Jay: The first characteristic was white-hot faith. What’s next?

Steve: The second one is commitment to a cause. Movements aren’t just about my experience of God; they’re about changing the world.

Every movement has a unique gift that God has given them. In the Catholic religious orders refer to their founding charism. Each order has call that members commit themselves to.

Obviously every Christian movement should share in what unties us all together as believers in Christ, but alongside of that would be a particular cause that God gives a movement and there are high levels of commitment and its not just an institution that’s demanding commitment, its the cause that draws people.

If we could just be half as committed as the average professional sporting team, we’d probably win the world to Christ in a very short period of time. By why are these people in that team committed? Sure they’re getting paid well probably, but they also love the game, and there’s an energy within them that drives the. So movements have high levels of commitment.

John Wesley rides into Bristol, there’s 900 on the books in the Methodist society there. When he left he had removed 143 of them, because he’s brought discipline, he removed the wife beaters, the smugglers, the drunkards. They’re a mission field, but they are not to be in the heart of his movements.

Movements make high levels of demand on one another and maintain that will. What I call commitment mechanisms, such as accountability groups. They know where they’re going and they expect that of each other.

Look at the heart of Jesus’ movement – high commitment, plenty of avenues of access and connect with the world around, but if you want to be a part of the twelve or the seventy then he is going to expect a lot.

There are striking parallels in the story of the Episcopalian demise in the US and Canada and the woes of the Uniting Church in Australia.

The heart of the problem is a failure of nerve in confronting a culture that is hostile to the Christian faith. Hitchcock quotes TS Eliot who said of liberalism that,

[It] tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, to relax rather than to fortify. It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards, something definite.

In religion, Liberalism may be characterized by a progressive discarding of elements in historical Christianity which appear superfluous or obsolete, confounded with practices and abuses which are legitimate objects of attack. But as its movement is controlled rather by its origin than by any goal, it loses force after a series of rejections, and with nothing to destroy is left with nothing to uphold and nowhere to go.

Unfortunately, this history will be repeated in the postmodern world by the stream of the emerging church described by Ed Stetzer as “Revisionists“. The scenery has changed but not the story.

Dynamic movements are committed to a cause. But what if you’re not sure what that cause is any more?

Tim Keller writes:

A generation ago, it would have been hard to imagine evangelicals unable to agree on what the simple gospel is: 1) God made you and you must have a relationship with him, 2) but your sin separates you from God. 3) Jesus, God’s Son took the punishment your sins deserved. 4)If you repent for your sins and trust in his work for your salvation, you will be forgiven, justified and accepted freely by grace, and indwelled with his Spirit until you die and go to heaven.

But many today challenge this way of expressing the gospel.

In A New Kind of Christian Brian McLaren’s character Neo says he doesn’t “think most Christians have any idea of what the gospel really is.” When his interlocutor responds that he thought the gospel was “accepting Christ as your personal savior and justification by faith not works based on the finished work of Christ on the cross” Neo responds, “Yes, that’s exactly what most modern Christians would say”. reduc[ing] the gospel to modern dimensions” laws, steps, simple diagrams, complete with a sales close.” When pressed on what the gospel is, Neo insists that it can’t be reduced to a formula, other than the one Jesus used, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” He then quickly adds that we shouldn’t use that short-hand either, since “everything is contextual” and the term “kingdom” would be opaque to many people today.

Read Tim Keller’s response to this postmodern confusion regarding the gospel.

Heroism is the lost chord, the missing note of present day Christianity!

Every true soldier is a hero! A Soldier without heroism is a Chocolate Soldier! Who has not been stirred to scorn and mirth at the very thought of a Chocolate Soldier? In peace true soldiers are captive lions, fretting in their cages. War gives them their liberty and sends them, like boys bounding out of school, to obtain their hearts desire or perish in the attempt. Battle is the soldiers vital breath! Peace turns him into a stooping asthmatic. War makes a whole man again, and gives him the heart, strength and vigor of a hero.

Every true Christian is a soldier of Christ a hero par excellence! Braver than the bravest, scorning the soft seductions of peace and her oft-repeated warnings against hardship, disease, danger and death, whom he counts among his bosom friends.

The otherwise Christian is a chocolate Christian! Dissolving in water and melting at the smell of fire. Sweet they are! Bonbons, lollipops! Living their lives on a glass dish or in a cardboard box, each clad in his soft clothing, a little frilled white paper to preserve his dear little delicate constitution.

CT Studd
Chocolate Soldier

CT Studd gave up fame, fortune and family to take the gospel to China, India and Africa. With his wife he founded World Evangelistic Crusade.

I did a great job of messing up my faith and my life as a young adult. Until I met a guy back in Australia who had come to faith on the hippie trail in India through Dilaram House—a ministry pioneered by Floyd and Sally McClung.

Six months later I ended up half way around the world in Holland with Dilaram. The next two years, mostly in Amsterdam on the Ark, changed my life.

Floyd and Sally are still going strong. I hear they are moving to South Africa to train church planters.

Here’s an article by Floyd on Apostolic Passion. Let it stir you.

HT: Under the Iceberg.

“Living on the Devil’s Doorstep: From Kabul to Amsterdam” (Floyd McClung)

He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.

“Orthodoxy” (G. K. Chesterton), 91-92

1) the message of Martin Luther; and
2) the printing press of Johannes Gutenberg.

Indulging in print

On a similar wavelength, some more great insights from OnMovments on Movements and Materials.

Dynamic movements use adaptive methods to spread the heart of their message like a virus.

Solid core. Pliable exterior.

Dying movements lock in their methods but adapt their message to suit the spirit of the age.

Pliable core. Solid exterior.

Got back to the room from my early morning walk. Told Grant, my room-mate, “Hey a new day and we’re alive. Let’s give thanks to God and make the best of this day.”

Sat down at the computer and picked up an email from Bert Olbrich, the missionary I have just visited in Trinidad.

The first paragraph left me stunned:

Steve

Yesterday we got the news that our good friends – Sue and Kevin Prins from YWAM Trinidad – have been robbed and shot in Trinidad. Kevin in the neck and shoulder, and Sue in the leg. One of their children was hurt as well, the others were able to escape. According to the evening news of TV6 both are in a stable condition and will have surgery today. The crime took place at their YWAM base in Las Lomas, Trinidad.

I’ve never met the Prins. But having just been to Trinidad I feel some how connected to them. Please pray for them and all those who serve in dangerous contexts.

Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.
Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of sufferings.

And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.

To him be the power for ever and ever. Amen.

I Peter 5:8-11

We are at war.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the sort of people who make great founders of movements. I think this letter from Rick reveals some of what it takes to be a great founder. He’s planted and grown one of the healthiest churches I know of and he’s planting other churches in Australia. Despite the demands of his local ministry, you just can’t keep Rick away from Papua New Guinea and the slums of Port Moresby where he partners with a local leader in church planting and development work.

Read it and see what you think. How does God shape the heart of a founder?

Lesson: Great founders are restless because they are compelled by the love of Christ.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

Never shall I forget those flames which consumed by faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of a the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

Elie Wiesel

Night by Elie Wiesel chronicles the author’s experiences as a young Jewish boy in a Nazi death camp. Those experiences led Wiesel to lose whatever faith he had.

The foreword to the book is written by a Francois Mauriac, a Christian. Here is his response to Wiesel’s story:

And I, who believe that God is love, what answer could I give my young questioner, whose dark eyes still held the reflection of that angelic sadness which had appeared one day upon the face of the hanged child? What did I say to him? Did I speak of that other Israeli, his brother, who may have resembled him—the Crucified, whose Cross has conquered the world? Did I affirm that the stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine, and that the conformity between the Cross and the suffering of men was in my eyes the key to that impenetrable mystery whereon the faith of his childhood had perished?

We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Eternal is the Eternal, the last word for each one of us belongs to Him. This is what I should have told this Jewish child. But I could only embrace him, weeping.

At the heart of our faith is Christ crucified. Crucified for young Jewish boys. Crucified for Nazi murderers. Crucified for you and for me. Crucified for sinful humanity. God in Christ.

“Night” (Elie Wiesel)