Mark Dever’s advice to first and last year college students

Mark Dever had a Q & A session at Boyce College recently.

Advice to first year college students: “You need to realize you’re arrogant. Not because you’re a first year student but because you’re a human being who’s fallen. Even if you’re redeemed you’re still fallen. Ok? You’re not glorified yet. Got that straight? That’s important. Now, you need to realize that that means you need people and that doesn’t mean just your friends here. Right? Even the Gentile Pagans have friends. No, you need to be in a local church that’s healthy and it preaches the Word. The church is far more important than any school you will ever go to. So you need to get in a local church, join it, officially be a member, put yourself under the authority of the elders in that church. They will watch over your soul as men who must give an account to God, Hebrews chapter 13.”

Advice to last year college students: “You are arrogant… Not because you’re in your final year but because you’re a fallen child of Adam. Even if you are redeemed, you’re still fallen. Alright? You know you’re not in glory yet. You’re not glorified. So you need to be in a local church. You need to be in a healthy local church. You are making life decisions that you are not competent, you are not made by yourself to make. You’re meant to be in a community of faith where your character is known, your gifts are understood, where they can give you good counsel and direction so get in a local healthy church. Spend this final year in school in a healthy local church as an official member of there.”

You can listen to the whole Q&A session here.

Michael Frost on the Missional Church and my thoughts on his talk

See and hear the video of Michael Frost on the Missional Church on youtube if you want to see where I’m getting these notes.

“The whole idea of missional church thinking is a fundamental and prophetic call for the church orient everything it is doing around the agenda of mission.  In other words, of all the practices of the church ought to legitimately be involved in, missional church thinkers believe that mission ought to be the organizing principle of all those things.  We don’t think that worship is the primary organizing principle… we don’t think the creation of Christian fellowship or community is the organizing principle… we don’t think even that the expression of evangelism is the primary or organizing principle… We are talking about a church in which worship, community, leadership, evangelism, social justice, theological thinking, is oriented around or organized around the fundamental agenda of mission.

(5:49) “It’s about the church of Jesus Christ galvanized into a viral movement sent outwards, propelled into every nook and cranny of, in your case, American culture, for the purpose of lifting up Jesus.” (He actually used this point in the context of an if/then statement, but I drew out from it this point).

Three things will happen if you embrace this paradigm:

1. You will see God differently.  They don’t believe God is far and distant in heaven only.  God has not separated himself but you have a God who moved outward and is into the world.    Missio Dei is not translated “Mission of God” but is a way of describing the very nature and character of God himself.  It is better translated as “The Missioning God” or “The God of Mission.”   The Missio Dei is going out in search of those who’ve not yet redeemed.
2. You will see the church differently (15:01).  We see the church as participatio Christi.  What is the church?  The gathering of the redeemed ones sent to participate in the work of Jesus in this world.  What does it mean, it is actually to go forth as salt and light in this world and not to huddle, not to gather, and not to pour most of our energies and most of our times and indeed most of our money on serving ourselves or our loved ones.  Participate in what Jesus is doing in this world.  You will be astonished at what you discover.  – The Missio Dei makes the church ask: Whom can we serve?  Whom can we love? and to whom can we go?
3. You will see the world differently (34:29).  Church thinking has been typically been how wonderful things are in church and how icky things are outside of the church.  Every person bears the imago dei, the image of God.  His fingerprint is on their souls.  He pointed out the wickedness in the church and goodness out of the church.  Forget the boundaries.  There are weeds and wheats in the church and out of the church.

49:17 – “The Missio Dei is inviting you to participate in what Christ has planted in the depths of their souls and the imago dei, the belief that every one of them has buried in the deep dark black rock canyons of their souls, the stuff of faith just waiting for a word or a prayer or an act of service from you his sent ones.  Are you covetous of that mission?  Is that the greatest happiness of your life?”

The Mission (51:06): finding your treasure buried in the hearts of every soul, [God's] fingerprints on the spirit of every person.

MY THOUGHTS AND REFLECTION:

1. I was rebuked in point two about the church that gets ingrown and is not aware and out there loving the people who are not yet in Christ.  What a great word of rebuke!  It brought clarity afresh to why I moved out to LA.  The Spirit convicted me sharply there and for that I’m grateful to God and to Michael Frost.
2. The outward/movement focus and ethos of the paradigm and lecture were as encouraging as the talk itself.  I loved the ethos and again stand corrected and helped because of it.
3. When he asked if the mission (as he describes and defines it) is the greatest happiness of my life, I thought to myself that I should be more passionate for the mission (of reconciliation as defined by 2 Cor. 5:4-21 in my view) and that the mission is not to be the greatest happiness in my life, lest I become idolotrous.  I appreciated his passion for the mission.  That was just a great overstatement to say that the mission is to be the greatest happiness of my life.  Very clearly God in Christ is to be the greatest happiness of my life, infinitely greater than the great mission.
4. The distinctive of the “missional church thinking paradigm” is a set of emphases and a philosophy of church.  So the philosophy is everything in church is oriented and organized around the mission.  I agree with that and actually think that that is inevitable in all churches and the difference is what they define their mission to be and what their functional definition of mission is.  But the emphases which gives flesh to Frost’s definition of mission is that (1) God is the missioning God who is seeking the unredeemed, (2) the church participates in what Christ is doing in the world and not allowing the church to be self-focused, and (3) everyone in the world is valuable because they are made in God’s image.  I appreciate these emphases and they are very corrective of much Christianity and evangelicalism that I’ve seen.  But I see this in many churches that would not be considered missional by many who use the term (like Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington DC).
5. I think the definition of the mission is real poetic and at the same time uclear.  How is this different from someone defining the organizing mission as evangelism of those not yet redeemed?  I love the passion and outward ethos of the lecture, but I don’t see how this is different than one saying the mission is evangelism of the lost unless they say it’s also social justice/good.  But even then, that’s not new and doesn’t seem distinct to this new label “missional church thinking paradigm.”
6. For other critiques of missional thinking, one should look at Dave Harvey’s notes and hear his talk on it and then also read Jonathan Leeman’s article on it.  I need to review these myself.

Darrin Patrick on Leadership

Session 1 – Darrin Patrick on Priorities of a Leader

Session 2 – Darrin Patrick on Tensions & Pitfalls Faced as a Leader

Why the Church Exists (according to Art Azurdia)

Taken from Art Azurdia’s message (16:23):

CrossView Church exists to joyfully exalt the Triune God, faithfully declare the Christ-centered Word, intentionally demonstrate Christian love, and zealously evangelize its community and world.

New D.A. Carson Audio

1.  D.A. Carson on the Good Samaritan (from The Gospel Coalition’s page on D.A. Carson Resources)

2.  Faith Bible Church 2002 Springfield Conference:

1. Vision of a Holy God
2. Vision of a Transcendent God
3. Vision of a Redeeming God
4. Questions and Answers
5. Two Ways to Live (Psalm 1)
6. On Worshipping God (Eph. 1:3-14)

To see all my D.A. Carson audio I’ve collected, go here.

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CJ: “I am the worst sinner I know.” True or false?

I’ve heard CJ Mahaney say, “I am the worst sinner I know” several times throughout his teaching ministry.  I appreciate it, but sometimes it’s hard for me to really say that of myself with full honesty and confidence.  James McDonald does an excellent job asking questions about this statement in this interview (go to 15:51 of the interview).  I still don’t get it and am with James McDonald, I have a lot to think about.

Free Resources for Hungry Students

(It’s hard to imagine anyone would read my blog that is unaware of the free resources from John Piper and Desiring God, but just in case):

If you’re a student, or you know a student, then you probably know how expensive going back to school can be. You have to buy books, pay tuition, cover housing, and then get enough together to buy something to eat (Ramen noodles anyone?). At Desiring God, we want a student’s “spiritual food” to always remain affordable.

That’s why, in this back-to-school season, we simply want to remind you of the wealth of free resources on the DG website. Currently we have

• 42 Full-length books (PDF)
• Approximately 1700 sermons
• 10 seminars
• Nearly 500 conference messages
• Several free podcasts
• and more…

And remember that these resources come in multiple formats, such as text, audio, video, or some combination of these.

Take for example our 2006 National Conference The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World. As with most of our content, you have several options for how to get it:

1. Download the book and then watch or listen to the messages online.
2. Purchase the conference DVD, audio, or book in our online store at regular price.
3. Order them by phone, email, or letter, and simply pay Whatever You Can Afford.

So don’t let your student go hungry this year. We want to make it easy for them to feast on the truth of God’s word.

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For free resources, visit our website: DesiringGod.org.

Church Planting: easy vs. hard

Jeff Vanderstelt has taught me a crucial truth about church planting:

Planting (and planning) services is easy, making disciples (who can make more disciples who can make more disciples) is hard.  But planting a church is the latter and not the former.

He talked about this truth in a message called, “Being a Leader who Grow Leaders” and wrote about it in a blog post entitled, “Observations about Church Planting.”

Update: Steve Timmis says the same thing in his own words:

If we think of church as primarily a Sunday morning meeting, an event, then the majority of our effort is going to be invested in putting on that event.  That’s what we’re going to be building towards.  That’s what we’re going to be focused on.  That’s what we’re going to be investing all of our energies into.  But if church is not less than that event, but significantly more than that event, then getting everyone togther for a public meeting is the easy step… But seeing a people pulled together, built together, through the gospel by the Holy Spirit, now that’s an altogether different task.  That’s of a different magnitude and order.    That, though brothers and sisters, is the long haul of seeing an authentic and alternative community that is created that models the reign of Christ by the gospel life that they live that invites others into it by the gospel word that they speak.  That’s really what church planting is.  It’s not just to put on an event.  It’s to build a church, a community of people living under the reign of King Jesus.

Jeff’s words from his post on this topic were:

1. The Bible doesn’t command us to plant churches, but “plant” the Gospel and make disciples. Churches grow up in that soil as Jesus builds his Church – So…Are we making disciples as Jesus defined disciples (Able to do all that Jesus commanded and trained his dis@
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ake disciples who make disciples)?

2. It seems that the large costs (referred to above) has a lot to do with planting services (the costs of buildings, supplies, equipment, a preacher, a worship leader, a children's ministry, etc…) and not making disciples who make disciples – Is it possible that Planting Churches could be a lot less expensive if our focus was on Making Disciples and not mainly on starting services? (I am not against the gathering, but my experience has been that making disciples cost less money and produces greater generosity to support the mission).

Audio from Timmis, Vanderstelt, and others on Church Planting

From the Acts 29 blog:

Last month we had the pleasure of officially launching Acts 29 Western Europe with a “Church Planting Foundations” conference – a boot camp by another name that was definitely just as sweet! Speakers include Steve Timmis, our new Western Europe director, Scott Thomas, Jeff Vanderstelt and David Fairchild. Check out the audio for these brilliant sessions here.

Steve Timmis, Tim Chester, and Jeff Vanderstelt have been very insightful in helping me think through ecclesiological and church planting issues.  Aside from Scripture and the 9Marks school of thought, Timmis, Chester, and Vanderstelt have been the most formative in my thinking and have provoked much reflection.  I trust I’ll be edified by this audio resource and may blog on it in the future.

Check out the audio here.

Questions for Communal Christian Living as a local Church

My friend Donovan sent me an email that will help Christians, pastors, and church planters:

This message is from a recent Acts29 Boot Camp. It’s pretty quiet at first, but hang in there – the volume quality gets better. Here’s the message:  http://www.acts29network.org/sermon/influence-through-community/. If you don’t have time to listen to it, consider these questions posed in the message:

- Who in your life knows the sin you struggle with?

- Who do you meet with regularly to pray?

- With whom are you living a life of love in front of amazed unbelievers?

- Who has corrected you in some area of your life lately? Who have you corrected lately?

- Who are you currently discipling and teaching with Scripture?

- Who do you meet with regularly to discuss what you’re learning in Scripture?

- Who will be by your hospital bed to comfort and encourage you? Whose hopsital bed will you be at when they need someone there?

- Who will fight to keep you straying from the faith?

- Who do you serve with, using the gifts God has given you?

- Who are you partnering with to reach the lost?

- Who do you meet with when your marriage is struggling? Who prays for your marriage consistantly?

- Who are you encouraging daily?

- Who have you counseled with the Word of God lately?

Howard says every Christian should be able to answer these questions. If not, they’re probably just going to a service, not genuinely a part of authentic Church community. And if we allow this in our churches, we facilitate an unbiblical understanding and practice of “church” amongst our people.