Theology of World Missions - Lesson 15

Theology of World Missions
Dr. Peter Kuzmič
wm602-15
The Gospel and Culture
Lesson Transcript

Now back to our discussion here. We have referred a couple of times to our brother Martin, looked at our, you know, his the image he uses of the way God administers the daily affairs of human existence, like marriage and family and politics and economics and cultural life. It's the image of the left hand of God. The left hand of God. Are you acquainted with that concept? So that's the imagery that Martin Luther uses. So God, with the left hand, governs what in the reformed theology would be called the realm of common grace. The right hand is the hand of salvation. The left hand is the hand of creation. Okay. The left hand would administer the political and economic and cultural life. And with the right hand, the God rules by the Gospel and commissions the church to preach the good news of salvation. Now, the problem, of course, is how to relate the two hands, and that's expressed in this series of questions How do we relate the two hands? See, the conservative Christians have the tendency of using just the right hand. And the liberal Christians have the tendency of the left hand. And a full fledged biblical Christians will use both. Who wants a one handed God. And yet we very often act as if we serve a one handed God. And I think you've noticed that both Jon Stewart and David Bush called for this balanced, both hands approach. They don't use the picture I'm bringing the picture of. I've looked at in here as we discussed these issues. If the left hand is the land, the hand of creation and the right hand is the hand of salvation, then my response to those Chinese professors should not be just the right hand, because what you are saying is give them the right hand.

Well, maybe we need to give them the left hand before we give them the right hand. Are you with me? Okay. Start with the creation before you go to salvation or you will lose them. Start with the common ground. I think I shared with this class my conversation with Bill Bright and then the discussion between him and Metallica and and Billy Graham. Did I? I did not. Billy Graham held his first crusade in Germany in the city of Hamburg. I do not recall the exact year somewhere. 56, maybe. One of the men who attended his service is the well-known German theologian Helmut Healthcare. Helmut Delic is mentioned in many contacts I would make. Every freshman theological student read his little classic, a little exercise for young theologians, which some of you have read. If you are interested in a solid Lutheran theology, then read his two volume evangelical theology that Erdmann has brought out in English translation. If you are interested in serious ethics, as all Christians should be, then read his three volume Theological Ethics. And if you are a preacher, you may want to look at his sermons that are classics like The Waiting Father and other collections of his sermons. Helmut DeLay was a great preacher and a great theologian. So Billy Graham, by the way, Helmut Delic was a professor in Tübingen and then professor in Hamburg as even a rector, which is president of the Hamburg University and a great preacher. He one of the very few German Lutheran churches that were filled to capacity every Sunday morning. And this is the kind of theologians we need. Do you see better courses that old theology and good theology should be reachable? You come from Scotland. Scotland has a great tradition of great theologians over great preachers.

And here in America we have put asunder what God has put together. You have great preachers who are lousy theologians, and you have great theologians who are lousy preachers. And I say, Why don't you follow the example of the apostle Paul, who was both Helmut Delicate was both. So he was there in the stadium when this young American evangelist Billy Graham, preaches every night and says, The Bible says, the Bible says. And a German translator goes, The Bibles are the Bible. That was supposedly a good crusade. But their response was not like in Los Angeles, not even like in London, where Billy had quite a response in 53, I think it was. In Wembley Stadium. So how delicate writes a letter to this American evangelist in which and I'm abbreviating Billy Graham did disclose the letter much later it was even published on part of the correspondence was published in the Decision magazine. Helmut DeLuca says, I have been to your services. I admire your faith, your enthusiasm, your energy. You call people to conversion. This is what Germany needs. German people claim to be Christian, but most of them have not encountered Christ. They have not been converted. Call me Delicate says I am a preacher of the gospel. I'm a professor of theology. Allow me to give you some advice as I would like to see you come back to Germany to evangelize. And I would like to see a better response to your crusades. Villegas Instagram. You start almost every sentence with the Bible says the Bible says. He says, That works in America. It doesn't work in Germany. In America, the Bible is still considered a sacred book. Your president is sworn in with his hand on the Bible. Your judges are sworn in with the Bible.

So he says the Bible carries authority in America. So when you said the Bible says people listen and say, oh, that has to be believed because the holy book says it. He says, In Germany, due to what the post-Enlightenment philosophy did, what destructive biblical criticism did in our liberal theological faculties is, says the Bible is does not carry out authority is just one of the religious books. So many of the younger generation and intellectuals, when you start the Bible says the Bible says they write you off. They don't even listen. Because as soon as you say the Bible says they know that it's not for them or them. It's irrelevant if it's in the old religion and they develop the correspondence. And basically Telecare is advising Graham to start with humanity. To start with the common ground and then come to the biblical message and to Christ. And Billy Graham confesses that he's learned a lot from Professor Tilak. MG regretted very often that he didn't study theology as a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Wheaton. He said many times, I've heard him say that on this campus because he was an active chairman of the board and he would come up once a year and chair the board meetings and meet with the faculty and meet with the students. But he's a humble man and he sees the need for theological education. And he was reading and and widely and had good advisors. Meryl Sidney was Dean at Wheaton grad School. I was his assistant back in 71, showed me manuscripts. MG Graham would send his book before he would publish it to several theologians. Callahan was one of them, and he would say, Now, I'm not a trained theologian, so please go through this manuscript before we publish it.

Make sure I haven't made obvious blunders in terms of using and applying scriptures, etc. And when Billy came back to Germany later, he changed the format and he had a better response. Now a similar story with Dr. Bill Bright. Some of you have worked with Campus Crusade. In 1974, I was a young delegate at the Lausanne Congress, and Bill Bright asked to meet with some of us, and he said, I would love to come to an East European country. I'll pay all the expenses if you would organize in Yugoslavia, since we had more freedom than Romania or Soviet Union. If you would organize a pastors conference and we did that in 1976, Dr. Bright came with some of his staff from Campus Crusade. He financed the translation and a large quantity of for spiritual laws. Did I tell you this one? No. Okay. Remind me if I did. For Spiritual laws were published and then the pastors and youth leaders were instructed on how to use them. And then everybody went out a whole afternoon. And in the evening we were to report on conversions. And there was not one conversion. I'm cutting the long story short. Awful disappointment, appointment. And next morning I had coffee with Dr. Bright. He spoke then also our school for chapel, and he said, Peter, this has been used so widely and is bringing fruit everywhere. So why is it that we didn't get any testimonies last night about conversions? And I said, Doctor, but I can I'd be very frank and very honest with you. He said, Yeah, please. I said, You are businessman turned evangelist. You have an organized mind and you understand the American mindset and American market. And you have created a wonderful tool for Americans for Spiritual laws.

The first one says, God has a wonderful plan for your life. Every American believes has some kind of a notion about God. And every American wants a wonderful life. So that works. It's contextually very fitting for the American. Positive, forward looking, success oriented mentality. But I said you are first time in a communist country. Here Wonderful Life is a dream. It doesn't have much meaning because people haven't experienced it. God, they don't have a mental image. I said, All of these people you've thought for several days have been raised and been educated in communist schools. They have been told that God does not exist. If they have a mental image of God, it's a distorted one. Not the people that he thought, but the people that these people share the four spiritual laws of it. Okay. So I said, when you start like this, God has a wonderful plan for your life in this context, in this culture, it doesn't work. And we had a long conversation. I'm cutting it short. And he said, Well, how would you stop it? So I am the one that told Dr. Brite to read Francis Schaeffer. I remember Francis Schaeffer came over as a missionary to Switzerland, to Europe, secular Europe, and started working with students, anarchists, skeptics, atheists, agnostics. And he developed quite an apologetic and was rather successful. And I said, well, I if I rewrote the for spiritual laws for our culture, I would the first law would be something like human existence is wonderful and miserable at the same time. You know, and and explain that there is something beautiful about human life. We are thinking persons. We have creative gifts. We are we love and want to receive love and so on. But at the same time we are selfish and greedy and grumpy and all that and, you know, point to the ambivalent of human nature.

Start with the reality. Start with the common ground. And shake them, awaken them, and then build up and show how all the other analysis of human predicament are deficient and how Marxism doesn't really provide an answer and materialism doesn't provide an answer and a religion per se. How cry is the only one God incarnate that is the answer. And then you end with the salvation rather than starting with God and his wonderful plan. Start with the man and his miserable failure, although he's obviously created for much more and more beautiful. So we need to learn how to bridge the gap, the chasm between the secular world and our Christian message, how to translate the good news of Christ for our culture, or how to use culture as a bridge for the Gospel into the world. Jerusalem has a lot to do with Athens. If Jerusalem has the answers, we need to hear the questions of Athens. If the church is God's missionary community in the world, the church better listen to what the world is saying and what the world is asking so that we will not be providing answers to the generations that have already been buried. But speak to the issues of the day with the gospel, which needs to be translated for every generation again and again. Helmut Taylor, in one of his writings, makes a statement. If I can translate that back into English somewhat faithfully. He says The gospel has to be forwarded to a new address for every generation. And he says modern generations are moving faster and changing that address faster. And very often, the church still mails the old gospel to the old address on the street where people have moved away a long time ago. And this is back to Leslie Newbiggin, who helps us understand Western culture and address the gospel to that Western culture.

And it will not go just by quoting scriptures as if there was some kind of a magic. It's not a hocus pocus. You know, we don't have a mormon or Islamic understanding of how scriptures came into existence. It's the word of God given in the words of men in history. Okay. It has already used human language and cultural vehicle and historical context to enter and address human race as a message of salvation. And we need to forward it to the new address to our generation. Now, what about the need for the whole gospel holistic mission? You've been doing so much reading in the area and I want to show you what I did find it in my office. This email is a personal message from Rick Warren, what he is planning to do now because of the powerful influence of his purpose driven life, he's influencing thousands of churches. He has also discovered and you know, and he has this enormous platform now, he has discovered a holistic, kingdom focused definition of missions. He's also reflecting a broad sentiment of many church leaders who are saying, and one of you is going to do a paper on that. During the break, we discussed this, that the strategic leadership of the global mission of God needs to be taken back by the church. From the parish church groups so that the parish church groups will serve the church. And the church will recover its true nature, nature and its mission. I have a little paraphrase of scriptures, and one of my paraphrase is I've been quoted on this here and there. One of the paraphrases is Jesus said, I will not build a para church agency. You know what I'm paraphrasing that Jesus said, I will build my church.

But our church agencies have arisen as a response to the failure of the church. But para church agencies cannot exist apart from the church, or, as is very often happens, exploiting the church for missions and being the kind of intermediary when the church itself should carry on on the mission. By the way, another quote, another paraphrase is God so loved the world that he didn't send the committee. Okay. What is Rick Warren trying to do? And he is focusing it on this month. That is parallel to our concern about the holistic mission and about the church being God's transformative agent in the world. Here is what he says this weekend. And he wrote this on the 1st of November. This weekend, I will begin teaching the most important series of messages we've ever taught in 23 years here at Saddleback Church. We believe it is part of the beginning of a spiritual awakening, a global movement, a new reformation. This is quite a claim, he says later in the letter. The bottom line is that we intend to reinvent mission strategy in the 21st century, he said. As I stated, this will be a new reformation. The first reformation returned to us the message of the original church. It was the reformation of the doctrine. What the church believes, he says the second Reformation will return us to the mission of the original church. It will be a reformation of purpose. What the church does in the world. Now I'm going to write to him because I think we cannot start with talking about what the church does in the world. You never start with a doing. You start with the being. That's the part of the problem of American theology, especially because it's all pragmatic, practice oriented.

You have to start with the being. You have to start with the nature of the church. And then you come to the mission of the church, which is part of its nature. But whenever you put the cart before the horse. Is that the idiom? Yeah. Yeah. You don't get anywhere. You hurt the horse and you break the cart. Yeah. Well, let me not develop this further. I'm tempted to. I'm tempted to. A Rick Warren says in the first century, mission strategy was always congregational based. The first missionaries were sent, supported and accountable to local churches. The church at Antioch was the first one to do this. There were no mission societies, mission boards or parish church organizations. Local churches accepted the responsibility for Jesus, his great commission and his great commandment. And the growth of the church worldwide was explosive. Now, he says, today, most local churches are sidelined and uninvolved when it comes to missions. The message from most mission and body church organizations to the local church is essentially pray, pay and get out of the way. But in the 21st century, he says, Kay and I case his wife, intend to help thousands of other local churches to move back to the front line in missions, in compassion and in providing the social services that historically the church provided. I believe the proper role for all the great parish church and the relief organizations is to serve local churches in a supportive role, offering their expertise and knowledge, but allowing the local churches around the world to be central focus and the distribution centers. I deeply believe that any organization that marginalized or many marginalizes or minimizes the local congregations the responsibility to go or bypasses the local churches moral authority to fulfill the Great Commission is out of sync with the strategy God intended and modeled in the Book of Acts.

Now he's onto something. He's on to something and he will make an impact. And he will have credibility because he is the pastor of the most powerful, largest church in North America. That's one thing. And the other thing that he has become now so popular because of his book. There are other books, but of course, The Purpose Driven Life they mentioned earlier, I believe. Yeah. Listen to this. The continuing sales of the Purpose Driven Life are quite amazing. We are almost at the tipping point where Purpose Driven Life becomes a national phenomenon. It will hit 10 million copies sold by the end of December and has been on the New York Times hardback bestseller longer than any other book this year for 40 weeks. Now that is a national phenomenon. A couple of weeks ago, I did six TV interviews, including Fox News Live, ABC, NBC and CBN. This has not happened before. So he says this spiritual awakening is starting to get the attention of the media. I now believe that I know why God is blessing this book in such an unusual way. It is more than just a message that God wants us to get out to everyone, which is huge. I now also see that God is using this phenomenon to expand the platform for us to mobilize thousands of local churches for global world missions through the peace plan. Right now, about 5000 more churches are doing the fourth The Day of Purpose campaign. And now the program has been adopted by corporations like Coke and Wal-Mart, sports teams like the Oakland Raiders and Green Bay Packers and NASCAR drivers and out the gay schools, civic clubs and even prisons. Last week, Paul Harvey told everyone to go buy a copy of PTL on his ABC Radio broadcast.

He said this is the quote from Paul Harvey. This is utterly amazing. It really is. It all happened in one week. Then I was away. Maybe I need to travel more. He said this is one of the most insightful books. This is Paul Harvey. Books I've ever read. And I've read it again and again and again. In 2004, we expect over 15,000 more churches to participate. So he says the influence of the book keeps amazing me every day as I get the request for autographed copies. In today's stack, I signed books for one all the Supreme Court justices, two one for Fidel Castro, three one for the President of Peru. These last two were Spanish editions, he says. And I recently got a note saying that everyone on Air Force One was reading the book recently. Well, but all this is not about us. And I like this. Have you any of you had Rick Warren speak? Because he was here on the campus a few years ago. Some of you have those of you have studied seven years or longer for the condition. Should remember, he said he's quite a common man. He's not you know, he's he's down to it. He says all of this is not about us. God intention is much bigger than the book. It's all about the global glory of God. I like this expression. I think I'm going to use it. The global glory of God. We intend to leverage the attention that the Purpose Driven Life has garnered to bring about a whole new way of thinking and acting in the church about our responsibility in the world. This is a stewardship we must be faithful to fulfill with humility, generosity, and integrity. If you would like to watch the piece series on the Internet and so on, we've created a special web page.

By the way, write it down. W w w dot saddleback dot com. And he says will launch a page that will give you three options. One, you can print an outline of the message. Two, you can watch one of the six we and services online. And times are given. And three, you can watch the archived services of any of the five services you missed in the Peace Plan series. Now, what is this peace plan and how is that related to the global mission? Here is what Rick Warren is arguing, and I think he's on the target. And he is he has a much stronger platform than any seminary professor. He certainly does through his writing for this phenomenal book sale and of course, through his church and TV ministry. He says during the five weeks of November, he started two days ago, we will teach five messages on the peace plan. A strategy to have every small group in our church and then tens of thousands of small groups in other churches become engaged in solving the five biggest problems in the world. Okay. The five biggest problems as he deals with them is, first, spiritual closeness. Second the shortage of servant leaders. Three. Poverty. And here he is breaking out of the earlier evangelical confines and discovering what you've discovered in your reading. The holistic mission. For disease and ignorance. Sorry. Ignorance is five actually disease and then ignorance. Or a lack of education. Okay. So he says these are the five biggest problems in the world. This is a holistic mission here. And so here is what he argues, and I'm with him on this. These giant problems are so big that neither the government nor all of the NGOs, the non-governmental organizations, can tackle them.

There is only one group large enough to tackle these global issues. The Christian church in all its local expressions around the world. That's why he's putting an emphasis on local congregations. Because he says they are everywhere. Okay. There is the presence. There is the infrastructure. Okay. So he says nothing else can compare to the distribution channels of the millions of churches around the world, even in villages where you cannot find a clinic, a store, a school, or a post office. You can often find a church. That's true. I've seen that in China. I've seen it in India. So the peace plan, as he calls it, will address these five giant problems by. First planting new churches. He's talking about a global plan following on the popularity of the book infecting all churches. Getting people involved around these five issues. Oh, they do already. I mean, every church would be a church, blanding church, you know, especially a church of that size. But he is not reducing that to saying, okay, that's what we do, because they are already doing it. He is saying the whole global Christian movement needs to be infected by this program first. And you will see why he calls it BS. And he has a very interesting theory here developing the biblical. Let let me just go through Julie and then we can discuss it. Equipping leaders. Equipping leaders, servant leaders. You see that's a response to this. Third part of his strategy is assisting the poor. The fourth is caring for the sick. Now, remember, this is a preacher. He has a gift of alliteration. If you've read his stuff or have listened to his sermons. And that's all right, because these are the kind of vehicles there is a there is a better word that helps people memorize things.

What's what's the expression? Device? Yeah. Yeah. Four, of course. Minimum Four for memorizing. Making it simple. It's like for spiritual loss. I did not try to laugh it for spiritual loss. When people kill for spiritual loss, they say, Well, they lost their spiritual. There are four. You know, you can handle it. And the five is educating the next generation. Let's just call it education. Now, he says, these problems and the answers are not new, but he says the way we intend to tackle them using the small groups of local churches in large numbers is revolutionary. So in each he's tackled the one that I five Sundays in November. 2nd of November. He already talked about the first one, I guess. So he says each week in November will explain one of the five parts of the plan in detail. We've been listening, praying and preparing for this launch for about a year, and we saw the advice of respected national Christian leaders around the world. We have tweaked the plans often and will continue to do so as we learn by doing. Now, we are ready to share the plan with our congregation, friends and others, their congregations across America. So that's what he's not talking about, kind of possibly launching a new reformation. Now, you do notice how that corresponds to the holistic mission. It's not just proclamation and church planting. It is the poor and the sick. Matthew 25 The great compassion, as well as the Great Commission, as well as education, both of the leaders in general. Yes, he talks about. I would assume so. I have not seen the plan, but I can tell you that, you know, we started playing for Russia. In Russia, there are still thousands, literally thousands of communities, local communities without anyone Jellicle Angelica.

There is a need for church planting, even in parts of America, especially in the strong urban centers, because the evangelicals have become comfortable and lazy and wanted to play safe and very often moved out of the inner city. This is one of the phenomena that I could not understand when I first came to America. Why were the evangelicals moving into the suburbs when the poor and the needy were living downtown? You know, and you kind of gave up on them. Now, some of the churches are now rediscovering next Sunday and preaching at Times Square Church, which David Wilkerson stopped at downtown Manhattan because he did the ministry with drug addicts in that area 30 years earlier. And when he decided 11 years ago to move back there and start the church, I have heard ecclesiastical leaders in various evangelical circles say he's he's crazy. He's committing a ministerial suicide. He's so popular through his books and so on. He will never have more than 200 people in Manhattan. He's got churches, church of some 7000, and they've planted a number of new churches around in the area. And they're serving the poor. They're feeding the people on the street. They have several homes for unwed mothers, full fledged social services, and working with dry drug addicts, as well as outreach to the business community. And if you have some of you heard Tim Keller here recently who pastors the PTA church there, and again, another very successful inner city church planter. But these are exceptions. In most cases, the inner city was abandoned by the evangelicals and there's a need to recover that. So there is probably a plan that they are developing and they are consulting. They are consulting with experts because they know they are stepping out into a very broad, complex arena and taking some risks.

But one would hope that on the popularity of the book and of his church as a model church, this could catch on and could provide a model. And who knows, a few years from now, when you have done your Ph.D., you will remember this class, how we discovered it here for the first time. When you write your doctoral work on Rick Warren's holistic theology. Thank you. God bless you. Do not forget the world as you study the world.