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letter publisher FROM THE
What are heroes? Heroes are people who stand up against insurmountable odds with little or no hope of success. They are people who refuse to give up, even when it’s contrary to the warnings of friends, loved ones, and common sense. They are people who don’t think about how they’ll be remembered, but take action in the moment because they feel the rightness of a cause . . . and the necessity of it. They risk it all for that one chance, that impossible opportunity to make the difference. They are selfless in that moment of heroism, maybe very different from how they might be judged in normal circumstances.
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Many people who hear the word hero immediately visualize a military person—perhaps someone receiving the Medal of Honor from a president or a family who receives it posthumously after their hero son, daughter, or spouse gives the last full measure of devotion. But there are heroes outside of war, and there are heroes whose stories are little known and seldom told. Hollywood has done some of its best work telling these stories. There’s Desmond Doss of Hacksaw Ridge, who alone saved approximately 75 men by lowering them down a 400-foot cliff on Iwo Jima without ever firing a shot. There’s Louis Zamperini, whose story
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is related in Unbroken, and Oskar Schindler, famous for saving Jews during the Holocaust. But other stories have remained in the background; they have never been depicted on the big screen. Christian Standard recounted such a story in the November issue when we highlighted the life and work of J. Russell Morse. He was both a hero of World War II and the cause of Christ. What a movie his story would make! We interview another such hero in this issue. His story may be unfamiliar to some, even though he was portrayed by Cuba Gooding Jr. in the movie Selma. It is certainly true he faced insurmountable odds with little hope of success. And he refused to give up. He didn’t think about how he would be remembered, but instead took the necessary action because of the rightness of it. And all of the things for which he is remembered happened in the context of being a minister in the church of Christ. His name is Fred Gray. I am pleased to bring his story to our readers because it is one for which Christians should be very proud. Inside the church of Christ
stream of this movement, God raised up a man to champion the cause of desegregation. We celebrate that! Eternal judgment is about a final “segregation,” the sheep from the goats, the righteous from the condemned. It’s a separation God seeks to eliminate through sharing the gospel and responding to the gospel. It’s a story that cost his Son—our Savior and Lord—his life! Reconciliation is our ministry! (2 Corinthians 5:11-21). Inside that plan of reconciliation is a picture of desegregation. We see the prophetic illustration in Revelation 7:9-12 and pray, as Jesus did, that God’s “will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).
Jerry Harris is publisher of Christian Standard Media and senior pastor of The Crossing, a multisite church located in three states across the Midwest. @_jerryharris /jerrydharris
CHRISTIAN STANDARD —
FOUNDED 1866 BY ISAAC ERRETT Devoted to the restoration of New Testament Christianity, its doctrine, its ordinances, and its fruits.
The Staff Jerry Harris, Publisher Michael C. Mack, Editor Jim Nieman, Managing Editor Shawn McMullen, Contributing Editor Megan Kempf, Designer Abby Wittler, Designer Renee Little, Operations
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Volume CLIV. Number 1. Christian Standard (ISSN 0009-5656) is published monthly by Christian Standard Media at 16965 Pine Lane, Suite 202, Parker, CO 80134. Periodicals postage paid at Parker, CO, and additional offices. All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Christian Standard Media, 16965 Pine Lane, Suite 202, Parker, CO 80134. Phone: 1-800543-1353. SUBSCRIBERS: Send address changes to Christian Standard, 16965 Pine Lane, Suite 202, Parker, CO 80134. Send old and new addresses, complete with zip codes, at least six weeks before delivery date.
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Copyright ©2018 by Christian Standard Media Email: cs@christianstandardmedia.com Website: www.christianstandard.com Printed in USA
regardless
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
FEA T U R E INTERVIEW WITH FRED GRAY: Preacher, Lawyer, and Civil Rights Warrior
by jerry harris
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I N E V E RY I S S UE 2-3 | L E TTE R F RO M THE P UB L ISH E R Jerry Harris
building an INTEGRATED church
by andy daniell
6-7 | L E TTE R F RO M THE E DITO R Michael C. Mack
44
ABORTION: a philosophical and biblical perspective
by andrew kaake
11-13 | E 2 : E F F E C TIVE EL D ER S Ho w to De a l Effe ctively w ith Diffic ult Pe ople David Roadcup
14-17 | ME TRIC S
Giving Insights for the Ne w Ye a r Kent Fillinger
50
IN THE ARENA: is alcohol really a stumbling block?
by ken idleman
18-19 | H O RIZO N S
51
IN THE ARENA: what if abstinence is the stumbling block?
20-21 | IMAG INE
Instill the Importance of Missions Emily Drayne
by zach spiering
Cloud Chur c h Mel McGowan
22-23 | MINISTRY L IF E Ama z ing Gra c e Rick Chromey
58
the past, present, and future of the RESTORATION MOVEMENT
by steve carr
Inte r vie w w ith Fred Gray: Pr e a c he r , La w y e r, and Civil Rights Wa r r ior Jerry Harris
64
the value of another person’s story in RESOLVING RACIAL CONFLICT in the church
76-79 | IN TE RAC T
by matthew mCbirth
80 | B IB L ITIC AL LY C OR R ECT
26-37 | F E ATURE ARTI CL E
Nic he Bible Nose dive After Class Podcast C H RIS TIA N STA N DAR D
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letter FROM THE
editor
Most of us can agree on a few facts about racial prejudice, division, and conflict. It’s real. It has existed in our culture and in our churches in the past. It persists today. And it will likely continue to be an issue for some time. Thank God, it will not exist in Heaven. I think we’d all agree it’s wrong. It’s unbiblical. It’s definitely not Christlike. Most of us know the Bible verses: Matthew 28:19; Galatians 3:28; Colossians 3:11; 1 John 4:8-11; Revelation 7:9; and others. Many of us know something I didn’t. Most Restoration Movement church leaders, at least those Andy Daniell has talked to, desire to build more integrated, multiethnic congregations. That’s all good news. I believe that today we are more aware of racial issues, and probably deny them less, than in the past. But while it’s good we’ve acknowledged the problem, we can’t stop there. So how do we take action and start making a difference in and through our churches?
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Model Leaders
It begins with bold spiritual leaders who model a lifestyle of crossing cultural barriers, just as Jesus did. He broke cultural norms to love all people, not just those like him, and showed his disciples how to confront their societal prejudices, preferences, and presuppositions. As Matthew McBirth points out, “Jesus treated everyone as important, regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, or class. Are we not to do the same?” McBirth provides several helpful suggestions (see p. 64). He says, “At the root of racial frustration is the feeling that a story is not valued or even considered.” So, he says, it’s vital that we “strive to understand the story of other people instead of immediately jumping to conclusions.” That takes effort, intentionality, and commitment from leaders. And it takes vision and passion. Fred Gray, the subject of Jerry Harris’s interview in our feature story this month (p. 26), is such a leader. When asked to describe his call to help eliminate segregation from our nation, he said, “I realized everything was segregated and something needed to be done about it.” Jerry said he left the interview “with a desire to make a difference with whatever opportunities God puts before me.” I hope Gray’s story inspires more church leaders to do the same. Dudley Rutherford, senior pastor of Shepherd Church (www.theshepherd.org), is another good example. In a June 2016 Christian Standard article, “We Have a Dream,” he said, “It became the burden of my heart to help lead the charge to correct this glaring blind spot [of a lack of racial diversity in our churches].” Rutherford’s burden led him to found Dream of Destiny (www.dreamofdestiny.com), which exists to “lead, teach, and mentor pastors,
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churches, colleges, universities, ministry leaders, and laymen to be more intentional in fostering diversity and inclusion in their particular ministry.”
Model Churches Shepherd Church has been called “the most racially diverse church in Los Angeles” by the city’s mayor. They are but one of the churches in our tribe taking strides in the right direction. Andy Daniell discusses the steps First Christian Church of Mableton, Georgia, has taken to move from single-digit minority representation on Sunday mornings to a consistent minority attendance in the 39 to 54 percent range. Read his article, starting on page 38, to see how they have become more integrated. Cloud Church, a two-year-old church plant in Irvine, California, led by pastor Jason Aguilar, is another example. Mel McGowan discusses how this church is “reconciling people groups to one another and loving them no matter where they come from” (see p. 20). This all makes me wonder. What would happen if our culture looked to the church as the place that crosses racial and other societal divides and radically loves people as no other element of society can? What if the church led the way and modeled racial reconciliation for the rest of the world?
@michaelcmack @michaelcmack @michaelcmack /AuthorMichaelCMack
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SPIRE
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e 2: effective elders
How to Deal Effectively with Difficult People
David Roadcup is cofounder and outreach director for e2: effective elders. He also serves as professor of discipleship and global outreach representative with TCM International Institute. He is also on the board of directors of Christian Arabic Services.
How we react to difficult people and their behavior is a test of how well we’ve implemented Scripture’s relational principles. The Word tells us how to respond when difficult situations present themselves. Effective leaders follow the teachings of patience, forbearance, self-control, careful thought, and action. When called upon to deal with a difficult person, our patience and forbearance will be strengthened as we do the right thing in dealing with those who need help. C H RIS TIA N STAN DA R D
BY DAVID ROADCUP
/ e2elders @e2elders
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Dealing with difficult people is always a stretching experience. As James 1:2-4 instructs us, difficult situations, especially those prompted by difficult people, prompt us to grow. I want to clarify that I’m not talking about supportive members of the congregation who might ask tough questions. Supportive members have the right to ask about issues, policies, and financial matters in the life of the church. People should not be written off as “difficult” by leaders simply because they ask questions—even pointed questions—to seek clarification. As church leaders, we should not be put off by such inquiries. There needs to be a balance in which the elders, staff, and congregation hold each other accountable. Such give-and-take indicates a healthy congregational life. But difficult people are in an entirely different category. Difficult people are, almost by default, unhappy, frustrated individuals. They desire to have control and enjoy being on top. They may suffer from depression. They may be fearful. They may have severe emotional insecurity issues. They do not lack for opinions on numerous topics. Some have the tendency to beef, bite, and bellyache about any number of issues and decisions in church life. Some gossip. Many maintain a critical, negative, divisive spirit. Difficult people might not know they are out of step with the rest of the congregation. Some are angry and communicate that fact. They may feel entitled. They may be envious. They can be combative, even abusive. Inflexibility is often part of their makeup. Difficult people, in most cases, are spiritually blind. They may have medical or psychiatric issues. They might even be affected by the demonic. C H RIS TIA N STAN DA R D
Keeping all this in mind, be on the lookout for these warning signs (or “opportunities to grow,” if you prefer that viewpoint): • a change or cooling in a relationship • “concerns” expressed in a cloaked veneer of caring • criticism or “stirring of the pot” • an interruption in their giving • collecting supporters • clandestine meetings • attacks or hurtful or negative opinions expressed in public meetings Difficult people exhibit behaviors that express their struggles and needs. The following word pictures describe different behaviors that difficult people may exhibit: • The Critic constantly complains and dispenses unwanted advice. • The Martyr plays the victim and is wracked with self-pity. • The Wet Blanket is pessimistic and invariably negative. • The Steamroller absolutely must have his or her own way. • The Gossip spreads rumors and leaks secrets. • The Control Freak is simply unable to “let go and let be.” • The Sniper “shoots” from cover and refuses to confront or address directly. • The Tank bullies others. • The Volcano verbally explodes to destabilize the situation or conversation to gain control. • The Sponge is constantly in need but never returns anything. • The Betrayer feigns loyalty but undermines others. - 12 -
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- e2: EFFECTIVE ELDERS -
Don’t get caught up by these or other behaviors. Character lies beneath behavior, and guiding our people into godly, mature character is always the foremost concern of an elder. When Jesus said, “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48*), the Greek word for perfect carries the idea of maturity and completeness. That’s what “making disciples” is all about—helping each other take on the character of Jesus. When we see these behaviors, look deeper to character. Troubled situations almost always get worse when they are not confronted and handled carefully, prayerfully, directly, and urgently. And yet, some try to ignore the behavior of difficult people and the problems that ungodly behaviors create, waiting and hoping that the people and problems will go away. But ignoring trouble is the worst thing the leadership team can do. (The second-worst approach is calling a public meeting.) As shepherds of our congregations, we need to actively watch over our flocks, and when some of the sheep are biting, harassing, and otherwise causing conflict among the flock, we must prayerfully make deliberate, conscientious, even step-by-step plans as an eldership to deal diligently with the impasse. Whatever our plan, it must stand equally well on all four of these “legs”: 1. In all things, we want to bring glory to God and work hard for his will ultimately to be done. “Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). 2. We want to protect the church and the ministry God has established and to whom we are accountable. “Shepherd the flock of God among you, exercising oversight not under compulsion, C H RIS TIA N STAN DA R D
but voluntarily, according to the will of God; not for sordid gain, but with eagerness” (1 Peter 5:2). “Upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it” (Matthew 16:18). 3. We should carry out all actions and steps regarding this sensitive situation carefully and in an orderly fashion. “But all things must be done properly and in an orderly manner” (1 Corinthians 14:40). 4. As we seek to bring peace, we should minister to those who are offensive and work toward reconciliation. “Being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3). “[Brothers,] even if anyone is caught in any trespass, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; each one looking to yourself, so that you too will not be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself” (Galatians 6:1-3). We lead our flock by stepping into the fray, perhaps even receiving a few “cheap shots” in the process, to help in every way we possibly can to bring reconciliation, restoration, peace, and wholeness to those under our watchful care. God has made us ambassadors of his Son, sharing this message of reconciliation (see 2 Corinthians 5:19, 20). Leadership in the church always means serving. “The one who is the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like the servant” (Luke 22:26). Let’s lead well. *All Scripture verses are from the New American Standard Bible. - 13 -
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met rics BY KENT FILLINGER
Giving Insights for the New Year
Kent E. Fillinger serves as president of 3:STRANDS Consulting, Indianapolis, Indiana, and regional vice president (Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan) with Christian Financial Resources.
Sermon series on giving, stewardship, and generosity are often popular to start a new year. To help church leaders gain a broader perspective on giving, here are some important research results.
/3strandsconsulting www.3strandsconsulting.com
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The State of Charitable Giving
According to Giving USA 2018: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2017, Charitable giving reached record levels for the fourth consecutive year in 2017. Total giving in the United States rose 5.2 percent, ringing in a new all-time high of $410 billion. Over the course of a decade, charitable giving increased by nearly $100 billion. Studies show the average individual donor gave $1,165 in 2017, and household giving rose to an average of $2,271. The Giving Institute in 2015 said that while charitable giving has been up, the percentage of that giving that went to churches dropped from 53 percent in 1987 to 32 percent in 2015. And the total number of charitable donors trended downward in the first half of 2018. The Nonprofit Times reported that the overall number was down 6.3 percent in the first quarter compared with the first quarter of 2017, and declined 6.6 percent year over year in quarter two. (See “Charitable Giving Gets Even Worse in Second Quarter,” by Paul Clolery, September 18, 2018.)
What Counts as Tithing Today? Tithers make up only 10 to 25 percent of any congregation today. On average, Christians give 2.5 percent of their income to churches. During the Great Depression, they gave 3.3 percent (see https://nonprofitssource.com/ online-giving-statistics/). A recent LifeWay Research project found that 83 percent of Americans who attend services at a Protestant or nondenominational church believe tithing is a biblical command that still applies today. Interestingly, only 72 percent of Protestant senior pastors said the same. C H RIS TIA N STAN DA R D
This same study discovered that less than half of churchgoers (47 percent) said only giving to the church counts for tithing. Half said tithes can go to a Christian ministry rather than a church. A third said tithes can go to help an individual in need. And 18 percent said tithes can even go to a secular charity. A recent Grey Matters Research project noted that only 23 percent of donors who attend a Protestant worship service at least once a month favor religious organizations when it comes to giving outside the church. Only 2 percent of donors who regularly attend church services said that a Christian organization was their favorite charity. What do donors favor instead? The top charitable causes among all donors (by far) target specific diseases (24 percent), followed by international relief and development (14 percent), animal welfare (13 percent), and community development (10 percent). (See “What America’s Favorite Charities Have in Common,” September 13, 2018, www.greymatterresearch.com.)
Giving vs. Budget Among Restoration Movement churches participating in our annual survey from 2011 to 2017, the findings show that post-recession church giving has been solid. Over this sevenyear period, an average of 71 percent of all churches surveyed, medium-size to mega, had annual giving totals that either met or exceeded the proposed budget. Megachurches fared the best during this time frame. An average of 76 percent of megachurches had giving that met or exceeded the church’s budget. Emerging megachurches and medium churches were tied for the lowest, with an average of 68 percent. An average of 70 percent of large church giving met or exceeded budget during the same time period. Small and very small churches were included in the annual survey for the first time last year. Among small and very small churches surveyed, 67 percent and 62 percent, respectively, had giving levels in 2017 that either met or exceeded the church’s budget. - 15 -
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- METRICS -
MOST COMMON OFFERING METHODS BY CHURCH SIZE MEGACHURCHES
EMERGING MEGACHURCHES
LARGE CHURCHES
MEDIUM CHURCHES
SMALL CHURCHES
VERY SMALL CHURCHES
online
online
online
pass plates
pass plates
pass plates
church app
pass plates
pass plates
online
online
drop box
pass plates
church app
church app
church app
drop box
online
text to give
text to give
text to give
text to give
church app
text to give
drop box
drop box
drop box
drop box
text to give
church app
giving kiosk
giving kiosk
giving kiosk
giving kiosk
giving kiosk
giving kiosk
BUDGET IMPACT OF OFFERING METHOD GIVING MET BUDGET
GIVING EXCEEDED BUDGET
GIVING FELL SHORT OF BUDGET
giving kiosk (33%)
drop box (58%)
church app (31%)
pass plates (24%)
text to give (51%)
pass plates (31%)
text to give (24%)
online (49%)
online (30%)
online (23%)
church app (48%)
giving kiosk (28%)
drop box (21%)
pass plates (45%)
text to give (26%)
church app (20%)
giving kiosk (39%)
drop box (21%)
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Online Giving Most Common Giving Methods by Church Size For the first time, I asked churches to identify which of the following six options they used to collect offerings: • pass collection plates during worship • use giving drop boxes inside/outside worship areas • online giving (automated giving/EFT/bill pay/credit card) • giving kiosks • church app with a giving option • text to give The first chart (left) shows the most common methods used to collect offerings for each size category. In general, the larger the church, the greater the number of giving options. Megachurches and emerging megachurches typically offered three to six of the giving options. Large churches offered three to five of the giving options. Very small, small, and medium-size churches offered one to four of the giving options. I was surprised to discover that passing collection plates was the third-most-common giving method used in megachurches behind online giving and church apps.
Giving and Technology There is a clear technological divide between larger churches and smaller churches when it comes to giving methods. For example, 80 percent of megachurches and 65 percent of emerging megachurches offered a church app with a giving option, but only 14 percent of small churches and 8 percent of very small churches offered such an app. Likewise, 71 percent of megachurches had a text to give option, but only 13 percent of small churches and 8 percent of very small churches offered that option. C H RIS TIA N STAN DA R D
Technology continues to change the landscape of church giving. I first surveyed churches about the availability of online giving in 2012. At that time, online giving was an option for 89 percent of megachurches, 79 percent of emerging megachurches, and 66 percent of large churches. Five years later, in 2017, every megachurch and emerging megachurch offered online giving, and all but one large church had it, as well. The biggest jump in online giving from 2012 to 2017 took place among the mediumsize churches, where the percentage with online giving jumped from 34 to 88 percent. Overall, 78 percent of the churches in our 2017 survey offered an online giving option. By comparison, 74 percent of U.S. churches offer congregants the ability to give online, up from 42 percent in 2015. Nationally, online giving accounted for 15 percent of total church giving in 2017 compared with 74 percent that came from money collected through offering plates.
How Did the Giving Method Impact Giving? I was curious if the method of giving had any impact on actual giving. I compared each church’s use of the six giving methods to whether that church’s giving met, exceeded, or fell short of its budget in 2017. The second chart breaks down the results. For example, 24 percent of the churches surveyed from very small churches to megachurches that passed offering plates had overall giving that met budget in 2017. The findings showed that 58 percent of the churches that used a giving drop box had offerings that exceeded their budget; this was the best of any of the giving methods studied. The churches using a drop box were also the least likely to have had their giving fall short of budget (only 21 percent). - 17 -
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hori zons BY EMILY DRAYNE
Instill the Importance of Missions What happens when our missionaries come off the field? Someone enters the mission field to replace them, right? At least we hope that’s what happens. We’re seeing many veteran missionaries who are ready to retire, but they are having a harder-than-expected time finding someone to take over their work. Are fewer people interested in entering the ministry as full-time missionaries? We need to pass on the importance of missions to our churches, families, and students. Here are four approaches that can help.
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Highlight Your Missionaries
Emily Drayne lives in North Carolina and has served with the International Conference On Missions since 2011.
Churches often fail to highlight their missionaries to the entire congregation or help them understand the types of mission works that exist. When I was growing up, I knew what missionary meant, but I didn’t know what missionaries actually did. The same thing may be happening today. Even churches with very strong and healthy missions budgets struggle to find ways to incorporate missions into their weekly routine. In previous articles, I’ve suggested ways to improve. Make it a church goal to emphasize global missions more often and more effectively this year.
/emilydrayne @edrayne0530 @edrayne0530 www.theicom.org
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2
Start Early We need to emphasize the importance of missions early. Children are eager to soak up information about new things. Highlight missions and missionaries by introducing children to new cultures, new languages, and new foods through various activities. If missionaries visit your church, give them opportunities to talk to the kids. Try to broaden the worldview of children by giving them a better idea of their options when they get older. Take time to paint a picture of the work a missionary does. Show children that anyone can be a missionary. Show them lessons from the Bible about people giving up everything to spread the Word of God. In 2018, my husband and I welcomed a baby into our lives. During this first year, we’ve made a list of all the things we want her to know as she grows up. It’s our job as parents to share with her all of the options she will have as an adult. I can’t wait to take her on mission trips and talk to her about my travels and people I’ve gotten to meet. Have you done that with your children? Have you done that with the kids in your church family?
It’s important for students to understand that missionaries use skill sets other than preaching and teaching. Students who major in business, agriculture, English, intercultural studies, and other subjects learn skills that can be transferred to a missions setting. You may be thinking, Some of my students don’t know what they’d like to do after graduation. That’s OK! Programs and internships are available for those who might not know what their next step will be. Many of these programs will help these young adults hone skills or identify the thing they are most interested in.
4
3
Continue the Emphasis This emphasis shouldn’t stop with kids. What about your students? Does your church go on mission trips regularly? Some of my most beloved memories from middle and high school are the mission trips we went on with our youth group. Our church went to Mexico every year and we got to know the family behind the organization really well. We looked forward to going back every year and renewing those friendships and expanding the scope of our projects. Is there a ministry your church supports that would welcome an annual mission trip? Consider doing a semiannual service project for a local ministry or in a nearby city. I think students sometimes hear the word missionary and automatically think of a remote overseas village; they don’t understand that missionaries can live in urban cities or on Native American reservations. C H RIS TIA N STAN DA R D
Involve Adults, Too At ICOM, people from area churches help with mailings and volunteer projects. We’d be lost without their help! It’s never too late to teach adults the importance of supporting missionaries through their giving, service, and prayers. They give financially, serve as advocates for missionaries in local churches, help forward their mail, or volunteer at local ministries to give back. An easy, hands-on way to engage adults is to have a mission trip every year. It could be a bigger trip than the youth go on, perhaps a prayer journey overseas. Churches need to incorporate missions into their services. Reach out to missionaries and identify ways your church can plug in with them and stay connected. Set up a Skype session with a missionary so your church family can see and hear them. Host a luncheon featuring the missionary’s favorite American foods; have a question and answer session and invite your missions team or those interested in missions. Make it a learning time as well as a way for your adults to get to know the people they are supporting. Serving these kingdom workers in a missionary care role is an important way to meet their needs. Every church can do better at expanding their congregation’s worldview, and we need to do everything we can to encourage those who are serving. We also need to provide information to the coming generations about the importance of missions in the lives of the church family.
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imag ine BY MEL MCGOWAN
Cloud Church // Space for Diversity, Relationship, and the Kingdom
Imagine you’re rearranging your office. You move your desk to one corner, your bookshelf to another. You move the lamps around to get the light just right. You adjust the couch so you can see your guests better. At the end of the day, you look around with satisfaction that all your office furniture, equipment, and supplies are in the right places. Why is this so important to us? Because the furnishings of our offices are tools that facilitate things like ideas, hard work, and skills. It should come as no surprise, then, that your sacred space should be designed for more than just seating and preaching platforms. Church buildings should be spaces to facilitate diversity, relationship, and discipleship— in other words, spaces for the kingdom.
Mel McGowan is cofounder and chief creative principal of PlainJoe Studios. He is a leading master planner and designer of churches in America. @visioneer /visioneer
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Disciple Makers
It will come as no surprise to those who know me that I was hanging out at Disneyland one afternoon when I ran into an old pastor friend of mine. He introduced me to his buddy Jason Aguilar. As Jason and I got to talking, I had a strong feeling we were meant to meet. Jason is the visionary pastor of Cloud Church, a two-year-old church plant in Irvine, California. He’s an exuberant guy with a quick wit and a great big heart for introducing people to Jesus and then turning them into disciples. “At the end of the day, if you cut us, we bleed one thing,” said Jason. “We bleed disciple-making. Disciple-making is the lifeblood of our church.” When Jesus commanded that we “go into all the world,” he didn’t give us the option to stop preaching the gospel. He expected we would go beyond the street corner, take the hands of new believers, and guide them toward becoming lifelong disciples of Jesus. Jason and the leaders of Cloud Church believe discipleship is their core mission. But they’re also convinced discipleship can’t happen without relationship. “You go from stranger to acquaintance, and acquaintance to relationship,” Jason said. “And that relationship eventually leads to a conversation that goes, ‘Hey, Jason, I’m going through something, man. What do you think?’ And then all of a sudden now I can actually have a spiritual conversation.”
Strategic Well Digging
What I love about talking with Jason is that he’s so strategic—it’s almost his second language. He sees relationship building as the outcome of an almost mathematical equation. It goes something like this: the right environment creates comfort, comfort creates openness, and openness leads to a discipling relationship. So when Cloud Church decided to convert a space in an office park into their church home, Jason’s primary motivation was to create a welcoming, relationship-nurturing environment. “We’ve always felt our sacred spaces should be more like modern-day wells,” Jason said. “We want to see our spaces as wells where the modern-day Samaritan women of the day can come C H RIS TIA N STAN DA R D
and have conversations that will lead them to eternal life.”
Space for Diversity
Jason and I worked together on an environmental design for their new building, and as I got to know some of the men and women who make up Cloud Church’s leadership, I recognized another element of his well strategy that leads to a comfortable environment: racial diversity. You see, the story of the Samaritan woman is not just about meeting people where they are, it’s also about reconciling people groups to one another and loving them no matter where they come from. And Cloud Church is striving to be a place that does both. “We’ve always felt there are two major diversities we want to see in our church that we feel God has called us to. We are to be multiethnic and multigenerational,” Jason said. “We believe that everybody brings a unique culture and life experience to share with the rest of us in the church. It’s a blend of all that we bring—our ethnicities, our backgrounds, everything that we are—into what we call ‘kingdom culture,’ which is the culture of Jesus Christ.” It’s not diversity for diversity’s sake. Diversity has a power to transform the way we think. “There’s a certain humility that has to come with being a multiethnic and multigenerational church,” Jason said, “because there are people who are older that I can receive from, people who are younger that I can receive from, people who are from the east and people from the west that I can receive from.” Jason is right. It’s not enough to create a beautiful space for worship. We can remodel, rebuild, and retrofit our churches to create comfortable places people will want to visit, but unless we also build a place where they feel accepted and welcomed no matter their race, origin, or culture, they won’t want to stay. On the other hand, as Jason said, if the physical and interpersonal environments make them comfortable, and if their comfort opens them up to relationship, there’s a golden opportunity to show them how to be sold-out disciples of Christ. “We’re not about building projects, we’re about building people. We know that creating the right sacred space is a huge element in that.” - 21 -
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mini stry life BY RICK CHROMEY
amazing Grace // How One Sunday in a Small, Dying Iowa Church Changed My Life “Amazing grace! How sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me.” I’ve been singing that hymn my whole life, yet never captured what it truly meant until one frigid Sunday morning. I was a student at Nebraska Christian College. For extra money, I’d occasionally preach for churches in need, and this particular weekend, I agreed to speak for a small church about two hours from school. It was a brutally cold Sunday. The tiny, white, clapboard and steepled church was miles from the nearest town, saddled by snowbanks, and guarded by Iowa cornfields. Only a few cars were parked outside. Was I late? Services were scheduled to start shortly.
Rick Chromey is the founder and president of MANNA! Educational Services International (www.mannasolutions.org). He has empowered leaders to lead, teachers to teach, and parents to parent for more than three decades. He lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife, Linda. C H RIS TIA N STAN DA R D
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I opened the front church door to enter a darkened sanctuary with rows of empty pews. No one greeted me. No signage. Just a deep, icy chill. I heard laughter and followed it to the basement where 15 saints were joyfully gathered. Metal chairs lined the wall. An old piano was in the corner. I introduced myself to an elderly gentleman, who graciously seated me before opening the service with prayer. Another lady led the songs, accompanied by an aged pianist whose keyboard method resembled a “search and destroy” mission. We sang a few hymns, passed an offering plate, and took the Lord’s Supper. And then it happened. A shabbily-dressed, overweight, twentysomething woman stood up to share “special music.” And, trust me, it was special as she tortured us with every verse of “Amazing Grace” (including stanzas I didn’t know existed). It was the worst rendition of “Amazing Grace” ever sung (if you can use that word). The poor woman crucified every note. She screeched and growled. Her pitch wasn’t even in the ballpark. It was absolutely, positively awful. Actually, the whole service was terrible (and I’m being kind). It’s no wonder this church was dying. In my college classes I learned how to grow churches, attract visitors, nurture families, and create positive spiritual experiences. This church broke every rule. As I sat in my chair of judgment, critically analyzing the experience, I quickly surmised this church was comatose. It was time to close the doors. When the young woman finally, and graciously, nailed her last painful note, I winced. I cringed again as everyone—the entire church— surprisingly stood and applauded the woman’s effort. Did I miss something? Surely, they don’t encourage this terrible singing? It’s no wonder people don’t return. I wanted to preach, gather my check, and leave. C H RIS TIA N STAN DA R D
I had suffered enough. And that’s when I saw it. The young woman beamed, ear to ear, and raised her arms and fingered “I love you” to her adoring friends. Suddenly everything became crystal clear. This young woman was deaf. She couldn’t sing a lick because she could hear nothing. I was shell-shocked. My pharisaical critiques melted like snow in Phoenix. My arrogance had deafened me to divine perspectives. I had judged this woman and this church far too harshly. I was the only deaf (and blind) person in that room. I was actually a blessed witness to a heavenly carol among a company of saints. I finally saw this church as God saw it. Suddenly my prepared sermon seemed shallow. What could I do to top that graceful performance? What could I say to improve what this deaf woman so powerfully communicated? I remember nothing after that angelic song. It was truly amazing. And something changed inside me. The amazing grace I hungered to experience was gloriously captured by the wonderful warble of a beautiful deaf girl. If she could bravely offer her feeble tune, surely God could use my frail talents. Don’t we all desperately desire to participate in a church where even the deaf enjoy a voice? Where even the average, shabby, and broken are empowered to serve? Where we all have a place of grace?
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound (and it is sweet!) I once was blind but now I see.” And now I hear, too. Grace is incredibly loud, when you truly listen. Submit your own 500- to 700-word essay telling of an experience through which you learned a vital ministry principle by emailing it to cs@christianstandardmedia.com with “MinistryLife” in the subject line. See more information at www.christianstandard.com/contact-us/submit-articles. - 23 -
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AD
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CHRISTIAN STANDARD INTERVIEW WITH THE PREACHER, LAWYER, AND CIVIL RIGHTS WARRIOR
fgrready
BY JERRY HARRIS
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He’s a quiet southern gentlemen, but he wields the law like a warrior. He is fueled with a deep conviction to his calling in life. Though he is nearly 88, his recall of facts and names is instantaneous. He is friendly . . . able to distinguish lines that separate the arena of ideas from the God-given value of every human being with whom he comes in contact. He’s among the last remaining champions of the earliest days of the civil rights movement; he is the one who brought the heavy weight of the law to bear on that movement, helping to change the nation forever. He was the primary counsel to Rosa Parks, Claudette Colvin, Dr. Martin Luther King, and many others. His legal voice was behind the Montgomery bus boycott, the desegregation of Alabama schools, the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March, and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. His name is Fred David Gray. He tells his story in Bus Ride to Justice: The Life and Works of Fred D. Gray, an autobiography of the life of a man thrust into one of the most pivotal periods of 20th-century American history. His cases and the landmark rulings that resulted are now studied by all lawyers, but it’s likely few know that the foundation of his life upon which his contributions rest is his relationship with Jesus Christ and his commitment to follow and serve him. I learned about Gray while studying the life of Marshall Keeble in preparation for my article in last February’s Christian Standard. As I sought to identify the young men sitting around Keeble in the photograph used on the cover of that issue, I discovered that a young Fred Gray was sitting on Keeble’s right. I shared that discovery with friends and colleagues. When I learned Gray would be speaking at the Christian Scholar’s Conference at Lipscomb University in Nashville, I lined up a one-on-one interview with him. I read Bus Ride to Justice in preparation for our talk; I highly recommend his autobiography for better insight into Gray’s life and work. Here are excerpts from our conversation:
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What was it like to attend Nashville Christian Institute and be one of Marshall Keeble’s boy preachers? Really—[and this is] most important—if I have made any contribution in the civil rights movement or in the church, it’s because of what my mother taught. My father died when I was 2 and we were as poor as anyone could be. [Mother] taught me to keep Christ first in my life, to get an education, and to stay out of trouble. Because I was interested in becoming a minister, I ended up going to Nashville. Brother Johnson, our minister at the Holt Street Church of Christ [Montgomery, Alabama], was from Nashville and knew about Nashville Christian Institute. When I got there in 1943, we may have had 200 students. It was a boarding school with one big room with double beds for all the male students. We established relationships with the persons who were there; one whom I met on the night of my arrival was Robert Woods from Gallatin, Tennessee. He later went to Chicago and preached for 50 years at the Monroe Street church before he retired. He died about two years ago. We had teachers who were very dedicated to the work. We had two white teachers, J. W. Brent, who taught Bible, and Lambert Campbell, who taught public speaking. A year later, when brother Keeble came, he decided to have some boy preachers, and that gave me the opportunity to travel and meet a lot of people; I met [many of those same people] later and was able to build on those relationships. Our world was based on Christianity . . . and it really served a very useful purpose.
That was my relationship to NCI, and I maintained it until the school closed. We believed that there should have been some effort to keep it open, but they closed it [in 1967] without giving the black members of the church an opportunity to raise enough money to keep it open. We recognized that the church in Nashville was very influential and that our likelihood of success [in legally challenging the school’s closing] was not that good, but we needed to do it, at least to let them know that we thought it was wrong. Students from that school, even though it was small, have gone on and developed into real leaders across the nation. With respect to brother Keeble, most people say in the church of Christ, both historically black and historically white, that he converted more individuals than any other single person. He converted many of those before he became involved in the school. Brother Keeble had a lot of good common sense and he knew how to deal with people of all races. I remember how he used to say that the Bible was God’s cookbook. “All you have to do is read that cookbook and do what it says. Then you can cook!” He used that as an example to follow the Bible, God’s cookbook. He taught me how to pack a bag and how to fold a suit. The picture on your cover [from last February’s issue] was made in Natchez, Mississippi, during the summer of 1947. Those persons were Robert Woods, Hansen Reed from Oklahoma, Robert McBride (who came up from Montgomery with me), and myself.
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Mars
02 How would you describe your call to help eliminate segregation from our nation, and how did that call connect to your call to ministry?
O
I was baptized when I was 8 and started preaching at 12 when I went to Nashville. There was no connection between deciding to be a preacher and deciding to do civil rights work. There was a relationship between deciding to be a lawyer and deciding to do civil rights work. I decided to become a lawyer because I understood that lawyers help people, [and I understood] how that related to segregation and how we were being treated on buses. I realized everything was segregated and something needed to be done about it. E. D. Nixon, our family friend, had been president of the NAACP, the state conference and branches, and was always looking for lawyers to help black folks. He encouraged me to become a lawyer. His wife was a member of our church.
rshall Keeble's boy preachers C H RIS TIA N STAN DA R D
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You have played a key role in the civil rights movement on the national stage. How did it feel working with Dr. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Claudette Colvin, and others?
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You have to remember that . . . none of us had in mind starting a civil rights movement. Certainly, Dr. King didn’t come to Montgomery to do that. A lot of people think that, but the church Dr. King came to preach for, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, was a small African-American Baptist Church with a small membership. Most of the people there were educated and had jobs, but most of those jobs were state, city, or civil related, and if their supervisors heard they were doing something to end segregation, they would have been fired. So that was not the church to file any of the lawsuits that had to do with desegregation, even though our first meeting was in the basement of that church. The pastor that preceded Dr. King was interested in desegregation, and the church didn’t agree with what he had in mind and got rid of him because, to them, that was unorthodox. Each of those persons got involved in the Montgomery bus boycott and the movement because they had a problem.
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Claudette Colvin wasn’t thinking about anything other than coming home from school like she had done all the time. That day, the school [released students] early for a teachers meeting. This meant she had to ride a bus earlier than normal. There were more white people on that earlier bus than her usual one. When the driver told her to get up, she said she wasn’t in the white section; she was sitting in her usual seat, had paid her fare, and wasn’t going to move. She was arrested. She had a problem, and so I defended her. I was very happy to defend Claudette, and was prepared to take her case as far as I needed to go to get justice for her. It was E. D. Nixon [president of the local chapter of the NAACP] who came to her rescue, and Jo Ann Robinson who had experienced her own problems on a bus years before who wanted a protest and mass participation. Dr. King was there as a pastor of a small church with a relatively new bride. All of these persons were just individuals, not anybody who was looked upon as iconic, or anybody that was looking to do anything . . . they all just had a problem. Dr. King didn’t suggest that he be the spokesman. Jo Ann and I were sitting in her living room making plans. Normally, E. D. Nixon would have been the spokesman because he had more black people following him. Rufus Lewis was also there, but he was only concerned with voter registration in order to hold elected officials accountable. We were afraid that if we selected either of these two to be spokesman, we would lose some other support. Then Jo Ann said about Dr. King, “Fred, I’ll tell you, my pastor can move people with words!” I said, “Well, I’ve met him, I don’t know him like you do, but that’s fine.” C H RIS TIA N STAN DA R D
We knew that if we were going to keep people off the buses, it was going to take time and money. E. D. Nixon knew A. Philip Randolph, a black labor leader in New York. He could get A. Philip Randolph to raise money from across the country, so we made him [Nixon] treasurer. With respect to Rufus Lewis, there wasn’t much we could do about voting, but his wife, Jewell, was the co-owner of the largest funeral home in town. They had cars, and the only time they used them was for funerals. They could use those cars to take people to and from work or wherever else they needed to go. We made Rufus chair of the transportation committee. None of us could tell about our involvement. Jo Ann would have been fired [from her teaching job at Alabama State College] and they would have disbarred me. Jo Ann was fired later during the sit-in protests, along with others, and they did attempt to disbar me. Dr. King was somewhat hesitant because there were older Baptist preachers with larger churches and more experience, but the community wanted him, so he accepted it. The rest is history, as they say. - 31 -
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04 How were you able to manage responsibilities as both minister and lawyer during that critical time? I had been a part-time preacher for some time. When I was in Nashville, there was a church in Gallatin that needed a preacher. They would call the school and ask them to send a preacher over. Later, they needed a preacher in Bowling Green, Kentucky. I’d take the bus early on Sunday morning. It would take an hour or two to get up there, and then I would ride back in the evening. When I was going to Alabama State College, brother John Henry Clay asked me to preach in two churches he had planted. Brother Clay baptized a lot of people in Alabama, probably second only to brother Keeble, and established a number of churches. Among those churches was one in Brundidge and another in Lanett. These were the two I served. In the meantime, I had to register for the draft and told them I was both a student and a minister, and the work I was doing. Annually, they would ask for a report, I would tell them what I was doing, and they would be perfectly satisfied with it. As soon as I got to Montgomery, my home church, Holt Street Church of Christ, was looking for a minister. K. K. Mitchell, a classmate of mine from NCI, was preaching in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, and my stepbrother and I recommended him for the position. When he became the minister, he asked for me to be his assistant. Then the bus boycott started and I continued to report my ministry work to the draft board. After I filed the lawsuit, a newspaper reporter found out that I had been classified as 4D, a ministry deferment, so he wrote an article about my classification. The draft board immediately changed my classification from 4D to 1A. It took lots of appeals to change that. Shortly after the boycott started, I was told the church in Newtown [in Montgomery, Alabama] needed a preacher and I preached there for the next 15 years, during the whole time I was working on these civil rights cases. There were some church folks who didn’t think that lawyers could be preachers, they didn’t even think they could be Christians because they were liars, but I had no problem with it. As a matter of fact, I felt that they complemented each other because whatever I did in the legal profession, I always looked first at what I was doing and whether it would be acceptable with Christ.
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t ' n d l u o h s p t u a o h r w g "Each the other group uld] tel t [instead sho says." u b , o d ot n what the Lord o e t a r oc ncent
05 Many Christian churches and churches of Christ are still very segregated. Why do you think it is so difficult to break through this barrier in the kingdom? I decided a long time ago about black churches [of Christ] that had problems [and] wanted me to [represent them in court] to solve those problem. I decided I was not going to participate in any dispute between churches of Christ over what the law says to do. I didn’t feel like that was the way the Lord wanted those problems resolved. They both ought to be willing to follow his instructions and solve them without the aid of the civilian government. And if the members are going to do that, there are other lawyers out there [to represent them]. I have felt that the matter of religion is an individual matter and it’s up to that individual to do what the Lord says to do. I have my opinion on what is right or wrong . . . or they might, but we will know [what was right] when the Lord comes back. If we’re reading the same Bible and understanding it properly, we should do what the Lord says to do. Each group shouldn’t tell the other group what to do, but [instead should] concentrate on what the Lord says.
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How can segregation be eliminated in our churches today? I think any of these churches—whether Christian church, church of Christ, or denominational church—should follow the instructions of Jesus . . . and if they follow his instructions, there will be no discrimination . . . it would be completely eliminated.
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GRAY’S LANDMARK CIVIL RIGHTS CASES Browder v. Gayle Integrated busing in Montgomery, Alabama, setting a national precedent. Gomillion v. Lightfoot Restored the voting rights of African Americans in the city of Tuskegee, Alabama, after city boundaries were redrawn to largely exclude them. Laid the foundation for the precedent of “one man, one vote.” NAACP v. Alabama Permitted civil rights organizations to assert the rights of their members. Smith v. Paris Eliminated vote dilution in the state of Alabama. St. John Dixon v. Alabama State Board of Education Established due process rights for students. Lee v. Macon County Board of Education Desegregated public school systems in Alabama and all institutions under the state board of education. Williams v. Wallace Ordered the governor of Alabama to protect participants in the Selma to Montgomery March, which led directly to passage of the Voting Rights Act. Pollard v. United States Prohibited the U.S. government from continuing to refuse to treat African Americans who had been used in human experiments (the Tuskegee Syphilis Study). (Adapted from Bus Ride To Justice.)
THE TUSKEGEE HISTORY CENTER (ALSO KNOWN AS THE TUSKEGEE HUMAN AND CIVIL RIGHTS MULTICULTURAL CENTER)
The Tuskegee History Center was born from Fred and Bernice Gray’s desire to capture the history of the area, and particularly to memorialize those who were abused as part of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Its formation was announced on May 17, 1997, at the White House, where President Bill Clinton formally apologized on behalf of the nation to the study participants and the community in Alabama for the conduct of the government. The center operates on the donations of those who wish to remind America and the world about the incredible need for human and civil rights. More information is available at www.tuskegeecenter.org; tax-deductible donations can also be made via that website.
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The Restoration Movement was meant to be a unity movement. In what ways do you think we should be unified today? I don’t profess to be an expert on the Restoration Movement. I have based my opinions on what the Bible teaches. I’ve done that from reading the Bible and learning from what preachers and teachers over the years have taught me. I understand what the Lord says I should do as a result of that. That is where I am, and I have been there all the time. I believe people need to understand what the Bible says and then obey it. In the final analysis, none of us may know until Jesus comes back who was right and who was wrong, but we will have done what we could.
Do you think the civil rights movement was a gospel-centered movement? I think the church played a major role in the civil rights movement because it was a relatively safe place for people to assemble and discuss whatever they wanted to discuss, including civil rights activities, without fear that anybody would hurt them or that they would be violating any laws. It may very well be a carryover, as far as African-Americans are concerned, from slavery times, even when they didn’t have buildings. They just met and sang songs that they made up about what they ought to do, how things should be improved, and how the Lord was going to help them do it. The church has served as a good meeting place, and it still does. There were many places in the South where you couldn’t have an integrated meeting without fear that something would happen to you. Even now there are problems. But the church has played a role in the movement. The Lord has a way of doing things we don’t understand, but he moves in mysterious ways with wonders to perform! I have my own personal feeling on some things, and over the years, when my mind has told me to do something, I usually did it. For some reason, it tells me to do something and when I do it, it becomes one of the best things that could ever happen. I feel the same about this interview. I receive sometimes two or three requests a day to do them but usually decline. I have a different feeling about this one. If this has an influence on somebody else or may help, you can’t tell what people may do.
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It’s rare to have an opportunity to speak with a person with personal insights into events of such historic importance. Fred Gray is a living example of how one person empowered by the Holy Spirit can make a difference both inside and outside of the church for now and eternity. I left the interview with a desire to make a difference with whatever opportunities God puts before me. Gray wrote in the epilogue to the 1995 version of Bus Ride to Justice: “Above all, I pledge to do my best to live a Christian life as a benediction to those I have loved and who have loved me, and to those who have inspired me and in some cases given their very lives so that I could do my part in destroying everything segregated I could find. May God Bless America, my home, sweet home, and may God bless you.”
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Building an Integrated Church a minister speaks about his experience in building a multiracial congregation by andy daniell
Most Restoration Movement church leaders I’ve talked to, both online and in person, say they desire to build more integrated, multiethnic congregations. They see advances in diversity in other parts of society and think their congregations are lagging behind. Bible verses such as Galatians 3:28, Colossians 3:11, and Revelation 5:9 and 7:9 suggest the church should lead in such efforts. And so it is dismaying that surveys consistently show only about 5 percent of Protestant and nondenominational congregations have a “minority” group—be it black, white, or other—comprising 20 percent or more of attendees. Congregations around my church, located near Atlanta, corroborate those survey results. Within a few miles of our property are churches that are predominantly white, black, or Hispanic. The overwhelming majority of them have only single-digit representation from other racial groups. When I became senior minister at First Christian in Mableton, Georgia, in 2013, our church fit that model, with single-digit minority representation in a historically white independent Christian church. Since then, our church has grown at a compounded annual rate of 15.1 percent and we now consistently enjoy minority attendance in the 39 to 54 percent range on Sunday mornings. I’ve meticulously documented our journey and spent time researching other churches and talking to their people, and I have isolated three key elements that have been essential in facilitating our successful integration. All three factors are of roughly equal significance, and while they are not earthshattering, they have proven to be effective in completely shifting the culture and complexion of a 61-year-old church in less than five years. C H RIS TIA N STAN DA R D
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2. We Incorporated a Bottom-Up Strategy of Attracting Young People Rather Than the Traditional Top-Down Strategy of Adding New Leadership
1. We Developed a Truly Evangelistic Growth Strategy When our congregation wasn’t growing, there was no way to impact our level of integration. Having no explicit growth strategy is a problem with many churches today. Every church should have such a plan to grow, and every church should work hard to discover the most effective ways to win new souls to Christ in their particular location. Each should also be aware of the folks it is attracting at any given moment. Praying about growth, focusing on it, and tracking it have a remarkable impact. For some churches, the growth strategy—whether implicit or explicit—involves attracting existing Christians rather than converting new ones. It will be difficult for a church to radically change its demographic profile if its methods are designed more to increase its share of existing Christians—through better facilities and more programs for children, as examples—than to evangelize the community and increase its interactions with non-Christians. Someone who has attended a historically black or historically white church for decades may move their membership to a new church, but it’s not likely they will switch to an integrated church. We have learned that being involved in our community draws the unchurched and marginally churched into our congregation equally well across all ethnicities. This has been achieved through consistent compassion and outreach efforts with schools, day cares, food banks, scout troops, and the YMCA via mentoring programs and the like. C H RIS TIA N STAN DA R D
A standard approach to increasing integration is to start by hiring minority staff members and/or making minority faces more visible (such as via the platform) to help draw in minority adults. I am unconvinced this strategy is effective, however. We have found that attracting minority youth and young adults first has been much easier than starting with new staff. And the unchurched teen and millennial visitors, in turn, often bring along friends, siblings, and even parents. Our experience clearly shows that younger adults are much more likely to invite people to join them at church than are older adults. As a result, while the racial demographics of our church now much more closely reflect our community, there are still noticeable differences by age. For example, the minority representation of our 60-plus age group struggles to crack 18 percent on Sunday morning, while the minority is actually in the majority—69 percent—among those college age and younger (roughly 39 percent black and 30 percent Hispanic). We simply are not seeing such positive results in the top-down strategy of integrating the leadership team or putting more faces of color in visible positions. Of course, this focus on unchurched teens and young adults goes hand in glove with the community evangelism efforts mentioned above. The minority representation of both our ministerial staff and team of elders today stands at 25 percent. Our deacons are 40 percent minority. The Wednesday-night teen worship team, though, is 60 percent minority. But these numbers grew in response to our changing demographics, not as a leading cause of the change. In the first few years after I came here, the ministerial and praise teams were entirely white. Over time, as more staff, elders, deacons, and praise team members are added, I fully expect people of color will have an increasing representation because we will have a larger pool from which to draw. Similarly, we have celebrated our diversity (for example, by holding an International Day). But this too was in response to our integration, not a cause of it. - 40 -
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3. Our Leaders Set the Example in Erasing All Bias While the ministers with whom I interact on a regular basis openly welcome more racial diversity in their congregations, I am familiar with an incredible number of congregations that are biased in various ways. In some churches, only individuals of a certain socioeconomic status are accepted; in others, only those with a certain political identity are made to feel welcome. Sometimes the cue is given by what is said from the pulpit, while at other times it manifests itself in inhospitable behavior within the congregation. And it cuts both ways. And visitors—black, Hispanic, white, rich, poor, Republican, Democrat— notice these things. Folks in upper-middle-class and wealthy churches can be very off-putting to those who have fallen on hard economic times, while in some churches envy or jealousy over the riches of the more affluent just seethes within the congregation. And each election cycle seems to create more and more division among American Christians. Sermons, small-group conversations, even prayer topics can drive Republicans from some churches and Democrats from others. Being biased in these subtle ways can hamper racial integration for two reasons. First, exclusivity begets exclusivity. Period. A congregation and its leaders must be intentionally open and accommodating to all or they are unlikely to be welcoming to any folks outside of their comfortable, homogeneous group. Second, if you are trying to attract a true racial minority in your congregation and area, excluding a portion of them off the top based on education, income, or political party affiliation is mathematical suicide. James 2 opens with a strong admonition against showing favoritism. Churches today would do well to heed his warning. C H RIS TIA N STAN DA R D
Implementing these three key elements of integrating a church does require buy-in from the leadership team and some discipline and dedication over time. More importantly, these suggestions will work only if the congregation and its leaders start from a position of love, especially love for the unchurched. The Bible speaks of people from every nation and every earthly language praising God together in Heaven. I believe all Christians, from church leaders to attenders, are becoming more interested in and working toward the integration of America’s houses of worship. We’re praying for and working together toward God’s will being done, on earth as it is in Heaven!
Andy Daniell serves as senior minister at the First Christian Church of Mableton, outside of Atlanta, Georgia. He is the author of the recently released book Clear Vision: How the Bible Teaches Us to View the World. / The-Analytical-Preacher-131325750978246 - 41 -
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ABORTION : A PHILOSOPHICAL AND BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVE
WHY A QUIETISTIC APPROACH IS B I B L I C A L LY INSUFFICIENT BY ANDR EW KAAKE
PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENTS Two main philosophical arguments are used to support abortion: the first is based on the denial of personhood to the fetal human and the second is rooted in the bodily rights of the woman. Even though most readers of this magazine believe in the authority of Scripture, it’s necessary to be familiar with arguments that will be used by people who don’t believe the Bible, and these arguments are probably used by some of the people at your church. The personhood argument sometimes masquerades as a scientific claim (for example, “It’s just a ball of cells”), but it really is a philosophical position. The science is clear: In conception, a genetically unique being comes into existence, and that being is undoubtedly human. Sometimes pro-choice people deny this, but it’s found in embryology textbooks everywhere. The real argument is that, even though it’s a human, it’s not a human worthy of status as a person—that is, someone who gets
The argument from bodily autonomy is much more complex and more intuitively powerful. It holds that either (1) a woman has complete authority over her body and anything in it (the “sovereign zone” argument) or (2) a woman has the right to refuse the use of her body to another human, even if allowing the use of her body would save that person’s life. These arguments don’t rely on denying the personhood of the fetus, but instead consider the rights of the woman to be more important. These arguments have great appeal because they accord with ideas we have about bodily integrity and consent; for example, everyone should agree that a woman has the right to refuse to have sex with someone, which would be a use of her body. However, these arguments still have problems. A consistent sovereign zone position, for example, would allow women to do things that almost everyone would agree to be evil as long as it was within their own body, such as intentionally harming, disabling, or torturing a fetal human (which is not to say that a woman would actually do these things, but that it would be logically necessary to allow it). And there are instances in which, against the right-torefusal argument, we would view it as morally wrong for a person to refuse to take an action involving her body that would save a life if no other person was capable of intervening.
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legal and moral protection. The problem with this argument is that any place you attempt to draw a line as to what constitutes a person—viability, sentience/consciousness, size—either leaves out people we recognize as members of the human community (i.e., comatose or disabled persons, toddlers) or includes creatures we do not recognize as persons (i.e., squirrels or cockroaches). The best explanation for including all the groups we recognize to be people as people is our inherent human dignity, which extends even to the smallest of humans.
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A B O R T I O N is the intentional killing of a human being before birth, usually in extremely violent fashion. It is a sin that harms mothers, fathers, and children. This month marks 46 years since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion through all nine months of pregnancy in all 50 states. Though there is a clear biblical and philosophical basis for opposing abortion, most Christians (at best) passively fight abortion through voting, and many (at worst) ignore the testimony of God’s biblical and natural revelation that abortion is the unjustified killing of a fetal human. I will lay out several arguments against abortion to explain why a quietistic approach to abortion is biblically insufficient, while also offering four possible next steps for ministers and all Christians.
NO R MA MC C ORV EY ( JANE R OE) AND HER AT T O R N E Y, G LO R IA AL L R E D, O U T S IDE T H E S U P R E M E COU R T, 1 9 6 8 . A LTH O UG H S HE W AS THE FA CE OF THE P R O - C H O IC E M O VE M E N T, S H E N E VE R A C T UAL LY H AD AN A B OR T I ON. SH E WE NT O N TO B E COME AN A CTIVE PR O- L IF E ADV O C AT E U N T IL H E R DE AT H IN 20 17 .
“REVERSING R O E V. W A D E W O N ’ T S O LV E O U R U N D E R LY I N G PROBLEMS. WE HAVE I N A D E Q U AT E LY C A R E D FOR WOMEN, WE HAVE I N A D E Q U AT E LY C A R E D FOR CHILDREN, AND WE HAVE I N A D E Q U AT E LY C A R E D FOR THOSE OPPOSED TO US AS PRO-LIFERS
THE BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVE While there is much complexity in the philosophical arguments for and against abortion, the biblical account of human value is more straightforward. From the beginning,
Scripture states that humans are created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:27), and it is this status as divine image-bearer that confers value upon us. God’s act of creating and imprinting individual humans does not begin at birth, but as he forms us in the womb (Psalm 139:13). Luke’s Gospel even documents that John the Baptist recognized Jesus as Lord while they were both gestating, which implies Jesus had both divine identity and personal status as a fetal human (Luke 1:41-44). The Scriptures testify to the equality of children in utero. Furthermore, the Bible declares it to be an “abomination” to kill children as a sacrifice to idols (Jeremiah 32:35); the prophet speaks of Molech and Baal, but I think it is proper to extend this reading to all idols, including Career, Fulfillment, and Material Things. If this were all the prophets and apostles had to say, we could perhaps stop here with an admonition to vote pro-life and avoid personally getting an abortion and believe we had satisfied our duty . . . but this will not do. The prophets who foretold the destruction of Israel and Judah did not generally cite idolatry as the primary reason (though, of course, it animates all the other sins), but instead the practice of destroying and profiteering off of the weakest members of society (examples: Micah 3, Amos 2). Furthermore, Amos
declared that God would not engage with their religious remembrances while they oppressed their fellow man (Amos 5:21-24), which Jesus echoed to the Pharisees (Matthew 23:23). James summarized it well: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (James 1:27, English Standard Version). Though they may not be literal orphans and widows, caring for the women and children affected by abortion and unexpected pregnancy is a necessary component to any practice of faith that God finds acceptable. This problem won’t be solved simply by reversing Roe v. Wade. The decision in Roe took abortion legislation away from the states and made abortion a federal right. A post-Roe world will look the same as a pre-Roe world: vicious fights in all 50 states over laws about what one group regards as a fundamental human right and what the other group regards as genocide. Reversing the decision would transform our nation’s laws into something more closely resembling moral truth, but it wouldn’t solve our underlying problems. We have inadequately cared for women, we have inadequately cared for children, and we have inadequately cared for those opposed to us as pro-lifers or Christians.
1. We must create an environment in our churches that doesn’t incentivize women to get abortions. Many of those who seek abortions are women or couples who attend church; this represents a breakdown in our witness both to the wrong of abortion and the restorative power of Christ. Women may feel (or worse, actually be) threatened with losing their church community if they are noticeably pregnant outside of marriage. Sex outside of marriage may be a sin, but regardless of how someone enters into the state of pregnancy, being pregnant is not a sin. Continuing to be pregnant often brings challenges that could be met by the church coming around the woman, supporting her and her child, and helping her seek restoration in relationships. Ministers, please make known from your pulpit once or twice a year that your church will love women who become pregnant, and don’t cause them to believe this is somehow an unforgivable sin. Congregants, love your neighbor and seek opportunities to help women and children in your churches and communities. (I owe this entire point to my boss, Josh Brahm, who wrote about it extensively.) 2. Our speech to women who are making a decision about abortion, or who have already made that decision, must “be gracious, seasoned with salt” (Colossians 4:6, ESV). According to Jacob Nels, the Equal Rights Institute’s sidewalk counseling expert, listening is one of the most helpful things you can do for someone making a decision about abortion. She could be facing potential for shame, financial loss, and the loss of relationships with people who will disagree with her decision.
Andrew Kaake is a trainer for Equal Rights Institute, a pro-life organization helping people be more intelligent, persuasive, and loving when talking about abortion. He is a member of Restore Christian Church in Quincy, Massachusetts.
@andrewkaake
/kaake42
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In most cases, a woman contemplating abortion is under a lot of pressure from various people to make a certain decision. This gives you and me the opportunity to be a person who is not seeking to apply pressure, but instead to listen, ask good questions about what she actually wants, and help by gently reminding her (after we’ve listened!) of the nature of the life that is inside her. We must exhibit this same grace when speaking with women after abortions, too. We know the brutal reality of what happened, but we can communicate that truth alongside the truth that God forgives powerfully, that abortion is not a sin beyond his ability to forgive. This is hard; it is too difficult for my ability. Thankfully, we worship a God who will supply us strength to do what is impossible for us in order to serve his people. 3. We must love our enemies. The beauty of the pro-life position is that it affirms the value of all people; unfortunately, when we argue with pro-choice people, we sometimes forget that we have to affirm their value, as well. They, too, are created in God’s image, and Christ died for them no less than for us. We need to be compassionate in dialogue, ready to listen, slow to anger, and sometimes even slow to speak. When we talk with pro-choice people, we may be opening wounds or discussing past trauma, and they might open up to us—if we let them—in spite of our disagreements. 4. We must be ready to give a defense. The truth about life is God’s truth. Not everyone needs to study philosophy or bioethics in college, but we should all be able to articulate why we believe what we believe when someone asks us about it. Even in the ugliness of our current politics, we have opportunities to speak with those who disagree with us, and, God willing, we may even be able to help them change their mind if we can answer their questions (and be honest when we can’t).
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NEXT STEPS FOR THE CHURCH What then should we, members of Christ’s church, do? I have a few closing suggestions.
AREN
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ENA In the arena of ideas and opinions, there needs to be a place for Christ-centered and Christ-honoring debate on nonessential issues. We will occasionally feature a debate like this in Christian Standard. This month, Ken Idleman and Zach Spiering give us two opinions on a common hot-button issue among Christians: public drinking. Weigh in! Tell us what you think on this issue by searching for the article title at ChristianStandard.com. Also . . . tell us what other debatable issues we should discuss “In the Arena.�
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Q: A:
IS R EA L L Y A S T U M B L ING BL OC K ? Y ES.
BY KEN IDLEMAN As I address this question, it is day four of the weeklong FBI investigation into the allegations of sexual assault leveled by Christine Blasey Ford against Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee for a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. A formal hearing featuring testimony from Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh conducted by the Senate Judiciary Committee a week earlier was telecast by major news networks. The process has been humiliating for both the accuser and the accused, to say the least. It has also codified the political rancor that exists between Republicans and Democrats in our deeply divided nation. But take a moment and walk it all back 36 years. What likely contributed to the events of that night, as alleged by Blasey Ford? The answer is beverage alcohol. Both parties acknowledge drinking alcohol as teenagers (though Kavanaugh denied ever
drinking when he was underage and denied the alleged encounter with Blasey Ford). Two additional women also made sordid accusations against Kavanaugh (which he also denied), saying the alleged events occurred at parties where large amounts of beverage alcohol was consumed. Clearly, drinking is at the center of all of these accusations. And clearly, alcohol, not abstinence, was the common stumbling block for the principal figures in this investigation. Watching these proceedings and listening to newscasts caused me to reflect on my own high school years. Beer drinking was deeply ingrained in the teenage culture of our small, rural Illinois communities. German Lutheran farm families had a liberal attitude toward drinking. It was widely accepted. The fact that drinking was unlawful for kids under age 21 was ignored by teens and parents alike. But, I had watched the lives of two of my uncles implode because of continued on page 54
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Q: A:
IS REALLY A S T UMBL ING B L OC K? WHAT IF ABS TINENCE IS THE S TUMB LING B LOCK?
BY ZACH SPIERING During the time I taught at a Restoration Movement Bible college, I enjoyed the opportunities to work with wonderful, godly men and women and to play a role in shaping young minds for kingdom work. For me, getting to do those things was worth giving up a few of my freedoms, such as freedom to enjoy alcohol in moderation, something I have done for most of my adult life. I have my faults (as my wife can attest), but I have never been drunk or abused alcohol. Not one time. While I willingly submitted to the leadership of the college when I learned of their expectations, I do not believe the restriction on alcohol consumption had any positive value for our work or the cause of Christ. Lest I be accused of petitioning merely for my own gratification, I should say that I voluntarily abstained from alcohol and pork for two and one-half years when I lived in a predominantly Muslim country. It was an important part of my Christian witness among a people
who viewed these things as forbidden. I found it a joy to do so. But I now live among a people who generally embrace both pork and alcohol. Abstaining from alcohol no longer benefits my Christian witness, and the expectation placed on Christian leaders to abstain is a detriment to our collective testimony to the grace and freedom we have in Christ. There is nothing inherently Christian about abstaining from alcohol, historically or biblically. Not only did nearly every person in Scripture drink wine, but they wrote about it in favorable terms, even lifting it to a sacred experience. Wine in its naturally fermented form “gladdens the human heart” (Psalm 104:15), and is a comfort to the suffering (Proverbs 31:6). Wine is a blessing that comes from honoring God (Proverbs 3:10); its absence is a sign of God’s wrath (Isaiah 24:7-11). It was also a part of the old covenant offerings to God (Numbers 15:7), and most critically, a part of the new covenant Communion meal. Jesus continued on page 55
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alcohol addiction. Then I watched close friends become problem drinkers because of accessibility of beverage alcohol in their homes. I had also watched Red Skelton’s humorous television skits that poked fun of drunks, and I decided I wanted no part of it. Of course, some of my peers marginalized me because of my decision. I had teammates in baseball, basketball, and football who wanted to go out and drink a couple of cases of beer after winning our home games. (And we never lost a home game in basketball or football in three years, so we are talking about a lot of drinking!) I chose never to participate, and so I was judged by some of my friends who were drinkers as “thinking I was better” than them . . . because, you see, the “judging” is not always done by the nondrinkers. Of course, not everyone who is a drinker becomes an alcoholic or problem drinker. But, it’s reasonable to conclude, virtually everyone who becomes addicted to alcohol started by consuming it in moderation. No one starts out with the desire to become an alcoholic. Most everyone who drinks starts with this defensive attitude: “I’m just a social drinker and there is nothing wrong with it!” “The Bible says moderation in everything!” No one who is just starting to drink says this: “It is my ambition to someday lose my job, my health, my self-respect, my marriage, and my family. Someday I want to be dependent on alcohol to get through my day.” And yet, several million people are alcoholics. And why? It is because drinking alcohol is promoted and elevated as a normal and sophisticated activity in daily life. Never mind that it is expensive and potentially enslaving. People get hooked on American’s numberone, best-selling legal drug. And just like all of the illegal drugs, alcohol finds its way quickly into the body, into the bloodstream, and into the brain of the user/abuser.
One in eight adults, or 12.7 percent of the current American population, are alcoholics . . . up a shocking 49 percent from the first decade of the 2000s. A total of 88,000 people die of alcohol-related causes every year, according to the Washington Post; that is 30,000 more than the total number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War. Alcohol, not abstinence, is a stumbling block for millions. I was captivated by the testimony of Elizabeth Vargas, former ABC News anchor, in her 2016 book Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction. She wrote, Today, when I walk down the streets of New York City on a warm evening, passing bars filled with people enjoying glasses of wine, it’s a very different experience for me than it once was. I don’t look at them and think, “I want one.” But I look at them and I think, “I miss that.” I miss that time when, you know, I felt so innocent and romantic. But that’s just me romanticizing something that turned out to be really monstrous for me. In a subsequent interview on 20/20, Vargas said, I started out with just a glass of wine at bedtime to relax and sleep. Then one became two; and two became three. Occasionally I wore knee-high boots so I could stick a bottle of wine in the boot. Nobody looks in the boot. I got to the place that I would give my life for my [two] sons, but I would not give up drinking for my sons. As father to 3 adult children and grandfather to 11, that last sentence is stunning to me. It illustrates the addictive potential of strong drink. Alcohol, not abstinence, was the stumbling block for Vargas’s marriage (which did not survive) and family. continued on page 56
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drank wine and commanded his disciples to do so, as well (Matthew 26:27). (This most certainly was fermented wine, as a reliable method for storing unfermented grape juice wasn’t invented for another 1,800 years.) Throughout Christian history, consuming alcohol in moderation has been the accepted norm, from our Jewish roots and apostolic fathers through the Middle Ages; alcohol was essential to clean the body from contaminants in the water (1 Timothy 5:23). Reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin embraced the drinking of alcohol, as did our Puritan ancestors in America, who never equated abstinence with holiness. Even today, throughout the world, prohibition against alcohol consumption is much more closely associated with Islam than Christianity. Complete abstinence from alcohol is a relatively recent phenomenon in Christianity. Methodists of the late 1700s were the earliest advocates, and it primarily was embraced by evangelical and fundamentalist groups in the American Midwest and South, and then exported by missionaries to India and subSaharan Africa. The idea of forbidding alcohol took off in the late 19th century as America’s cities filled with people from around the world. Industrialization and rapid urbanization upset the delicate balance of society, throwing off many of the old social restraints. Cities became, for the first time in history, the violent frontier of society, the hotbed of vice and crime. It was the early evangelical progressives (a rather ironic term these days) who decided, in their compassion, not to blame the people or the inhuman industrial systems under which they labored for their lack of morality. Alcohol became the scapegoat, the easy fix to humanity’s problems. If America could just get rid of the drink, it was thought, it could get rid of violence, debauchery, and probably even poverty.
Prohibition—the formal outlawing of alcohol production and consumption in America— lasted from 1920 to 1933, and the concurrent rise in crime and vice proved, in historical terms, the folly of arguments demonizing alcohol. Banning alcohol would not rid evil from the hearts of people; only the work of God’s Spirit will do that. But among the faithful, the vilification of alcohol persisted. For more than 100 years, many American Christians have strived under the assumption that alcohol (not money) is the root of all kinds of evil. The problem NONBELIEVERS is not that many leaders OFTEN ACCUSE in our moveCHRISTIANS OF ment abstain from alcohol. BEING JUDGMENTAL , Discipline, in AND SOMETIMES general, is dying in today’s THE ACCUSATION Christian IS FAIR . circles, and fasting is a lost art; I appreci- WE TEND TO DEFINE ate those who THE CHRISTIAN were willing to make sacrific- LIFE BY A LIST OF es for holiness. PROHIB ITIONS God certainly R ATHER THAN A S A honors those sacrifices LIFE OF FREEDOM, made from love and devo- WHICH IS HOW THE tion to him. NEW TESTAMENT The problem begins when DESCRIBES IT. leaders elevate these sacrifices to something beyond a personal decision, when they equate abstinence with Christlikeness, and when they pressure or force others to go along (1 Timothy 4:3, 4). The common argument for Christian leaders to abstain from alcohol rests on the belief that they should exhibit the highest level of continued on page 57
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Vargas had turned her life around by 2016, but that was a tragic year for the Rinehart family: Ruth Ann, 74, her son David, 45, and granddaughter Sophie, 17. David was like a third son-in-law to me. He was the outstanding worship pastor at Crossroads Christian Church, Evansville, Indiana, where we were yoked in ministry leadership for a decade.
OF COURSE , NOT EVERYONE WHO IS A DRINKER BECOMES AN ALCOHOLIC OR PROBLEM DRINKER .
I got the call on a Sunday morning as I sat in the parking lot of Harborside Christian Church in Safety Harbor, Florida, preparing to go in and BUT, IT’S preach. It was a REA SONABLE gut punch. DaTO CONCLUDE , vid, his middle daughter, and VIRTUALLY his mother EVERYONE were killed in an automobile WHO BECOMES accident in ADDIC TED TO central Indiana earlier that ALCOHOL STARTED morning; their car, BY CONSUMING IT disabled pulled to the IN MODER ATION. side of the road, was rear-ended by a pickup truck traveling 70 mph driven by a 19-year-old man who had been drinking beer that afternoon and evening on the campus of Indiana University. It was the first, and I hope the last, triple funeral I have conducted. About 4,000 people attended the service to deeply grieve the senseless deaths of three amazing Christian people.
Months later, in a courtroom not far from the accident scene, the young man who drove the truck was sentenced to a lengthy prison term for vehicular homicide. His blood-alcohol level revealed he was driving impaired, and that drinking was the determining factor in the tragedy. So, alcohol, not abstinence, was the stumbling block for the young man who victimized the Rinehart and Crossroads Church families. Paul wrote in Romans 14, Therefore, let us [those who choose to drink and those who choose to abstain] stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in the way of a brother or sister. . . . It is better not to eat meat [that had been sacrificed to idols . . . nothing wrong with it really] or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother or sister to fall (vv. 13, 21). With one in eight Americans being alcoholic, and who knows how many problem drinkers out there, can we risk being a stumbling block to them and others by insisting on exercising our Christian liberty to drink in moderation? What if you can handle it and they—members of your own family or someone else’s family—cannot? Can you live with the knowledge that you may have even passively contributed to their fall? As a Christian leader committed to willingly sacrifice my liberty to avoid being a stumbling block, I won’t take the chance. The stakes are too high in the lives of real people in this life and real people’s souls in the greater life to come.
Ken Idleman served as the fourth president of Ozark Christian College, Joplin, Missouri, was senior pastor for 10 years at Crossroads Christian Church, a megachurch in Evansville, Indiana, and is presently mentoring pastors as vice president of leadership development with The Solomon Foundation. C H RIS TIA N STAN DA R D
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Christian character (a sentiment I agree with). Abstinence advocates also contend that drinking alcohol can be a stumbling block for some nonbelievers or new Christians. Therefore, it is argued, Christian leaders have a duty to avoid alcohol at all times so as not to chance causing others to stumble. This line of reasoning is often supported by Scriptures such as 1 Corinthians 8:9, though the hermeneutic is applied rather inconsistently. I have never heard anyone preach that Christian leaders should give up access to the Internet because of those who struggle with pornography, or give up all their money because of those who struggle with greed (and much better cases can be made for those). My non-Christian acquaintances are understandably confused about the Christian position on alcohol. On the one hand, we teach that Jesus changed water into wine—really good wine apparently—and on the other, we advise Christians not to drink it. Nonbelievers do not see Christian abstinence from alcohol as beneficial to them.
Max Lucado has been credited with saying, “I have never heard anyone say, ‘A beer makes me feel more Christlike.’” The logic of that statement is itself dubious—one could substitute “beer” for nearly anything and make the same claim. More importantly, guilting or shaming those who partake of God’s good gifts is inherently un-Christlike. It drives people away from God. And if we are willing to keep people away from God to preserve our moral high ground, then we have missed the gospel. Our judgmental attitudes about alcohol can also hurt the weaker believers in our care. Like it or not, Christians are beginning to embrace alcohol consumption. According to a Barna article from 2017, 60 percent of practicing Christians in America report drinking at least occasionally.
When our nonbelieving friends hear from Christian leaders who wear their abstention on their sleeve, they do not feel that person is speaking out of love of them, but rather out of judgment. Such folks often become convinced of the lie that they must give up alcohol to come to Christ, or at the least, must eventually give it up if they want to progress in their faith.
Many Christians who drink are ashamed of it and believe they should hide their drinking from other Christians, or at least from their Christian leaders. Making these believers feel dirty or shameful for exercising their freedom will drive them into the margins and increase the possibility they will abuse alcohol. On what will drinking Christians model their habits? TV and movies? Bingedrinking parties at college? Or will they find a model in a Christian leader who teaches them to enjoy God’s good gifts with gratitude and moderation?
Nonbelievers often accuse Christians of being judgmental, and sometimes the accusation is fair. We tend to define the Christian life by a list of prohibitions rather than as a life of freedom, which is how the New Testament describes it. Yes, our exercise of freedoms could be a stumbling block in some contexts, but Romans 14 makes it clear our judgment of those who exercise freedom can also be the stumbling block.
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control [i.e., temperance]; against such things there is no law” (Galatians 5:22, 23, English Standard Version). If we keep alcohol on the margins of the faith community, we only perpetuate legalism and judgment, and we fail to teach true temperance, the self-controlled life of following Jesus.
Zach Spiering resides in Joplin, Missouri, with his wife and three children. He is a teacher, writer, community organizer, and serves as an advocate for immigrants and the poor among the community. C H RIS TIA N STAN DA R D
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THE PAST, PRESENT, and FUTURE of the RESTORATION MOVEMENT BY STEVE CARR
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movements. By virtue of reading this magazine, I’m sure you can guess the first one, so I’ll introduce you to the other. About four decades after the inception of the Restoration Movement, American innovation led to the creation of a game that would quickly become the national pastime: baseball. Abner Doubleday is often credited with creating the game, but historians have virtually refuted this. Regardless of who started it, the history of baseball is robust. It continued to spread rapidly across the United States during the 19th century. These two movements intersected in my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio; both the Restoration Movement and baseball took root here. Quite a few major Restoration Movement events and debates took place in the Queen City. And in 1869, shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War, the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first professional baseball team. This brings us to 1924, when a minister at a Christian church in town sent a letter to the Cincinnati Reds. He submitted a formal request on church letterhead for a special day at the ballpark. The minister asked for his group to be recognized before the game and between innings. The minister represented the Ku Klux Klan. Yes, this church, a prominent congregation in the Restoration Movement at that time, asked the local baseball club to host a KKK day. The Reds front office dismissed the request. Eventually the tension over this KKK issue resulted in a church split. The KKK remnant couldn’t keep the church solvent and it was forced to close its doors. A few years later, their building was torn down, and a portion of the plot was claimed as easement for a new expressway. The rest of the church’s land now boasts a baseball field—located in what is now one of Cincinnati’s African-American neighborhoods.*
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L et me st a r t with the story of two
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C ha r t i n g t he Two Movement s This obscure story, and the intersection of these two movements, makes me think of both the past and the future; specifically, I’m led to consider how we remember what once was and how we determine what lies ahead. Both baseball and the Restoration Movement have rich histories that have been studied and analyzed. The successes of the past lead some to believe these movements have questionable futures. Baseball, for example, is no longer our country’s unquestioned pastime. Just look at the sports young people of today are playing— fewer children wear baseball gear, and rarely will a kid watch baseball on television. Over the summer, I attended a major league game in another town. Since it was my first experience in a new ballpark, I paid special attention to everything going on around me. Even though it was a beautiful night, the stands were far short of capacity. There appeared to be a general sense of boredom among the attendees. In fact, the crowd grew most excited that day when a cannon shot free T-shirts into the stands. Despite being reared on baseball, I can’t say I love the game as I did years ago. Baseball just feels slow, like an institution past its prime. Similarly, some are concerned the Restoration Movement has become archaic. Our fellowship’s institutions have definitely seen better days, with many of them struggling to maintain financial viability. Talk to younger leaders about how they view the movement, and they’ll likely shrug their shoulders in apathy. It’s not that they’re embarrassed by the Restoration plea, but they’re not convinced it’s relevant in the 21st century. I’m not a betting man (with all this Cincinnati talk, a Pete Rose reference might be appropriate here), but if I were asked to wager, I’d put money on the future of the Restoration Movement over that of baseball. I don’t arrive at this position because of our glorious past, but rather because our movement is tailormade for what lies ahead.
• Our fellowship boasts some of the largest churches in the United States. • Our churches have developed ministry models that are globally adopted. • Our ideals—once shunned by outsiders— are now embraced by mainstream evangelicalism. Yet despite these successes, we still doubt our future; we aren’t sure where this movement is . . . moving to. This past summer, when the Spire conference was announced as the successor to the North American Christian Convention, I sensed uneasiness among many of the leaders I know. Their trepidation had little to do with the changing of the convention itself but what this shift seemed to signify. The institutional transition in our movement (whether with our colleges, magazines, or conventions) has been perceived as a harbinger of failure. And we’ve generally responded with attempts to diagnose the cause: Are we struggling because we abandoned biblical fidelity? Did we too closely align with the evangelical movement? Has technological innovation made our ideals obsolete? But these things miss the point. There’s something deeper at work here—a foundational issue that has gone unnoticed far too long: We don’t really know who we are anymore. This identity crisis has been decades in the making. The last 100 years of our history featured the forging of influential institutions. We started to define ourselves by these establishments because they were the backbone of our regional networks; eventually, those networks became our identity. But as our institutions started to
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While often overlooked, it’s nearly impossible to deny the influence our movement has made on global Christianity. In an era of denominational decay, this little brotherhood is overachieving:
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W hat I s t he Re st orat ion Movement Be c om i n g?
struggle, our networks eroded, and we became less connected. Despite living in an age of unprecedented technological accessibility, our movement feels further apart. This lack of fellowship within our fellowship is causing us to reassess the relevancy of our movement. But things aren’t nearly as dire as we seem to think. In fact, we could perceive the potential for a brighter future if we would merely be honest with ourselves.
SIMILARLY, SOME ARE CONCERNED THE RESTORATION MOVEMENT HAS BECOME ARCHAIC. OUR FELLOWSHIP’S INSTITUTIONS HAVE DEFINITELY SEEN BETTER DAYS, WITH MANY OF THEM STRUGGLING TO MAINTAIN FINANCIAL
VIABILITY.
YOUNGER
TALK
LEADERS
TO
ABOUT
HOW THEY VIEW THE MOVEMENT, AND THEY’LL LIKELY
SHRUG
THEIR
SHOUL-
DERS IN APATHY. IT’S NOT THAT
THEY’RE
RASSED TION
BY
PLEA,
THE BUT
EMBARRESTORATHEY’RE
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A Bet t er V ie w of Tomor row The problem isn’t our future; our issue, rather, is the way we remember our past. In his recent book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, historian Yuval Noah Harari suggests that our view of history can fuel negativity. He writes, “This is what is happening all over the globe . . . the vacuum left by the breakdown of [modern happenings] is tentatively filled by nostalgic fantasies of some golden past.” We have been unduly bound to our movement’s history; we view our yesterdays with rose-colored glasses. Historians refer to this as hagiography—a revisionist’s history of events that idolizes the people and events of our past. Our love of yesterday undermines our hope for tomorrow. If we venerate our history, there is no way the future can ever measure up to it. With this mind-set, we’ll revert to attitudes of skepticism. This is why the KKK story is so important. For all the good our movement has accomplished, the promotion of this kind of evil is inexcusable. Though it’s an embarrassment we’d prefer to forget, it’s part of our history. Yet we must engage it, because it’s a clear reminder that our movement was never perfect, as we want to believe it was. Jesus taught his disciples, “There is only One who is good” (Matthew 19:17). Any lack of perfection in those who came before us does not nullify the ideals the movement represents. We can simultaneously respect their accomplishments and acknowledge their flaws. There’s no reason for us to not be honest about our past. That’s why, in the next two issues of Christian Standard, I’m going to share a few more stories from our history. In doing so, we will see a much more realistic picture of what our movement was, is, and could become. Only in examining the flaws of our forefathers will we be able to address our own need for repentance and fully rely on Christ.
*The story of minister Orval Baylor, the Richmond Street Christian Church, and the Ku Klux Klan has been featured in sources both inside and outside the Restoration Movement. James DeForest Murch discussed the incident at length in his autobiography, Adventuring for Christ in Changing Times. A web search of “Ku Klux Klan Cincinnati Reds” provides external coverage of this unfortunate part of our movement’s history.
Steve Carr is vice president of ministry development with CDF Capital. His thoughts on the Restoration Movement and ministry can be found at houseofcarr.com. Read part two of this three-part series next month.
THE VALUE OF ANOTHER PERSON’S STORY IN
RESOLVING RACIAL CONFLICT IN THE CHURCH
BY MATTHEW M c BIRTH
As I see it, the relationship between two Jewish characters and their families in Chaim Potok’s novel The Chosen illustrates one of the primary causes of racial conflict in our communities. The plot (in short): Reuven and Danny grow up in different sects and communities, and Reuven strongly objects to how Danny’s father raises his son in virtual silence to prepare him to be his community’s next leader. When Danny and his father do speak, it’s only while studying the Talmud or in times of discipline. When Reuven expresses his frustration with this, Danny responds that this is how it is done, regardless of how peculiar it is to those outside the community. As the novel progresses, this fundamental disagreement leads to conflict between the two families and larger communities. I believe this—the devaluing of another’s story —is one of the primary causes of racial conflict in our communities, country, and churches.
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HOW WE DEVALUE OTHERS’ STORIES (AND HOW THAT LEADS TO CONFLICT) At the root of racial frustration is the feeling that a story is not valued or even considered. Story, in this sense, is one’s testimony, family history, or background in general; it’s the narrative that creates the way one perceives the world and oneself. Our stories influence our cultures and values. When someone intentionally or unintentionally attempts to devalue our story, we feel unimportant, invisible, and underrepresented . . . and rightfully so. These are actions and habits the church is taught to avoid, for Jesus treated everyone as important, regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, or class. Are we not to do the same? To achieve authentic unity in the church, we must first identify the two ways stories are devalued, for devaluation leads to conflict.
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jesus treated everyone as important, regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, or class.
ARE WE NOT TO DO THE SAME?
DENIAL To achieve unity, we often strive to ignore or deny race or ethnicity. We take on a false perspective of people; we claim the color of one’s skin or ethnicity of one’s family does not matter. Honestly, it makes sense for people to think this way, especially when considering verses like Galatians 3:28 that talk about there being “neither Jew nor Gentile.” However, this perspective can fail to acknowledge, and can even erase, one’s unique story. The kingdom of God explicitly recognizes the importance of ethnic diversity, evident through the coupling of the Lord’s Prayer and Revelation 7. Race tells a story in the same way one’s family name tells a story. Although these stories should not dominate one’s life over the Christian narrative, they should be seen as important. When a person says, “I do not see color or race,” it denies a person or group their identity. It’s like saying, “I don’t care that you’re Hispanic, or Asian, or black, or white, or . . .” Sometimes this comes masked in a truth statement such as, “Aren’t we all just one race—the human race?” I understand the heart behind statements like these. However, these types of statements cause conflict because they not only deny obvious differences (color of skin) but also historic and individual experiences. I was discussing racial issues with two friends, one black and one white. One friend stated, “It’s OK to say ‘the black community’; don’t look over our skin color, it’s part of who we are.” Unfortunately, we often deny the story of the ethnic minority while emphasizing the story of the majority, and we couple it with a request that they assimilate. COMPLETE ASSIMILATION The word assimilation may cause one person to cringe and another to smile. In my time serving college students, I can say without reservation that assimilation is not inherently negative. At Ozark Christian College, we have systemically influenced culture. If you arrive at OCC’s campus at 9:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, you won’t see anyone unless you happen to enter the Chapel, where students, faculty, and staff meet together
for worship. It’s a cultural habit to which students assimilate, and it’s an example of how assimilation can be good. And so assimilation is not inherently negative, but requesting complete assimilation is. Every church has a way of doing things, whether it’s Sunday’s song selection, leadership structures, or the clothes people wear. Most likely, these things reflect the majority culture, or at the very least, the leadership. This may seem OK, but for a church to achieve unity across ethnicities and cultures, it cannot be the norm. When we are content with serving people only in a specific cultural way, this leads to homogeneity—which is why a majority of U.S. churches are homogenous in their leadership, staff, and congregations (according to the book Divided by Faith). The unvoiced statement to “outsiders” is this: “You can be a part of our church, but you have to worship the way we worship.” It’s like telling a prospective member to leave their unique culture at the door. Is your church requesting complete assimilation? Look at your leaders and volunteers. When they all are of one ethnicity, we indirectly indicate the cultural stories we value most. The same goes for whom we put on stage or in front of the congregation, because it indicates the people we trust. We also need to pay attention to our worship songs, for these can fail to celebrate the different genres of music that various cultures bring with them. Denying stories and requesting complete assimilation lead to conflict. This conflict may take any number of forms. Attendees or members may • express frustration with music choices, • share with the pastor that they don’t feel represented or that leadership is deaf to their concerns, or • contemplate leaving because of the church’s lack of concern for racial injustice. All of these stem from churches either denying a person’s story or requesting complete assimilation into the existing culture. It isn’t enough to say, “We will not do this anymore.” We must intentionally resolve these conflicts and avoid them in the future.
PRACTICAL STEPS TOWARD RESOLVING RACIAL CONFLICT Here are three practical steps toward racial conflict resolution and unity. 1. WHEN RACIAL CONFLICT ARISES, RECOGNIZE THERE ARE DIFFERENT CULTURAL WAYS TO HANDLE IT. One popular way conflict is managed is in a direct, but emotionless, conversational style . . . but it’s not the only way. Some cultures are more direct and open with their emotions; they invite passionate dialogue. Other cultures may be indirect and emotionless; the discussion can be more dispassionate, and the answer might need to be inferred based on subtle clues. I once spoke with a student who began to raise her voice as we discussed a difficult topic. After the conversation, others who had overheard part of the conversation asked, “Is everything OK?” because they interpreted the louder-than-normal voice as anger. Yet, the student wasn’t angry at all, she was simply passionate about the topic. 2. STRIVE TO UNDERSTAND THE STORY OF OTHER PEOPLE INSTEAD OF IMMEDIATELY JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS. Because it’s our tendency to be color-blind or to see our culture as the norm, we often make assumptions about why somebody is upset rather than trying to get at the root of the issue. Jesus, in his encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4), provides us with a good example to follow. That type of meeting—a Jew meeting a Samaritan—would typically have led to conflict (see John 4:9), yet Jesus, rather than questioning why the woman was at the well during that hour of day, engaged in her story. His approach led to unity and reconciliation (4:16-42). 3. BE PROACTIVE. If we strive to be proactive to racialized incidents, racial conflict will occur less, or it will at least be handled better. To be proactive, we should have ethnic diversity represented in the eldership, executive team, staff, and volunteers. The leadership of the church at Antioch exemplifies this (Acts 13:1). We also must preach about the importance of unity in the church. Paul clearly did this throughout his letters. He wrote on racial unity being an essential implication of the presence of the gospel (see Romans and Ephesians 2, 3).
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regardless.
In The Chosen, Reuven grew frustrated with Danny’s father because he thought it was wrong to raise a child in silence. By the end of the book, Reuven sits down with Danny and Reb (the father), and listens as Reb explains why he raised Danny in silence. Reb tells him silence is practiced to teach a child the need for compassion and empathy in a suffering world. Reb’s story matters—and the stories of other ethnicities matter. It’s easy for us to operate in a way that doesn’t consider another’s story, because a consideration for others takes more effort. But when we consider others’ stories, it helps us get to know people who are different (or not so different) from us. It’s easier to ask others to assimilate to our story—to our culture—but it’s far better to be willing to be the ones to adapt. As followers of Christ, we are called to value one another’s stories and to take steps toward reconciliation (1 Corinthians 9:19-23). This happens through embracing and valuing healthy diversity, listening and engaging in people’s stories, and being proactive to show God’s kingdom is for every tribe, nation, people, and language.
Matthew McBirth, husband and father, serves as director of diversity at Ozark Christian College in Joplin, Missouri, where he assists the college in cultivating a multiethnic campus and institution. /matthew.mcbirth
@MatthewMcBirth
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It’s exciting to see new trends in ministry approaches in our movement of churches. It’s even more exciting to partner with them!
2|42 Community Church Brighton, Michigan 2|42 Community Church in Brighton, Michigan, is known for its concept of a community center that houses a church, and while it might sound like the church has taken a back seat to all that 2|42 does to serve the community, it hasn’t stopped it from being one of the fastestgrowing megachurches year after year. With its indoor soccer field, children’s play areas, café, and constantly booked community functions, there is never a time when the facility isn’t vibrant and active. That model has reproduced itself in multisite locations in Ann Arbor, Lansing, and Saginaw. It’s a far cry from a few years back when pastor Dave Dummitt had no one to fund their dream . . . no one who would believe in 2|42’s out-of-the-box vision. That was true until he placed a critical phone call to Doug Crozier and The Solomon Foundation. TSF’s team went to work, transforming a former indoor tennis club into the vision Dummitt and the 2|42 church had for it. TSF has been with 2|42 every step of the way, empowering the church’s vision with the ministry partnership necessary to turn the dream into a reality.
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Eastpoint Christian Church Portland, Maine Scott Taube had a similar idea in the state of Maine. Portland, the major city in a state that is adverse to any kind of conventional ministry, wasn’t an easy place to plant a church, but Taube went anyway. Eastpoint Christian Church outgrew multiple rented locations and began searching for a way to get to the next level. Taube communicated with Dummitt and the 2|42 team about their desire for a similar ministry approach in Portland. The Solomon Foundation catalyzed that relationship and helped Eastpoint find the perfect place for a community center that housed a church . . . the former Home Depot. Solomon even negotiated a lower purchase price. That location is now bursting with activity and the church inside it has grown exponentially. In addition to being the only independent Christian church in the state of Maine, Eastpoint is the largest church of any kind in that state!
Discovery Christian Church Broomfield, Colorado Across the country, Steve Cuss and Discovery Christian Church in Broomfield, Colorado, took a different innovative approach. Instead of being a center for community activity, Discovery’s leaders were determined to be a place of healing and wellness in an area of Colorado not especially receptive to churches. Discovery was the first church launched in the area in 14 years! Discovery’s facility has the appearance of a barn, and its outreach strategy is to help people through counseling and therapy. The 20-acre space is an oasis of peace and comfort that was sorely needed by the community. And the people of that area have responded, growing Discovery into a church of nearly 1,000! Once again, The Solomon Foundation became a part of this innovative ministry, providing the partnership necessary to make these dreams a reality.
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Southern Hills Christian Church Carrollton, Georgia Most recently, The Solomon Foundation teamed up with Shannon Lovelady of Southern Hills Christian Church in Carrollton, Georgia, for another fresh approach to lifechanging ministry. Southern Hills had a vision to be a community center that housed a church, but with a new, completely unique spin. The idea was to create City Station, a nexus between the church and community that would affect change at a root level. City Station is a facility that houses a number of critical bridges to the community of Carrollton. City Station includes two floors of housing suites for students who attend the local university. These beautiful, well-appointed suites make quite an impression on parents who want the best living space for their son or daughter. As soon as it opened, the housing units were fully occupied—with a waiting list to get in. A fitness center features state-of-the-art equipment and a helpful staff. Community rooms of different sizes are
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available for various needs; these rooms with modern furnishings are provided free to the community. A café provides not only a great place to eat and relax but also caters events that take place in the community rooms. The community also has an all-day preschool. The gym is used regularly for pickup games. Counseling suites with trained biblical counselors are available to the public at no charge. The local police have offices in the building. The list goes on and on. And while all this is happening, the church family continues to set up and tear down for services, just like when they were a mobile facility in their own gym. Since moving into their new facility last summer, it’s been amazing to see the bridge between the community of Carrollton and Southern Hills Christian Church that City Station is providing. This ministry vision, like the other aspects of Southern Hills’ approach, are completely innovative . . . doing fresh things in fresh ways to reach people that no one else is reaching. That’s why The Solomon Foundation partnered with Lovelady and Southern Hills . . . it loves being a part of taking new ground for the kingdom!
It’s important to fuel ministry innovation because of what it produces. During the seven and one-half years of its existence, The Solomon Foundation has partnered with more than 200 churches and loaned more than $450 million. Those churches have grown in attendance by more than 50,000, but even more importantly, there have been more than 17,500 baptisms! The Solomon Foundation knows that leaders whom God has raised up are out there; they possess big ideas that will make an eternal difference in the lives of thousands of families, and they want to help turn those ideas and dreams into a tangible reality. We want to thank our investors who make it possible for TSF to fuel these dreams.
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interact AN INSPIRING LEGACY Thank you so much, Morse family.
Outstanding article, Russell [“Prayer, Power, Purpose: J. Russell & Gertrude Morse and Four Generations of Ministry to Southeast Asia and Beyond,” by Russell Johnson, p. 34, November 2018]. . . . Wonderful account, inspiring legacy, true servants of the Most High God. May this account of their faithfulness and grit challenge a new generation who read it . . . to take the whole gospel to the whole world before he comes!
May Zin San via website
Many years ago, I was blest to have been given a paperback copy of Gertrude Morse’s book The Dogs May Bark, but the Caravan Moves On (and also Eugene Morse’s Exodus to a Hidden Valley). I had never read such a compelling book. I passed it on until it fell apart. So I searched for and ordered new copies and continued to bless others until those paperbacks fell apart. . . . I hope there will be a reprint of her actual book. It was a book that compelled sharing. The responses (unsolicited) from those with whom I shared it were life changing. The Morse family were wholly committed to their faith in Jesus, gave up their families and home . . . never knowing if they would ever see their parents and family again in this life. They ventured out in faith, enduring and accepting unimaginable hardship, never giving up. It makes me weep when I see the deviation from the faith that is so prevalent today.
David Stokes via Facebook
Terrific article, Russell. It’s been the privilege of the Christian Benevolent Association of Greater Cincinnati and subsidiary, the Christian Village at Mason, to be home to LaVerne and Lois Morse for nearly the past decade. I stood at LaVerne’s feet as medics discontinued lifesaving measures the night he passed in our dining room. As I gazed at those feet, I thought of Romans 10:15. Lois continues to live actively in an apartment in the Christian Village. Praise God for this amazing family. Larry Monroe CEO of Christian Village Communities via website
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Juanita Long via website
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At the 1952 Conference on Evangelism sponsored by Cincinnati Bible Seminary (now CCU), J. Russell Morse—a few months after his release [from captivity]—gave his testimony of torture at the hands of the Chinese Communists. He described “the nutcracker,” in which his head was placed between two boards while Chinese soldiers jumped up and down on the ends. Another torture consisted of driving splinters under the fingernails, then setting them on fire to burn down into the quick. He said the only thing that kept him sane was his daily Communion with the Lord using moldy bread for the body of Christ and watery gruel for the blood of Christ. Not yet 10 years of age, I was already a seriousminded, baptized believer with a desire to one day be a missionary. But hearing Morse’s testimony caused me to cry out, “God, I don’t know if I would be able to remain faithful to you under that kind of torture.” That question stayed buried in my memory until 1975. Working with a mission taking Bibles and other help to persecuted believers behind the Iron Curtain, I was part of five teams who had just returned from Communist Eastern Europe, gathered for a debriefing in a home south of Munich, West Germany. Speaking to us was a Christian brother from Russia whose whole German ethnic community in western Russia had been uprooted by Stalin at the beginning of World War II and moved to western Siberia. He told us stories of about a dozen believers in his community who had suffered torture in the gulag. Several of them reported that when they were ready to give up hope, angels visited them and strengthened them to overcome. Hearing all this evoked the memory of J. Russell Morse’s story and my own youthful unanswered question, “Would I be able to remain faithful under trial?” With this new perspective came the awareness that it is impossible to receive a right answer to a wrong question. The question is not, “Would I be able to remain faithful to him?” but rather, “Would God be able to remain faithful to me?” And the answer to that is found in Scripture: His name is True and Faithful!
This is a perceptive summary of the lives of four generations of the Morse family. Charles Dailey via Facebook
A very good presentation of God’s work in SE Asia. I remember our church praying for Lois (Elliott) and LaVerne Morse when going to Burma, about the time I was converted in NYC in 1960.
Thomas Mackey via website
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Jaffet J Perez via Facebook
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SHORT-TERM MISSION TRIPS Great article. Very well-written and so true [“Rethinking Short-Term Missions,” by Josh Rouse, p. 68. November 2018]. One plus about taking people on short-term trips is they get to see in person how people really live in other places and it gives people a heart for it, by either becoming a missionary or giving more to the missions there.
Anita Lindeman via Facebook
Great job, Josh Rouse, for highlighting the potential shortcomings of these STMs. I especially like that you have provided solutions. Keep up the good work.
David Yunker via Facebook
I would encourage all church leaders to read this with an open mind and chew on its implications. It is on target! My friend and teammate Josh is wellread, practical, and gracious here. But what he says is vital for churches in the developed world to grasp. We’ve been given much. Let’s make sure we make much of what we’ve been given. Tyler McKenzie Lead Pastor Northeast Christian Church, Louisville, Kentucky via Facebook
I have waited 16 years for this posting in Christian Standard. Very well written and spot-on in content by experience. A must-read by mission people both sending and receiving. Thank you!
CHURCH HOPPING (AND CHURCH GROWTH) I think we do a disservice to people when we encourage them to “Go where you can be best fed” [Relevance: “How the Baby Boomers Introduced One of the Gravest Spiritual Dangers of Our Era,” by Haydn Shaw, p. 28, November 2018] and forget to bring them to maturity and replace that with, “Go where you can best serve.” It’s partly the church’s fault for switching from a discipling and equipping ministry to an entertainment-only type of ministry. I’m not against quality ministry, I’m defining quality ministry as ministry that matures the church rather than just entertains it. David Cole via Facebook
Hey! No we didn’t! Diane E Gulley-Clay via Facebook
This is way off base. Tricia Johnson @trishkj via Twitter
We live in a consumer-driven society. Sometimes we make gods of consumerism [and] individualism because that’s our way of life & it seems we sometimes believe that if all countries would adopt our way that would solve their problems. When consumerism is god even in some of our churches, is it any wonder people church hop to get the “best deal”?
Ruth Anne Shattuck via Facebook
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Sandi Mull via Facebook
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BEEN MISSING OUT!
I experienced a bit of cognitive dissonance as I read Haydn Shaw’s article on the dangers of church hopping and then Jim Nieman’s article on the fastest-growing churches [“What Makes the Fastest-Growing Churches Grow?” p. 72, November 2018]. Has there ever been a serious reflection on the effects of the church-growth movement on our tradition? By serious reflection I mean a group of leaders from the whole tradition coming together to study, pray, and discuss the effects of the movement on our spirituality? The NACC (Spire) seems to be doubling down on church-growth strategies while other groups are questioning it.
I’m a preacher and a PK who grew up in the CC/ CC, but hadn’t read the CS in a while. Wow. I’ve been missing out! I’m now brainstorming ways to get this into my leaders’ hands and promote this churchwide. Dyke McCord Senior Minister Church of Christ at Manor Woods, Rockville, Maryland via email
Editor’s Note: Thanks, Mr. McCord! We are currently developing some free downloadable tools, available on our website, to help you promote Christian Standard and The Lookout to your church. You can find them at ChristianStandardMedia.com/Resources.
Matt Larimer @mattlarimer via Twitter
While I’m the first in line to ensure that we aren’t just gathering a crowd, I also don’t think all growth models encourage church hopping or weak discipleship.
Aaron Brockett @AaronBrockett via Twitter
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feedback! /ChristianStandardMagazine @ChrStandard @christianstandardmagazine Cs@ChristianStandardMedia.com
Brian @pastorbriby
For space, length, readability, relevance, and civility, comments sent to Interact may remain unpublished or be edited. We do read them all and prayerfully take them to heart. If we publish your comment, we will try to honestly reproduce your thoughts with those considerations in mind. Where we disagree, let’s continue to keep P.H. Welshimer’s words in mind to “disagree without being disagreeable.”
Thankful for @LookoutMagazine and @ChrStandard for leading me daily through the Scriptures!
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NICHE BIBLE NOSEDIVE From After Class Podcast Despite record holiday sales, a titan of Christian merchandising is entering the new year in the red. Rumors of layoffs and closures at Living Path Christian Stores are growing. While sales on phone cases with crosses, waffle makers that burn the face of Jesus on batter, and “Save Your Breath” mints are up, executives fear their biggest moneymaker—the niche study Bible—has reached its saturation point. Living Path executive Jordan Gecko shared his vision: “Our goal has always been to put a targeted Bible into the hands of every seeker. So we try to follow cultural trends and become ‘All things to all people.’” Guided by this principle, Living Path recently published the Upside-Down Bible for Stranger Things fans, The Bible Awakens for Star Wars junkies, and Bible Royale for Fortnite fanatics. While The Marvels of the Bible series has proven quite popular, the Justice League series has experienced a tepid reception, at best—the lone exception being the Wonderful Woman: Become a Heroine for God edition. Regrettably, even such “successes” have proven unprofitable, as licensing payments to Disney and Time Warner have siphoned away most of the earnings. As a result, it appears this publishing giant is about to fall. In a recent brainstorming session, the creative team dreamed up numerous fresh and innovative concepts. Or so they thought. In every instance, when they thought they had a winner, a quick Internet search sent them back to the drawing board. The concept had already been done. Living Path even brought in John Crist as an outside consultant—they hoped his keen wit and snarky demeanor might serve to inspire new Bible ideas. But even Crist was stumped, and he finally conceded, “It looks like you all have wrung those poor Christian saps dry.” Yet Living Path isn’t ready to throw in the towel. With Christmas 2018 in the rearview mirror, they have 10 months to roll out a fresh lineup in time for next Christmas. Promising prospects include: • The Ancestry Study Bible with study notes tailored to DNA analysis • The Weight-Loss Word whose font choice and color scheme force readers to exert more energy while reading, thus burning more calories • The MAGA Bible, which helps readers see the connections between Israel, the church, and America • The #resistance Study Bible, which helps readers see the connections between Babylon, Rome, and America “We have some ideas that have not been explored yet,” explained Gecko. “It may be time for us to look beyond our borders. Billions of untapped seekers need Bibles just for them. Why not offer a Life in Limbo Bible for refugees still searching for a safe haven?” But such a Bible raises another difficult issue, he conceded. “Establishing a price point for that demographic may prove challenging.” The After Class Podcast guys are Bible and theology professors at Great Lakes Christian College; from left to right in the logo, they are Samuel C. Long, Ronald D. Peters, and John C. Nugent. They strive to engage provocative contemporary topics with wit and careful biblical scholarship. https://afterclass.libsyn.com/
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