Powlison on the Mission of JBC

The Journal of Biblical Counseling is now available on-line. In the opening editorial, David Powlison re-introduces JBC and talks about its mission:

CCEF works and prays to restore Christ to counseling and counseling to the church. JBC serves this mission as a publishing ministry of CCEF. Why is this mission important? Why does it take work to restore Christ to counseling and counseling to the church? Let me set the stage by describing the issues at stake.

Why restore Christ to counseling? The wider counseling world views Jesus as irrelevant to understanding and addressing people’s deepest personal and interpersonal troubles. He might as well not even exist. Whoever he is, whatever he did, whatever he is doing, whatever he will do, and however he does it—it’s all intellectually and practically insignificant. The Jesus Christ of the Bible does not appear in self-help books, in classrooms, or in the licensure of mental health personnel. He apparently has no traction when it comes to the problems that break down lives and break up relationships.

But we believe that true, life-explaining insight into people necessarily involves thinking Christianly. Loving, lasting help necessarily involves practicing ‘counseling’ as one aspect of consciously Christian ministry. The deeper you gaze into what actually goes wrong with people—the weight of our sins and sorrows—the more clearly you see that Jesus Christ is essential to making it right.

Why restore counseling to the church? The wider counseling world views the church as mostly irrelevant to resolving people’s troubles. At best, churchy communities and religious practice might offer auxiliary support services for clients who happen to be religiously-oriented. Churches can be only incidentally useful to someone else’s agenda.

But we believe that the message and life of the body of Christ connects to the core of what is going on in disturbed relationships and in disturbed, disturbing people. Christ’s church is necessary—life-or-death necessary—for all people, whatever their current religious or irreligious orientation. This doesn’t mean that churches are islands of paradise on earth. Sinners and sufferers inhabit churches. In fact, the better a church is, the more broken people will be drawn, and the more problems will be present! But Jesus came, comes and will come to build his church, his ekklesia, a people who gather in his Name.

Review of Kingdom Calling

Tom Nelson reviews Amy Sherman's book Kingdom Calling.

The author’s well-placed concern is that many church leaders are woefully inadequate at equipping their congregational members to connect Sunday worship with Monday work. Even though ministry leaders seek faithful gospel ministry, many are overlooking a vital stewardship in the comprehensive outworking of the gospel in this already, but not fully yet moment in redemptive history. Sherman writes,

American workers, on average, spend 45 hours a week at work. That’s about 40 percent of our waking hours each week—a huge amount of time. If church leaders don’t help parishioners discern how to live missionally through that work, they miss a major—in some instances the major—avenue believers have for learning to live as foretastes.

Ministry leaders often use the language of stewardship when addressing financial wealth, but they seldom talk about vocational stewardship so passionately or seriously. Sherman calls Christian leaders to become more theologically informed and intentional about vocational stewardship.

This looks like a very good book. I've added it to my "wish list" of books to get.

Called to Be Productive

Greg Forster on being Productive for the Glory of God, Good of Neighbors:

I don't think pastors should pretend to be experts on international finance, or try to handle political and policy questions beyond their knowledge. What they can do is equip people to discern the calling of God to productive work.

Imagine pulpits across America clearly and consistently preaching:

• God is calling you to spend every day making the lives of others better through productive work in your home, workplace, and community.
• God is calling you to be a spiritual leader who gracefully sets that expectation for others - because everyone made in God's image is called to productivity - and for our nation.

Productivity is a critically essential component of both discipleship and good citizenship. In the long term it is the only protection against both pietistic subjectivism in our churches and also economic collapse in our nation.

Missional: The New Christian Consumerism?

Jonathan Dodson in Be Missional, Not Superficially Contextual (emphasis added):

The main impetus behind superficial contextualization is church growth, not gospel communication. As a result, missional may mean: "You can grow your church by getting a cool worship leader, an edgy venue, an anti-religion message, and a preacher with hip clothing."

When we become primarily concerned with church forms---building, music, service, website design---we dip below superficial contextualization into syncretism, blending Christianity with another religion, in this case consumerism. Christian consumerism gives people what we think they want, instead of calling them to what they need: repentance and faith in Jesus Christ as Lord. Instead of cracking the missional code, many churches have cracked a consumer code, attracting people to culturally bland but comfortable services while occasionally injecting them with the feel-good serum of social justice. But if Jesus Christ is Lord, his lordship should produce particular expressions of the gospel---music with local flavor and gospel-rich lyrics, community that incarnates grace in the neighborhood, culture-making that reflects his grandeur, and fresh language that awakens locals to grace.

Some versions of missional are simply a new form of church growth that caters to consumer Christianity. Underneath superficial contextualization lurks a consumeristic impulse that gathers people around church forms instead of Jesus Christ as Lord. This misuse leads us to contaminate both contextualization and the gospel. We try to get people to buy in to a new form of church instead of dying so they might live for Christ. This is troubling.

In Defense of the Gospels

Greg Thornbury at the BibleMesh blog talks about why four Gospel accounts of Jesus' life do not pose a problem to the historical accuracy of the Gospels. He makes three points in defense of the truthfulness of the Gospels; the first one is this:

Whenever someone raises a question about the truthfulness of the Bible, ask yourself first whether or not the same question would bother any other scholar about any other figure in history. How many biographies are there of George Washington, for example? Is this in itself a concern about the historicity of the life of a pivotal figure during the American Revolution or actual evidence of his greatness and importance?

Read the rest of his points here.

Weaning the Church Off Programs

Bobby Jamieson has been writing about the The Post-Program Church. The series includes some practical thoughts on Which Programs to Cut? and Strategies for Becoming a Post-Program Church.

What then does it mean to be a post-program church? For now I’ll simply make one vision-level suggestion: instead of running programs, cultivate a culture. Specifically, nurture a culture of evangelism and discipleship.

Culture is a notoriously slippery concept to define because it’s so pervasive and all-encompassing. Culture is to humans what water is to a fish. We hardly notice it because it’s all around us. In this way, culture defines what’s normal. And my point here is simply that pastors should preach and teach and lead in such a way that evangelism and discipleship become normal parts of every single church member’s life. That’s the goal to aim at, anyway.

The New Testament instructs every Christian to make disciples (Matt. 28:19). It teaches that the church grows as every single member contributes to the body’s development (Eph. 4:11-16).

Although it doesn’t have to be this way, one of the dangers of programs is that they can make it seem like evangelism or discipleship only occurs within the program. But evangelism and discipleship are things that, in one way or another, all of us should be doing on a regular basis. So make that your plumb line for evaluating programs—and everything else in the corporate life of your church.

Is Our Charity Creating Dependency?

Bob Lupton offers some warnings about How Charity Can Be Toxic.

There is a difference between crisis intervention and chronic poverty. The Good Samaritan is a story about crisis intervention. Gleaning is about how to share our assets and protect the world's poor. Don't reap to the competitive edges of your field; leave room for the poor to work so they can harvest where they haven't planted. In your grace don't strip the vines; leave some for the poor so that everybody can work at harvest.

The point is, let's examine the outcome of care. When I talk about the progression of one-way giving, first you elicit appreciation. You do it twice, you elicit anticipation. What's more, you do it three times and it becomes expectation that he's going to do it again. Four times and it's an entitlement. By the fifth time it's dependency. They've done it every year and we count on it. If anybody has been doing this kind of work, they begin to see that pattern. There is a chronic poverty issue and it calls for a chronic intervention, which is enabling people.

Children in the Church Gathering

David Fitch deals with the issue of "Our Children Don’t Get Anything Out of the Service": Worship as Training for Life. I like what he says to parents:

... what I do when parents say to me “Our Children Don’t Get Anything Out of the Service” is a gentile nudge around three statements. I ask these parents, please remember three things:

1.) There’s an encounter with the living God here at our worship service. Your son/daughter need to be coached into that reality. They need to be prepared for the reality that we gather into His presence so that we might in turn know His presence in every area of our everyday lives....

2.) But Discerning God is Rarely Immediately Obvious. God is hidden. So your son and/or daughter and our church need to learn and be sensitized to discerning the presence of God. If we put God into sound bites or hyped up worship experiences, then your child will learn instinctually that church is the only place he or she can find God. And this simply isn’t true....

3.) Children Ultimately Will Follow/Imitate Their Parents and Adults They Can Respect – therefore one’s children and how they are progressing can function as an excellent diagnostic for our own level of engagement with God. I must be careful to not overstate this because children all develop differently. But let’s face it, eh? If we are forcing our children to do something we are ourselves are disconnected from, it ain’t going to happen....

Discipleship Resource

Looking for customized, biblical discipleship material? I haven't searched through the site and material but Downline Ministries looks like it might be a helpful resource.

Sunday is for Encouragement

Worship. On one hand, we say it involves all of life - our work, our play; not just Sunday but Monday to Saturday. On the other hand, we say it's what we do on Sunday in the church service/gathering/meeting - and not everything in the service, just the part where we sing; and not always everything we sing, just the music that makes us feel close to God.

Steve Atkerson helpfully cuts through this and reminds us to "Worship At All Times, But Meet Primarily to Edify.

The reason for “meeting together” is to “encourage” one another. We are to think of ways to “spur” one another on toward love and good deeds. In this sense the church meeting is to be designed to equip the believer to go out and worship during the week. As Francis Scott Key wrote, “And since words can never measure, let my life show forth thy praise.”