12 Witnesses

Dr. Andy Davis is the Pastor of FBC, Durham, NC, who came to a theologically divided church which is typical of many FBC situations in the old south.  He led the church back to a theologically Biblical standard and shared with us ten “Dangers of Reforming a Church.”  (Or… 10 things to not do when reforming a church - Art)

I have to say that this was a powerful message and hit me right where I needed it and I heard that from many people in the conference as well.

While reforming FBC, Durham, Dr. Davis said he saw the greatest glimpse of the glory of God at work.  He also saw the most bitter conflict and pain in ministry.  In the middle of teaching expositionally through Scripture, he said he felt led to preach, out of sequence, through Revelation 1:10-20.  Jesus is speaking to John and asking for John to write to the Pastors (angels - angelos or messengers) at the seven churches nearby the Island of Patmos, where John was imprisoned.  Jesus is walking among the lampstands (churches) made of gold (value/purity) and holding the stars representing the pastors in His right hand - a very comforting image.  The church belongs to Christ and the undershepherds are in His hand.

Facing the reformation of the church was a very daunting task.  As he read Revelation 1-3, he was confronted with the “immense danger of NOT reforming the church”:  that the lampstand would be taken from its place - judgement would come from God Himself.

10 Dangers of Reforming the Church

1. Forgetting the Centrality of God.  The church is God’s and He is the central figure in it.  Trusting Him is crucial to success.  Acts 20:28 - the church was bought by His blood.  1 Cor. 3:17 - God will judge who tears down His temple.
2. Self Reliance.  We always turn to ourselves to see if we can handle the situation.  2 Cor. 1:9 - Rely on God who raises the dead.  Deut. 1:41 - Israel has refused to take the promised land and God declare they must wander for 40 years.  Their response is to go up to the hill country and fight after God says He will no longer go with them.  They chose to go as if it were easy. Self reliance kills in two ways.  1.  You look into yourself and don’t find what you need to accomplish the task, so you blaspheme God and refuse the call.  2.  You look inside and think you do find what you need to answer the task, so you trust yourself and ignore God.
3. Failure to Rely on God’s Word alone - or the Sufficiency of Scripture.  Do you believe that God’s Word has all that is needed and is powerful enough?  Is. 55:10-11, God’s Word will not return void.  2 Cor. 4:2 - Renouncing secret ways avoiding worldly political maneuvering and being completely honest, places trust in God and His Word.
4. Deficiency in Prayer.  This is from a title of one of Jonathan Edward’s sermons.  1 Sam. 12:23 - Far be it from me to sin against God by failing to pray for you.  Eph. 1:15-23 - Praying that they may know God, know God, and know God - “17 [I pray] that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, ^[a] would give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him. 18 [I pray] that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened so you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the glorious riches of His inheritance among the saints, 19 and what is the immeasurable greatness of His power to us who believe, according to the working of His vast strength.” -HCSB
5. Pride toward you opponents.  That you are somehow better that they are.  Luke 18:9-14 - The tax collector and the pharisee.  2 Tim 2 - Pray for them to repent and come to the Truth.  What do you have that you did not receive?  If you received it, why do you boast as if it were from you?
6. Fear of what man thinks.  It causes a pastor not to preach the full counsel of God’s Word.  Gal.1:10 - Now trying to please man or God?  Is. 51:12-13 - God is the one who comforts.  Who are we to fear man who dies and withers like the grass?  Ps 37 - all of it, but especially v.35-36 - I saw a wicked man flourishing and then I passed by and he was gone.
7. Making Non-Essential into Essentials.  Not everything is worth dividing over.  Most arguments in the church are over control of non-doctrinal, non-essential issues.  “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity” - Unsourced, mistakenly attributed to Augustine on occasion.  (Also, he listed Scripture here, but I missed it. - Art)
8. Impatience.  1 Tim 4:3 - …with great patience…  You didn’t come to your convictions overnight, how can you expect others to do so?
9. Discouragement.  Satan sells it to the Pastor, because if we were to don the full armor of God in Eph. 6, he could not stand.  Therefore, he sells us on the belief that all is lost.
10. Failure to develop men around you.  Paul/Timothy, etc.

Inversion:

1. Keep glorifying God first and foremost.  It’s His church.
2. Rely only on God.
3. Unleash God’s Word.
4. Saturate with prayer.
5. Humble yourself.
6. have a strong fear of God and no one else.
7. Put the Essentials first.
8. Be Patient.
9. Fight discouragement with God’s Word.
10. Surround yourself with Godly men who will fight on God’s behalf (not stand aside while you fight).

Well, it’s not live blogging, by any means, but I’ve gotten a tremendous amount out of today’s sessions, so I feel compelled to pass them on to whomever might be interested. I was taking good old fashioned notes on paper, so you get the outline, but I think it is worthwhile.

If you want more, be sure to check out Timmy Brister’s Live Blog over at Provocations & Pantings.

So Ted Christman, a pastor from Owensboro, KY, home of the Moonlite Bar-B-Q, exposited Psalm 1 and did a masterful job.

Here are the highlights.

Theme: The Present and Future Blessing of the Righteous & the Present and Future Misery of the Wicked.

General Observations:

1. The text divides the whole of humanity into 2 categories: Righteous and Wicked. These categories are throughout the Bible and seen throughout history.
2. The righteous experience joy, which is not worldly happiness, but exuberance based on God’s presence and blessing, not circumstances.
3. Delighting in the “Law” is delight in the Lord Himself.

“Blessed” man: (The word “blessed” is the same word that Christ used to open the Sermon on the Mount - Note from Ted Christman)

1. Negatively described - Where he is not, what he is not doing. He is not following the counsel of the wicked. We may hang out with the lost, but not because we relish their company or influence. We are compelled to do so because they are lost and we have compassion for them.
2. Positively described - Delights in the Law of the Lord. Shows true desire to seek God that comes from a heart of passion inspired by God Himself.
3. Analogously described - “Like” a tree with rich nourishment and bearing much fruit. It can stand the heat because of the nurture provided.
4. Pragmatically described - In all he does, he prospers.
5. Covenantally described - The Lord “knows” (reveals deep intimacy - TC) the way of the righteous.
6. Morally described - He is “righteous” (his character and his way are “upright” - Art)

Wicked man:

1. Morally described - Wicked.
2. Contrastively described - Shows the differences between the righteous man and the wicked man.
3. Analogously described - “Like” the chaff, with no taste and no nourishment, of no significance so it is easily blown away.
4. Eschatologically described - Faces judgement; will not be with righteous, will perish.

A final word of encouragement to Pastors and others:

“Delights in the Law of the the Lord and meditates on it day and night.” Application:

1. Delighting in God’s Word is essential for salvation, for happiness. Not doing the negative descriptors in verse 1 is no guarantee of the benefits described in verse 3. Only delighting in God’s Word will reap those benefits, but so many simply think that avoiding certain actions is “good enough.”
2. Delighting in God’s Word is dynamic. It builds upon itself and draws one in. Like a completely addictive drug, that only benefits you and has no down side. Would you take it?

People of our churches need pastors who are passionate for His Word.

I mentioned in Better Blogging: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that Search Engines will evaluate your host server’s ability to handle traffic and will not send you what you can not handle. Nevertheless, having your own site instead of having a .blogspot.com, .wordpress.com, .typepad.com, .squarespace.com or whatever other free blog site you might acquire will cause you to stand out to Search Engines better and is easier for most people to find. Remember, although you are super tech savvy, most of the world is still catching up. The vast majority of the world does not read blogs, but if you want them to find your content, you have to get the Search Engines to rank you high enough that you are found before they get tired of looking through all the links.

There are other reasons. One is financial. Believe it or not, typepad is not free, although your blog will show up as a subdomain on their site. For a couple of dollars more per month, you can have your own .com website. Granted, this is more than the other subdomain sites, which are free, but it is not overly expensive. I bought my server space for two years up front and haven’t had to worry about it since that time. It’s coming up again, and I’ll evaluate as the time draws near, but I use Bluehost and they are pretty good - constantly upgrading, etc.

By the way, I’ve given this before, but I’ll give you another link to “Who is Hosting This?” Go to the site and input the address of the site you wish to know about, and it will return the registered host of the domain in question. Just in case you want to know who your favorite blogger uses as a host.

As I mentioned, performance is an issue. I know that I just said that Bluehost is good with its servers. It is. But. Did you know there is more to server speed that you should consider?

Up until recently, the size, speed, operating system and uptime (time your servers were running properly, which equals the time your site functioned properly as well) were all that you had to consider when it came to choosing a host.

That was all I worried about when I signed on with Bluehost and all that I concerned myself with until I found this out: The scientists that actually invented the internet - no, not Al Gore, but the physicists at Cern - have actually already re-invented the internet.

Here’s the brief sketch and a link to the full story.

They invented the internet to store data that they were collecting as they attempted to record the splitting of atoms in the world’s largest supercollider. Well, the old internet has proven to be insufficient to handle the data, because, no matter how big and fast the computers they attempt to use to record everything, the massive amounts of data that get collected bottles up on phone lines that are not efficient, even for phone service. Thus, they have replaced the phoneline connections with a series of fiber optics called “The Grid.”

The Grid is 10,000 times faster than the typical BROADBAND connection. Think, the fastest connection you can get vs. instant. The only thing slowing you down now is your own computer. What’s this got to do with blogging? As technology advances, prices will come down. This will one day be affordable. Well, first it has to be available, then it will become affordable. It will happen a lot faster than the first internet, though. That’s what I think, anyway.

Finally, Layered Technologies offers a different type of grid. Although out of most people’s price range at $49/mo, LT handles your information by spreading it out over several “nodes” rather than piling all on one machine, which can only give your site so much time if it also happens to host one or more busy sites. Thus, the requests for your info gets shared over a system of servers rather than just one machine. That is also technology that is going to get cheaper as time goes by.

Heck, it’s already cheaper than a tank of gas, though that is not saying much.

I know that downloading and watching video is a time consuming task, so I won’t give you hours of video, but I do want to show you what I see when I go overseas in just over 5 weeks.

As a result, I have set up to video blog. Below is the opening video, which you can dowload or stream, whichever you choose. I have also loaded it to youtube.com/12witnesses, but the quality bottoms out significantly. Of course, Wordpress and YouTube don’t always play nicely together, so I won’t depend on them to get you the videos.

I intend them to be short and worthwhile. Here’s the index for this one:

• Why I’m doing it
• Future pre-trip posts - tech and travel
• Run Time: appx. 2:31

 

 Vietnam Video Blog Opening [2:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

BTW, if you are picking this up in a feed and want to stream the video, click the “enclosure” link at the bottom of the feed. If you want to download it, right click the link and then select the “save as” option in IE and the “save link as” option in Firefox. It is a .mov file which you can import to your iPod, should you care to take me with you. All you have to do is import it in iTunes, right click on it to pop up a menu and then select convert for iPod.

[edit] Future videos will, I hope, be in mp4 format, which is what iPods use, so you can skip the conversion proces as I’ll do it myself. Your Quicktime player (which plays .mov) will play mp4 as well, so you should notice no difference on your computer.

Final overview of Reggie McNeal’s day with us.

First, he was so full of one liners that pointed out the things that we have as core values that are not biblically based. I wish I could have kept up with him, but I was typing with my thumbs on my Treo.

Secondly, McNeal was not critical of the traditional church, but did pointedly point out that we seem to be tied to things that are not getting the job done and are not commanded us by Scripture.

Thirdly, you kind of have to be there to get him. He has a dry wit and even when you are there, if you aren’t paying attention, he will say things that won’t make sense to you because you either miss something else to which it was related, or you miss that he is being sarcastic (not bitterly sarcastic).

Finally, McNeal was so full of stories that illustrated his point, hearing the points alone can leave you without the punch that being there does.

The day was taped, though I saw several flips of the cassette (yes cassette, not digitally recorded) so I know we missed several things. I don’t know if the tape will be made available. If so, you should get it.

Using the 5 Questions is a great way to talk to anyone: church, family & lost.

Meaningful engagement will take place through shaped conversation.

An apostolic version of engagement is to send out people before they are ready and debrief them after. We’ve turned it into training, discipling and working that they never get out of the building.

If we do not change the scorecard, we will never change the result. We do what we reward. Conversions will not go up until conversations go up.

3rd shift

Church-based Leadership to Apostolic Era Leadership (AD 30)

We are in a pre- Christian Culture again. Less than 10% of bridgers/millenials have any connection to church.

In AD 30, you don’t have a church job, you are the leader of a movement.

It’s messy and you can’t organize it. You follow where God is leading.

Apostolic Era leaders are Kingdom Minded. No fiefdoms. Don’t have a call to a church as much as they partner with the church to reach the area to which they are called.

They are visionary. Willing to do what has not been done and see what others have not seen.

They are developers of people.

They are Spiritual. The stink of Jesus is on them.

They are Entrepenurial. They see opportunity. Only church people lament the disintigration of churched culture. These people shout that it is great because light shines best in darkness. Missional Church doesn’t limit itself to the money in the pew. There are pagans with money who want a better city and will help finance our engagement and we build a relationship with them as well.

We think money follows meetings. House churches make us nervous because we don’t know how to take the offering.

Money follows Mission. You start Mission, and Money will find you.

You’ve got teachers, you’ve got grant writers in your church. Get them to write grants for your engagement.

In AD 30, people don’t have a single income stream. Missionality creates ways to get people engaged and will find a way to get them through.

They are plural or team oriented.

Program Driven to People Driven

In a program driven church, people exist to staff the programs and ensure their success. It makes people miserable.

Willow Creek just released Reveal where they studied their church members. They found that the more involved with their programs, and they are the best at programs, the less happy they were & 25% were thinking about leaving. the bad thing was that the conclusion was that they said they weren’t sure what to do but they suggested a whole chart of new program centered changes.

(He praised them for the willing introspection.)

Tailoring church to people, 5 Questions we asked our church members.

1 What do you enjoy doing?
2 Where do you see God most at work?
3 What would you like to see God do in your life over the 6 - 12 mos & how can we help?
4 How would you like to serve other people and how can we help?
5 How can we pray for you?

Break. Con’t soon.

Points 2 & 3 coming.

Still talking about change.

Don’t go back and try to program a shift. Churches will never vote to go Missional. They will always vote to go back to Egypt, because they like the problems they know better than the problems they don’t know.

What you want to do is get the virus started. Be Jesus yourself and share it. When someone else catches it and starts ministering to people, shine a light on them and spread it to the congregation.

Q: Is there a point when you call people to salvation in the missional engagement? A: Absolutely. As soon as the Spirit leads you MUST give an answer for reason for the hope.

Q: Shouldn’t the church be the ones creating these Missional Communities? A: Absolutely. Every church should have many Missional Communities within them set loose to do what needs to be done - not fettered by the church organization, etc. It will cause your church to explode.

Coming Shift: Program Driven to People Driven

Because of a challenge that the HS resides only in Christians, Reggie takes off on a tangent of speaking to God being at work beyond the church.

People who were not part of our “line” …

Melchezidek - who taught Abraham to tithe? Where did he get it?

Jethro - who helped Moses organize, gave him a wife and a job? Where did he get it?

Jonah mad at God over Nin. - God asked, “how could I ignore so many people?”

Followed by several stories of God at work in the middle of people’s lives who are lost.

God has not surrendered his mission to us. He is still at work whether we are promoting the church or working His mission - they are not the same thing, necessarily.

John 4:34-35

Open your eyes, the fields are ripe for harvest.

Surveyed room: 2 people in leadership Christians for less than 15 years. Chrisianity can’t survive with the leadership this mature.

We are pharisees: come and get it church culture.

Across denomInations, missional people have more in common with other missionals than those that don’t. The great divide in America is among those that “get it” & those that don’t. You are going to self opt in or out.

If you are going to be a part, you must make three shifts.

First shift from an internal, church-centric focus to an external focus. We try to export the church because we rhink the church saves people. We don’t take God to people. God is already there.

We have Muslim Imams coming to our M’s saying that Jesus is appearing to them in their dreams. Blackaby is right, we need to join God where He is working.

cont’d momentarily