Sunday, May 30, 2010
Simplicity is Sweet
I thought this was a good article for myself especially with my people pleasing tendencies.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Weird dude in search of weird team
Thought this was a great blog post by Driscoll. Hope to get plugged into one of these communities one day.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
The Gospel
The last month has been one of Gospel saturated preaching for me, and it has been GREAT! I started out the past 3 weeks with a trip to T4G (Together for the Gospel) in Louisville, KY, and ended it up last week in Raleigh, NC at Advance 10 (Contextualizing the Gospel in the New South). I came away from both with a deep desire to see the Gospel proclaimed in our churches, and a heavy heart of realization that it has been sorely neglected or even intentionally left out in most of our churches.
The focus of T4G was "The Unadjusted Gospel". This is the gospel we as believers are bound to proclaim. Unfortunately for a plethora of reasons the church has adjusted the gospel. Those adjustments have been for what men thought were good reasons whether it be to draw people into the church, or to make the gospel more mainstream, or less offensive, but the effect has been to water it down or make it something other than the Gospel all together. This has no doubt been a plan of the enemy to lead many astray and to sleep in the comfort of false religion.
The speakers at T4G were men whom God has used in a huge way to further the gospel in their contexts and around the world. The sermons/talks were so incredibly God glorifying and refreshing to my soul. God was the focus and His glory was magnified through the proclamation of the greatest story ever told, THE GOSPEL. I highly recommend going to t4g.org and checking out the talks.
I had about a 10 day break between arriving home from T4G and going to Advance 10 which was a good break to try and digest the meat of God's word I had been fed in KY. My good buddy Zack and I headed out to Raleigh and stayed with my in laws for the second annual Advance the Church conference. The venue had changed this year (held at the Summit Church this year instead of the Durham Performing Arts Center), and a lot of the nationally known pastors that were at the first Advance conference were not at this one in person for various reasons. However that did not slow or hinder the proclamation of the Gospel in all its glory. God is moving among some young men of the faith and I feel grooming them to be the next group of nationally known proclaimers of His message. The Summit Church also put the Gospel on display in their service to those of us who came to the conference. It was an amazing volunteer staff.
The focus of Advance 10 was the contextualization of the Gospel in the "New South". The church is declining faster in the south than anywhere else in the nation. This is true for many reasons, but some of the major ones are the influx of people from other regions of the country that are traditionally less churched, as well as the quickly growing number of dechurched (people who have walked away from the church for various reasons) people in the south.
The problem is obvious, but what has been the cause, and what is the solution? That is what the conference strove to answer. Much of the problem has stemmed from a few major issues. One being the teaching of quaint moralism in the church instead of the Gospel. People think the church is a bunch of good people telling other good people how to do good things (paraphrase of Mark Twain). Another is a stem of this quaint moralism in that people are trying to bring about outward mechanical change and not addressing the heart issue which brings about inward organic change. So what we have is a bunch of unconverted people in the pews that the church is trying to moralize. Obviously this doesn't last, and the outside world sees straight through the hypocrisy which results. Those that grow up in it see the nominalism and walk as soon as they get a chance. Therefore you have a steep decline in the church. Couple this with the lack of true missional focus in the spread of the true Gospel and the cause of said decline is glaring.
So what is the solution? The solution is the Gospel and it's proclamation in every context of society. Whether that be to the affluent old money south, or the generationally impoverished projects in our cities and every pocket of culture in between. To proclaim it we obviously have to understand it and have been changed by it ourselves. So knowing what it is, and is not, and then making it central in what we preach to our congregations is imperative.
So now the process continues in my own life of being changed by the Gospel as it is the "medicine we Christians must take everyday" (Tchividjian). I will close with this quote form J.D. Greear (who probably stole it from someone without quoting them : ) ) "The Spirit of God using the story of God to make the beauty of God come alive in our hearts" That story of God is the Gospel and God is using it to draw us to making Him our treasure. So why would we use anything else to try and draw people to the church?
Soli Deo Gloria
The focus of T4G was "The Unadjusted Gospel". This is the gospel we as believers are bound to proclaim. Unfortunately for a plethora of reasons the church has adjusted the gospel. Those adjustments have been for what men thought were good reasons whether it be to draw people into the church, or to make the gospel more mainstream, or less offensive, but the effect has been to water it down or make it something other than the Gospel all together. This has no doubt been a plan of the enemy to lead many astray and to sleep in the comfort of false religion.
The speakers at T4G were men whom God has used in a huge way to further the gospel in their contexts and around the world. The sermons/talks were so incredibly God glorifying and refreshing to my soul. God was the focus and His glory was magnified through the proclamation of the greatest story ever told, THE GOSPEL. I highly recommend going to t4g.org and checking out the talks.
I had about a 10 day break between arriving home from T4G and going to Advance 10 which was a good break to try and digest the meat of God's word I had been fed in KY. My good buddy Zack and I headed out to Raleigh and stayed with my in laws for the second annual Advance the Church conference. The venue had changed this year (held at the Summit Church this year instead of the Durham Performing Arts Center), and a lot of the nationally known pastors that were at the first Advance conference were not at this one in person for various reasons. However that did not slow or hinder the proclamation of the Gospel in all its glory. God is moving among some young men of the faith and I feel grooming them to be the next group of nationally known proclaimers of His message. The Summit Church also put the Gospel on display in their service to those of us who came to the conference. It was an amazing volunteer staff.
The focus of Advance 10 was the contextualization of the Gospel in the "New South". The church is declining faster in the south than anywhere else in the nation. This is true for many reasons, but some of the major ones are the influx of people from other regions of the country that are traditionally less churched, as well as the quickly growing number of dechurched (people who have walked away from the church for various reasons) people in the south.
The problem is obvious, but what has been the cause, and what is the solution? That is what the conference strove to answer. Much of the problem has stemmed from a few major issues. One being the teaching of quaint moralism in the church instead of the Gospel. People think the church is a bunch of good people telling other good people how to do good things (paraphrase of Mark Twain). Another is a stem of this quaint moralism in that people are trying to bring about outward mechanical change and not addressing the heart issue which brings about inward organic change. So what we have is a bunch of unconverted people in the pews that the church is trying to moralize. Obviously this doesn't last, and the outside world sees straight through the hypocrisy which results. Those that grow up in it see the nominalism and walk as soon as they get a chance. Therefore you have a steep decline in the church. Couple this with the lack of true missional focus in the spread of the true Gospel and the cause of said decline is glaring.
So what is the solution? The solution is the Gospel and it's proclamation in every context of society. Whether that be to the affluent old money south, or the generationally impoverished projects in our cities and every pocket of culture in between. To proclaim it we obviously have to understand it and have been changed by it ourselves. So knowing what it is, and is not, and then making it central in what we preach to our congregations is imperative.
So now the process continues in my own life of being changed by the Gospel as it is the "medicine we Christians must take everyday" (Tchividjian). I will close with this quote form J.D. Greear (who probably stole it from someone without quoting them : ) ) "The Spirit of God using the story of God to make the beauty of God come alive in our hearts" That story of God is the Gospel and God is using it to draw us to making Him our treasure. So why would we use anything else to try and draw people to the church?
Soli Deo Gloria
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