Tomorrow I will be speaking at the Brazos Valley Church Planters Network in Brenham, Texas. Justin Hyde of Christ Church Brenham was kind enough to invite me. I’ll be speaking on Churching the Gospel in Your Culture. Over the course of two talks, my aim will be to help missional leaders:
As I see it, there are two kinds of simplicity: one that ignores complexity and the other that understands complexity. The former you might call “Black & White Church”. The latter you might call “Grey Church”. I want to be a Grey Church.
In a blog post on the Resurgence today, Mark Driscoll posted some sage advice on training leaders in the church. The main theme in his post is “train the called, don’t call the trained.”
Driscoll on Training the Called
Jesus called his leaders. He didn’t get a committee. They didn’t take a congregational vote. They didn’t do nominations. Jesus called them. Jesus still calls people into ministry. We believe that. Acts 20 says that the Holy Spirit chooses the leaders in the church, he appoints the overseers. So God still picks leaders. Jesus still picks leaders through the indwelling, empowering, calling of the Holy Spirit, and Jesus trained the called. We don’t make leaders, God does. We recognize them, and then train them….
But how do you know what you are called to? Driscoll continues…
Serve How You Want
When asked about how to serve, Driscoll responded: “Do whatever you want.” They’re like, “What? Do whatever I want?” “Yeah, because if you delight yourself in the Lord, he’ll give you the desires of your heart. He’ll put desires on your heart, so that God’s desires become your desires.” Augustine said it this way, “Love God and do whatever you please.” I said, “Well, what do you like?”
Except When You’re on Mission
One exception to this excellent advice is that we don’t always have the privilege of serving “how we want” in small missional churches. If leaders come from servants, and they do, then your desires for the mission will be greater than you desires for gifted service (serving where you are gifted). Very often we mistake “the desires of our heart” for “preferences fo the heart.” We mistake natural ability or spiritual gifting for license to not sacrifice or be on mission to the poor and the needy. Although God has created us with unique gifts, he has also called us to humble ourselves to serve out of “gifting of the gospel” to bless the peoples of this world.
It is critical that we make the distinction between “preferences of the heart” and “desires of the heart.” Preferences are entitlements. Desires, in Psalm 37, come from the Spirit of God. Remember that your spiritual gift is not your spiritual gift; it’s is the Spirit’s gift, given along with a host other gifts, talents, faculties, and abilities to push the mission of God forward.
For the sake of the Gospel, many people are called to lay down “the preferences of their hearts” in order to cultivate a heart that desires God’s greater mission. If we love God first, we may find ourselves doing what we want, not second or third, but fourth or fifth. In my church, we have well-educated entrepreneurs setting up chairs, husbands serving in Kids ministry, people helping with media who aren’t “media geeks”, people running PowerPoint who could be leading worship. We also have some people serving in their natural gifts and strengths.
Using Gifts for the Mission
In the missional church, there should always be seasons of sacrifice and re-alignment of our hearts desires through serving in areas that we are not “comfortable.” Gifting and calling doesn’t lead to comfort but it does lead to joy. As small churches and missional churches grow, people will be able to move into places where they have gifts. This will bless and strengthen the community and mission of the church. It will allow the diverse body to be unified in the mission of Christ, pushing the gospel into a harmonious community that brings the sound of the gospel into every domain of the city. However, if they move into these natural places without the heart of a servant, then they can end up sabotaging the mission through “burn out”, or hurting the church through a demanding heart.
Driscoll is right. Our service stands and falls in the heart, where the gospel must be applied daily so that we can love God first and then do what our heart desires. The challenges is to so truly love God first that, for a season, you may serve out of sacrifice and the “gift of the gospel” than out of your heart’s preferences. In fact, your gifting will inevitably taking into the heart of suffering. Was Jesus “gifted to be the messiah”? Absolutely. Did it remove discomfort, inconvenience, ans suffering? Quite the opposite. The further we move into God’s calling, through obedience and mission, we will discover there is a discomfort in discipleship that must be embraced, but that with it comes a profound, deep joy of serving in the strength that God supplies so that in all things Jesus Christ may be magnified (1 Peter 4:11).
Read the rest of Mark Driscoll’s helpful post on leadership in the church.
Because the Crusades are often understood within a larger framework that says that Islam is the gentle faith and Christianity the violent one. Karen Armstrong would have us believe that Muhammad was a pacifist.
Take Major Nidal Hassan, the man responsible for the Fort Hood massacre. Had an evangelical Christian of the nutty sort gotten up in front of Army psychiatrists and talked about how much he respected people who shot abortionists, he would have been out of the Army an hour later. But everybody tiptoes around the issue of Islam.
[Clinton] said we had much to be sorry about, and we bore some of the guilt for sending those airplanes plunging into the Twin Towers. Now, Clinton isn’t a nut. He’s not an anti-American. He’s just been miseducated.
Several months after 9/11, former President Clinton gave a speech at Georgetown University in which he apologized for the Crusades. He said we had much to be sorry about, and we bore some of the guilt for sending those airplanes plunging into the Twin Towers. Now, Clinton isn’t a nut. He’s not an anti-American. He’s just been miseducated. He’s been told a whole lot of nonsense about the Crusades.
Read the rest of this intriguing interview with Rodney Stark on his new book God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades.
