Great Gospel Articles

The Christian Vision Project is spending all of 08 asking the question, is our gospel too small. I have enjoyed several of the articles, but I particularly liked this interview by Andy Crouch of James Choung called From Four Laws to Four Circles. I would be curious to hear your thoughts. Also, on the gospel, I would recommend Christianity Today's article by Tim Keller called "The Gospel in All Its Forms."

unChristian

I recommend unChristian as a great book that everyone should read. The book records 20 somethings' views of Christianity. Unfortunately we all know that Christians have not always represented Jesus very well and the research confirms it. I appreciated the research, but I especially liked the end of the book where respected leaders discussed how to positively contribute to culture. I found it interesting that almost every responder said Christianity must change the way it is responding to the major issues like Aids, poverty, injustice, etc. Our gospel has to be bigger than the individualistic version that is so common today.

on the way

This week as I sit in a coffee shop in rainy Seattle, I keep having these few words running through my head. "Come let us go to the other side." We all know that Jesus spent time with the prostitutes, tax collectors, cheats, lepers, but now Jesus was taking it to a whole new level. The other side is the pagan area called the Decapolis or the land of the Gerasenes. This is a place that every good Jew avoided for a lot of reasons. This was their Ninevah! On the way to mission in this pagan place, they face the mother of all storms. And what comes out - FEAR.

This week as I am being challenged to go to the other side. My fears have become front and center. Fear of rejection. Fear of change. Fear of the costs. As we take steps toward mission toward people God truly loves (interestingly enough as Ron Ruchruff said today that Jesus loved the demoniac enough to destroy the economy of the decapolis by killing the pigs in order to deliver and heal him) the evil one wants to put fears front and center. Jesus' answer shouldn't surprise us. It is radical faith.

my new friend

Today I met some of the most amazing people that I have ever been around. People from all over the world like Kenya, Nigeria, Taiwan, India, South Africa, Holland, Reno, Seattle, San Diego to mention a few. I talked to many people today and was quite overwhelmed by all that these people are doing to demonstrate and declare the gospel of Jesus in our world. But one new friend is Jack. Jack serves as a bishop overseing over 400 churches in the Kibera Slum in Kenya. The Kibera slum is the biggest slum in Africa and has over 1 million people living there. I was amazed as he told me stories of ministry in the slums especially in light of the tribal tension this year. Needless to say, my perspective is being changed.

Hotel Rwanda Clip

This week as I was preparing for a sermon about the poor and the oppressed, I was reminded of this convicting clip in Hotel Rwanda. It is a film that talks about the genocide of 800,000 pople in 100 days in Rwanda in 1994. Just as a comparison: 2700 people died in the Twin towers and the Pentagon on 9-11. The genocide in Rwanda would be the same as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon tragedy happening at 8am, 4pm and midnight every single day for 3.5 months.

Here is the clip on Youtube from Hotel Rwanda:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QMKv3vRHtg

Letter to Diognetus

This is an exerpt from a letter to Diognetus in the 2nd Century describing early Christians. I thought it was a good explanation of being wholly countercultural while still looking like our culture. I wonder what it would take for someone to write a similar letter today.

“Christians are not differentiated from other people by country, language, or customs; you see, they do not live in cities or their own or speak some strange dialect, or have some peculiar lifestyle. They live in both Greek and foreign cities, wherever chance has put them. They follow local customs in clothing, food, and the other aspects of life. But at the same time, they demonstrate to us the wonderful and certainly unusual form of their own citizenship. They live in their own native lands, but as aliens: as citizens they share all things with others; but like aliens suffer all things. Every foreign country is to them as their native country, and ever native land as a foreign country. They are treated outrageously and behave respectfully to others. When they do good, they are punished as evildoers; when punished, they rejoice as if being given new life. They are attacked by Jews as aliens, and presecuted by Greeks; yet those who hate them cannot give any reason for their hostility."

unedited version

It seems everywhere you look, our culture is longing for true community. This is from John Mayer's blog: "This is about us all. Every one of us. Who all seem to know deep down that it's incredibly hard to be alive and interact with the world around us but will try and cover it up at any cost. For as badass and unaffected as we try to come off, we're all just one sentence away from being brought to the edge of tears, if only it was worded right." He continues to say that he longs to be authentic and I think he incapsulates the human desire to be fully known.

Frederick Buechner in Telling Secrets says "the central paradox of our condition--that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are--even if we tell it only to ourselves--because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing."

The kind of community where we can truly be our "unedited" self should be found so profoundly in the community centered around the gospel of Christ. Unfortunately Christians can be really good cover-up artists. But if the gospel is true and we are all collectively worse off than we ever thought yet more accepted than we ever hoped to be because of Christ - we of all people ought to be the most authentic, free and unedited.