by | Jun 12, 2023 | Uncategorized
Scripture is clear that both go hand in hand.
In seminary, my discipleship courses had a particular focus: passing on what the apostles had taught about doctrines like the Atonement and practices like Bible reading and prayer. For me, as for many evangelicals today, this made discipleship mainly a matter of nurturing faith and spiritual growth.
Michael J. Rhodes had a similar experience. But then one day he heard John Perkins speak: “He pointed out all this stuff in Scripture I’d never paid attention to, stuff that had never crossed my discipleship radar.” Poverty relief, love for other races and ethnicities, and other justice issues were central to the discipleship modeled by Jesus and the apostles.
Rhodes, a pastor and an Old Testament professor, came to realize that community justice needs to be part of Christian discipleship, “not because of some liberal agenda or to ‘keep up with the times,’” but “because ‘the Bible tells us so!’” And so he devoted himself to this fuller perspective in his own ministry. His book Just Discipleship: Biblical Justice in an Unjust World is the fruit of that work.
The book is structured in four parts. The first gives a biblical definition of justice and shows its place within the Bible’s mandate for discipleship. As Rhodes observes, the American church in particular has “offered the world a justice-less, or at least justice-light, version of our faith,” but Scripture is a story of unjust people being justified and renewed in God’s just image.
Part 2 explores several ways God’s people were shaped for justice in biblical times, distilling key concepts from those examples for our own day. Rhodes explores the just community created through Israel’s …
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by | Jun 12, 2023 | Uncategorized
Our ambition should take a back seat to our conscience.
The late pastor Eugene Peterson, in a letter to his son, also a pastor, wrote that the primary problem for the Christian leader is to take responsibility not just for the ends but also for the “ways and means” by which we guide people to pursue those ends. “The devil’s three temptations of Jesus all had to do with ways and means,” he wrote. “Every one of the devil’s goals was excellent. The devil had an unsurpassed vision statement. But the ways and means were incompatible with the ends.”
As Peterson put it, the discipleship that Jesus calls us to is one “both personally and corporately conducted in which the insides and outsides are continuous. A life in which we are as careful and attentive to the how as to the what.”
This is because, Peterson counseled, “if we are going to live the Jesus life, we simply have to do it the Jesus way—he is, after all, the Way as well as the Truth and Life.” There are no emergency escape clauses from the way of the Cross.
What seems to be popular in this moment is not so much a prosperity gospel as a depravity gospel. In this depravity gospel, appeals to character or moral norms are met not with appeals of “Not guilty!” but with dismissals of “Get real!”
Yet this depravity gospel tries to lure us in. It doesn’t matter if you get to it by adopting it outright, with glee at cruelty and vulgarity, or if it drives you to the kind of cynicism that doesn’t ever expect anything better.
That way lies nihilism. You will find yourself in situations, and you may be in one of those situations already, where you have a responsibility for holding an institution accountable. Maybe it’s simply …
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by | Jun 12, 2023 | Uncategorized
No less than her martyred husband, she could be inspiring and frustrating all at once.
Elisabeth Elliot was one of the most extraordinary and controversial evangelicals of the post–World War II era. Anyone even marginally affiliated with the American missionary community knows the stirring and tragic story of Elisabeth and her first husband, Jim Elliot, who was killed in Ecuador by Waorani tribesmen in 1956.
Perhaps even more remarkably, Elisabeth Elliot and Rachel Saint (whose brother Nate also died in the attack) went to live among the Waorani in 1958. Before returning to the US, Elliot had become one of the best-known evangelicals in America, with coverage of Jim Elliot’s death and of her endurance on the mission field appearing in major national outlets like Life magazine.
Lucy S. R. Austen’s Elisabeth Elliot: A Life is a biography worthy of its subject, diving deep into Elliot’s vast body of correspondence and other writings to present an exceptionally detailed and sometimes conflicted portrait. About three-quarters of the book covers Elliot’s story up to 1963, when she returned to the US from South America. By that time, Elliot was a bestselling author whose now-classic books Through Gates of Splendor (1957) and Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot (1958) were fast becoming standard reading among evangelicals.
Biographers of figures like Elliot always grapple with finding the right tone. Some Christian authors choose a hagiographical approach, presenting their subjects in a holy, inspirational light. In recent years, growing numbers of iconoclastic authors—especially academics—have gone to the other extreme, reviling once-revered evangelical figures and judging them irredeemable due to their complicity in various sins.
Austen happily inhabits …
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by | Jun 12, 2023 | Uncategorized
The city some dismiss as “The Swamp” is fertile ground for evangelicals.
The District Church could be a Baptist church. The lead pastor, after all, grew up as a Southern Baptist missionary kid and still has a lot of ties to that denomination.
It could also be Anglican, with the way it leans into liturgy and the church calendar. Or a social justice church, with its focus on the inequality so visible in Washington, DC, or charismatic, with its emphasis on prayer and sensitivity to the Spirit.
Instead, the church is a little bit of all these things. It is nondenominational, pulling together different Christian streams to minister effectively to the young white professionals who have moved to work in the capital, as well as the upwardly mobile Nigerians and South Koreans who’ve emigrated to the seat of the United States government.
“The strength of being nondenominational is there are fewer barriers,” said Aaron Graham, who planted the church with his wife, Amy, 13 years ago. “It allows you to lead with a brand that is more city-focused and seeker-focused. We respond to the questions people are asking. ‘Do you believe in God? Do you believe in the Bible? Do you believe God is at work in the world today?’”
Nondenominational churches like The District Church have been multiplying across America, according to the 2020 US Religion Census. Their numbers today dwarf the mainline churches that once dominated American public life. There are six times more nondenominational churches than there are Episcopal congregations, and five times more than Presbyterian Church (USA). If nondenominational were a denomination, it would even be larger than the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest denomination in the US.
The popular image of these churches skews suburban. People …
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by | Jun 12, 2023 | Uncategorized
Our view of the end times should affect our politics. But how?
For decades, the dominant evangelical perspective on the end times has been a premillennial, dispensationalist eschatology. As shown in the Left Behind series, this view says the end is nigh and the world—politics included—will grow increasingly wicked and catastrophic until the end comes. Therefore, as Jesus tells his disciples, we should “keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come” (Matt. 24:42).
Yet for Christian nationalists, rejecting an imminent apocalypse is a logical move. Among the “most important tasks for the Christian Nationalist is overcoming the idea that the world is going to end very soon,” Andrew Torba and Andrew Isker argue in their self-published book, Christian Nationalism.
That might come as a surprise to the average American evangelical, to whom Torba and Isker seem to be writing. But if God is helping evangelicals “take dominion in His name,” it doesn’t make sense for the world to end at any moment, they argue. Accepting an “eschatology of defeat” in which God raptures Christians away from advancing evil discourages effective political organizing. To win, Torba and Isker advise, Christians need a theology with room for victory.
Until the early 1800s, an optimistic, postmillennial eschatology—that believed in a golden age preceding Christ’s return—was the majority American perspective, as historians like Daniel Hummel, author of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, have documented.
After the horrors of the Civil War, however, that positive narrative of history fell out of favor, and Western hopes for historical progress further declined following World War I. Premillennialism’s catastrophic …
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