TILL HE COMES Blog

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Yesterday I reminisced about Will Smith and his transformation from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to Will Smith of Hollywood.

In the December 10, 2007 issue of TIME magazine, there was a writeup about Will Smith and how this transformation occurred.

What is Will’s secret? Intentionality. Will Smith says that this is all according to plan. TIME reports that “Because Smith has mastered the delicate art of appearing artless, few moviegoers realize that his is one of Hollywood’s most meticulously planned and executed careers.” He hatched his plan at age 16 after his first girlfriend cheated on him because (in his mind) he wasn’t good enough. he decided that he was never not be good enough again. He made a plan to correct this, and never looked back. You can see the plan unfold as you watch the career of Will Smith. But what interests me are ten principles he operates by to execute that plan. Here they are as gleaned from the article:

1. Don’t have a Plan B. Relentlessly pursue plan A. Smith says “By even contemplating a Plan B, you almost create the necessity for a Plan B.” As church leaders, while it is often a good idea to make plans, I think we sometimes get derailed from God’s vision for our lives by naysayers and setbacks. But if all we have is Plan A, we will work at it wholeheartedly because there is no other  option.

2. Read. Read. Read. Find your answers in books. Smith has a library stocked with books on every topic imaginable. He reads and studies to find the answers he needs. This reminds me of something I heard Chuck Swindoll say: “Readers are leaders.”

3. Study what others have done, and emulate. Learn by watching others. When Smith began his acting career, he would watch and emulate the various actors that came on the show, even mouthing their words after them when they rehearsed. Later, when he started to try to get into movies, he and his manager found a list of the 10 top-grossing movies of all time, and looked for patterns and similarities in them. Church leaders can do this with churches, but we have to be careful how we define “success.” Big churches are not the most successful churches.

4. Be Friendly. Make contacts.Smith had a knack for charming his way out of trouble and winning friends.  This is how he met “DJ Jazzy Jeff” and later, James Lassiter, his manager. Church leaders and planters cannot afford to be introverted. We must love to spend time with people.

5. Work hard. Be Diligent. Smith has a good work ethic and works hard at everything he does. Leading a church is not easy. It takes hard work and lots of sweat and tears.

We’ll save the final five Principles for tomorrow.

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We previously asked the question, “Who is the church service for - believers or unbelievers?” (See Part 1 and Part 2). We saw that depending on how you answer that question determines whether you are going to focus on teaching believers or reaching out to unbelievers (aka seekers) in your “church service.” However, statistics and surveys reveal that in general, disciple-making churches don’t turn out very good disciples, and seeker-sensitive churches tend mostly to attract Christians from other churches. So both approaches are failing in both discipleship and evangelism.

I suggested that the solution to this dilemma is to ask different questions. First, What is church? and second, What is the church service? With basic answers to these questions, we can now see that the only time “church service” is happening is when a group of believers (the church) are actually meeting the needs of someone else (serving), whether these needs are spiritual or physical. To be balanced, a church should focus on both spiritual and physical needs. Who is the church service for? It is for anybody that that the church is serving.

Ideally, a group of believers could meet together for prayer, Bible study, and fellowship, then as a group, go and put into practice what they have learned in Scripture. They could do this all on one day, or split it up during the days of the week, or even alternate weeks. This will work best when the same group of believers that learns together goes out and serves together as well. Other than these few things, I cannot find any clear guidelines in Scripture on when the church is supposed to meet and/or what they are supposed to do.

This will radically free you from the constraints of what has come to be known as “church.” Tune in tomorrow to see what I mean.

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Yesterday we looked at the two most common formats for church services. Some focus on teaching and training Christians, while others focus on reaching out to unbelieving seekers. Both have weaknesses.

Teaching churches focus on training Christians, but do a relatively poor job of reaching the lost. They will often say that outreach and evangelism is the job of the individual Christian, and you will hear them say things like “Healthy sheep naturally reproduce.” But little evangelism actually takes place. And, as it turns out, though many of the believers in these churches know their Bibles well, few of them actually live out what they know in their day-to-day lives, nor are they reaching out with the gospel, which challenges the idea that these sorts of churches are actually doing a good job making disciples. So such churches fail at reaching out, and ultimately, fail at making disciples.

Seeker sensitive churches try to fix this by making their church programs and services more welcoming to unbelievers. They seem to do a great job at this. They will often offer Saturday or weeknight services for the Christians to help them mature, or will encourage believers to get involved in home groups for discipleship. But in reality, few disciples are brought to maturity. Furthermore, it has become increasintly evident that although these churches do grow numerically, most of their growth is transfer growth from other churches, rather than actual evangelism growth. So unbelievers are really not being reached. Such churches fail at reaching out, and ultimately, fail at making disiciples.

The problem with both models is the same: the church cannot focus primarily on training believers or primarily on reaching unbelievers. Both are needed. But even churches that try to do both are generally quite weak in one or the other. So who is the church service for - believers or unbelievers? The answer is: “Wrong question.”

The correct questions are “What is the church?” and “What is the church service?” We will begin looking at those questions in the days ahead.

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The previous post talked about how there are lots of church planting networks, but many of them are opposed to Free Grace Theology. Some have e-mailed in asking why we even need to plant churches. (By the way, if you have something to say/ask, go ahead and use the comment box rather than e-mail me.) Basicically, people think that there are already too many churches and it is better to revitalize and support existing churches rather than plant new ones.

So many things can be said about this, and I will try to post some responses in the following few posts. Here is the first thing ( I pulled this from ThinkChristian.net):

1. There are 195 million non-churched people in America, making America one of the top four largest “unchurched” nations in the world.
2. In spite of the rise of mega-churches, no county in America has a greater church population than it did ten years ago.
3. During the last ten years, combined communicant membership of all Protestant denominations declined by 9.5 percent (4,498,242), while the national population increased by 11.4 percent (24,153,000).
4. Each year 3,500 to 4,000 churches close their doors forever; yet only as many as 1,500 new churches are started.
5. There are now nearly 60 percent fewer churches per 10,000 persons than in 1920.

• In 1920 27 churches existed for every 10,000 Americans.
• In 1950 17 churches existed for every 10,000 Americans.
• In 1996 11 churches existed for every 10,000 Americans.

6. “Today, of the approximately 350,000 churches in America, four out of five are either plateaued or declining.”
7. American denomination recently found that 80% of its converts came to Christ in churches less than two years old.
8. Hence the claim of many leaders: “The single most effective evangelistic methodology under heaven is planting new churches” (Peter Wagner).

He also lists some poverty statistics taken from Wikipedia, which everybody should be familiar with by now. Find them here.

Just for fun, I found a quick map that gives a generalized picture of religious adherents in the US from 2000: Religious Adherents. The map is from a page on Valparaiso University’s web site called American Ethnic Geography.

There may be lots of churches today, but there are LOTS more people, and the number of churches per person is decreasing. Some might argue that this is because small churches are closing and the people are going to mega-churches, which is true. But it is becoming increasingly obvious that many mega-churches are not doing a better job than smaller churches of making disciples of the people who attend.

Most importantly, is that new church plants tend to be much more effective and efficient at reaching out to unbelievers. For this reason alone, we need to get involved in and excited about church planting.

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I have a heart that beats for church planting…I’m just not sure I’m cut out to be a church planter! I mentioned it before, but I have become increasingly convinced that if Free Grace theology is going to move forward, we have to involved in church planting. There are numerous organizations and networks which are planting hundreds of churches worldwide, and most of them are strongly Lordship/Calvinistic. We need one for Free Grace Theology! It’s not enough to just write and speak and debate. We need to get out there and share the gospel, make disciples, and plant churches.

Below are 15 of the top church planting organizations. Though for many of them I could not find a doctrinal statement, the ones that did have doctrinal statements leaned toward Calvinistic/Lordship theology.

1. Acts 29 - Calvinstic
2. New Thing Network - Lordship
3. Global Church Advancement - I’m Unsure
4. Leadership Network - I can’t find a doctrinal statement
5. Orchard Group - I can’t find a doctrinal statement
6. Passion 4 Planting - Lordship
7. Stadia: New Church Strategies - I can’t find a doctrinal statement
8. Grace Church Planting Ministries - Lordship
9. house2house - I can’t find a doctrinal statement
10. Kairos - I can’t find a doctrinal statement
11. Emerging Church Network - I can’t find a doctrinal statement
12. 153 House Churches Network - I can’t find a doctrinal statement
13. multiplyingchurches.org - I can’t find a doctrinal statement
14. Church Planting Movement - I can’t find a doctrinal statement
15. Association of Related Churches - I can’t find a doctrinal statement

By the way, if you are interested in church planting, or just doing things better at your church to reach out more effectively, many of these sites have excellent free tools and ideas. Make use of them.

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There is a tendency in many Christian circles to think that if a particular theological viewpoint can quote a lot of Scripture, it must be right. For example, in a recent book defending the Five Points of Calvinism (by David Steele and Curtis Thomas), the authors seem to think that if they just quote Scripture, they have proved their point. For each of the five points, they provide a theological explanation for the point, and then “prove” it by citing numerous pages of Scriptural proof-texts, without ever attempting an explanation of those texts. In the debate about three years ago between Bob Wilkin and James White, Dr. White used almost his entire opening statement to simply read Bible verses. The implication was that to prove Calvinism, all you have to do is read the Bible, and anybody is not a Calvinist, hasn’t read Scripture.

I call this shotgun hermeneutics. Those who use this tactic try to “blow you away” by the sheer number of verses they can quote which they feel proves their point. When you try to explain one or two of them to show that you are aware of these passages but have a different understanding, they will focus on all the other passages they quoted which you did not explain.

In my discussions, the dialogue generally goes like this:

Calvinist: My view is right because of Passages A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J. If you would simply read and believe the Bible, you would agree with what God has said.

Calvinist: I’ll be praying for your soul that you would repent from your darkness and be brought into the light!

If you have ever tried to discuss theology with someone who holds strongly to a particular system of theology, you know that this is how many of these discussions go.

Recently, I have noticed this tactic being used by some who disagree with me on various other issues. In their blogs and articles, they seem to imply that I have not read the Bible, and that if I did, I would see the truth of their position. They argue that when they read Scripture to me, I am silenced by the weight of Biblical evidence. When I attempt explanations of one or two passages they quoted, they say that my interpretation cannot be correct because of so many other Biblical passages which say something different, and furthermore, nobody they have ever read holds to my interpretation. Then I get called a heretic.

Shotgun hermeneutics and name calling is no way to proceed in theological discussion. To really get somewhere in theological debate, we must pick one passage at a time, and stick to it, camp upon it, walk around it, and work through it. Then, hopefully, we will arrive at two or three possible interpretations. Only then can we go to a second passage.

We do the same thing with passages A-Z. When all is done, we go back and reconsider all the evidence. You discard all interpretations that contradict other interpretations. Hopefully, you are left with only one possible interpretation. If not, you go back and try to decide which of the remaining views is the best.

This is the approach I used about 15 years ago to leave Calvinism. In the early 90’s, I was a five-point, hyper-Calvinistic, Lordship Salvationist. Then, a good friend challenged my thinking on James 2:14-26. I camped on that passage for a few months. I saw that my friend’s interpretation was one possible understanding. However, I wanted to reject that view, because of “all the other passages which contradicted it.” But he said, “That’s one option. Or maybe you are wrong on your understanding of all those passages too, and you need to study each one individually.” So that’s what I did. It took me about ten years, at the end of which time, every single point of Calvinism had fallen for me. I still read books and articles by Calvinists and those who disagree with my views. Why? Because if I am wrong in my understanding of a particular passage, I want to know. I hope you do too.

So don’t practice shotgun hermeneutics. Such a practice is not beneficial since all it does is take aim at other people’s heads in an effort to blow them away.

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I want to begin a study today on the terms “Christ” and “Son of God” as they relate to Jesus. Since this study will require quite a bit of research, I will only be able to make one post per week (maybe less!) related to this issue. Today, I am only introducing the study.

The importance of this study cannot be overemphasized, since all four Gospels center their message around the identity of Jesus, who He is, and what He has done. This study will help our understanding of the Gospel of John in particular, since John’s purpose in writing is to get people to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. If people receive eternal life by believing that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, it is vitally important to understand what these terms mean, and what must be believed about Jesus, so that we can be sure we have everlasting life.

By way of full disclosure, I do not yet know where this study will lead. Too many people come to Scripture with their theology already set by tradition and what their favorite teachers proclaim. I will do my best to let the Scriptures speak for themselves. Many people today teach that the terms “Christ” and “Son of God” refer to the divinity of Jesus. While that certainly has been a popular view in the past, and may be what is considered the “traditional” view, more and more students of the Word are realizing this view does not fit all the Biblical data. However, if in my study, I find that this traditional view best fits Scripture, I will believe and teach it to the best of my ability.

Where I Currently Am
Nobody, of course, is a blank slate. We all have theological systems of thought which must either be corrected or supported by Scripture. One key to proper Biblical investigation is knowing where you are starting from, and then turning to Scripture, not in an attempt to defend what you believe, but in an attempt to see if Scripture should challenge and change what is believed. We must never believe the theology handed down to us simply because it is the traditional or majority view.

So my current view is this by historical and cultural definition, the terms “Christ” and “Son of God” do not inherently refer to deity. Instead, they refer to the role or function of someone who is being used by God in a special way to carry out God’s will on earth.

In the current tradition I am part of (the Free Grace movement), the Gospel of John is often seen as “the only evangelistic book of the Bible.” I am not completely convinced that this is the case. In fact, I think every single book of the Bible is “evangelistic” but this is more due to how I understand the word “evangelism” than anything else. I will save that for a different study.

I believe that John, in his Gospel, is trying to get people to see that Jesus is God, and is possibly trying to instill more meaning in the terms “Christ” and “Son of God” than the average person in the first century would have understood or immediately grasped. In other words, one of the primary purposes of John is to impregnate the terms “Christ” and “Son of God” with new meaning and significance that cannot be used of any other human throughout history.

If this is true, John is not trying to teach that believing that Jesus is God is how a person receives eternal life, but that believing that Jesus is God brings a person to believe in Jesus for everlasting life. There is a vast difference. 

So my hypothesis is as follows:

The terms “Christ” (or “Messiah”) and “Son of God” did not originally refer to someone who was divine, but to someone who had a special relationship with God and was therefore given a God-appointed task, which was often related to some sort of deliverance. However, as Jesus performed His ministry as “the Christ, the Son of God” the terms grew in significance to include the idea that the God-appointed task of Jesus required Him to be God in the flesh. The Gospel writers (especially John) emphasized the divinity of Jesus to prove that everlasting life is freely given to those who believe in the name of Jesus for it.

A Warning
I can already hear certain people calling me a heretic and a false teacher. If that is you, I invite you to withhold judgment and embark with me on this study. Let’s search the Scriptures together. I value and desire your input…if it is genuine and spoken in love. There are certain men out there right now on different blogs and publications calling me a heretic for even proposing such a study. They misquote and misrepresent what I have said and written, and though they claim a desire to see me “return to the truth,” the tone of their posts, their bitter name-calling, and their complete unwillingness to honestly critique their “tradition” makes anything they say worthless to this discussion. If you want to lambaste and quarrel, I can’t stop you from saying such things, but I can stop you from saying them on this site. Such comments will be deleted and such users will be blocked. For everybody else, please try to keep your comments concise, clear, and on-topic.

How We will Proceed
1. We will begin by looking at the terms “Christ” and “Son of God” in the Old Testament and extra-biblical literature to determine their customary usage. 

2. Focusing on the Gospels of John and Matthew, we will look at several key passages to determine how these terms were understood in the days of Jesus, and what the Gospel writer was intending His readers to understand by these terms. As part of this study, we will try to examine the true purpose and intended audience of the Gospel of John.

3. We will look at later New Testament usage and extra-biblical literature to determine if the meaning of the terms had changed due to the life and ministry of Jesus.

By way of preparing for points 2 and 3, please feel free to list in the comments section below the passages you feel must be discussed and looked at.

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We in the Free Grace camp need to think BIG about the future. I am not sure if I mentioned in my post about the Acts 29 conference I went to, but my biggest ache on that day was that all these men were going out to plant churches, and they were all Lordship/Calvinistic. In my post on Emergent Immersion, Don made the following comment which I thought was so good, I would post it here:

To be perfectly honest, I cannot stand any of the churches in the area. In the Philadelphia area, there are really no good churches. ALL and I mean ALL the “good” mild lordship Bible believing Baptist churches have gone totally reformed over the last 30 years (yes I was born and raised here). There are a few mild lordship Bible churches, but the vast majority are hardline lordship. Then there are the KJV only, legalistic kind of churches.

I agree with this 100%. Thank you Don! 

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Ok, the cat is out of the bag (I guess it was never in the bag)…The article I referred to in the previous post is indeed the one by Tom Stegall. But I am also now including Rokser’s “Two Clarifications” from the most recent issue of the Grace Family Journal.

It appears from Comments to my previous post that although Stegall is accusing various Free Grace writers and speakers of having a “Crossless Gospel” what he really means is that we have “Crossless evangelism.” I see these two things as distinctly different since nobody ever shares the entire New Testament gospel when they evangelize. So the issue isn’t whether the cross is part of the gospel or not. Of course it is! The issue is, “Does a person need to believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to receive eternal life?”

So to help clarify the debate, I thought it might help to share what I try to do when I evangelize…after all, this is what it is all about, right? Please note that I don’t exactly know what the evangelistic method is of Zane Hodges, Antonio DaRosa, or any of the other Free Grace people accused of teaching a “crossless gospel.” I do, however, know that the evangelistic practice I describe below closely resembles what Bob Wilkin does. I know this, becuase I work with him, and we have talked a lot about it. Even still, I am not speaking for him, but for myself alone.

But before I get to my practice, it is probably best to begin with what Stegall says a person must believe to receive eternal life. If I remember correctly, Stegall has five things he says must be believed if a person is to be born again. These five things were not listed in his article, but I think I heard him list them in a talk he gave at the Annual Fall Conference at Duluth Bible Church. (So my memory may be wrong on these five…). He says that for a person to be born again, they have to believe in: 

1. The death, resurrection, and substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ.
2. The full humanity of Christ.
3. The full deity of Christ.
4. The sinfulness of man.
5. Salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

Technically, this is more than five, but I’m not going to quibble over that.

My question is, “Why these five?”

What if a person believes all these five, but doesn’t believe in the virgin birth and believes that Jesus sinned? What if a person doesn’t believe in the Trinity, and instead is a modalist? What if they believe these five things, but believe that Jesus is “a god” just like the rest of us? What if they believe these five things, but don’t believe in life after death, and “salvation” is only a good life here and now?

Personally, I believe that all of these things are part of the gospel, as well as numerous other truths. But do I expect a person to know and believe all of this in order to become a Christian? No. So I don’t have a “crossless gospel.” I have a gospel that includes all five elements Stegall includes, plus a bunch of truths Scripture includes but Stegall does not.

So the real issue is, “What do I share when I evangelize?” Right? Though not directly stated, it seems this is what people want to know. Here is my answer:

I share any truth of the gospel I think is necessary to get a person to believe in Jesus for everlasting life. All of the truths of the gospel either prepare a person to believe in Jesus for everlasting life, or prove that He can make good on His promise.

So, when I evangelize, I always begin with the gospel invitation and tell them that if they believe in Jesus, He guarantees them eternal life.

Then, I allow the convicting and drawing work of the Holy Spirit upon that person and their natural, logical questions to lead me into what other information about the gospel I might share. Most people, I find, already know and believe that Jesus was God, that He died on the cross for their sins, and that He rose again from the dead. Even most unbelievers believe this.

So generally, the conversation centers around how Jesus can guarantee eternal life to those who believe or how it can be only faith without works, or why a good person cannot get into heaven. This is when we get to Stegall’s five truths plus any of the other gospel truths that will convince the person to believe in Jesus for everlasting life. One time, I actually talked to a person in the United States who didn’t know who Jesus was. I was pretty amazed that they had never heard of Jesus, but went on to explain to them that He was God, who came to earth 2000 years ago, and lived a sinless life, yet died a painful death on a cross for the sins of the whole world. His resurrection three days later proved that His death was acceptable to God as the payment for our sin. We were able to have a long and lively discussion about the gospel and the offer of eternal life. The conversation naturally led to all of Stegall’s five points, plus several others. But even if the conversation is short, I have still expressed the bottom line gospel invitation.

This, it seems, is the most natural and biblical way to evangelize. It’s what Jesus did. It’s what Paul and Peter did. I can’t find any place in Scripture where a person shares all five of Stegall’s points when evangelizing or defining the basics of the gospel. Even 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 10 don’t include all five of these truths. And when compared, those two passages don’t even include the same gospel truths. The truth is, I can’t find one Scriptural passage that includes all five of Stegall’s truths. He has to pick and choose from various passages to get his essential gospel truths, and these five seem pretty arbitrary.

So what do I share? I share anything and everything I can in the time I have that I think will get the person to the point where they become persuaded that simply by faith alone in Jesus they have everlasting life. Once, when I was a pastor in Montana, I was outside by my woodpile (we use wood to heat our houses in Montana) talking with a man about all of this, and he wasn’t persuaded. He said, “I just don’t know if all of this is true. If it is true, I wish God would just hit me over the head with a 2×4. Then I would believe it.”

I almost reached out and grabbed a 2×4 and wacked him on the head with it! If he said “Why did you do that?” I could have responded, “God told me to, and He wants to know if you’ll believe in Jesus for everlasting life now.” If I had done that, I would have called it the 2×4 gospel, because not only did I share with him about his sin, the deity, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, I also got a 2×4 in there…all in an effort to get him to beleive in Jesus for everlasting life.

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