Following Jesus-Part IV

This is the last day of my posting about the session at Dallas Theological Seminary hosted by the Center for Christian Leadership entitled Following Jesus In a World Like Ours.

We have covered Assessing Ourselves in Our Cultural Climate, Engaging One Another in Community. and Engaging God in Worship. The final topic is Mark Young covering Engaging Our World in Missions. Dr. Young started with some basic statements:

• It is naive to think that as Christians, we can live outside of the culture around us
  
• That culture was created by people and we need to be more interested in people than in culture
• When we view culture as the enemy we withdraw from it or fight it. That moves us towards the fringes of the culture.

Young gave a definition of culture as a shared way of life designed to achieve a shared vision of common good with shared patterns of behaviors lived out through shared institutions. As such, culture is not intrinsically good or evil, but it is created by people who are by Christian definition sinful and depraved (that includes us as well). We have terminal values that are the idealized end state (i.e., independence) that are arrived at by practicing instrumental values (i.e., individualism). Culture needs to be looked at as a gift from God so we could live together and enjoy the world He created for us.

Young described the Bible not as a book about God, but one about God and humanity.Everything we know about God is through the lens of human interaction with the divine as revealed in Scripture. We need to understand that we are in the image of God, image as revealing and representing His creation.

How do we live in mission within the culture? We need to be right (tell the truth of God), relevant (tell it in a manner understandable within the culture) and redemptive (people have to want what we have in our relationship with God). Young pointed to 1 Peter 2:9-25 as the type of morally blameless, non-retaliatory, trusting and sacrificial living we need to engage in.

During the day, I had posed this question anonymously, and it was used to wrap up the session. With all that was covered today, what is the one key take away each speaker would have us leave with:

• Bock: Spiritual formation (conforming ourselves to image of Christ) is not enough; we need to help people we are called to love by bringing Christ to them.

• Bingham: Scripture is the basis from which all perspectives are to proceed out from.

• Jones: We need to be bi-lingual; speaking the languages of both tradition and culture.

• Young: seek to live good lives amongst non-believers, They may argue with you but they will see your good deeds and lives and God will be glorified by that.

I thoroughly enjoyed this seminar and what each speaker had to offer. I hope you enjoyed my meager summary thes epast four days.

Following Jesus-Part III

This is the third day of my posting about the session at Dallas Theological Seminary hosted by the Center for Christian Leadership entitled Following Jesus In a World Like Ours.

We have covered Assessing Ourselves in Our Cultural Climate and Engaging One Another in Community. Now, Barry Jones will take us through Engaging God in Worship. Dr. Jones began with a very basic premise: we worship God because He deserves it. Our worship has that one purpose but many consequences as you candle God's faithfulness against the faithlessness of people. Jones noted that as a culture we deal less with theological concepts of spirituality and more with psychic well being. We are interested as a culture with feeling good more than we are with feeling God.

Jones covered four acts in the drama of worship:

• Gathering: the coming together in worship and attending to God. We need to pay attention to God. We need to pay attention to what is said about God. The concept of lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi (The law of prayer is the law of belief is the law of life; or as the church prays and worships, so she beleives, so she lives life). We need to pay attention to the Christian past. Do not just ask is it relevant, ask if it is ancient, has it passed the test of time.

• Word: we need to recover a robust theology of preaching, to focus on the importance of the sermon. We need to make the Gospel the center of the sermon. We need to preach by naming the idols we follow after in life. Bold, robust preaching.

• Table: we need to reconsider the weight of history, to note the spiritual nourishment in partaking in the Lord's Supper, to counter the logic of consumerism, of giving to get. Our spirituality has to be holistic, embracing our minds and bodies.

• Sending: worship has to be at the heart of our missionary zeal. Worship that doesn't result in mission is abortive, it does not give life from the sending out of the church.

Jones concluded by noting that worship should lead to living transformed lives serving others in mission. Tomorrow I will wrap up with Engaging our World in Missions.

Following Jesus-Part II

Monday I got the chance to attend a really good session at Dallas Theological Seminary hosted by the Center for Christian Leadership. It was entitled Following Jesus In a World Like Ours.

Yesterday I posted on Assessing Ourselves in Our Cultural Climate. Today I will talk about Engaging One Another in Community. Jeff Bingham presented this portion of the session. Dr. Bingham started with some statements of what is necessary for us to be authentic Christians:

• Authentic worship requires us to be reconciled to each other within the community
• Authentic language about loving God demands loving relationships with each other
• Authentic devotional life requires honorable relationships within the community, especially that of marriage
• God did not create us to be alone with Him; He created us to be with Him in community

Bingham discussed that we have reduced community activities due to items such as television and computers making leisure and entertainment making it easy to go it alone; with suburbanization making it more difficult to get together. Bingham went on to descibe several false concepts of Christian community:

• Individualism: thought that it is not essential to be spiritually nurtured in a communal fashion
• Tribalism: a commmunity is adequate unto itself without interfacing with other communities
• Presentism:the community is perfectly governed and provided for in the present without connection to past Christianity
• Concertism:if you get people in same place witnessing same event, you have Christian community without regard for whether there is actual communal interaction

Bingham pointed to scripture to deal with these false concepts, most specifically 1 Corinthians 12:4-11 for the utilizing of different giftsd together in community; Romans 12:4-5 for the concept that believers gather together and complete each other and Ephesians 2:11-22 for a description of a new Christian community. Practical steps included:

• Enhancing the communal nature and frequency of the Lord's supper
• Adapting the communal identity before the individual identity
• Acknowledge that some of the most significant spiritual growth occurs in community and not all in an individual personal relationship
  
• Establish accountability with other communities including the Chrisitian past

Tomorrow we will discuss how to engage in worship.

Following Jesus-Part I

Monday I got the chance to attend a really good session at Dallas Theological Seminary hosted by the Center for Christian Leadership. It was entitled Following Jesus In a World Like Ours. I will attempt a couple of blog posts to cover the information discussed. Four main speakers, all on faculty at DTS: Darrell Bock, Jeff Bingham, Barry Jones and Mark Young. All did a great job presenting and were very accessible to participants after presentations and on breaks throughout the day.

Dr Bock opened things up with a session entitled Assessing Ourselves in Our Cultural Climate. He laid out a road map of the issues facing the church today, that the follow on presenters would address. Dr. Bock noted 5 main issues from his perspective:

• Post-modern relativism: an entitlement culture that extends all the way to things of God. Will come up against the concept of grace, which would define us as not entitled. No revelation from above, the creator-creature interaction is obliterated.

• Pluralism: there are no valid exclusivity claims by any religion. Bock saw people moving down one of two tracks here; either towards more fundamentalism within their respective religion or more secularism, with both blocs trying to impose their worldview on others. Bock saw three potential reactions: 1)Dig in-and hold your line, 2)Withdraw-and step out of the culture or 3)Engage-both to understand other viewpoints and explain yours.

• Personalized Globalism: distance between people is shrinking, more diverse people moving into our culture generating fear and uncertainty in how to engage. We have mor epersonal knowledge of cultural differences than before.

• Materialism: An oldie but a goodie. it has been around a long, long time. Keads to life being defined by possessions and an excessive individualism. Religion is reduced to a transaction or consumer product-what can God do for me?

• Omnipresent Technology: open and instant access to information at an emotive level with much multiprocessing.

Bock gave a brief idea on how to tackle these issues which he would sum up as engage, engage, engage. Don't shrink away, understand the person before you explain your position, look for a Gospel message that is trans-national to fit a globalizing culture, use technology and use God's gifts to serve.

That is a mouthful, I hope I got it right. More tomorrow, but you can see the issues to be addressed in following Jesus today are not insignificant.