From CS Lewis. . . of course.

Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your own ambitions and favourite wishes every day and the death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life.

Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead.

Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, 188.

Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acurate readers.

Friedrich Nietzche

I’m on the road again. Somewhere in the Middle East. Learning what I can about church planting movements. Catching up with some co-workers. Dropping in on our team in London.

Back home and off on summer holidays in December. Finishing the year tired but happy.

In the last six months God has been at work in ways that have taken my breath away.

I think it’s a trend. A new generation of Reformed leaders in the Acts 29 mould, but here in Australia. They’re young, clear on the gospel, serious about evangelism and church planting, flexible in methodology and not afraid of the Holy Spirit.

Some of them have planted churches. Others are getting ready. No one is orchestrating it. It’s Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, independent Evangelical, but they don’t really care about denominational tags.

I would not have predicted it. But now that it’s happening I’ll make a prediction. They’re going somewhere.

Are the glory days over? Leonard Sweet speaks out on the emerging church. . .

The emerging church has become another form of social gospel. And the problem with every social gospel is that it becomes all social and no gospel. All social justice and no social gospel. It is embarrassing that evangelicals have discovered and embraced liberation theology after it destroyed the main line, old line, side line, off line, flat line church.

Leonard Sweet

Does it really matter?

HT: Michael Krahn

Around the turn of the century the Baptist Union in the state of NSW was languishing. Almost seventy years of ministry had resulted in just 37 churches in the most populous Australian colony. Only Tasmania had fewer Baptists.

Then along came AJ Waldock to turn things around. This is what he taught me:

1. Appoint visionary leadership

In 1904 the Union appointed a young man to lead Home Missions—AJ Waldock.

Previously Home Mission Secretaries were just that—secretaries or administrators. Waldock reinvented the role and began travelling to every corner of the state.

By the end of his first year 9 mission stations became 13. The number of preaching stations had doubled to 40. The number of workers in the field grew to 22.

2. Commit to an effective strategy

Waldock was not just an energetic activist. He was a strategist. He produced a strategy paper for the 1905 Assembly: “Methods of Home Mission Work”. His approach was direct and uncompromising.

“All too long has our denominational expansion been left to haphazard and chance. We need a fixed policy and a determined plan; we need a method in our work that will give some guarantee of a going forward all the time.”

‘Too long the [Home Mission] Committee has been the benevolent institution of the denomination—the asylum of aged and infirm Churches—a kind of ecclesiastical couch for sleeping congregations to repose their weary limbs—a perambulator for carrying infant causes which never learn to walk’. AJ Waldock

Waldock argued that the primary role of the Society was not to prop up struggling churches that could not fend for themselves. It must be to establish new churches that grow to healthy independence and then reproduce.

Waldock laid down a number of practical steps towards this goal:

1. Overcome the tyranny of distance by grouping churches into District Associations, under the leadership of a senior minister. Each Association was to take responsibility for Mission in their region.
2. Appoint a salaried General Superintendent of Home Missions.
3. Reorganize finances so that mission workers could be paid and directed centrally.

The Annual Assembly of 1905 adopted Waldock’s vision for expansion. A young and inexperienced minister of 32 years had struck the first blow in the battle to turn the denomination around.

4. Partner with key leaders and churches

CJ Tinsley was the other key figure in the resurgence of the BUNSW. Australian born, he trained at Spurgeon’s College London. He returned to take up leadership at the newly constituted Stanmore Baptist in 1901.

For the next thirty years Tinsley was “a blaze of evangelistic fire and fervour” at Stanmore and among the Baptist churches throughout the state and nation. He was a great evangelist and he led the whole denomination into evangelism.

In 1912 he became President of the Union. The denomination was already advancing under Waldock’s leadership in the field. Tinsley challenged them to go further.

“We must preach or we will perish; we must evangelise or we shall fossilise; we must be a missionary force or we shall become a missionary field.”

5. Partner with major donors

Right from the beginning Waldock’s vision for expansion was supported by a small group of major donors led by Hugh Dixson and William Buckingham. By 1925 Dixson had contributed £11,000, Buckingham, £3,000.

The outcome?

From 1901-1930 the number of churches and members in NSW almost tripled.

Future Prospects for the Baptist Union of Australia

The good news is the BUA has a future. The bad news is if that future is more of the same then the Baptist are headed for long term, gradual decline in relation to the Australian population.

Here’s a summary of the trends

1. Baptist membership has been falling since 1992.
2. The gap between membership and population growth has been widening since 1911.
3. Church attendance has been growing since 2003 but the numbers may not be accurate.
4. The number of churches is increasing.
5. The gap between number of churches and population growth has been widening since 1911.
6. Mainline Protestant churches are in serious decline which outweighs the growth in evangelical churches.
7. The Australian population is growing at unexpectedly high levels and will continue to do so.

So what is to be done? Apart from a new logo I suggested we need to:

1. Confront the evidence
2. Keep returning to our evangelical heritage
3. See our future through Great Commission eyes
4. Release pioneering leadership
5. Build a church planting movement
6. Keep learning
7. Exercise faith

Future Prospects for the Baptist Union of Australia

In one case, I was training a group of 10 Hindu background believers in T4T. They came back after the training and reported 30 Hindus high caste Hindus had come to Christ. This was exciting in itself, but what happened next was incredible. I told them that when we meet next time we would not discuss who they had led to Christ. We would only discuss who they led to Christ and had trained to share their story and helped them in telling others of Christ.

When they came back they reported that those 30 new believers had led 270 people to Christ, including those who the new believers taught also to share their faith who in turn led others to Christ. This is where evangelism turns from addition to multiplication.

I told these Hindu background believers that I do not see two hundred new believers, I see a whole people touched by the gospel as you train all new believers to share Christ and they in turn also share Christ following up these new believers growing in the word in participative Bible studies and starting multiplying house churches. If you live this vision, I told them, the Gospel will cover your people (of twelve million) like the waters cover the sea.

I caught up with old friend last week. I was telling him what I learnt about church planting movements on my trip to India. He’s a good guy. But his response bothered me. . .

“But that’s India. How do you know it will work in Australia?”

I hear responses just like this too often.
With one comment we set ourselves up as unique in the world and in history. Nothing to learn from what God has done in other contexts and in other times. I hear it all the time.

“That works in America. Not here.”

”Sure he’s multiplying leaders and churches, but that’s Africa, not Europe.“

So no lessons from history. No lessons from other contexts.

I have a theory. These objections are not about contextualization. They’re about resistance to change.

If the Celtic missionary movement, or the Indian church, or the Pentecostals, or the Americans, or anyone who is not like us—if they all have nothing to teach us, then we have nothing to learn, and nothing to change.

We’re looking in the mirror and seeing our own reflection.

Contextualization is useless unless we understand biblical principles. And you can learn biblical principles from any context and any era. In fact, you’re more likely to learn them from a context that is totally different from the one you’re in right now.

In Creed or Chaos? she wrote:

Official Christianity, of late years, has been having what is known as bad press. We are constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers insist too much upon doctrine – dull dogma as people call it. The fact is quite the opposite. It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man – and the dogma is the drama.

Christ, in His divine innocence, said to the Woman of Samaria, ‘Ye worship ye know not what’ – being apparently under the impression that it might be desirable, on the whole, to know what one was worshiping. He thus showed Himself sadly out of touch with the twentieth-century mind, for the cry today is: ‘Away with the tedious complexities of dogma – let us have the simple spirit of worship; just worship, no matter of what!’

The only drawback to this demand for a generalized and undirected worship is the practical difficulty of arousing any sort of enthusiasm for the worship of nothing in particular (19).

Let us, in Heaven’s name, drag out the Divine Drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slipshod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction. If the pious are the first to be shocked, so much the worse for the pious — others will enter the Kingdom of Heaven before them. If all men are offended because of Christ, let them be offended; but where is the sense of their being offended at something that is not Christ and is nothing like Him? We do Him singularly little honor by watering down till it could not offend a fly. Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ. (24-25).

It is the dogma that is the drama, not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death — but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to a heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that a man might be glad to believe. (25).

HT: CultureWatch