In the Called Out conference, I had the privilege of speaking three times on the topics of discipleship, community life, and missional living. The host church, Maranatha Grace, was incredibly hospitable. Also, check out Shai Linne’s great message on Psalms 16, a Christian Hedonism 101 sermon!
I felt strongly about these talks as I wrote and delivered them. Listening to the first talk on Pastoral Identity, I was reminded just how important they are—for me. I hope you’ll find them helpful too.
Session 1 - The Pastor’s Identity: Gospel-formed Leadership
Session 2 - The Pastor’s Church: Shepherding Sinners as Disciples
Session 3 - The Pastor’s Mission: Your Role in the Mission of the Church
“Is Jesus the only way to God?” Some ask it with disdain: How could anyone assert that Jesus is the only way to God? Others ask it with genuine sense of doubt. Is Jesus the only way to God? How should we answer this question? What is the answer? I work through these and other questions in this blog series at The Resurgence.
After writing Fight Clubs: Gospel-Centered Discipleship a couple of years ago, the need for reliable gospel-centered resources on all things discipleship became apparent. While making disciples over the past fifteen years, and training many pastors all over the world, I continue to see and hear the need for more Christ-centered wisdom in discipleship. Various questions arise for which there are few gospel-centered answers, at least in writing.
How Will Gospel Centered Discipleship.com Help You?
Unfortunately, no single book or series of books can sufficiently address all these kinds of questions. Meanwhile, new questions continue to arise from the unique challenges of being a disciple and making disciples in context. The vision of Gospel Centered Discipleship.com (GCD) is to meet many of these needs by making discipleship resources available at one site. The values that shape our resources include:
GCD.com is a long form resource site that will electronically distribute Articles, eBooks, and Curriculum on a host of discipleship issues, all from a gospel or grace centered perspective. Contributions come from a collective of proven gospel-centered practioners addressing a myriad of discipleship issues. It’s been great to see excellent content come in. The site launches Summer 2011.
REGISTER for email updates
FOLLOW us on TWITTER to keep up with progress and get some great discipleship tweets.
More to come…
I continue to be amazed by how popular this little, self-published book is. I am grateful that God is using it in so many lives to cultivate Christ-centered joy and discipleship growth. For a limited time, there is a ONEFIFTY coupon for $150 off 100 books for bulk orders. Order here.
Check out www.gospelcentereddiscipleship.com and the book, Fight Clubs: gospel-centered discipleship. Learn what a Fight Club is, preview the first two chapters for free, get free Fight Club resources, or just weigh in on how God is using Fight Clubs in your life.
In the prior three posts (Pt 1, Pt 2, Pt 3) we have examined the claim that Jesus exclusive claim as the only way to God is both unenlightened and arrogant. As it turns out, it is actually the opposite. It is religious pluralism that is rather unenlightened and carries an air of arrogance. In this post we will examine the important idea of tolerance. Is religious pluralism more tolerant that Christianity?
Is Religious Pluralism Truly Tolerant?
Very often people hold to religious pluralism because they think it is more tolerant than Christianity. I’ll be the first to say that we need tolerance, but what does it mean to be tolerant? To be tolerant is to accommodate differences, which can be very noble. I believe that Christians should be some of the most accommodating kinds of people, giving everyone the dignity to believe whatever they want and not enforcing their beliefs on others through politics or preaching. We should winsomely tolerate different beliefs. Interestingly, religious pluralism doesn’t really allow for this kind of tolerance. Instead of accommodating spiritual differences, religious pluralism blunts them. Let me explain.
Instead of accommodating spiritual differences, religious pluralism blunts the differences between world religions.
The claim that all paths lead to the same God actually minimizes other religions by asserting a new religious claim. When someone says all paths lead to the same God, they blunt the distinctives between religions, throwing them all in one pot, saying: “See, they all get us to God so the differences don’t really matter.” This isn’t tolerance; it’s a power play. When asserting all religions lead to God, the distinctive and very different views of God and how to reach him in Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam are brushed aside in one powerful swoop. The Eightfold Noble Path, the 5 Pillars of Islam, and the Gospel of Christ are not tolerated but told they must submit to a new religious claim–religious pluralism–despite the fact that this isn’t what those religions teach.
The Religion of Religious Pluralism
People spend years studying and practicing their religious distinctives. To say they don’t really matter is highly intolerant! The very notion of religious tolerance assumes there are differences to tolerate but pluralism is intolerant of those very differences! In this sense, religious pluralism is a religion of its own. It has its own religious absolute—all paths lead to the same God—and requires people of other faiths to embrace this absolute, without any religious backing at all. It is highly evangelistic! Religious pluralism is highly political and preachy. Yet, it does so under the guise of tolerance. It is a leap of faith to say there are many paths to God. Says who? The idea that all paths lead to the same God is not a self-evident fact; it is a leap of faith. It isn’t even an educated leap, nor is it as humble and tolerant as it might appear.
Religious pluralism is a religion of its own. It has its own religious absolute—all paths lead to the same God—and requires people of other faiths to embrace this absolute, without any religious backing at all.
Recall Stephen Prothero’s comment regarding religious pluralism: “But this sentiment, however well-intentioned, is neither accurate nor ethically responsible. God is not one.” He goes on: “Faith in the unity of religions is just that—faith (perhaps even a kind of fundamentalism). And the leap that gets us there is an act of the hyperactive imagination.”
As it turns out, the reasons for subscribing to religious pluralism—enlightenment, humility, and tolerance—actually backfire. They don’t carry through. Religious pluralism isn’t enlightened, it’s inaccurate; it isn’t humble, it’s fiercely dogmatic; and it isn’t really all that tolerant because it intolerantly blunts religious distinctives. In the end, religious pluralism is a religion, a leap of faith, based on contradiction and is highly untenable. Christianity, on the other hand, should respect and honor the various distinctives of other religions, comparing them, and honoring their differing principles–Karma (Hinduism), Enlightenment (Buddhism), Submission (Islam), and Grace (Christianity). In the next and final post, I will examine Jesus’ exclusive claim, and the charge that his teachings in Christianity are unenlightened, arrogant, and intolerant. In particular, we will examine the unique principle of grace.
Thomas Weaver lists 7 things to keep in mind about people who don’t claim to be Christians that might visit your church. What do you think?
My first year of church planting I started a new, full-time job, in a new city, with a new daughter, in a new church. Guess which one got the least attention? Family. As all these new things filled our lives, they began to crowd conversation with my wife. What was once natural—inquiring about my wife’s hopes, fears, and joys—became unnatural, even absent from our conversation. She patiently continued to ask how I was doing, but I was “working for the church while my family died.”
This article first appeared at Christianity Today in the Faith & Work section. Be sure to check out The High Calling for other helpful articles on vocation.
How do you know if you’re gossiping? The Apostle Paul warned young Timothy, a church leader, to curb the gossip that was happening from “house to house.” Unfortunately, we don’t spend the same amount of time in one another’s homes as the early church did, but that doesn’t mean we lack the means for gossip. Today, gossip lurks on Facebook, in emails, over phone calls, through text messages, and good old-fashioned face-to-face. Over the course of this series, we will look at the three faces of gossip: complainer, leaker, and meddler – and how Jesus speaks to each
Counseling might not be your gift, but it is your responsibility. It’s easy to put it off on the “professionals”, but we’re all called to counsel one another. In fact, we are always counseling, offering advice and direction to one another. The question is whether or not we are offering good counsel! Good counseling is discipling others with gospel wisdom in the full range of human thinking, feeling, and behaving. So how do we do that?
