Having gone to the trouble of writing a 3500 word post graduate essay in applied theology I thought I may as well share it on my blog so more than three people can read it. With minor changes here 'tis. If this sort if thing isn't your cup of tea there's plenty of other interesting stuff on this blog.
Identify personal elements in your life and critically reflect on how they contribute to the formation of your theology of ministry
Graduate
Certificate in Ministry
Introduction
My three siblings
are passionately opposed to aspects of Biblical Christianity. Their criticisms have forced me to develop a
theology that works robustly in society not just in church.
From 14 to 24 I
made it my task to develop a practical theology for the wider world,
particularly in the context of the environmental challenge. In this, I
succeeded but charismatic puritanism/Gnosticism (Peacock 2016) failed me and I
was forced to re-examine the fundamentalist approach to life.
In this paper,
I argue that the missio Dei is the outworking of God’s will and ways in each
and every aspect of society, extending beyond individual soul salvation to the
redemption and restoration of human society. In so doing I aim to provide a practical
road map that can be used reverse the current catastrophic decline of
Christianity in the Western World.
Personal Elements
Fundamentalism
vs Practical Theology
I was born a
Seventh Day Adventist and thus come from a legalistic faith tradition– the
Bible is true, literal, and should be followed. My grandparents believed that
‘Sunday keepers’ were not saved since the ten commandments require a day of
rest on Saturday. As a young person I rejected that kind of fundamentalism
because of its patent absurdity and wild inconsistency e.g. tithing is
mandatory but its OK to work on weekends. However I continued to believe in
pacifism and celibacy before marriage. Two events forced me to reconsider. The
first was my time in Ambon province in Indonesia where I lived for two months.
Ambon is (or was) the only majority Christian province but was invaded my
Jihadists who forced conversions and slaughtered Christians. The official death
toll is around ten thousand (Schulze 2002, pp 57-69). In that context, pacifism
results in genocide. The second was a relationship failure in which the church’s
teaching was particularly unhelpful.
Inadequate
Sexual Ethic
While the
teaching I received in sexual matters was Biblical in a narrow puritan sense it
was taught as a matter of geography rather than relationship or consequence,
and there was no flexibility – the location of my private parts being the
primary issue of concern. The inadequacy of this teaching is the primary reason
why my generation rejected Christianity. It did me great harm.
Destroyed
for lack of knowledge
After three
decades of church attendance in traditional, charismatic and Pentecostal
churches the only message I have heard that addressed apologetics was preached
by me. I have heard no systematic world-view teaching, training in how to
interpret the Bible, or systematic theology. For example, I was never told why
I should not have sex with my girlfriend or why I should believe the Bible. Yet
many Christians send their children to school for 12 years of indoctrination
into anti-Biblical world view and expect them to be Christians.
Church
vs Kingdom
Being in
Tasmania the environmental conflict was unavoidable. This forced me to consider
what the Bible had to say beyond soul salvation, which in turn expanded my
theological horizons beyond church culture. I became an environmental activist
(see further Gee 2001, and Peacock 2012), studied environmental thought at
post-graduate level which included grappling with a well-developed anti-Christian
critique (White, 1974 and Hay, 2002, pp. 100-106), and sought to bring the
gospel to that movement. I was the only Christian in my city at that time who
did. Many in the church saw my involvement as a distraction from
‘the gospel’.
These
inadequacies are writ large in the church. They are a core part of the
secular/pagan polemic against Christianity which society and my siblings
largely adopted, and are the main reason why we are currently losing the third
generation since the 1950’s.
A workable
theology of ministry therefore requires that evidence based policy sit
alongside theology. This in fact is what the Bible does. Rather than hand down
a set of rules God reveals Himself progressively to the cultures of Bible times
first as creator (Elohim), as Holy and sovereign (to Job), then as the covenant
keeping God (Jehovah), then as a husband to Israel, and on to the establishment
of the tabernacle, to the law and the prophets, the establishment of Israel as
a testimony and a blessing to ‘all
nations’, then to the Messiah and the marriage of Christ to his bride the
church.
In each context
the practical outworking of God’s revelation was culturally specific to the
practical situation, be it polygamy (Matt 22:24 TCRB NIV), gleanings (Leviticus
19:9 TCRB NIV), or ‘wives’ captured in war (Deut 21:11-13 TCRB NIV). While God
will not change, the application of His character to our problems will change.
This approach to ministry and mission does not require that we abandon the
creeds, but rather that we navigate a passage between the twin errors of
legalism and licence (Tyra, G 2014 pp. 40, 132). As the Bible puts it, ‘whoever
fears God will avoid all extremes’ (Eccl 7:18 TCRB NIV) and ‘do not be over-righteous…why
destroy yourself?’ (Eccl 7:16 TCRB NIV). For example, if the Sabbath were
sexuality, what would Jesus say about it?
Personal Understanding of Mission
My
understanding of mission has grown mainly in detail since I was 17. The mission
flows out of God’s delight in the world and in the lives of believers and unbelievers.
Genesis declares the creation ‘good’, while the book of Jonah reveals that God
is as passionately interested in unbelievers as in believers. John 3:16 affirms
this in Christs mission to the ‘kosmos’ (Interlinear
Greek – English New Testament, Authorised KJF), and Revelation 11:15 confirms
it. The Lord’s prayer says: ‘your kingdom come your will be done on earth as it
is in heaven’. Since war, poverty, structural injustice, disease etc do not
exist in heaven the mission Dei encompasses seeking to minimise them on earth. These
are the ‘works of the Devil’ which Jesus came to eliminate (1 John 3:8
TCRB NIV) and which forms part of our mission (John 20:21 TCRB NIV). While this
allows room for a separation of church and state at an institutional level it
leaves no room for a separation of faith, values, and public policy. It is for
this reason that Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible into English led to the
world’s first documented socialist revolution, the ‘peasant’s revolt’ in 1381
on specifically theological grounds: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who then
was the gentleman?’ (Alderman 1974). This took place because the notion that
ultimate authority lies outside government and the church and places intrinsic
and equal value on those at the bottom, was and is revolutionary (see further (Black
Jr, G 2014, p.8). As Brown notes (2011 p. 6), when David and his descendants
were appointed human kings over God’s people, they were subordinate kings under
God and ruled as His “sons” over His kingdom.
So in the
mission Dei the salvation of human souls, the transformation of human
character, and the building of the church as an organism, works in parallel
with the redemption of the public sphere. As theologian John Baille has said,
‘In proportion as a society relaxes its hold upon the eternal, it ensures the
corruption of the temporal’. Thus ‘…we live in our temporal setting with a firm
grasp of God’s eternal claims while we transform the culture he has entrusted
to us’ (Solomon Undated, pp.2-3). In this I favour the fifth view in Richard
Neibuhr’s classification being ‘Christ the transformer of culture’ (ibid, pp.
2-4), but in so doing I recognise that all elements of his classification will
be relevant in different contexts. There will be times when Christ is against
culture, for example ‘raunch culture’ (Levy 2005, p.74). There will be times
when Christ will join with culture as the apostle Paul did, becoming ‘all
things to all people’ (1 Cor 9:19-22 TCRB NIV). However Christ is ultimately
above culture
(Daniel 7:27 TCRB NIV) and calls his people to ‘come out and be
separate’ (Rev 18:4 TCRB NIV), for example regarding homosexual indoctrination
in schools; and there will be times when Christ and culture exist in tension,
for example, during war time.
Hesselgrave and
others (Shantz 2009, p. 10) have noted that culture is directed by those who
influence the ‘seven mountains’ of business, government, media, arts and
entertainment, education, the family, and religion. Others add science and
technology. I suggest that the environmental challenge presents another
mountain. Hesselgrave notes:
‘It takes less than 3-5 per cent of those
operating at the tops of a cultural mountain to actually shift the values
represented on that mountain. Mountains are controlled by a small percentage of
leaders and networks….In sum, between 150 and 3000 people (a tiny fraction of
the roughly 23 billion people living between 600 B.C. and A.D. 1900) framed the
major contours of all world civilisations. Clearly, the transformations were
top-down’, (Hesselgrave 1995, pp. 7-8).
It is by
capturing this high ground that we fulfil the great commission to ‘disciple all
nations’ per Matt 28:18-20. This transformation of culture is part of the
outflowing impetus of God’s grace (Arthur, E 2009 pp.3-5) since, as Linda Cope
has observed (ibid p. 20) God is:
- King of kings – the Lord of justice
- Jehovah Jireh – Lord of economics
- Father – Lord of the family
- Creator God – Lord of science and technology
- Living Word – Lord of communication
- Potter – Lord of the arts and beauty
- Great Teacher – Lord of education
In this way
Jesus reconciles all things to himself (Col 1:19-20 TCRB NIV).
It will be the
task of practical theologians to do the intellectual work in solving the real
problems that confront all seven plus mountains because it is by solving those
problems that the high ground will be taken (Johnson 2013, p.33). The change in
my understanding of mission is that where I once saw changing culture as an
uncompromising stand for righteousness in terms similar to the call of Samuel
(Siqueira 2012, pp. 364-365 and 373) I now see that the practical application
of the gospel usually requires a middle path between extremes. This has grown
out of my professional experience as a policy analyst and my Christian
experience.
Contribution to effective ministry in lived
experience
In my
experience the most effective ministry occurred in the developing world where I
encountered easy conversation about spiritual things, rapid and sustained
church growth, and openness to the gospel. The reason for this is because those
cultures are closer to the cultures of Bible times, so the gospel naturally
achieves comparable results.
In Australia I
found effective ministry when it:
- focussed on genuine discipleship; and
- understood that it was engaged in cross cultural mission.
In the
discipleship context this meant singles of the same sex living together in
shared rental accommodation, and in YWAM people living on-base. It included
daily corporate prayer, and regular group evangelistic activity. This aligned
with the practice of the early church and with Jesus’ command and example to
make disciples.
In the cultural
context successful evangelism occurred when people were engaged at a point of
connection or commonality, the gospel was contextualised, and then they were
trained at the level of core values/worldview in a way that merged evangelism
with discipleship. This reflected an intuitive understanding of the meaning of
culture as a matrix of shared beliefs, values, assumptions, and patterns of
behaviour (Kraft 1999, pp. 1-3) and the contextualisation of the gospel in the
context of that matrix (Hesselgrave 1995, pp. 1-3). However, it also included
acculturation into a Christian culture, the adoption of a new Christian
identity, and a ‘leaving behind’ of parts of the old scene since it is
necessary to divorce the world before marrying Christ.
This is the
anthropological revelation of the Kingdom of God (unpublished lecture notes,
2017), which at an individual level is about forming a church ‘family culture’
where a person’s identity and beliefs will be distinct to varying degrees but
within the boundaries of the shared core values and behaviours (Spencer-Oatey
2012, pp. 9-10) since ‘Ultimately beliefs lead to behaviour’ (Hollinger
Undated, p. 3).
Effective
ministry has thus involved three things:
- contextualisation - evangelism
- enculturation – discipleship
- world view formation – growth and sanctification
This cross
cultural approach to mission faces all the challenges identified of cross
cultural mission but presents the only effective model I know. It fairly closely resembles Hesselgrave’s
three culture model (Hesselgrave 1995, pp. 116-117).
Reflection
As “Director of
Calling, Discernment and Achievement” (Black Jr, G 2014, p.12) it is the role
of ordained ministers to equip the saints for ‘every good work’ (2 Tim 3:17).
That necessarily includes a redemptive engagement with every aspect of culture (Wallnau
& Johnson, 2013) by finding God’s remaining redemptive analogies within it
(Richardson, 1981), and a constructive relationship with the natural world. This
builds upon and does not replace the foundation truths of personal salvation
and sanctification.
However, in
reality, the contemporary Western culture, when understood as the ‘shared basic
and learned assumptions and values of a people’ (Solomon J, Undated pp. 4, 13)
has been more effective at evangelising the church than visa-versa.
Consequently Western Christianity is dying a slow demographic death and has
been since the 1950’s. According to respected research firm Ipsos Mori
approximately 15 per cent of people in Britain hold definitional Christian
beliefs
(MORI 2011, see
also UK Office of National Statistics 2011). Significantly, many of those who
do hold definitional beliefs are old. The next two decades will see a massive
die-off of Christians as the ‘greatest generation’ and the ‘baby boomers’ pass
and their children are not saved. Church attendance is on schedule to drop off
a cliff (Dickerson JS 2013, pp.12 - 20) and with it our influence and our
witness in society. Already in the United States for every 1000 churches that
open 4000 close and even megachurches are in decline. In a decades long survey of 1000 churches in
the USA Dr Richard J. Krejcir identified a lack of genuine discipleship and
Biblical teaching as the core reason for decline and conversely found that
discipleship and Biblical teaching were keys to church growth (Dr Krejcir,
2007). This and his other findings correspond to my own experience over three
decades but leave substantial gaps since he focuses only on church attendees
not the children of church goers who reject the faith, or the unchurched.
In my
experience the genuine reasons for rejecting Christianity are:
- Christianity has nothing useful or helpful to say about sex and sexuality
- Christianity is good on helping the poor but has nothing useful or helpful to say about the big issues – war, the economy, economic justice, and the environment
- Christianity makes extraordinary truth claims that are not backed by anything other than tradition
- Science and secularism provide better explanations about reality and solutions to real world problems than the church does
Effective
mission cannot occur without effective ministry because without ministry you
will not have people to conduct mission. Therefore if our mission is to succeed,
our ministry must comprehensively address these objections, first to those who
are still attending church, and then to the wider world. This will require a degree
of training of both leaders and laity that is unprecedented in church history.
While I do not
doubt Dr Krejcir’s observations, he does not address these issues, though
I have elsewhere (Peacock 2017). Answering secular objections and solving the
problems confronting the seven plus mountains is not impossibly difficult (I do
it for fun), but it does require that we deal with the evidence then work back
to our theology/ideology. In my experience this usually means charting a middle
path on contentious issues such as economics, sustainability, immigration,
sexual issues etc. (That said, the middle path can appear radical when society
leans in a radically ungodly direction). This is, I believe, critically
important if we are to engage, foster and promote future opportunities for
ministry and mission.
Conclusion
Effective
mission is founded on effective ministry. In the current context effective
ministry builds on the foundational Christian disciplines of prayer, study,
praise, discipleship, service, and corporate fellowship. As we connect with who
God is, we are caught in the creative outflowing of His grace to rescue and
redeem those and that which is lost. In doing so the church is divided between
those who feel it imperative to be faithful to the literal word of God as we
look forward to heaven, and those who seek a practical theology by applying
Biblical principles to real world problems. In that context I note that neither
David, Solomon, or any of the Patriarchs before Moses would have met the
character requirements for this course, (see for example Genesis 38: 13-26) and
many of the secular criticisms of the church (though not of God) are correct.
In the Bible,
God’s progressive revelation always deals with the world as it is in all its
messiness and confusion. God and the Bible are big enough to deal with, for
example, war, terrorism, slavery, sexual confusion and environmental collapse.
The principles are there, but there is no formula. The effectual application of
God’s ways to our circumstances will require intellectual courage, Spirit led
guidance and doctrinal flexibility, but it is the only way forward. Jehovah is
big enough. Is the church?
References
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