More on the 12 mistakes

by Frank Turk



Pressed for time today, but we can knock off 2 or 3 from Winter's original list pretty quickly

6. The Mistake of Sending Only Money, Not Missionaries

Yeah, on the one hand, that's about right – that missions work is actually about sending a preacher – Romans 10 and all that.

On the other hand, Dr. Winter needs to decide whether or not he thinks missions agencies are the right sending vehicle – because if you're not sending money to missions agencies, the agencies aren’t going to be around very long. It certainly can't be "only money", but we have to send missionaries.

I think it is also useful to point out that if missions agencies are the right vehicle, they should prolly be in some way recruiting people for missions work. I'm just sayin' that if the missions agencies are going to do the work of the local church in the NT, they should do the work and not dabble in it.

7. The Mistake of Sending Short-Termers, Not Long-Termers

Amen. Talked about it already a long time ago. Willing to hear the other side, but this is the rule which is validated by the proper exceptions.

8. The Mistake of Not Understanding Business in Mission and Mission in Business

Yeah, this is the "kingdom Now" stuff which needs its own special kind of beating. If this means we ought to be "good stewards" of the stuff we have, who can argue? If this means somehow changing Microsoft and the United Nations into organs of the Gospel somehow ... it seems to me this is both an unreasonable expectation and a violation of being in the world but not of the world.

That's all I have time for today. Talk amongst yourselves.

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Two-for-one mistakes

by Frank Turk

If I had been slightly more awake last week, I would have made that a two-for-one post because it turns out that Mistake #4 on our list looks like this:

4. The Mistake of Whole Congregations in Direct Involvement, Not Professional Missions.

And I think it is pretty self-evident that is a different flavor of Mistake #3, which is at its root a mistake of replacing the local church with something else.

If I need to cover that more deeply, bring it up in the meta – as if you people needed any encouragement on that front ...

Anyway, Mistake #5 of the list looks like this:

5. The Mistake of Insisting that Devout Followers of Jesus Call Themselves “Christians” and Identify with the Western Church



And for those of you who have followed my inglorious career as a blogger and fusser, you'll recognize this as what I would call an "oldie but a goodie". That is, it's something that comes up now and again, and it simply doesn’t make any more sense when the next guy brings it up.

This discussion is triggering a flashback to Jesuit all-boys High School where I had a Jesuit for senior elective theology and he was chastising the hypothetical Christian who did not want to self-identify. It made sense, he reasoned, that a devil would want to be reckoned as an angel -- because if you knew someone was a devil, you'd have to be crazy to follow him anywhere, right? And it made sense that if one was on the side of the angels one ought to want the credibility that goes along with being on Heaven's team. But what did you gain, exactly, by being an angel and posing as a devil? How does that deception advance the cause of truth?

This from a fellow who frequently smoke and drank around the seniors when the opportunity arose, and who swore like a sailor. Father, as they say, absolve thyself.

At its root, however, is the problem of whether those who follow Christ "own" the whole Christian church. I think the answer, for good and ill, is that they do -- and trying to change one's name to avoid that is, frankly, a shell game.

Let's first reason from the lesser to the greater, and consider the Southern Baptist Convention. There was a bit of conventional wisdom about 10 years ago that if you took the word "Baptist" out of your name and converted to a "community church" or "fellowship" church, you could participate in church growth by separating yourself and your church from the stigma of being called a Baptist. Yet here we are today, and Lifeway has conducted some studies that indicate that now, rather than contributing to growth and bon home, the unchurched and even those who are attending these churches cannot answer the question, "what is a Baptist?"

Think about that – because it is a perfectly logical paradigm. If you change your name to escape the so-called "stigma" of those who are like you, what you are doing is blotting that name.

And in this case, the name is "christianos" – those who follow Christ.

That seems to me to be the baby, the bath water, the tub, and the kitchen sink – and probably throws away too much.

Now, here's the reasoning behind this: the name "Christian" has a lot of political baggage, and it impairs evangelism to have that baggage attached – even in the west.

Apparently it was fine to be a Christian like Torequemada, and a Christian like Chrysostom (who was an anti-semite), and a Christian like Innocent III, but Boar's Head forbid that one is a Christian as portrayed by the propaganda arm of the Islamist political movement and a liberal media which cannot gets its fact straight about the abolition of slavery and the rise of civil rights in the West, let alone the implications of the human right to life.

But then there is the problem, as they say in some circles, of "catholicity". That is, the problem of being the visible church in a circle larger than the one at your dining room table. We often use the apologetic device that people should judge the church by what Christ has done for it rather than what the people in it are doing (that is, if you are encountering lost people), but that's really the same answer as, "well, I'm not a 'Christian'." It's conceding the point that people allegedly like Jesus but hate the church.

Listen: there's no question that there are some people who are inside the boundaries of the church who, frankly, blow it. In fact, you cannot find any age of the church in which the church wasn't cross-populated with those who are in the unenviable position of needing the church most and also demonstrating they do not belong there. It goes back as early as the Galatian church, and the Corinthian church, and the Laodicean church – which were, btw, still called churches in spite of their problems.

But that fact did not cause the Apostles to rethink their branding: it caused them to press harder on the Gospel and correct or discipline those who were falling away.

And my opinion is that we should follow those apostles and not some others who are self-appointed and clearly off the Biblical map.

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Pre-bird (or pre-pizza) blog post

by Frank Turk

Just as a pre-blogopalooza series of updates, my child is much better, thank you. We slept through the night last night (first night in 4 nights), the hives are almost all down and gone, spirits are pretty much high (thanks, prednisone), and I'm well-rested enough to blog this morning.

For those who are worried that you can't cook a turkey, my annual turkey recipe post at my blog is up, and it has ZERO unsatisfied users. Phil has, of course, never tried it, but for a guy who says he will eat anything he sure is a fussy eater.

And as a last sort of update and segue, last week when I posted on mistake #2 of the 12 mistake series, alert reader "MadTownGuy" pointed out that Ralph Winter --- the author of the list of 12 mistakes – has his own problems. MadTownGuy put it this way:

Ralph Winter’s “Kingdom on earth” is a defined term in the parlance of the promoters of the New Apostolic Reformation, and Ralph Winter‘s connection to that movement is clearly known. It is taken by him to mean a government, both in the ecclesiastical and political senses of the word, and it is the chief aim of Winter and his close associate from Fuller Seminary, C. Peter Wagner. So when he uses that term he means the establishment of a hierarchical structure of apostles in the church and in the marketplace, along with prophets who do vision casting and spiritual warriors à la Joel’s Army who will promote their agenda in each apostle’s territorial or professional sphere of influence. Their highest goal is not the salvation of souls but the transformation of society. The living out of Christ’s life in us is done only as a means to an end, to promote the establishment of the kingdom, without which (in their view) the end time revival, and the return of Christ, will be delayed. This is what drives their methods which include spiritual mapping, intercessory prayer (as they define it), city-church movements and calls to unity while disregarding, or overtly disrespecting, sound doctrine.

Now, while I wouldn’t deny any of that, here's what I'd say about that in the context of this blog and my posts about this list: until I read this list, I had no idea who Ralph Winter was. I had to Google the guy to get a bead on him, and I figured that most people are probably about as informed as I am – which, apparently, means "not very".

Ultimately, Winter's connection to the stuff MTG listed is "clearly known", or can be "clearly known" with only a little effort, but here's the thing: I think we can't let ourselves get flap-jacked by someone with, um, an over-realized eschatology. We can't let someone's wacky redefinition of terms push us off the scriptural ground in which those terms ought to be planted.

So, rather than make this an obscure series of posts about the quirks of Ralph Winter, I'm taking Winter's list at face value, reading standard theological meaning into the words, and asking the question whether these are mistakes or not. The more esoteric among you will find this off-putting. Let's be honest: I write as a pleb for the plebs.

So, that said, here's the so-called "third mistake":

The Mistake of Congregations Sending Missionaries, Not Using Mission Agencies

And you'll get right away why I think this mistake is incorrect because I'm the guy who thinks that the local church is God's plan, and maybe we should ourselves think a little more of it. But before I launch into my objection(s), let me properly issue the disclaimer that I am a, um, proud member of an SBC church and I am generally proud of the IMB and NAMB for the work they do or try to do in equipping and sending missionaries. One of the chief reasons my wife and I are SBC people is that we want to know that our church is rightly sending qualified missionaries to people who need the Gospel.

So, on the one hand, I think that it is possible to have a "mission agency" which effectively sends missionaries, and actually demonstrates a good kind of synergy among local churches – one which takes the limited resources of one body or another and multiplies them using what they call in the secular marketplace "economies of scale". "Mission agencies" can be good things.

But this is where the disclaimer as a member of an SBC church comes in: they are also not the be-all and end-all of missions work, and in fact we have to admit they are also not necessarily the biblically-mandated form of sending missionaries.

This is a big beef for me. The NT describes a church which is local, united, and discipling people toward two specific milestones: discipling toward personal maturity (cf. 1 Tim 1:5), and discipling toward making men into elders in the church (cf. Tit 1:5-9). That is, as Paul told Titus and Timothy, they were sent to preach the Gospel, teach it, exhort the people to live as an adornment of sound doctrine, and take the men who demonstrate this in life and practice and ordain them as elders.

Not to establish seminaries and mission agencies.

Now, while we can agree that seminaries and mission agencies can do good, and have done good, we also have to grapple with what Phil noted back in mistake #1, which is that institutions – especially Christian institutions – have a ridiculously-bad track record of fumbling confessional issues and sliding into (at best) syncretic habits. And the reason, I think, is that an institution is not a church.

Think about that a second: it's not a church. Now: why is that a critical distinction? For example, why is it important to realize that a bookstore is not a church? Isn't it because a bookstore is primarily a business which has as its chief end to pay the rent and all the employees, not to mention the owner?

That end doesn’t frankly square up to the end of the church – which Paul, btw, says plainly is not for monetary gain (cf. 2 Tim, if you don't know).

And while the chief end of a seminary, for example, may not be to make money, the sad fact is that institutions have self-preservation as an unstated goal. There's nobody who's going to take a seminary and turn a blind eye to its endowment or its enrollment or its ability to attract faculty even if its mission is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever.

And the same can be, and ought to be, said about mission agencies: these are not churches. That doesn’t make them bad people, or people with nefarious self-interest wrapped up in some kind of holy: it makes them people who, like all of us, have divided interests and are prone to err on the side of practical.

For what it's worth, Paul defines the practicality of the church in this matter pretty plainly, like this:

For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. The saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist on these things, so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works. These things are excellent and profitable for people.

That is, I want you to insist on sound doctrine so that those who have a right faith will live out good works.

The doctrine comes first. And in that, institutions set up for pragmatic ends are prone to employ pragmatic means, thereby taking their eyes off the ball.

The brighter ones among you may want to apply that to the post I made in statement #1; that's what the meta is for.

Enjoy the gifts which you are about to receive from the bounty of the Lord, and be in the Lord's house with the Lord's people on the Lord's day this week because He has made it easy for you to do so.

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The Second Mistake?

by Frank Turk

OK – so we have started answering the 12 mistakes from last week’s post, and here’s the second mistake from the list:

The Mistake of Only "Salvation in Heaven," not "Kingdom on Earth"

And you’d think I could keep it brief this week because Phil has already unloaded on this one pretty well over the course of the last month or so. But I really haven’t been blogging much since my so-called hiatus (for which many of you are grateful, right?), and I have a couple of things to say on this subject which I think are worth airing out.

Let's start here: we have to understand the importance of the word "only" in this affirmation. If you omit that word, and the statement goes, "The Mistake of ‘Salvation in Heaven,’ not ‘Kingdom on Earth’," (comma on the inside, Dan, but on the outside of the original quote marks) we get the emergent/liberal/social gospel gripe that Jesus was preaching a kingdom of this world rather than something which requires a plan, as they say, from before the foundation of the world.

What I read this complaint to mean, then, is that it is not either/or – it is not only "salvation in Heaven", nor is it "only" "kingdom on earth". It is both salvation and kingdom. So as we assess the critique as a so-called "mistake", we need to frame it as the complainer frames it and not like the fish in the barrel we intend to shoot.

And in that complaint, there is on the one hand, a lot to complain about. For example, part of the "salvation + kingdom" model is local church. Another part is doer of the word and not hearer only. Stuff like love one another and cup of cold water. Being a saved person doesn’t just make a "not yet" promise, but also an "already" promise and implies some "already" responsibilities.

The question is at what place have we replaced the Gospel – the proclamation of what God has done, in Jesus Christ, for His own purposes – with cultural idolatry? In spite of some real kvetching lately in some circles about Mark Driscoll’s sermon which kicked off his current series on Philippians, he makes a great point in his prologue there which is summed up in this way: in our search for joy, we often fill in with stuff, people and religion when in fact we need to be filled in with Jesus. As another wise man has said, the Gospel is the solution to Culture and not a slave to culture.

So when we start making a big deal out of the Kingdom matters – the "already" matters – of the Gospel, we have to be certain we aren’t confusing a result with the cause.

You know: saved people will act differently – because they are new on the one hand, declared righteous, and because they are, on the other hand, grateful for being new and declared righteous.

So maybe a better way of making this objection is to say The Mistake of "Salvation in Heaven," without "Kingdom on Earth". It speaks to the matter of both/and more clearly without rejecting, for example, the eternal nature of God’s plan, the transcendent nature of God Himself, and the metaphysical nature of man’s plight (that is, a problem which is not merely a symptom but actually a disease).

And here's the thing: a metaphysical problem requires a metaphysical solution. What that doesn't mean is that the problem is non-corporeal and therefore some kind of invisible pixie dust is necessary to solve it. What it does mean is that the the fundamental nature of who and what we are requires more than a band aid, more than a witty saying or a slogan. What it requires is some kind of solution by the Creator to turn it from car wreck to Chrysler 300.

And that solution is wrapped up in the death and resurrection of Jesus, which is not a dualistic solution, but a holistic solution for mankind. It covers all the bases.

I tell my adult Sunday school class that Paul himself hangs pretty much everything on the Resurrection – the whole Gospel is in the balance of whether Jesus really left an empty tomb. He says it this way in Romans 1 (ESV):

Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ

Notice, without violating and conciliar affirmations which we agree with and also affirm, that Paul doesn’t say that the virgin birth is what declares Jesus to be the Son of God: it’s the resurrection which declares this of Him in power.

No resurrection: no Jesus who can give grace and apostleship or fulfillment of the holy Scriptures.

But we say that to say this: the resurrection doesn’t just point to a future state or a future fulfillment. It points to bringing "the obedience of faith among all the nations". That’s something that has to happen now.

But how that happens now is not hardly for the sake of becoming a better you, or by obtaining your best life now. It’s not about being rich or healthy. In fact, it is often presented most vividly when we are afflicted or unable to manifest what the world would call "success".

Paul ended his life chained to a pillar in a cave or a dungeon, and he told his dear friend Timothy not to be ashamed of his own afflictions, nor of the cross, nor of the persecutions all who lead a Godly life must experience. He said, instead, that this is how and when the Gospel is preached – in faith in spite of trials.

And this, dear readers, is the meaning of "Kingdom on Earth". Our sovereign is Lord of All, and we ought to act like his subjects when we are in all circumstances. Yes: preach a salvation from sin which delivers from the final judgment, but live here and now for the sake of demonstrating that Kingdom which is to come.

If missionary agencies aren't delivering this message, using these means, they are definitely wrong. The Gospel is not either salvation or kingdom: it is both. And may Jesus come quickly.

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12 ways centuri0n can get himself in trouble

by Frank Turk



You’ll all have noticed that I didn’t really post anything last week except for my d-blog exchange with Jesse on the necessity of the charismatic gifts, which is now over and you can read for yourselves. I’m sure many of you will have breathed a sigh of relief that I didn’t post at TeamPyro last week because you’re tired of me beating you up over you and your local church.

Yeah, OK: I get that.

Because Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat, I’ll change subjects for you slightly. Alert reader Joel Griffith e-mailed me a link to this article about world mission agencies, and it culminates in an interesting list of mistakes, thus:

12 Mistakes Western Mission Agencies Make:

1. The Mistake of Starting Bible Schools, Not Universities
2. The Mistake of Only “Salvation in Heaven,” not “Kingdom on Earth”
3. The Mistake of Congregations Sending Missionaries, Not Using Mission Agencies
4. The Mistake of Whole Congregations in Direct Involvement, Not Professional Missions.
5. The Mistake of Insisting that Devout Followers of Jesus Call Themselves “Christians” and Identify with the Western Church
6. The Mistake of Sending Only Money, Not Missionaries
7. The Mistake of Sending Short-Termers, Not Long-Termers
8. The Mistake of Not Understanding Business in Mission and Mission in Business
9. The Mistake of Healing the Sick, Not Eradicating Disease Germs
10. The Mistake of Thinking “Peace” Not “War”
11. The Mistake of Assuming Science Is a Foe Not a Friend
12. The Mistake of An Evangelism That is Not Validated and Empowered by Social Transformation

I asked the handful of journeyman readers of my blog (which has not fully recovered from my hiatus in spite of my really cool new blog template) to take a poke at this list of 12 mistakes, and I liked the idea so well that I decided to take a poke at the “12 mistakes” myself here at TeamPyro under the heading of “missiology” or some such thing.

As you read this list, some of the items will pop out at you and you will say, “that sounds suspiciously familiar," and other parts will be completely alien to you. And no doubt: you will have some kind of opinion about every one of these randy statements because you are quite an assortment of readers.

So today I’ll address Mistake #1, and we’ll try to make this a 12-part series ...

Is it a mistake of mission agencies to establish Bible Colleges and not Universities?

Here’s the mistake, which is in the presupposition of the question: the mistake is assuming that there are two kinds of education – secular and “Christian”. There is only one kind of education proper, if we define education as “development mentally, morally, or aesthetically especially by instruction”, as m-w.com does.

And to get this, I want you to think about something: someone who is a great baseball player obviously plays a lot of baseball. In fact, he probably does more baseball than anything else because he wants to be great at baseball. But here’s the truth: he also does other kinds of conditioning in order to be a better baseball player. He may be a runner; he may lift weights; he may play other sports which have related skills. And some of these guys realize that they aren’t going to be hitting a hard ball with a hardwood bat for the rest of their lives, so they also develop other skills like the ability to speak in public, or run businesses, or manage money, or write copy for sports news, or maybe leadership skills which a coach will require.

So in summary, a baseball player may know baseball best, but he doesn’t know baseball exclusively. He knows other things because baseball isn’t everything even if it relates to everything.

And in education in general, the fundamentalists on all sides of the ideological rubick’s cube make the same mistake: they fence themselves into a pen with other ideological livestock just like themselves, and they all make the same cattle noises – whether those sound suspiciously like the Gaither Vocal Band, or Nine Inch Nails, or David Crowder, or Michael W. Smith, or whatever – and they believe that they have established a culture by which all other cultures ought to be measured. In that conclusion, they start to believe that they are the only ones who have anything useful to say.

But what education ought to be is something a little more frankly humble. But humble toward what?

Well: humble toward the fact that we are all created beings.

Now, the naturalist/atheist is ready to check out of this discussion, because by G... um, by his troth, he’s not created: he’s just part of an eternal universe of matter and nobody made him – or maybe everything made him, and therefore there’s no intention in what he is, so the word “created” is anathema to him.

Yeah, well: that’s what I’m talking about.

Even the atheist ought to have the good sense to admit that he didn’t make himself, and he didn’t spring out of nothing like some kind of subatomic particle: there was something before him which caused him to be born, and then to grow, and then to know something that he knows. None of us are self-caused, and we are a consequence of something prior to ourselves.

And this, dear readers, is a foundational premise of education.

Now, since I have just crested page 3 in WORD here, I’ll not rant too much farther on what education is. I’ll instead apply it to mission agencies and what they ought to be doing when they set up school for missionaries.

Listen: there is a secular counterpart to the “Bible college” which helps line out the problem here. It’s called a “trade school”. And without offending anybody – or intending to offend anybody – there’s a reason there’s a difference between college and trade school. And in order to avoid offending, I’m not going to detail that any farther than this: the key difference is breadth of knowledge and ability to work outside of a narrow band of experience.

It’s a fine pursuit, I think, to “major in Bible” as they say at a 2-year school. But while most people at a bible college are doing that, all the rest of the world is having a radically-different world-changing experience at college (and not all of it good, in case you wanted to ask). But the people in college are (allegedly) reading books which they wouldn’t have otherwise read; they are encountering (allegedly) ideas which are not their own, and testing them (allegedly) to see if they are better than the ones they came to college with.

And if you come out the other end of your Bible college with a very denominationally-informed survey of the Bible and some basic homiletic skills, you have the problem of being connected to no other culture but the denominational culture you started in. And how many lost people (in theory, anyway) is that going to reach?

You know, my pastor coined a term which I highlight at my blog: The Gospel is the Solution to Culture. But what that means is that the Gospel has to come in contact with other cultures to “solve” them or offer the Jesus solution to the people inside that culture.

And the current problem of post-modernism in the church, frankly, is not something which happened 6 years ago when McLaren published a New Kind of Christian. It happened decades ago in the 60’s when Derrida started writing his ridiculous screed and there was nobody in the Christian church who was equipped to answer him on his own terms.

Intellectually, we are a bunkered-down people. It may be nice to have me instead of Dennis Miller, but the problem that we cannot engage the culture because we don’t really grasp the intellectual foundations of the culture has to cause us to ask more questions of what it means to be a people tasked with the great commission.

We don’t have to be the smartest kids on the block; we don’t have to be riding the intellectual equivalent of $5000 racing bikes. But when everyone else has a 3-speed 2-wheeler, there’s no way we can keep up if all we have is our homejob skateboard.

And I dare you in the meta to tell me I have denigrated the sufficiency of Scripture to say that Christian education ought to be more than memorizing the Bible.

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