Eugene Peterson will be here at RTS next week for the annual Kistemaker Lectures. I don't know too much about Peterson, aside from having read an article or two by him in the past, but I'm looking forward to hearing him. He has a reputation for possessing a great deal of wisdom in regards to pastoral concerns and various issues that arise in ministry.

Part of the reason I'm looking forward to the lectures is because of Peterson's commitment to Christian formation and discipleship (his title while at Regent was Professor of Spiritual Theology), and his recognition that the church is to be intimately involved in the lives of believers. The American church, both historically and presently, has demonstrated a great interest in saving souls and seeing people converted, but has not often invested in their lives as they subsequently learn what it looks like to have a life transformed by the gospel. Peterson addresses this in the introduction (and presumably the rest of the chapters) of his latest book, Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing up in Christ:

We cannot overemphasize bringing men and women to new birth in Christ. Evangelism is essential, critically essential. But is it not obvious that growth in Christ is equally essential? Yet the American church has not treated it with an equivalent urgency. The American church runs on the euphoria and adrenaline of new birth—getting people into the church, into the kingdom, into causes, into crusades, into programs. We turn matters of growing up over to Sunday school teachers, specialists in Christian education, committees to revise curricula, retreat centers, and deeper life conferences, farming it out to parachurch groups for remedial assistance. I don't find pastors and professors, for the most part, very interested in matters of formation and holiness. The have higher profile things to tend to.

Americans in general have little tolerance for a centering way of life that is submissive to the conditions in which growth takes place, quiet, obscure, patient, not subject to human control and management. The American church is uneasy in these conditions. Typically, in the name of 'relevance,' it adapts itself to the prevailing American culture and is soon indistinguishable from that culture; talkative, noisy, busy, controlling, image-conscious.

Meanwhile, what has in previous centuries and other cultures been a major preoccupation of the Christian community, becoming men and women who live to 'the praise of God's glory,' has become a mere footnote within a church that has taken on the agenda of the secular society—its educational goals, its activity goals, its psychological goals. By delegating character formation, the life of prayer, the beauty of holiness—growing up in Christ—to specialized ministries or groups, we remove it from the center of the church's life. We disconnect growth from birth, and, in effect, place it on a bench at the margins of the church's life. Wendell Berry, one of our most perceptive prophets of contemporary culture and spirituality, wrote, 'We think it ordinary to spend twelve or sixteen or twenty years of a person's life and many thousands of public dollars on "education"—and not one dime or a thought on character.'

It takes a serious amount of effort to invest that much in someone's life, but Peterson obviously stands as an advocate for the essentiality of this fully-involved discipleship. And the Bible, of course, is replete with examples of this—one only need look to the three years Jesus spent in forming his disciples.

If we truly believe that all of life is to be lived under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, we as the Church need to ensure that we become fully invested in each other's lives as we learn together what that looks like.

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The words that follow belong to David J. Bosch, the renowned South African missiologist, who initially had them published in the December 1979 issue of the Journal of Theology for Southern Africa. This is the kind of thing that simply electrifies me.

As Lord, Jesus was given 'all power in heaven and on earth' (Matt. 28:18). He is therefore repeatedly referred to as 'Saviour of the world' (John 4:42; 1 John 4:14). 'All things were created by him, and all things exist through him and for him,' says Paul (Rom. 11:36). It is the purpose of God to bring all creation together, everything in heaven and on earth, with Christ as head (Eph. 1:10).

All this means that the Kingdom of God (or the Lordship of Christ) is without boundaries. Christ is Lord of all. Naturally, his Lordship his not yet openly and finally manifested. The ultimate is yet to come. We live in the penultimate. We still wait for the day of which Rev. 11:15 speaks, when, as it affirms 'the kingdoms of this world are to become the Kingdom of God,' when God 'will be all in all' (1 Cor. 15:28). For the time being Christ's Lordship over the universe is anonymous; he is not recognised and acclaimed as Lord.

We should, however, not deduce from this that God has handed the universe over to the counter-forces. He is not an absentee Lord whose estate is being ransacked by his enemies during his absence. To be sure, the enemy is active in God's world, extremely active, but we should never allow ourselves to accept that this world belongs to the enemy. If areas of the universe indeed appear to be enemy-occupied territory, let us never for one moment forget that they are occupied illegally, by a usurpur. Satan does not belong in this world. The earth is the Lord's.

If we forget this we commit the same mistake as those Christians who argue...that we had better withdraw from the world into a religious enclave. The terrible thing these Christians are doing is to grant legality to the spurious claim of the enemy that this world belongs to him, not to God! And when Jesus said to Pilate, 'My Kingdom is not of this world', his words should not be understood as meaning that his Kingdom is entirely other-worldly. It should rather, within the context of John's gospel, be understood to mean, 'My Kingdom does not operate according to the rules of this world which have been adulterated by Satan. My Kingdom is unique. But this does not make it other-worldly.' Did Jesus not, after all, teach his disciples to pray, 'Thy Kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven?' Therefore, if we Christians surrender this world to Satan, we play right into his hands. And we betray the Lordship of Christ.

I will leave you to draw out the practical implications of Bosch's excellent words. They are legion.

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If you float around in the circles I do for a while---like maybe for a couple of hours, give or take---you are bound to hear this statement, or at least some variant of it:

In the total expanse of human life there is not a square inch of which the Christ, who alone is sovereign, does not declare, 'That is mine!'

These words of Abraham Kuyper encapsulate, in a simple and profound way, a worldview that I (unapologetically) align myself with. Jesus Christ is Lord of all, or He is not Lord at all [Romans 11:36].

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