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Tag: Discipleship

Moving Beyond Amusement!

Published by Jeff Kennon on May 20, 2015

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“[It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. (87)”
–Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman

These words by Neil Postman have proven to be characteristic of our age. We long for entertainment and fear boredom. This has dramatically affected the way we educate. Material must be presented in ways that grab and keep the attention.

I don’t believe we should ever seek to be boring, but the reality is that if everything we deliver or teach has to be exciting, then its relevancy will be based not on truth, but on whether it entertained. The topic which is most exciting will be deemed as the topic that is most important.

Our entertainment driven culture has no doubt affected the way we do church. And in some ways, it should. We should learn to be engaging and learn how to tell better stories from the pulpit. The danger however, is when we feel the need to make the next church service more enthralling than the last one. When we do so, we forget the purpose of why we are at church to begin with as well as portray a false image of what it means to follow Christ.

The reality of life, and even the Christian life, is that it is not all entertainment. Some of it is rather ordinary. And some of it is a bit of work. On a Sunday morning, the sermon you hear in church might not be as exciting as the one you heard the week before. This is okay and needed. If we begin to think that Christianity and church is about a quick enjoyment of a worship service, then we have missed the heart of what it means to follow Christ.

Following Christ is about being conformed into his image (Rom. 8:29; Eph. 4:24). This means we live a life formed by the cross as we walk humbly in obedience to God, sacrificially loving and serving those around us. This is not always easy nor glamourous. As Tim Chester has written, living for Christ involves learning to wash the dishes.

You should not think however, that though our lives are filled with the ordinary, that they will be void of joy. Christ has come to give us life. And when we see the life he has given us, we will recognize all things we do as permeated by His grace. Washing dishes provides us with the opportunity to consider others. Being obedient, though difficult, will be seen in light of God’s purpose for all of humanity. Our lives will become ones in which we trust God with the mundane and understand that it is through the ordinary that God sometimes chooses to do the extraordinary.

Christianity is more than an entertaining experience. I’m not saying that we don’t or can’t experience God, but if we begin to buy into our media saturated culture and reduce following Christ to just an experience which is valued only by it’s entertainment value, then I’m afraid we will begin to stop making disciples. Instead, we will be producing consumers.

We must therefore, move beyond amusement  into amazement; amazement of what God has done for us through Christ. And for this to happen, we must trust, beyond our methods, the Spirit of God. Paul, when he preached in Corinth, made the following statement: And my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God (1 Cor. 2:4-5). We do well to do the same!

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Is There Aversion To Theology Today?

Published by Jeff Kennon on March 6, 2015

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I occasionally hear and read that there is an apprehensiveness towards Christian doctrine. David Wells, in his book No Place For Truth, has led a charge that we must reestablish Christian doctrine in our North American context or we will end up with a shallow faith that will be tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes (Ephesians 4:14).

Historian Mark Noll has also chimed in along with Wells when he wrote The Scandal Of The Evangelical Mind. For Noll, the scandal is that there is no evangelical mind. He contends that there is a great divorce between intellect and piety within North American evangelicalism.

As I have thought about the issue of our North American scandal of a lack of theological thinking, I found an old copy of W.T. Conner‘s book Christian Doctrine. Conner was professor of systematic theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in the early to mid 1900’s. In the introduction to Christian Doctrine, written in 1937, he wrote…

Many people today have little patience with any kind of definite doctrinal teaching in religion. This aversion to religious doctrine is not confined to those who are altogether indifferent or hostile to religion. Even many religious people are unfriendly toward any kind of definite doctrinal teaching. They wish to confine religion to the realm of feeling or friendly good will, or make it a matter of practical social activity.

There has been much discussion as to whether religion is properly a matter of feeling, or belief, or activity. As a matter of fact, it is all three. Without the element of feeling, religion has little motive power; without doctrinal belief, the element of intelligence is lacking; without practical activity, it is vapid and empty. 

No doubt, Conner does well at helping us to see that the antipathy to theology is nothing new to the 21st Century. But on the other hand, I think he helps us to achieve some balance in that though we must teach Christian doctrine, it must never be divorced from real life. As Conner has succinctly written, our faith is a matter of feeling, belief, and activity.

So what do you think? Are we needing a return to deeper theological thinking in today’s evangelical world? And what does it look like to do good theology?

For help in thinking about theology, consider reading Theology Is For The Living Room along with A Little Book For New Theologians: Why and How To Study Theology by Kelly Kapic. You can also read my review of Kapic’s book as well.

 

 

 

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The Cross: The Signature Of Jesus

Published by Jeff Kennon on March 3, 2015

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Challenging words from Brennan Manning…

The signature of Jesus, the Cross, is the ultimate expression of God’s love for the world. The church is the church of the crucified, risen Christ only when it is stamped with his signature; only when it faces outward and moves with him along the way of the Cross. 

Fidelity to the Word  will take us along the path of downward mobility in the midst of an upwardly mobile world. We will find ourselves not on the path to power but on the path to powerlessness; not on the road to success but on the road to servanthood; not on the broad road of praise and popularity but on the narrow road of ridicule and rejection. 

To be a Christian is to be like Christ. Somehow we must lose our life in order to find it. Christianity preaches not only a crucified God, but also crucified men and women. There is no discipleship without the Cross. I am not a follow of Jesus if I live with him only in Bethlehem and Nazareth and not in Gethsemane and on Calvary, too. 

-Brennan Manning, The Signature of Jesus (p. 10-11)

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A Discipleship Problem?

Published by Jeff Kennon on February 25, 2015

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What’s our problem in the church these days? There is no lack of research or books written regarding this question. However, as I have read and thought through some of the issues being raised about today’s church in the West, there is one quote that continues to come back to my mind again and again. It is by Mike Breen in his book Building A Discipleship Culture.

Breen writes:

We don’t have a missional or leadership problem in the Western church. We have a discipleship problem.

Is Breen correct in his assessment? Is discipleship the key?

Whenever I think about discipleship, I think of Jesus leading his small group of disciples as he taught them, encouraged them, prayed with them, empowered them, and sent them out to declare that the kingdom of God had come. And he did so, as Robert Coleman aptly writes, “for the salvation of the multitudes.”

We have to ask therefore, if we as a church are making disciples? And if we say we are, then are we seeing the gospel spread? Because if we are truly making disciples, then I believe we will, over time, begin to see the multitudes reached. It is disciples who make disciples. This means that if you are a follower of Christ, then you have been commissioned to help others follow Christ. Jesus’ disciples, in following Him, became “fishers of men” (Mt. 4:19).

So since it is true that it is disciples who make disciples, this means that it is not a one person job. It is for all followers of Christ. Ed Stetzer has recently written that when it comes to making disciples, you can’t mass produce them. “God did not plan for one person to disciple an entire church,” writes Stetzer, “and He didn’t design us to grow via mass discipleship.” Discipleship involves the whole body of believers. It’s not all on the shoulders of the pastor.

Paul told Timothy that “what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also” (2 Timothy 2:2). This is discipleship. It’s teaching others to teach others. We must pass what we know to others.

I don’t think I have written anything here that the majority of believers in a church do not know or have not heard before. The question is, “Are we doing this?” Are we making disciples who make disciples? And we may need to ask ourselves if discipleship really is a major problem in today’s church. You might not think that discipleship is the issue.

Regardless of what you might think today’s problem in the church might be, I pray that you (and me) not become too critical, but humbly realize that God is still in the process of building His church. And remarkably enough, He is using us to do it! The church is His Bride and though it is blemished at the moment, we know that God makes all things new.

 

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Living Like Christ Involves The Cross

Published by Jeff Kennon on February 11, 2015

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As Christ-followers, we are constantly encouraged to “live like Christ.” What would Jesus do? we are often asked. And rightly so as John himself writes that whoever says he abides in him [Christ] ought to walk in the same way in which he walked (1 John 2:6).

But what does it mean to “walk like he walked?” I think theologian Kelly Kapic nails it when he writes…

The short answer is that Christians are called to imitate Jesus’ self giving love on the cross, not his crown as a king of his career as a carpenter. The point is clear: Jesus cross provides the primary pattern for our faithfulness to God in the present.  

It was the cross of Christ in which humility, sacrifice, and love were exhibited. Therefore, for us to imitate Christ leads us to a life of humility, sacrifice, and love as well.

We are told by John that by this we know love, that he [Christ] laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth (1 John 3:16-18).

Our lives should be one of cruciformity. To be saved by the power of the cross is also to be transformed by it. Christ made us alive with Him so that we could freely live and find true life; the true life that goes counter to the ways of this world as it lives out the ways of the cross.

This life of the cross, along with the message of the cross, will look foolish to the world. Paul writes that God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong;  God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being[d] might boast in the presence of God (1 Corinthians 1:27-29).

“When we remember,” Kapic writes, “just how radical the cross is, keeping in mind how it was considered ‘folly’ to worship a crucified Lord, we see how radical this metaphor becomes for shaping the Christian life.” The world glamorizes comfort, ease, and personal honor, but the cross is one of suffering, humility, and sacrifice.

However, though such suffering, humility, and sacrifice look weak to the world, they are really the ways in which God is shown to be most powerful. God does not and has not used the ways of our fallen world to reveal himself. Our King came to the earth by being born in a stable and died by way of a cross. Not exactly the way we would visualize the Creator of the universe coming to the world to restore it. And yet it is through such foolishness that we are being saved (see 1 Corinthians 1:18).

To walk as Jesus walked, therefore, and to live as he lived, is one which is shaped by the cross. It is a life of humility empowered for service and obedience. It is a life of self-sacrifice. And, contrary to the world’s thinking, it is a life of joy!!

 

 

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