Jimmy Shaw somehow got Shane Claiborne, author of The Irresistible Revolution, to come to share his vision of the kingdom in Searcy on December 8. The event is free and open to all, and is not sponsored by Harding.

Read more on Jimmy’s site

HU friends Brett & April Emerson are missionaries in Africa, and need a new truck.

In January, Brett, April, and Caden Emerson moved to Togo to join the mission team in Kara. Since then, they had been borrowing a truck and saving up for their own. A few months ago, they finally got it. A few weeks ago, they found a minor leak and gave it to a mechanic to fix. He fixed it, took it for a test drive, had a momentary lapse in judgement, started speeding, drove off a bridge, landed 40 feet away, completely totaling the Emerson’s brand new truck that took them 7 months to raise the money for. All I’m asking for is a dollar, but dollars add up pretty quickly. Let’s see what God can do…I don’t think it will take another 7 months for a new one. link to Facebook group

Brett explains on their blog:

We did not have comprehensive accident coverage because it costs about $10,000 per year, so we are going to have to salvage what we can and find the money for a new truck, around $40,000. The thought of fundraising again makes us sick to our stomachs, but it also gives us a chance to step aside and allow God to work, because there is NO WAY that we can do it on our own. We just don’t have the resources available to us. We know that God will provide, so stay tuned for a crazy and encouraging story about how He does it…

If you’d like to help, use the PayPal button in the sidebar here on RC or in the latest post on their blog.

I promised a few weeks ago to spend more time thinking and writing about ecclesiology. Doing so requires reflection on the story of God and his people.

I am in the midst of a great ongoing discussion with thewalrus about whether evangelism is an OK thing to do to people. I am arguing that it is, under certain conditions. One of those conditions came up wihen Amy and I were talking with our church planting mentor recently.

He asked us which churches in Seattle are growing, and I said that I was hesitant to answer conclusively because I think some churches are growing at the expense of the Kingdom as a whole. Their theology says that what’s good news for us is bad news for everyone else.

In one sense, this is understandable. If we have The Truth and you don’t, too bad for you, right?

If someone declines to get in on our way of life, then yes, they are missing out, and that’s too bad for them. But that doesn’t mean the Good News has to be bad news for them.

I believe in a way of life in Jesus, in covenant with the Creator God, that is good for the whole world, even for those who don’t buy in.

Say there’s a sale at Macy’s, the best sale ever. I’m going, and I want all the pople I care about to benefit from the amazing prices. I invite people to come with me, offer to give them a ride, even to loan them money if they’re short on cash. Anything so they don’t miss this opportunity.

Let’s say my friend Bob isn’t into shopping, and says he probably won’t go to the sale, even though I know he needs some new clothes and will save money. (Never mind how I know this - stick with me.)

When I hear Bob’s response, what are my options?

1. Do nothing. Enjoy the benefits of the sale for myself, but don’t worry about Bob. After all, it’s his life.

2. Tell Bob he’s a fool, and go on and on about the horrible consequences of his choice. Tell him he’ll suffer if he doesn’t go to the sale, then write him off. Don’t talk to him again, except to remind him of the sale.

Most churches take one of these first two approaches, neither of which embodies God’s promise to make the people of Abraham - and ultimately the church - a blessing to all the peoples of the earth.

How can the church bless those who have not accepted its message? There is a third option in our fable.

3. Go to the sale, enjoy it fully, and get something for Bob.

Does mission flow from theology, or should theology flow from mission? Which came first chronologically (if there is chronology for such things), and which has primacy?

Andrew Jones is at camp, and asks this question based on something Alan Hirsch said here at Radical Congruency a few years ago:

Missiology or Theology? Chicken or the egg? Is missiology a slice of the theological cake or a foundational layer? And what about the sequence that goes missiology-christology-ecclesiology? Or as Alan Hirsch has laid it out, Christology-Missiology-Ecclesiology. How would you sequence it? link

Alan Hirsch said:

By my reading of the Scriptures, ecclesiology is the most fluid of the doctrines. The church is a dynamic cultural expression of the people of God in any given place. Worship style, social dynamics, liturgical expressions must the result from the process of contextualizing the gospel in any given culture. Church must follow mission. We engage first in incarnational mission and the church so to speak, comes out the back of it. But if it is consistent with incarnational practices, that church will take the shape of the cultural group it is trying to reach. Mission in the incarnational mode is highly sensitive to the cultural forms and rhythms of a people group because these are the means of meaningful relationship and influence. Incarnational mission thus engages people from within their cultural expression. Once this essential missional listening, observation, connecting, and networking has been done, then the forming of Jesus communities can take place. This is the only way to ensure that the Christian community truly incarnates itself and is fully contextualized. link

Rob, a commenter on Andrew’s post takes it to another level:

I’m glad someone mentioned Chris Wright’s The Mission of God in this thread. Wright argues, and I think convincingly, for the primacy of mission. If there were no mission, there would be no Scripture, indeed, no Christ.

And if one sees Mission as unfolding in the pageant of Creation/Fall/Redemption/Restoration then other themes come under this rubric somewhere.
…
Back to the first question, “Is Mission the Mother of Theology?” Perhaps the question is really one of perspective. In one sense, Theology Proper precedes mission, in that the providential purpose for mission proceeds from God himself prior even to creation. So if we approach the issue under the rubric of “Theology from Above,” then although the providential ordering of creation, fall, redemption and restoration is subsumed under the Mission of God, theology is primary.

If we are doing theology from below, with the camera here, though, Mission is primary, and becomes the lens through which we look at theology.

In either case, it would seem that God is logically prior to Mission. Yet theology, the study or knowledge of God, is not God himself. Any theology that attempts to know or apprehend God in himself risks being too speculative. God is apprehensible only insofar as he has revealed himself, and that revelation is always and ever subsumed under God’s mission of redemption and restoration.

…I would be inclined to conclude that in abstract terms Theology comes first. But if we are talking in concrete terms we can get our fingers on, then Mission is logically prior for our purposes, and arguably becomes the primary medium through which we apprehend God.

I appreciate Rob’s thinking here, but will go in a slightly different direction in addressing question of whether mission or theology is primary.

First, I agree that theology is primary. God, existing eternally in trinitarian community, is the beginning and the end. I do not think mission is the reason for Christ; that is, God did not come up with Christ because we screwed up and needed to be rescued. Paul says of Christ:

He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Col 1:17

Second, I think the next movement, proceeding from an eternal trinitarian God, is creation. God created the world, including us, and it was good. This creation was and is continually a relational act - God created us to be in relationship with him, and that was and is good. But we too quickly forget this goodness and move on to “the fall,” which we pump up in importance because it somehow heightens our need for Christ and the redemption that he brings.

If we say that Christ is necessary only because of our sin and fall, we make our sin a requirement for Christ to reach out to us. I’d like to suggest instead that we are created for relationship, and that relationship has always been possible through covenant with God. The problem is that we fail to live up to the terms of the covenant, and screw up the relationship (just as we screw up relationships with one another).

Jesus is God saying to us that he will fix it, if we’ll let him. Sin or rebellion or evil or fallenness cannot be the determining factor; Christ triumphs over and trumps all of these. To again quote Paul:

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Rom 8:38-39

Third, therefore, is redemption. We often look at the fall and redemption as singular, one-time events, the latter canceling our the former. Again, I think this is a mistake. We are perpetually in need of redemption and righting, and this is what God continually provides through Christ. The restoration of relationships among humans, and between humans and himself, is simply what God does as our Creator and as an inherently relational trinity.

That brings us to mission. Where does mission fit? We can either put it into some sequence like Christology > Missiology > Ecclesiology, or we can say mission is what’s behind the whole story, as Rob alludes to above.

I don’t think I can see mission as the whole deal, because that presupposes that God created us in such a way as to ensure that we would become estranged, so that he could then reach out to us and save us. If God’s clear purpose is to be in relation with us, there’s no inherent need for sin or mission - though sin and our voluntary estrangement from God do make mission necessary. That’s why it’s a good idea, as I said a long time ago, to let ecclesiology (the form our churches and structures take) flow from missional concerns.

But saying God’s mission to us is a practical necessity given the current state of humankind is different from saying the purpose of Christ or of scripture or of Israel is mission. Christ does not have a “purpose.” Our trinitarian God just is, always, and that is the fundamental fact of the universe as we know it.

EDIT: Cultural Savage suggests Christology> Pneumology> Missiology> Ecclesiology> Eschatology> Theology> Christology

I picked up a copy of Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches: Five Perspectives at the library recently. It’s one of those point/counterpoint books, in which five church leaders (Mark Driscoll, John Burke, Dan Kimball, Doug Pagitt, and Karen Ward) each write a chapter on what they believe about the church’s role, and the other four authors all make a short response/rebuttal.

The first chapter, called “The Emerging Church and Biblicist Theology”, is by Seattle’s own Mark Driscoll - pastor of the Calvinist hipster megachurch Mars Hill Church, blogger at TheResurgence, and all-around bad-boy of the conservative evangelical subculture (Donald Miller’s famously referred to him in Blue Like Jazz as “Mark the cussing pastor”). Mark’s main objective in his chapter, as evidenced by the 700 (!) Scripture verses he references in the endnotes, is “to defend the traditional Protestant doctrines of scriptural authority, the Trinitarian nature of God, and the substitutionary atonement” (p.16, from the introduction by Robert Webber).

Mark represents a passionate adherence to the particulars of a Reformed evangelical theology, and in that sense, is not typically emerging. He is a theological traditionalist leading a cutting-edge church that ministers primarily to the new emerging generation. (ibid.)

I think that his perspective is valid, and I understand the concern of [some] theological “conservatives” that some doctrinal essentials are being overlooked or ignored [by some] in the “emerging conversation”. With that said, however, I think that Mark setting himself up as the arbiter of truth is a bit disingenuous. “This chapter is my attempt to address three of the hottest theological issues in our day and to correct emerging error with biblical orthodoxy” (p.21). I get the impression that he thinks that he’s the only one that does theology; that if everyone else would just read the Bible and take it seriously, they would come to the same conclusions that he has.

The following lengthy quote is from pages 34-35. It’s the climax of his chapter, in which he defines and defends his position on hell:

The following Old Testament truths about hell are worthy of note:

• Hell is unending, conscious, loathsome torment.¹⁵⁹
• Heaven and hell will have people in them forever.¹⁶⁰

Also, Jesus had much to say about hell, including the following:

• The pain in hell will be excruciating, causing “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”¹⁶¹
• The torture in hell comes from Jesus.¹⁶²
• Jesus is coming to throw people into the fiery furnace of hell.¹⁶³
• The physical pain of hell is like being burned in a fire.¹⁶⁴
• Unrepentant sinners will be thrown into a fiery hell.¹⁶⁵
• Hypocrites will be butchered and spend eternity in pain.¹⁶⁶
• God will send unbelievers to the same fate as Satan and demons.¹⁶⁷
• Jesus said the eternal torment of Isaiah 66:22-24 is literally coming.¹⁶⁸
• The punishment of hell is like a painful beating.¹⁶⁹
• Hell is a place of unending torment.¹⁷⁰

Lastly, the apostles also speak of hell in the following terms:

• Jesus will repay unrepentant sinners with everlasting destruction.¹⁷¹
• Jesus today holds the unrighteous in punishment.¹⁷²
• Jesus will rule over hell as well as heaven.¹⁷³
• Hell is like spending eternity in a fiery lake of burning sulfur.¹⁷⁴

---

Footnotes:
¹⁵⁹ Is 66.22-24
¹⁶⁰ Dn 12.1-2
¹⁶¹ Mt 8.11-12; 13.40-42, 49-50; 22.13; 24.50-51; 25.30; Lk 13.27-28
¹⁶² Mt 8.29; Mk 1.24; 5.7
¹⁶³ Mt 13.40-42, 49-50; 22.13; 25.30
¹⁶⁴ Mt 13.49-50; 18.8-9; 25.41; Mk 9.43-48; Lk 16.19-31
¹⁶⁵ Mt 18.8-9; Mk 9.43-48
¹⁶⁶ Mt 24.50-51
¹⁶⁷ Mt 25.41
¹⁶⁸ Mk 9.43-48
¹⁶⁹ Lk 12.46-48
¹⁷⁰ Lk 16.19-31
¹⁷¹ 2Th 1.6-9
¹⁷² 2Pt 2.9
¹⁷³ Rv 14.9-11
¹⁷⁴ Rv 19.20; 20.10-15; 21.8

Honestly, this section has me fuming. To my reading, Mark’s tone seems to be giddy to “correct [this] emerging error”. I can understand and respect that people hold to the traditional doctrine of hell as “eternal, conscious torment”, but I just can’t deal with the smugness, superiority and presumption that he exudes here.

Additionally, I think that his over-eagerness to stand up for orthodoxy causes him to overstate his arguments. I didn’t have the time or energy to investigate all the verses he cited, but two of the claims struck me as preposterous, if not disgusting - and here I find his exegesis dubious at best:

• The torture in hell comes from Jesus
  Mt 8.29 - “What do you want with us, Son of God?” they shouted. “Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?”
  Mk 1.24 - “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!”
  Mk 5.7 - He shouted at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? Swear to God that you won’t torture me!”
  So, some demons ask Jesus not to torture them, and Mark sees this as saying that Jesus does torture? That’s just wrong - not to mention that even if it were a valid argument, the passages in question are about demons, not people.
• Jesus is coming to throw people into the fiery furnace of hell
  Mt 13.40-42, 49-50; 22.13; 25.30 - all variations on The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
  Quite simply, these verses do not say what Driscoll says they say.

I’m done. If anyone wants to evaluate the rest of his claims, that’s fine; I think I’m going to wash my hands of this whole thing. It’s neither useful nor helpful in living an authentic, spiritual life - rather, it seems to be only concerned with defining the boundary markers of acceptable belief, in order to decide who’s in and who’s out. I’m tired of it.

What’s the point of Christianity? It’s a question seemingly as eternal as God himself. It’s been asked by people of every gender, age, color, worldview, and religion (or lack thereof) since the carpenter from Nazareth left this world some 2000 years ago. And many answers have risen from this question, some intelligent and thoughtful and some not so. In my own meager way, I will share my own initial thoughts (rough though they may be; I hope to expound on these thoughts later).

Sadly, when I look deep within myself and closely at my walk with Jesus whom I call Christ, the point of Christianity seems pretty weak. I am, by most appearances, a good man. I am kind, honest, and hardworking. I love my wife and son. I try to treat others as I would like to be treated. I have my vices, sure, but nothing that would cause any red-blooded American to look down on me. I’m just your average good guy. And I think that’s the problem.

What is the point of a faith whose adherents are just like everyone else? What is the draw to be part of a community of faith that acts, in many ways, like non-believers but forbids any temporary carnal pleasures? Shouldn’t there be more? Where is the good news in this “gospel”? Is this to what God is really calling me?

When I read the Christian scriptures, I don’t see a God of mediocrity. I see a God, all-powerful, who did not consider such power a thing to be grasped, but made himself to be a servant. I see a God whose simple life, as Jesus, brought good news to the poor, whose touch brought healing and peace, whose actions set the captives free. But not only that, I also see a God who invites me to follow him, to continues his mission of bringing good news, healing, and freedom to the world.

That is the point of Christianity to me, now. If I take five minutes to look outside of my comfortable Seattle condo then I see that the world is a very messy place. I see that young men are being consumed by addiction. I see that women are being abused. I see that violence and crime are eroding my city. I see couples whose relationships are whithering. I see that insatiable appetites are destroying our planet and leaving my peers in bottomless debt. And God, just as he did 2000 years ago, aches to bring good news, healing, and freedom to the world - and we’re all invited to join him.

Since it’s summer and I have time to blog, I am realizing that some of my better posts deserve more attention than they got the first time around. Here’s one from last year.

I think most people will agree that Christians have, at various times throughout history and throughout our own lives, been jerks. Time to own up to that and apologize, for what it’s worth. Hopefully it will be worth something to someone.

Here’s what you can do:
1. Check out the photos
2. Download and print the Sorry We Christians Have Been Jerks PDF
3. Write your name or city (or whatever) on the sign and take a picture of yourself holding it
4. Upload your picture to Flickr and tag it with these tags: sorry sorryeverybody sorrychristians (three separate tags - this is essential for the meme to work)
5. Tell all your friends and get them to do the same thing (hint: just write your city on the sign and pass it around when you’re with a bunch of people, and take pictures of each of them holding the sign)
6. Most importantly, mean it, and contribute to a global, lived-out apology to the world for the way Christians have acted (or failed to act)

Code to copy this post to your blog:<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/sorrychristians/">Here’s a new photomeme on Flickr</a>, to re:mix what the way many Americans <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/sorryeverybody/">apologized to the world</a> that Bush was reelected (regardless of how you felt about that). <p><!-- upload your photo and insert it using the img tag here --></p> <p>I think most people will agree that Christians have, at various times throughout history and throughout our own lives, been jerks. Time to own up to that and apologize, for what it’s worth. Hopefully it will be worth something to someone.</p> <p>Here’s what you can do:<br />1. <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/sorrychristians/">Check out the photos</a><br />2. Download and print the <a href="http://www.radicalcongruency.com/wp-content/sorrychristians.pdf" title="Sorry We Christians Have Been Jerks">Sorry We Christians Have Been Jerks</a> PDF<br />3. Write your name or city (or whatever) on the sign and take a picture of yourself holding it<br />4. Upload your picture to Flickr and tag it with these tags: <strong>sorry sorryeverybody sorrychristians</strong> (three separate tags - this is essential for the meme to work)<br />5. Tell all your friends and get them to do the same thing (hint: just write your city on the sign and pass it around when you’re with a bunch of people, and take pictures of each of them holding the sign)<br />6. Most importantly, mean it, and contribute to a global, lived-out apology to the world for the way Christians have acted (or failed to act)</p> <p>

To keep up with how this progresses, here is the RSS photo feed for this meme.

Jim Henderson of Off the Map purchased the time of a guy named Hemant on eBay. Hemant is atheist who offered to visit the church of the winning bidder’s choice for a year.

Jim’s idea (brilliant as always) was to have Hemant blog about his experiences visiting 50 different churches. Since Jim is a kind of make-things-happen guy, and Hemant was true to his word (and the terms of the auction), it’s happening. You can read about Hemant’s adventures visiting churches on the Off the Map eBay Atheist Blog, and see the national media coverage here.