Session 5 - Witness & Mission | Core Testimony

The mission of the Church begins with the mission of God.

From the beginning, God has been at work restoring His creation and drawing His children back into life with Him. God called Israel to become a visible community of justice, peace, and human flourishing. In Jesus, God entered the story personally, accomplishing what His people could not accomplish for themselves. Now the Church lives between Christ’s resurrection and His promised return, bearing witness to what God has done and beginning to live the life of His coming Kingdom.

Wayne describes this calling as seeking the thriving of others without coercion. Christian witness makes our faith visible through the way we live and the testimony we offer. Christian mission moves beyond individual lives into the shared work of restoring goodness, resisting evil, learning the heart of Jesus, and bringing signs of God’s future into our neighborhoods and communities.

This session invites us to consider a pointed question: If someone asked whether the Church truly cares, whose name could we give them?

Transcript

Choir Room Words That Sting

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One of the great preachers and teachers of preaching in a previous generation was Fred Craddock. He died some years ago. And he told the story of being in a great church, large church building with all of the wonderful things that a healthy church does and is. And he was asked to be the preacher for a Sunday morning. Now he had several appointments scheduled through the day, and so he had to leave right after the worship service in order to get to his next appointment. It was a nice service. There was a choir singing. The choir was beautiful. The music, the hymns were wonderful, the response was great. But right after the service, Fred Craddock had to leave for his next appointment. And so instead of standing out in the crowd of people at the exits, he went through the choir room in order to get to his car so he could drive to his next engagement. As he was passing through the choir room, the choir members were taking off their robes and hanging them up on the hangers that were provided for them. And he passed by one of the sopranos and she said in one of these loud voices that is meant for no one and for everyone, well, I guess that's as good as a way as any to end it all. And he stopped short. What was she thinking? Was she contemplating the end of her life? What was going on here? So he he said to her, I'm sorry, I heard you say that's the way to end it all. What do you mean by that? Oh, she says, don't worry about me. She says, This is the last Sunday I'm singing in this choir. Been singing in this choir for 25 years, but I don't know. It just doesn't seem to matter at all. They don't care. What do you mean they don't care? Ah, she says, I've been a member of this church all my life. And they don't really care about anything. They don't care about me. We try to do our work well. We try to sing in the choir, but nobody really cares. They don't care. And that really hit Fred Craddock hard. He said, I really don't have the time to talk with you about this, but I'd really like to have a further conversation. Could I stop by your place later on today? Oh, you don't have to do that. It's no trouble. Don't worry about me. No, he said, I'd really like to. I'd like to talk with you further about what you mean about this church not caring. It seemed to be a wonderful congregation. Nah, they don't really care, and you don't have to do that. But finally he insisted that he was going to come to her place that afternoon. So they arranged for a time and he got her address and then he went on to his next appointment. He spent time in the car thinking about this idea. They don't care. They don't care. They don't care. And that really resonated with Fred because he had had that experience when he was just a little boy.

A Father’s Refrain About Church

SPEAKER_00 2:53

His mother used to get him and his brothers ready to go to church on Sunday mornings. There was a church at the corner of their street, a little Bible church, and his mom would get each of them ready, look for washing behind the ears, and they had little bow ties that they attached to the corners of their shirts and they got all cleaned up. And all the while that this was taking place, Fred remembers his dad, who never went to worship services, sitting in the big overstuffed chair that he always sat in and hiding behind the Sunday morning newspaper, big newspaper. He'd sit there and he'd read it, turning the pages, and he'd mutter. And all the while that his wife, Fred's mom, was getting the kids ready for worship, he was saying, Well, they don't care. They don't care. Those people in the church, they don't care. They just want some more bodies, they just want your money. They don't really care about anybody or anything. And Fred had that drilled into his ears, into his heart during those young years. His dad said, the church doesn't care. Until one time, many years later, now Fred was fully grown.

Cards On The Wall Change Everything

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His mother had passed on. His father was now in the hospital. He had cancer. It was likely that his life would end very soon. He had been a smoker all his life, and he got lung cancer and throat cancer and radiation and chemotherapy. The big strapping guy was down when Fred came to see him in the hospital, down to 97 pounds, almost skin on bones. He couldn't talk because the tubes were in his nose. He couldn't feed himself. It was nutrition going in and things that were alleviating his pain. His throat had been burned out by the radiation, trying to address the cancer. His body was wasted away. And Fred came to see his dad, knowing it'd probably be for the last time. He stood in the doorway and he looked at his dad, terribly small in that hospital bed. And he said, Hey Daddy, how are you doing? Fred's dad couldn't speak. So he grabbed for something that he could write on, and the only thing that was near him that seemed to have some space, he grabbed a pen, and there was a box of facial tissues that had an open white space on the bottom. So Fred's dad grabbed for that with his weak hands and arms, and he began writing on there. He wrote a line from Shakespeare's play Hamlet. His dad had always liked Shakespeare and his dramas. It was from Hamlet, that tragedy of everyone doing the wrong thing and often conniving against one another and the whole world seeming to come apart and senseless and meaningless and painful. And now Hamlet himself is dying because he's been poisoned and he's been struck, and others are attacking him, and he's falling to his death, and his friend Yaduk was there, and he says to his friend, In this cruel, in this harsh world, draw thy breath in sorrow to tell my story. He wants someone to remember his story and to pass it along, how he tried to do the right thing, even though everything fell apart. That's what Fred's dad now writes on the bottom of that tissue box. And Fred comes close to the bed and he holds his dad's hand. And he says to his dad, What's your story, Daddy? What's your story that I can tell? And then his dad did something quite astounding. There was this cart where meals are usually put. It's on wheels and it slides over a hospital bed, and people can eat from the cart when the meals are brought, but Fred's dad couldn't eat anymore. So instead of there being a place for meal trays on there, there were all stacks of cars. And Fred began to look through them, seeing the best wishes and the assurances of prayer and the desire for healing and all of that. And then Fred's dad went like this. He went and kind of waved his hand around the room, and there were cards taped on the walls, and there were plants on every place you could set anything, and there were flowers, and there were other cards standing up on the windowsills. And Fred quickly noticed that most of the cards that he read, just standing quickly, came from people who belonged to that little church on the corner. That church that Fred's dad had always said to his mom, they don't care. And these people were the very ones who were now remembering him, thinking about him, wishing him well, and praying for him. Fred's dad reached for that tissue box one more time, and he wrote on the bottom three words. Fred had asked him, What's your story, Daddy? And Fred's dad had written these three words. I was wrong. I was wrong. And now Fred is going back to see this soprano from the choir, from the congregation where Fred preached that morning.

The Soprano Demands A Name

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He comes to the place, the address where she lives. He knocks on the door. After a little while, she opens the door. She looks at him and she says, I didn't think you'd come. No, says Fred, I promised I would come. Well, as long as you're here, you might as well come in. She prepares some tea for them. They sit down in the chairs and they talk to one another. And he says, What's your story? And she says, Well, I've been part of this church all my life, and they don't really care about me. They don't care about my family. They don't really care about anybody. They just want numbers. They're always talking about numbers. They always are talking about money. We need money for more buildings and more things that we have to do. She says, they don't really care. And Fred says to her, now I don't know much about your congregation. I was invited here to be the speaker at worship this morning, but I'm guessing that there are a lot of people in your congregation that do care. It's a Church of Jesus Christ, after all. Nah, she says, they don't care. He says, I'm sure they care. She says, no, they don't care. He says they have to care. That's what it is to be a Christian. She says, really? He says, really? She says they care? He says they care. She says, name one. Well, now she wants names? Names? Names of people who care? In the church. And Fred thinks about that a little bit. Whose name should he give her? The pastor of the congregation? The choir director? People who've been members a long time? Whose name would you give to her if you were to think about someone who cared? Would you tell her about friends of yours? Would you give her your name? Would I give her my name? There's something kind of pointed about the mission of the church, isn't there? The idea that we in fact might need to care. That the primary aspect of the church's identity is to care. We've been looking at a number of things in these weeks. We started out with the idea of faith itself, because not

What The Church Exists To Do

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everybody is Christian. They see the world that I see, but they see it in a different way. We talked about worldview and the choices we make about the questions that are before the questions that we have, the questions about the existence of the world. Why does the world exist? Why do I exist? What's meaning? What's purpose? Where's it all ending? What's the unity that brings it together? Worldview connected to faith, belief that there is a way of understanding this world that makes sense, and that way can be and should be for us connected to a God who actually created us and cares about us. We looked in the second session about how do we know God? How has God become aware among us? How have we thought about God? What's the revelation by which God has made God's own self known to us and the changing and growing understanding we have of God through the story of the Bible, through the redemptive history of Israel and Jesus and the church? And then we talked about the Holy Spirit and what is the Holy Spirit? Or we talked about the work of Jesus. How do we understand the work of Jesus? What exactly did he do and what is its effect on us? And then we talked about the Holy Spirit and how the Holy Spirit applies that work and how the church becomes a living and powerful reality in this world. And now we're talking about. So what does the church do? How does the church exist? What does the church look like? How does the church live? What is the witness of the church? What is the mission of the church? How do we then carry out whatever it means to be the followers of Jesus? I've suggested in the past that the Bible itself can be understood in six M words,

The Bible’s Story In Six Ms

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four of those related to the Old Testament and then pouring over into the New Testament, and then two in particular with the New Testament. It starts out with the mission of God. That God is the one who made this world, that God is the one who created humans as the crown of the creation, made as children of God in the image of God, and the thing has gone wrong in some horrible ways. But God is on a mission to recover the creation and especially the children of God, all of us. That method by which God accomplishes that through the Old Testament is to partner with the family of Abraham. The world has gone awry, and people are no longer connecting with their creator, and God has to choose a way in which to reinvest into the human race without coercion, without just simply wiping them out, without manipulating in ways that are harsh and take away the freedom of human identity. And so God partners with the family of Abraham. And there's a long history to that. And finally, God partners with Abraham's family and places them by way of rescue and settlement in what's called the Promised Land. Why this promised land? Because it's at the center of the global movements of all of God's children in those times, the migrations from Africa to Asia to Europe and back again, the people movements all over the world in a time before planes, trains, and automobiles. And there, this community that God has uniquely shaped and taught and formed by his covenant identity, this unique community has the ability to live in a way that makes sense to the other nations. The prophet Isaiah says if this takes hold, if people see this, they will stream to Jerusalem, to Zion, and they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not make war against nation, nor will they seek to learn war anymore. And people will say, come, let's walk in the light of the God of Jacob. So there's this transformation that's there. And that's managed, that method of God's mission is managed by a number of key leaders. Moses is the critical person at the start of this era of God's activity. And then there's Joshua who follows him, and then the elders, and then the judges, and then the kings, and finally the prophets. And during the days of the prophets, the fourth thing takes place, and that's sort of the meltdown. So you have the mission, the method, the managers, and the meltdown. And the thing doesn't seem to have any legs. It's not going anywhere, it's falling apart. And the prophets continue to say, well, if this is the way things are, God's going to have to break in and make the thing happen, God's own self. God's going to have to come in the day of the Lord. And he's going to have to deal with the sin and evil. And he's going to have to spare a remnant people. And he's going to have to initiate the restoration of the community, of the creation itself, bring in the messianic age. The prophets are looking for that. And then we get to the New Testament, and that's where the other two words come in. And the first of those is the miracle, because when the day of the Lord arrives, God doesn't just send another Moses or another Samuel or another David. God sends God's own self miraculously in the person of Jesus Christ to do what was necessary, to provide judgment on sin, to provide salvation for a remnant community, to provide the beginnings of the messianic age in which things get back to the way they were supposed to be. But Jesus does a very strange thing that nobody saw coming. While Jesus completely accomplishes everything the day of the Lord was about, Jesus accomplishes that work only for Jesus and in anticipation for everybody else. But the transformation to the whole of creation does not come. In other words, this singular day of the Lord that the prophets talked about, Jesus splits in two, wanting his followers, wanting the disciples to tell everybody about this so that as many as possible of the children of God scattered around the face of the earth will come home before the final judgment happens and the transformation takes into, takes place into the new age, the messianic age, which we're going to look at next session. But what do we do living in that age? What do we do? There's a song that was popular when I was much younger. It was part of the pop music

The Treasure Under The Stone

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scene. It was even a theme song to a movie. It went like this Listen, children, to a story that was written long ago about a kingdom on a mountain and the valley far below. On the mountain was a treasure buried deep beneath a stone, and the valley people swore they'd have it for their very own. So the people of the valley sent a message up the hill asking for the buried treasure, tons of gold for which they'd kill. Came the answer from the kingdom. With our brothers, we will share all the secrets of our mountain, all the riches buried there. Now the valley cried with anger, Mount your horses, draw your swords, and they killed the mountain people. So they won their just reward. Now they stood beside the treasure on the mountain, dark and red, turned the stone and looked beneath it. Peace on earth was all it said. There's something powerful about that because that's the eternal conflict, isn't it? Between what God seeks to bring, not gold, not diamonds, not wealth, not riches, but peace on earth, where things are the way they're supposed to be, where children are born and can live healthy lives and play and work and learn, where people can engage in their talents in society and meaningful relationships and nations, live at peace with one another and promote the thriving and health of one another. And this becomes the mission of God and the mission of the church. In a sense, it's basically this: to encourage healthy existence

Thriving Without Coercion

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without coercion. And all of that is part of a very important thing. We were meant to live. That's why our bodies struggle to stay alive even against threats of disease and injuries and difficult times. We want to live because we were made to live. We are the children of the living God, and God made for us to live. But there are so many things that attack us and try to tear us down. There are certainly threats from the outside, wars and rumors of war, fighting, diseases, all sorts of oppression and stifling of creative activities. There are sociological things where we are put in categories and said, you can't do this, and you're not able to do this, and this is not for you. Only the elites can have this. There are sociological things in which we have the power hungry and the powerful ranged over against the powerless. And the only thing that the powerless are good for is helping us thrive in our wonderful kingdoms. We set ourselves over against one another until death becomes the norm of the day. And if there's anything that Jesus said that's of significance, he said to his disciples, I came that you might have life and have it to the fullness, to in abundance, that life as God intended for you to have it will thrive. And so the mission of the church is to encourage the thriving of life. How does that happen? What does that look like? One of the caveats I put in that statement to desire and to promote the well-being of others without coercion. That's an important thing because we know that sometimes coercion is necessary. For instance, if people are involved in a traffic accident and their lives are endangered because of punctures to their skin or to their organs, and there's a need for doctors and medications. Medical personnel to come in to free them from the wreckage and then will them to stay alive, force them to stay alive with medical means. For a brief time, that may be necessary. But in the long run, life cannot be coerced. We cannot continue to be parents to children who grow to adult years. When they are very young, we protect them and we coerce them in a good way to be as healthy as they can be. We coerce them to eat certain foods and not other foods. We coerce them into being in safe places and not in places that might jeopardize their health and well-being. But as they grow, they take on adult responsibilities and they become equals with us. And so they have their own way of living. We hope and we encourage that way of living to be healthy, but we cannot coerce that. The best of human life is wishing for the best, seeking the best, trying to thrive, but without coercion. And that becomes really what the mission of the church is all about. There's a sense in which the mission of Israel was exactly that. While Israel had a standing army, there are very few aggressive maneuvers that are taken by the armies of Israel in the Old Testament. They are mostly defensive things. Sometimes there are kings that choose not to do, to be righteous, and then they take their armies on terrible campaigns. And there are times in the book of Judges when whole of society is falling apart and very evil things are done. But by and large, the purpose of Israel's armies was merely defensive, and the goal of Israel's existence was to be the city set on the hill. Jesus would even say that, a light to the nations. If you see this, you'll be attracted to it and you'll say, wow, what do they have that we need? They will come and they'll seek wisdom. They'll wonder, what are you saying about God and life? What is this covenant that you're talking about? What are the nature of the regulations in society that bring health and well-being and protect those who have smaller or no voice at all? Thriving without coercion, public justice, as the Citizens for Public Justice talks about it. That government is not in the business of seeking to warp lives of others or create bastions of self-centeredness, but rather to allow all in societies to thrive and to have a voice that makes sense and to negotiate between the variety of needs so that the best of the needs can be addressed and given expression to. That's the way in which Israel was supposed to exist. And that's why the prophets so often spoke about things like just weights in the marketplace, about not taking usury or excessive interest when borrowing and loaning money, of equity in relationships, where it's not one person lording it over another person, where there's punishment for evil, but not excessive. And it's always, in a sense, of restoring people to society in a way that makes sense, of words that encourage, that help rather than cut and hurt and undermine. The prophets are constantly speaking about these things, promoting the thriving of all in the community without coercion. And that then becomes the witness of the church in the New Testament. The disciples are told to make disciples of

Witness That Looks Like Real Life

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all nations, and they're supposed to bring them into the new fellowship of the Christian church, and they're supposed to give shade to that community so that it begins to anticipate and look like the community that Jesus wants it to be. Now, sometimes we think about Christianity, and it's kind of all over the place, and we delight too often, perhaps, in making it into a theology. What's your doctrine of God? What's your doctrine of salvation? What's your doctrine of the church? What's your doctrine of the Holy Spirit? What's your doctrine of the last things? And we argue theology. In this, Muhammad and the Muslims rightly saw that both Judaism and Christianity by the seventh or eighth century had often turned into little fragments of society that were disputing with one another rather than promoting the health and well-being of society. And in that age and in that time, Muhammad, as part of this developing Islamic identity, established what have become to be known as the five pillars of Islam. And so Islam is not really recognized so much by its deep theology, although Islam has theologians. It's recognized primarily by its five practices. And what are the five practices of Islam? The testimony, the monotheistic testimony. There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Praha. There is, secondly, the daily prayers, five times, pausing to remember who you are and whose you are, and to bow toward Mecca and to pray to Allah. Do it with others, with prayers. The third one is almsgiving, that there are those in need in every society, and those who have should share with those who have not, and we should do something to make life better for everybody. The fourth is fasting, fasting in times of need and discernment, but especially during things like Ramadan, where the whole Islamic community is supposed to join in a corporate fast, recognizing dependence on Allah and reveling in the supplies of Allah after sundown with the great feasts. And then the fifth one is the Hajj, or to make pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in one's lifetime. Or if one can't do that to help others make the Hajj. So it becomes a religion of practices, five specific practices, the pillars of Islam. If one were to think about similar kinds of things with regard to Christianity, what kinds of pillars of behavior might one think about? And there have been really essentially four major pillars of behaviors that have become part of the DNA of Christian identity, or biblical identity, you might say, all the way through Old and New Testament. And they have to do with the flow of human history. The four pillars that Christianity points to in terms of behaviors are these. Number one, restore creational goodness. That's why there's the story of creation

Four Pillars Of Christian Practice

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in the Bible. While the Bible itself starts in that rescue story of the Exodus and the Sinai Covenant, it continually points back to the way that God intended for things to be. Why was the rescue necessary? Because that's not what God intended, and God had to kind of force God's way into human history to make things right again. So what was it that God was intending? To restore creational goodness. What exactly is the character of human life? Are we merely another biological phenomena in the long chains of evolutionary change? Or are we something special? And the Bible continually says human beings, while biologically similar to other parts of this world in which we live, are unique with some very unique characteristics. And that's because humans are uniquely the children of God, made in the image of God. And if one is to be on a mission for anything, one is on a mission to restore the creational goodness that humans were intended to have and to be and to display. And what exactly is the nature of the relationship between humans and the animal world and the plant world and the world around us generally? And so we see in those opening stories that there's a relationship of harmony and stewardship, not of using and abusing, not of taking and transforming in mean-spirited ways or for one's own aggrandizement. But there's this sense of participation and responsibility that's part of it all. And human societies, how we are intended to be people who together look toward the Creator rather than those who, like at the Tower of Babel, the descendants of Noah, sought to build their own kingdom that didn't need God. So there are things that are told in the early stories that become the benchmarks of what human life is all about, what the universe is all about. And they have to do with a kind of restoring the pristine character of what God intended. Wherever possible, that should be a benchmark of the values that we have to restore creational goodness. We know it's not going to entirely happen. And we'll talk more about that in the next session that we're never going to bring this eternal kingdom on earth by our own designs and devices. But it is a goal, a practice that becomes part of the mission of the people of God. The second practice of the people of God is pushing back against the effects of evil. In a way similar to that which we experienced some years ago with the COVID invasion and the threats to human health and the way in which everything was disrupted because we were unsure if when we breathed, we were breathing death into one another's faces. There is this pushback against evil. We know how evil we can be toward one another. We know the wickedness present in our world. We know the injustices that are there. And this is why, as part of the covenant that God establishes with Israel, there are the Ten Commandments, most of which are stated in negative terms. You shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, you shall not kill, you shall not covet. These kinds of things come from a world that is already compromised. And so the second of the practices of the people of God, the first is to try to restore whatever is possible of creational goodness. The second is to push back and restrain the power of evil. Like viruses, like decay, like cancerous cells, like those things in society that are harmful to different groups in society, to push back against what has become, unfortunately, all too often, the evil expression of human identity and living. The third thing is to learn the mind of the master. That is to say, if one falls in love, one begins to appreciate and adore, if rightly loved, the other person. If one falls in love and that love leads to marriage and a spouse, and that leads to the begetting of children, the coming of children, one adores those individuals and one seeks the well-being of those individuals. And one listens to those individuals as they thrive. One delights in those individuals. And the same is true in this world, which is God's world and we the children of God. If in fact we understand who we are and how we were made, then we begin to understand and love the God who made us. For we are the children of God. And so to have the mind of the Maker, the mind of the Master, we see that in different ways throughout the Old Testament. The Psalms talk about delighting in the law of the Lord. They talk about experiencing the grace of God, the forgiveness of God, shouting the praises of God. Those are things that are seeking to be one with God or one like the family of God and participate in the things that God loves and cherishes. And in the New Testament, we have an even greater experience of God, for God becomes one among us. Who is Jesus? What are Jesus' characteristics? What is the personality of Jesus? How does Jesus live? What do people say about Jesus? And if there's anything that's said about Jesus, sure there are the naysayers who say, well, he he thinks too much of himself. He thinks he's God, or there are those who say, he's a witch and he does magic tricks and stuff like that. But those who know Jesus best, they say, has anyone ever spoke like this before? There are people like Mary Magdalene who say, he loved me in a way that I had never been loved. And she's not speaking of romantic love. She's talking about the restoration of her own identity. There are those who see Jesus wishing the best for people and then performing miracles that allow them to become the persons they were intended to be, raising those who are lame so they can walk and leap and dance once again, bringing sight to the blind so that they can participate more fully in the things that human life is all about, opening the ears of the deaf, giving restoration of health to those who were sick, even raising those who died simply because death is not what God intended for us as human beings. There's so much that is part of learning the mind of the master, learning the personality of the maker, understanding the one who loves us into loving. It's the kind of journey that we often take in our own lives as we experience the ups and downs of our personal identities. When we're children, we delight in our parents, and they are the ones that we go to, we run to, we smile to in order to get them to smile. We want them to hold us, to cuddle us, to diggle us, to do all sorts of things. And then we come along and want to assert our self-awareness, our independence, and we sometimes push back at them. But when the life of our best life comes around, we come full circle, we say, you know, whatever they might have been, they really wanted us to exist and they cared about us. They didn't always do so perfectly, but truly we have to thank them for the lives we have. And so it is when we look at our heavenly Father, who loves us more than any of our parents ever could, and we have to learn to live in a way that reflects and echoes that lifestyle. And that's where we get Jesus saying things like the Beatitudes, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. And where we hear Paul talking about the fruit of the spirit when God is at work in us, bringing out love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And then there's one more thing in these four pillars of Christian behavior. Restore creational goodness, push back the evil effects of sin that happen in our lives and in our world, learn the mind, the mission and the heart of the master, and then finally lean into God's future. We'll look more at this next session, but right now, Jesus has said there's coming a day in which the other end of the day of the Lord will take shape, when there will be a breaking into human history once again and a restoration and restitution of all things. And whatever it is that God is seeking to do in the restoration of this world, this creation and human race, the church begins to live that out right now. In 2 Corinthians 5, Paul talked about if anyone is in Christ, new creation, the old is past, the new has come. And many places throughout the New Testament talk about living in anticipation of the coming of Jesus, the second coming of Jesus, living as if these things matter. So whatever it is that God is seeking to bring about in the human race, and there are hints about that, and that's what the book of Revelation in particular is about. Whatever it is God wants to do in the restoration of humankind and the world that God has created, that is what the church begins right now as its witness. Now it's important for us to think about those things in terms of both mission and witness. Four things, the pillars of behavior in the church and the witness and the mission. Restore creational goodness, push back the evil effects of sin, learn the mind, the character, and the mission and the heart of the master, and lean into God's future. And that happens in two ways in particular. One is witness and one is mission.

Personal Witness And Shared Mission

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Both are important, both are linked together, but both are slightly different. Witness is where our faith becomes active in our lives and we live as if those things actually matter. We live in ways in which those principles, those values become the driving force of who we are. And we speak about that and we give testimony to that. Sometimes without words, we live in that way. Francis of Assisi said, preach Christ always, sometimes use words. And that's what he did, right? To live as if these things actually shape our lives. That's the witness. Speaking about what God has done, who God is, what Jesus has brought us. I am a Christian. Why are you a Christian? Let me tell you these things, the witness that we have. But it's also the mission. And the mission is bigger than just individual witness. The mission is transformative. The mission is transformative in terms of engagement, of seeking to do those four things, not just in my life personally or in the life of my family, but in the neighborhood, in the society. What are ways in which the shape of our world, the shape of our communities is too much under the influence of evil and the powers of hell? And in what ways can we bring the insistence of another way, not by coercion, but rather by transformation? And that's where we come to this idea of witness and mission, the individual testimonies plus the corporate actions. Now, at one of the churches where I served, we had everyone participate in a membership covenant and renewal in which we encourage people to do five things on a regular basis. We said, these are the five things. A daily tithe in which you acknowledge God, a weekly task in which you give of yourself to those around you in ways that are not just for making money or aggrandizing yourself. A weekly tithe, a monthly task, a yearly team, a small group, and a lifetime testimony. These were the ways daily time, weekly tithe, monthly task, yearly team, and lifetime testimony. That's the way we tried to get people to live out. But there are also the corporate entities. And here are things like uh Rick Warren's saddleback church and the way in which he conceived of what the church was all about. He talked about it in terms of magnification, membership, maturity, ministry, and mission. That is to say, the church seeks to promote the worship of God in all aspects of life. It seeks to draw together the community of believers in fellowship and caring and restoring health and well-being. Maturity, we grow in faith through education and discipleship. We minister to others in the name of Christ. We help others around us that are not of our congregation to find the thriving that God wants for them and then. We seek to tell others why this all takes place. So magnification, membership, maturity, ministry, and mission, coupled with daily time, weekly time, monthly task, yearly team, lifetime testimony. Those things come together. Now, that doesn't really answer all the questions about how we might do that socially. And here's where I want to take us on a little bit of a theological sociological journal journey. And I'm looking

Niebuhr’s Five Ways To Engage Culture

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particularly at a guy named H. Richard Niebor. Many decades ago, he wrote a book that still I think is a powerful help in thinking about these things. He called it Christ and Culture. And here we're not thinking just about my testimony, my witness, nor my congregation's witness, but the mindset. How do we think about Jesus being a living reality in the world today? And H. Richard Niebor came up with five different ways historically that Christians have done this. The first of those is Christ against culture. And this was often what was experienced in the early church in the persecution that was there. You can be one of us in the shadows or in the catacombs, but in society, society is largely against us. That lingers today in what we sometimes see, for instance, in Amish and Hutterite communities where people exclude themselves from the world and build separated kingdoms. The Puritans tried to do that in the city on a hill in what's called New England of the United States. They left England, which was Christianized, but to start a pure Christian community. Christ against culture, our separated communities. A second possibility is Christ of culture. And some of the early philosophers in the Christian church looked at this. Clement of Alexandria was one of those. He said that he had studied Greek philosophy and there was a lot of wisdom in Greek philosophy. But then he became a Christian and he understood that the philosophy and the insights and the wisdom that was resident in Greek philosophy was true wisdom, but it was God's wisdom since God was the creator of all things and Jesus had come to restore that wisdom to the creation. So for Clement of Alexandria, there was this sense that wherever we see good in society, we ought to affirm that that's gone at work. That's another way of seeing this. And so sort of roll with the good areas of life and affirm these things and work together with others that are seeking the well-being of others. Because in all of that, Christ is present. A third possibility, said H. Richard Niebor, is Christ's overculture. And here we have the story of the Church of the Middle Ages, where human society is what it is, and we need by force sometimes to come in, and we need to almost colonize others and force them to become Christians. We have human society, which is so-so, and then we bring Christ and we make Christianity the kind of overlord of creation. This is sort of what happened in the colonial experiences of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries and on into the 20th century, where predominantly nations whose major religious expression was Christianity kind of sliced and diced the rest of the world and took it over and said, Well, we have to look after you. We're Christians and we're God's people and we love God and we do things the right way. And unfortunately, you don't know anything about that. So we're going to come in here and we're going to force you into our factories and our farms, and then we're going to fork you into our churches and we're going to Christianize you. Now, there are some good things that come out of that, obviously. Unfortunately, it happens in a way that sets people and societies over against one another and creates awful forms of racism that have pervaded our communities ever since. So that's Christ over culture. And it still happens in many respects today. Even in some of the kind of what we call paternalistic mission efforts, where rich Christians and Christian communities from, say, the United States or Canada or Europe, some places, send goods over to other places. We'll take our cast-off clothing and we'll put them in a shipping container and send it to some other country where they don't have so much. And then suddenly the economy in that other place is completely destroyed because local weavers and textile makers are out of business because things are dumped on them out of a kind of paternalistic we do, we have, and we do for those who don't have. A fourth way in which H. Richard Niebuhr talked about these things is Christ and culture in paradox. This was largely the way that Martin Luther, among others, began to conceive of it. And this becomes sort of a sacred secular divide where we do our Christian thing in the churches primarily on Sundays, and then we have to live in our secular vocations, our just humdrum lives and careers, which are shaped by the norms of society, not necessarily by our faith. We do our faith thing and then we do our worldly things. So kind of sacred, secular. And we see a lot of that happening within Christianity too, where people talk about their private faith and do you know Jesus? But they live in ways in society that don't really touch that personal testimony at all. There's a big difference between them. There's a line between them. I'm a Christian, but then I could do what I want in business and society. And then, said H. Richard Niebor, there's the fifth way, and it's Christ, the transformer of society. And he was thinking particularly about how Augustine and some of the early Christians, and then John Calvin in particular, began to think about there being only one kingdom of God, and that one kingdom of God was not in the church and not in the world, but or church and world differently. But there was one kingdom of God in which the church was sort of the anticipation of the way that God was reshaping all of society. It gets back to those four things again: creational goodness, promoting creational goodness and pushing back the effects of evil and learning the mind and the mission of the maker, and then leaning toward God's future. That becomes the transforming thing. Well, how do we do that? It's a way in which we think about the world not as the evil target for our personal evangelism, but in which we maintain a strong personal testimony, a witness, while at the same time seeking to encourage the thriving and the best welfare of those around us without undue coercion, seeking to restore the balances that God intended, the relationships that God was seeking to have in society, the stewardship of the creation in the manner in which God directly spoke to our first parents about and to know it after the flood, this sense of justice, this sense of knowing where the voices of some are muted, and then making sure that they have a place at the table and food and a recognition. All of these kinds of things. Christ, the transformer of society. Of course, from my vantage point and the things that I have learned and experienced over the years, I try to live in that fifth approach of H. Richard Niebor. Not Christ against culture, not the Christ of culture, not Christ over culture, not Christ and culture and paradox, but Christ the transformer of culture. In other words, the mission of God is to restore and bring back what it was that God had intended and place us in a new world where those things once again are fully experienced. How does that happen? Tony Kampala talked about going to Hawaii and speaking at a conference. And while he was there,

A Diner Party That Feels Like Gospel

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his body was out of sync with the time zone in Hawaii. And so he found himself up at 2 o'clock in the morning, and his stomach was hungry. And so he wandered around restaurants and clothes. Finally, he came to a diner down a dingy street, and he went in there, and it really wasn't a good choice because it was a dirty place that probably had been there since the Second World War, and probably the dirt and grime and frud was there too. He didn't even want to pick up one of the plastic menus because he was afraid that if he opened it, something with too many legs to count would crawl out of it. He went to the counter at the front of the diner, the guy behind the diner, he had a dirty apron on. He said, What do you want? And Tony said, I guess I'll have one of those donuts and a cup of coffee. Well, the coffee was stale and sour, and the donut was worse. And Tony wanted to drink a couple of quick swigs and maybe take a nibble off the donut and then get out of there. When all of a sudden, wham, the doors of the diner opened up, and a bunch of women, 40 in all at once, and they surrounded Tony, who was sitting at the counter. It was clearly obvious that these were nighttime street workers in Hawaii, in Honolulu, in other words, prostitutes, and that they had just finished with their nighttime activities. And now they were talking and yapping and yelling at one another all around Tony. And Tony didn't have a way of getting out of a seat. They completely surrounded him. And then suddenly they all left, and Tony said to the guy behind the counter, Do you do, do they do that often? Yes, says the guy behind the counter. They do that every night. That's why we stay open. We get some business that way. And Tony said, Well, I heard the woman standing next to me on my right here, yeah, he said, that's egg. She comes in here every night. I heard her say to the woman on my left that it's her birthday tomorrow and that she's never had anyone wish her well or bake her a cake. Do you think we could throw a birthday party for her? Well, the guy says, I don't know. And he looks back and through the hole into the kitchen where his wife is doing the things at the grill, cooking the food. He says, Hey, this guy says that Agnes has a birthday tomorrow and that uh he wants to throw a birthday party. And they decide that that'd be a good thing to do. And Tony says, Well, I'll go get a cake. No, says the guy, this is a restaurant, it's my place. I'll I'll make the cake. So they decide what they're going to do. And by 2:30 the next morning, Tony is there again with some stringers that say happy birthday and some uh plastic flowers on some of the tables. And the guy behind the counter is really excited because he says, Look at this, I've got a I've got a cake here. And it says on it, Happy Birthday, Agnes. And all of the words are spelled correctly. And there's even one candle in there. And he's so excited. And then he says, Yeah, my wife put the word out on the streets, and people are going to come in. And they began to come in. The whole place was absolutely filled with people on the streets, knowing there was free cake. They were going to get something to eat. And finally, on queue, three o'clock, the doors slam open. These women come in, they pour in, and everybody, Tony gets them to say, Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Agnes. Happy birthday to you. Agnes stops right there, completely bewildered. She's shaking. She doesn't know what to do with herself. Tears are streaming down her cheeks. And behind the counter, the guy says, Agnes, you gotta come here. You gotta take a look at this. I made you this cake. And she moves slowly ahead. And she sees this beautiful cake with her name on it. Happy birthday, Agnes, and candle. And the guy lights the candle and he says, Agnes, you gotta blow out the candle so we can cut it up and we can serve it. And Agnes just stands there shaking. She doesn't know what to do. And then she says, No one's ever done this for me before. No one's ever made me a birthday cake or thrown me a party. And then she says, My mother lives just around the corner. Would it be possible if I could take this cake and go show it to her? I promise I'll bring it back. And now the guy behind the counter is really torn because this was supposed to be his fake thing. He was throwing the parter. And suddenly he says, That guy's the one who decides, he'll have to ask him. She looks at Tony and Tony says, Agnes, it's your birthday. It's your day, it's your cake. If you want to take the cake and show your mom, you do what you want. And Agnes picks up that cake as if it's the Holy Grail itself. And she turns around and she walks out the door. The people part like the Red Sea in front of her, and she's gone. And what are they supposed to do? And now suddenly Tony gets up and he stands on a chair and he says, Let's pray. And he prays for these people and he prays for their well-being and he prays for Agnes that she'll have a good day and that she will experience the grace of God. And he prays for these people that they may know more fully just how much God loves them and what life can be like if they find themselves in the love of God. And when he finishes his prayer, he steps down, and the guy behind the counter says, You didn't tell me you were a preacher. Tony says, Well, that's who I am. Guy says, What kind of church are you a preacher at anyway? Tony says, I'm a church, a preacher at a church that throws birthday parties for prostitutes at three o'clock in the morning. Then the guy has to think about that for a little while. And he says, No, no, no, no. No, no, no. You're pulling my leg now. You couldn't be. He says, if there was a church like that, I'd be a member. Huh. Would that be the case? Is that man your friend? Is he in your church? And how do

A Healed Femur And True Civilization

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you know? One day, Margaret Mead, the great cultural anthropologist, was speaking at a university. She's the one who gave us coming of age in Samoa, spending most of her life on a South Pacific Island trying to figure out the rites and rituals of a society, how people are born, what happens to children, how they eat and how they court, and how they get work and how they grow into old age and all of these things. And Margaret Meade was speaking about these things at a university, and she gave time for questions and answers at the end. And then one young man stands up to a microphone and he says, Ms. Mead, what do you consider to be the first sign of civilization in any community? And she could have said a lot of things. Well, the domestication of animals or the development of language or symbolic language of arts and pictures on the wall or the cultivation of crops. But this is what Margaret Mead said. She says, I think the first sign of civilization in any community is where we find through our archaeological digs a healed femur. That astounded everybody. What do you mean, a healed femur? Well, the femur is the bone that runs between our hips and our knees. And she said the law of the jungle is this if you break your femur, you die. Because your femur carries the weight of your body. If you're out gathering berries, if you're out gathering food and you trip and you fall and your femur breaks, you will not be able to go back to your hut or your tent or anything, you will die. If you're in battle and someone attacks you and breaks your femur, you will fall and you will die. If a wild animal chases you and you fall and your femur breaks, you will die. She said, if we find a healed femur, the only thing we can deduce from that is that there was someone else who came along or who was with the person who fell and who would have died, who at great expense to herself or himself protected that person from the wild beasts, protected that person from enemy armies, protected that person from disasters that might happen, lifted that person, pulled that person to a place of safety, went out and got food and water for two people now, and tended to that person as long as it took for that person to heal once again. She said, the first place we experience civilization in any community is where there is a healed femur. And isn't that really what the gospel is all about? Paul says, while we were still sinners, alienated

Why Care Is The Church’s Calling

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from God, he came. He came from the other side. He protected us. He saved us. He picked us up, he cared for us, he established boundaries for us until we were safe enough and cared enough to be restored to health and dignity and well-being. And if there's anything that the mission of the church is all about, it's to restore civilization to the human realm, to bring back what God intended for God's children, the thriving of one another, the care for one another, in which we respect one another and bring a word of encouragement so that we restore the civilization that God intended for us to have. This is why we were made, and this is why we were remade in Jesus. And this is the witness of the church, and this is the mission of the church.