Update:Stefan Paas has produced a transcript of his lecture in PDF form, which is available for download here. The paper also clarifies some points and addresses some of the questions that were raised by his talk.
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Stefan Paas is a professor at the Free University of Amsterdam, holding the J.H. Bavinck Chair for Church Planting and Church Renewal. He was at the recent Redeemer City to City Europe conference in Berlin where he gave a talk entitled "A European Perspective on Church Planting." If you're involved in ministry in the UK or Europe, I think you'll find this to be very interesting. He raises a lot of important questions to consider about the nature of ministry here and the vision and aims of the church on this continent.
Below is the audio of his session as well as the slides he used during the presentation, which he has now made available.
If you are interested in the rest of the audio sessions of the conference, including some by Tim Keller, they can be found here. Do note that you need to register in order to be able to get access to all of them.
David J. Bosch wrote the following in December 1979 issue of the Journal of Theology for Southern Africa. Bosch, a renowned missiologist, wants us to think about what it means to recognise and acknowledge the Lordship of Christ over all of creation. 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 am signing off for the next couple of weeks, and so during that time I will leave you to draw out the practical implications of Bosch's excellent words. Any comments you have in response would be most welcome. We need to be talking about this since it is so crucial to discipleship and to the church's mission in the world.
Chris Wright, a leading missiologist and International Director for the Langham Partnership International, gave this excellent talk at the Third Lausanne Congress in Cape Town this week. The blurb on the website says, "[Wright] challenges the people of God to confront the idols of power and pride, popularity and success, and wealth and greed. He calls the Church to repentance and simplicity." You must find 23 minutes to watch this.
While I was away this week, I had some time to start reading Urban Ministry: The Kingdom, the City & the People of God, co-authored by Harvie Conn and Manuel Ortiz. It really is an excellent book, although I've discovered that just reading through it is not sufficient—I am going to have to go back to the beginning armed with my trusty pencil and ruler and take the time to pore over the material and mine the gold from this thick volume.
One of the themes Conn and Ortiz develop in the book is that the city is a fundamentally religious place, a theme I will be looking at in the next few posts as I continue to work through the book. In ancient history, the religious character of the city was much more overt, but the more subliminal religiosity of today's cities does not obscure the fact that it still remains a fundamentally religious place. Conn and Ortiz write that in the city we find
urban mazes searching through the city for meaning and order to existence—quests that never escape their religious origins. With organized systems that structure religion around the supernatural, building temple and mosque. With unorganized common or folk religions that focus hopes for safe air travel in the 'spirit of the air' embodied in a straw idol and then discard it at the Kimpo airport in Seoul as the plane is boarded. With the surrogate religion of the great England bowler Harold Larwood, who claimed, 'Cricket was my reason for living.' With the unorganized invisible religion that finds its answer to the yearning of the heart in sex or ideology, work or family (191).
Of course, this is just a testament to the reality that human beings are themselves, at the core, religious beings. Conn and Ortiz cite John Calvin in the first book of his Institutes of the Christian Religion:
God himself has implanted in all men a certain understanding of his divine majesty. Ever renewing its memory, he repeatedly sheds fresh drops...[All men] continue to retain some seed of religion. So deeply does the common conception occupy the minds of all, so tenaciously does it inhere in the hearts of all! Therefore, since from the beginning of the world there has been no region, no city, in short, no household, that could do without religion, there lies in this a tacit confession of a sense of deity inscribed in the hearts of all (I.iii.1).
With that in view, Conn and Ortiz ask a pressing question: "Who waits in the urban shadows of these dead-end mazeways distorted by sin, these blurred human paths along which we stumble through the city, blindly searching for links to the cosmos and its norm, to the riddle of our existence?" (191). Whoever these people are, let it be the church that shines light into those shadows, being the presence of Jesus and his Kingdom in the city. We are called as the people of God to "seek the peace and prosperity of the city" and to "pray to the Lord for it" (Jeremiah 29:7). The best thing for any city are churches that actively seek to love and serve their cities.
In a place where a plethora of idols compete for its citizens hearts, in a place where meaning and purpose is distored or even lost, in a place where people's identities can be reduced to nothing, let us proclaim the message of the gospel that crushes all idols, provides total meaning and purpose, and gives people their ultimate identity as citizens of the Kindgom and children of the King.
If you are not familiar with Lesslie Newbigin's story, he grew up in Britain and studied at Cambridge, where he was converted and trained for the ministry. After getting married, he spent nearly forty years in India as a missionary. When he was in Britain as a child and a student, it was still something of a "Christian" society, but upon his return in 1974, he discovered a country that he could describe as nothing less than pagan.
Michael Goheen, in his doctoral dissertation on Newbigin's missionary ecclesiology (which is available online for free!), writes that Newbigin had come to understand the church's relationship to the culture as a missionary encounter because "the church embodies the gospel as an alternative way of life to the culture in which it is set and thereby challenges the culture's fundamental assumptions" (365). Newbigin borrowed language from the sociology of knowledge to express this notion of a missionary encounter in his book, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. He writes,
The gospel gives rise to a new plausibility structure, a radically different vision of things from those that shape all human cultures apart from the gospel. The Church, therefore, as the bearer of the gospel, inhabits a plausibility structure which is at variance with, and which calls into question, those that govern all human cultures without exception (9).
Goheen adds that "all cultures exhibit a plausibility structure that embody and transmit the fundamental beliefs of its inhabitants. Those fundamental beliefs stand in opposition to the gospel and if there is to be a missionary encounter, the church itself must be a community that embodies an alternative set of foundational beliefs" (365-366). If the church is faithful in doing this then three things will result: first, the foundational beliefs of a culture will be challenged; second, the church will offer the gospel as a credible alternative way of life; and third, the church will call the culture to radical conversion and invite it to live and understand the world through the lens of the gospel. At that point, the culture is left with the choice of accepting or rejecting the gospel and the lordship of Jesus Christ. As Newbigin expresses it in his little book, The Other Side of 1984: Questions for the Churches, the church that embodies the gospel
must necessarily clash with contemporary culture. It must challenge the whole 'fiduciary framework' within which our culture operates. It must call unequivocally for radical conversion, a conversion of the mind so that things are seen differently, and a conversion of the will so that things are done differently. It must decline altogether the futile attempt to commend the biblical vision of how things are by seeking to adjust it to the assumptions of our culture (53).
The fact that Newbigin would say something this provocative in the context he did was significant, for he was speaking about a culture that, to some degree, still believed it was a Christian culture, much like America today. But Newbigin understands that just because a certain percentage of a culture's population professes belief in God or attends church regularly does not mean its underlying worldview is shaped by the gospel.
Further, he rightly recognizes that the worldviews that give shape to a culture are religious in nature. Religion, in Newbigin's view, is not just a cultural form, and "it is more than an institution that embodies beliefs and practices concerning God and the destiny of the soul. It is a set of ultimate commitments about the nature of the world that gives shape, direction, and meaning to life and demands final loyalty" (Goheen, 367).
And here, then, is the reason the gospel needs to challenge the foundational beliefs of a culture—because all of life is religion, and everything we think, say, and do is either in service to God or an idol. Christ is Lord over all of life, and the church is called to proclaim and embody this truth. As witnesses to Jesus and the presence of his kingdom and rule, we cannot be satisfied to accept a sacred/secular divide and leave our culture to let its presuppositions inform certain areas while challenging its assumptions in other areas. All of life belongs to the Lord and our calling as the church is to unapologetically call to the world to recognize that truth.
