-all?” No, but as a leader it’s impossible to please everybody. If you constantly need approval you’ll end up being controlled by those you’re supposed to lead. Paul recognized this, that’s why he told Timothy: “Teach…and encourage your people…correcting them when necessary. You have the authority to do this, so don’t let anyone…disregard what you say” (Titus 2:15 NLT).

Insecure, inexperienced leaders agonize over decisions they suspect will cause unhappiness in the ranks. They feel responsible for other people’s emotional reaction. They fail to realize that when you’re doing what you should be doing and others don’t agree, that’s their problem, unless you allow it to become yours. A mature leader deals with disappointment and keeps a good attitude; he faces the music even when he doesn’t like the tune. Think, as a parent when you warn your children about putting their hand on a hot stove, it’s not your responsibility to make them enjoy hearing it, right? Hopefully, as they mature they’ll understand. But the truth is, some people won’t like hearing “no” regardless of how old they get! However, we all need to hear it from time to time, otherwise we’ll never be happy with anything other than getting our own way. Which means – getting nowhere, or getting into trouble!

“I’m with you all the way.” 2 Corinthians 7:4 TM

For leadership at its finest, consider the Apostle Paul. He told the fledgling, often-troubled Christians at Corinth: “I’m with you all the way, no matter what. I have…the greatest confidence in you. If only you knew how proud I am of you…despite all our troubles.” Goethe said, “Correction does much, but encouragement does more.” In spite of their immaturity, and “fights in the church” (2Co 7:5 TM), Paul was their biggest cheerleader. He knew how to comfort and correct, encourage and sharpen – hallmarks of exemplary leadership.

So, what does it mean to be a good leader? Good leaders: (a) are consistent; they set an example by “walking the walk,” so everyone knows that what’s heard at the bottom is first practiced at the top; (b) constantly express their appreciation, realizing people need to know they’re an important part of the team; (c) always listen to suggestions, opinions, fears and ideas without pre-judging or being dismissive. Author Betty Bender said, “It’s a mistake to surround yourself only with people just like you. Throw off that worn comforter – replace it with a crazy quilt of different and imaginative people. Then watch the ideas erupt!”; (d) don’t see people as statistics; Mary Kay Ash said, “P & L doesn’t just mean ‘profit and loss’ – it means ‘people and love’”; (e) explain why they like things done a certain way, because it lessens mistakes and the resentment that can stem from feeling “ordered around.” Clarence Francis said, “You can buy a man’s time, his physical presence at a given place, and even his skill. But you can’t buy enthusiasm…loyalty…and devotion…you have to earn these.”

“He gave constant encouragement.” Acts 20:2 TM

A good leader has 2 important characteristics: he or she knows where they’re going, and can show others the value of going with them. There are talented people who’ll never be effective leaders because they’re more interested in themselves than in those they lead. However, once they’ve gone through the school of hard knocks they become sensitive to other people’s needs. But effective leaders don’t wait for that to happen. They realize that ideas are a dime a dozen, while the people who implement them are priceless. Legendary football coach Bear Bryant used to say, “I’m just a plow-hand…but I’ve learned how to hold a team together; how to lift some men up, how to calm others down, until…they’ve got one heartbeat. There are just 3 things I say: if something goes bad, I did it; if it goes semi-good, we did it; if it goes really good, you did it!”

If you aspire to lead others, consider this: exemplary leaders are approachable; they don’t get touchy and fly off the handle; they never let minor problems poison their outlook; they sandwich every slice of criticism between two layers of praise. Robert Louis Stevenson said, “Keep your fears to yourself but share your courage with others.” There are people who knock the heart out of you and others who put it back in. Encouraging others simply means giving them “a courage transfusion.” “Paul called the disciples together and…gave constant encouragement, lifting their spirits…charging them with fresh hope.” That’s exemplary leadership! So, do you have what it takes to lead?

Thanks,

Vincent D. Smith, Jr.

“You can achieve whatever you set out to accomplish. A positive attitude, coupled by a strong aptitude, will determine your altitude in life” …..Ben Ruffin

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Posted by holyman

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