Transubstantiate

The Parable of the Sower frees us from our desire for resolution.

How can we evangelize with integrity? As my husband and I lead our church together, this is a question we wrestle with a lot. Namely, in our enthusiasm to see people come to know Christ, how do we resist the temptation of results-driven ministry? How can we communicate the urgency of the gospel without manipulating others’ emotions or fears? How can we present the gospel in a way that is inviting without truncating the message to make it more palatable?

As we have processed these questions and temptations regarding evangelism, we have found ourselves both chastened and encouraged by the Parable of the Sower (Matt. 13). In this famous story, Jesus uses an analogy that would have been familiar to his Palestinian audience. According to Bible scholar William Barclay, farmers at the time would have sown their seed in one of two ways: either casting out the seed by hand or strapping a bag of seed to the back of a donkey, tearing a hole in the sack, and letting the seed spill out as the animal crossed the field.

In both scenarios, the seed would have been vulnerable to variables such as wind or rocky terrain, but because of these two different practices, the identity of the “sower” in this parable remains unclear. Perhaps we are the human sower, or perhaps we are the farmer’s donkey, but it is “God who gives the growth” (1 Cor. 3:7, ESV). In this way, the parable is symbolic of three “actors” who are present in the sharing of the gospel—you, the hearers, and God—and until we understand these roles properly, the work of evangelism will be much harder and more burdensome than God ever intended.

Your Role

In Matthew 13, the sower goes out to sow (v. 3), and he sows into all sorts …

Continue reading…

What happens when you plant a church only for Walt Disney World employees?

I saw Pluto just a few minutes earlier. Now I happen upon Wonderland’s Alice, chatting away with a clerk at the Tea Caddy in Epcot’s United Kingdom. Of course she’s in character­­—Alice, I mean—talking about her tea party experience with the March Hare and the Mad Hatter. As for the tea clerk, it’s complicated. Disney calls her a “Cast Member,” and her store is “on stage”—the parts of Walt Disney World that are visible to “guests” like me. But she’s from Bristol and her English accent is real. She plays herself, or at least a cheery, especially English version of herself. Her conversation is no more scripted than it is for retail clerks anywhere else in America, though perhaps with more discussion about Bristol.

Shortly after Alice scampers away, a man engages the clerk in conversation. It turns out her mum is coming for a visit soon. He asks her how long it’s been since she’s seen her mum, how long she’s been at Epcot, how long it’ll be before she heads back to the UK. He asks if she’s been homesick. (She is, she says with a very large smile.) The conversation ends with no reference to his large and prominent nametag: “Steven. Cast Member Church.” He’ll be back, sometimes to chat, more often to prayer-walk quietly with half a dozen or so other members of his small but growing church plant. He’s not there to evangelize; he respects both the Cast Member’s time and Disney’s rules against “solicitation.” Even if the clerk were a Cast Member Church member, he wouldn’t pray with her. “That could get them in trouble and the church in trouble,” …

Continue reading…

“High Christianity’s positive contribution to artistic culture can actually spill into every area of our lives.”

Ed: Keith, the album is dropping today. Tell me, what is this all about?

Keith: It’s called Sing! An Irish Christmas Live at the Grand Ole Opry.

We started writing this Christmas music ten years ago, and we could never have dreamed we’d get to do this ten years on.

But the Sing! Conference this year was ‘The Life of Christ,’ and the first day was ‘An Incarnation.’ Just as we were thinking about that and what we would do in the evening, we were talking about a new television special with PBS. TBN came around and said, “We want to put this around the world,” and they made a bigger vision for it. They said “Let’s create a new television special.”

So on the hottest day in 2019 in August, we recorded two Christmas shows at the Grand Ole Opry. So it’s really exciting; it’s part of a campaign to help to get the nation to learn the ten great carols of the faith in the hope that the people learn them and sing them to their kids and their grandkids and their friends, and that it will be something that they remember as the years go on.

When we were PBS artists, we would do half of our interviews on faith radio and half would be public television interviews, and there was quite a lot of questioning about why we would be trying to do religious carols, because apparently, in current surveys, only one in the top 40 Christmas songs is religious now, and this got me really riled up.

I thought, I’ve got to get people back to learning these carols, because they’re the master works of the Christian faith, and they help us learn it, and they are just so good to sing.

Continue reading…

An assessment of the Hispanic Church Planting Report reveals the necessity of training.

According to the Hispanic Church Planting Report, church planting basic training plays a major role when it comes to the number of new commitments to Jesus Christ in Hispanic congregations during the first four years of existence.

Typically, church plants grow when members from other churches transfer membership or when believers move to the area and are looking for a church.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with those methods of church growth, the goal of church planting is to expand the Kingdom of God through new believers who will also present the gospel to those who do not have a relationship with Christ.

Planters who received basic training in church planting prior to launching a new congregation saw more new commitments to Jesus than those who did not. Clearly, we have a case for investing time in church planters before they start working on the field.

One can argue that a church planter’s training should continue even after they have launched the church. From the survey, we see that regardless of the type and duration of the instruction, basic training positively impacts the success rate of church planters and the expansion of the kingdom, equipping planters to better understand essential factors in the church planting process.

This knowledge allows new churches to start healthier and be more evangelistic.

Any kind of training that church planters receive needs to establish the biblical foundations for the mission and the Christian character of the planter. Besides those key elements, basic training should address four main factors: calling, motivation, team development and leadership, and community exegesis and engagement.

First, when planters arrive to the basic training meeting, they have usually gone through …

Continue reading…

Incarcerated Christians have heard the sermon about the Prodigal Son. Now they need church.

Leon Leonard was a Christian, but he didn’t go to church.

There were a few reasons. One, he hadn’t been in a long time. Two, he’d done some things he wasn’t proud of and was afraid of being judged. And then there was the third reason: Leonard was in prison, serving a nine-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter.

In the hallway of Lebanon Correctional Institution in Ohio, though, he noticed a poster for a megachurch that was starting its newest campus right there in the maximum security prison.

He signed up. Days later, the 24-year-old was sitting in a prison classroom with 22 other inmates and a married couple in their 20s, who played them recorded worship music and last week’s sermon on an old TV. The newest site of Crossroads Church wasn’t much, but it was what Leonard needed.

“It rekindled my relationship with God,” Leonard recalled. “I became more steady in my walk.”

Crossroads is one of a handful of multisite churches across the country that have launched campuses in state penitentiaries—maximizing the benefits of the replicate-ready multisite model to develop prison ministries that go beyond evangelism alone to focus on community and discipleship. Church By the Glades has sites in prisons in Florida; Church of the Highlands in Alabama; The Summit Church and New Hope Church in North Carolina; Gateway Church in Texas; First Capital Christian Church and Emmanuel Church in Indiana; and The Father’s House and EastLake Church in California.

At Lebanon, the church started in 2011 with Grant and Kyla Doepel burning a DVD of the service at Crossroads’ main location and bringing it into the prison each week. The inmates, including Leonard, would help …

Continue reading…

It’s time to remember the qualifications of biblical leadership.

Something doesn’t smell right in Lynchburg, Virginia, home of Liberty University and its controversial president, Jerry Falwell Jr. According to a September report in Politico:

“Everybody is scared for their life. Everybody walks around in fear,” said a current university employee who agreed to speak for this article only after purchasing a burner phone, fearing that Falwell was monitoring their communications…. “Fear is probably his most powerful weapon,” a former senior university official said.

Politico also reported that many Falwell confidants are concerned that tuition money is going “into university-funded construction and real estate projects that enrich the Falwell family and their friends,” going on to detail a number of examples.

Days later, further glimpses of Falwell’s leadership character emerged when Reuters quoted leaked emails in which he called some students “social misfits,” called the school’s police chief a “half-wit and easy to manipulate,” and said students trying to avoid Liberty parking fees were egg-sucking “dogs.”

There is plenty in the reports for Falwell and defenders to argue with. Many accusations were based on anonymous sources, and allegations of financial misconduct, to the degree there is any, of course must be borne out by impartial investigations and credible evidence.

Still there is an odor in the air. Falwell doesn’t emphasize that he is innocent but that, “In the end, they [his accusers] are going to look like fools.” He believes the entire affair is about power. He told CNN: “I think it’s all a political-based attack by people who wanted to run the school for themselves.” …

Continue reading…

Kathryn Kuhlman’s story offers a case study of the indisputable achievements of strong evangelical women and the equally indisputable roadblocks they often face.

“You have been called ‘hypnotic, charismatic, hypnotizing,’” said Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show in 1974. His guest resisted. With a disarming smile, she said she was “just the most ordinary person in the world.” Carson didn’t buy it. “You’re not quite ordinary.”

With this telling anecdote, Amy Artman launches her masterful biography of Kathryn Kuhlman, a charismatic healing evangelist who emerged in the post-World War II era alongside Oral Roberts. It’s hard to say whether Roberts or Kuhlman was the most prominent healing evangelist of the day, but it’s easy to say that she was the most prominent woman in the field. At the height of her ministry, many people considered Kuhlman “the best-known woman preacher in the world.” Very few female religious leaders of any theological stripe were famous enough to snare a berth on a network talk show like Carson’s.

Kuhlman’s story is a big one, yet she has won little attention from historians. Most American religious history textbooks give her a few sentences at most and some none at all. In The Miracle Lady: Kathryn Kuhlman and the Transformation of Charismatic Christianity, Artman not only rescues Kuhlman from undeserved obscurity but also crafts a sweeping interpretation of the cultural origins of the modern charismatic movement. (Artman is careful to credit her secondary sources, including Edith Blumhofer, David Edwin Harrell, Wayne Warner, and, in the interest of full disclosure, me.)

Artman—who teaches religious studies at Missouri State University—offers ample biographical details, but her main interest lies in two overarching arguments. The first is that Kuhlman was one …

Continue reading…

The movement is richer and more diverse than media portrayals suggest.

There was a time when the term evangelical was a badge of honor, not a cause for embarrassment. In 1976, Newsweek magazine proclaimed “the year of the evangelical,” heralding the new prominence of theologically conservative Protestants with the cover story “Born Again!” At the time, evangelical churches were expanding rapidly, and the movement, which was still politically and theologically diverse, seemed well positioned not only for continued influence but also for a positive effect on the nation’s morals. With a newly elected evangelical Democrat ready to enter the White House—and with evangelicals of both parties embracing racial diversity, antipoverty programs, and a host of intellectual and artistic endeavors—evangelicalism hadn’t yet acquired its pejorative connotations.

Four decades later, this state of affairs is difficult to imagine. The political behavior, sexual peccadilloes, flamboyant posturing, and harsh rhetoric from some of America’s most prominent evangelicals have tarnished the movement’s reputation. For some, the nadir occurred in 2016, when 81 percent of white evangelical voters cast ballots for Donald Trump, with some Christians attempting to excuse his racially charged and sexually crude behavior.

Now that much of the public equates the term evangelical with the Republican Party and conservative politics, is rehabilitation possible? Perhaps, as Thomas Kidd suggests in Who Is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis, it helps to step back and enlarge our field of vision. Seen only from the perspective of the 2016 election, alongside the internal disputes and stagnating membership numbers that have accompanied its increasingly negative …

Continue reading…

Bearing witness to our past and present reveals a relentless love in the face of evil.

In The New York Times’ 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones writes, “Black Americans have been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom.” On the 400th anniversary of Africans arriving to this land as slaves, she makes the case that “It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy,” that black Americans have pushed toward the country’s ideals in spite of their circumstances.

I’ve heard it said that history is a “dangerous” memory. It never lets us go until we attest to the wounds and commit to healing. It presses upon us that piercing but powerful word: love, love, love.

Still, it is hard to see how society might change, how such healing might finally come about. Rarely does the one who injures another have the moral imagination to do right unless forced to. Even spiritual awakening, religious education, and visionary declarations have often bore bad fruit. Plenty of promises of peace and freedom only brought on further oppression.

Even if we don’t have all the answers now, we must bear witness. And we must prophesy hope.

The black church in America offers a rich legacy of faith that—like the crucifixion itself—exists at the intersection of chaos and pain and love. Its stories shine through to our present day and remind us that history without hope is indeed a history without help.

The Chaos of Darkness

What greater tribute could be paid to religious faith in general and to their [slaves] religious faith in particular than this: It taught a people how to ride high to life, to look squarely in the face of those facts that argue most dramatically against all hope and to use those facts as raw material out of which they fashioned …

Continue reading…

Hero is the first and last word that comes to mind as I reflect on the passing of Dr. Lon Allison, former executive director of the Billy Graham Center and teaching pastor at Wheaton Bible Church.

We ought never take the word or concept of ‘hero’ lightly. It is reserved for those who live with courage and boldness, who see things a little differently than most and who inspire us to be better and do better. Hero is the first and last word that comes to mind as I reflect on the passing of Dr. Lon Allison, former executive director of the Billy Graham Center and teaching pastor at Wheaton Bible Church.

After a nearly 2-year batter with cancer, Lon went to be with Jesus today.

After being diagnosed with liver cancer, Lon, a trained actor who loved to use his full self to express his love of God and our world, sang this remarkable renditionof Chris Rice’s “Untitled Hymn.” The words must never be lost on us:

Weak and wounded sinner, lost and left to die
O, raise your head for Love is passing by

Come to Jesus, come to Jesus
Come to Jesus and live

Now your burden’s lifted and carried far away
And precious blood has washed away the stain

So sing to Jesus, sing to Jesus
Sing to Jesus and live

And like a newborn baby, don’t be afraid to crawl
And remember when you walk, sometimes we fall

So fall on Jesus, fall on Jesus
Fall on Jesus and live

Sometimes the way is lonely and steep and filled with pain
So if your sky is dark and pours the rain

Then cry to Jesus, cry to Jesus
Cry to Jesus and live

O, and when the love spills over and music fills the night
And when you can’t contain your joy inside

Then dance for Jesus, dance for Jesus
Dance for Jesus and live

And with your final heartbeat, kiss the world goodbye
Then go in peace, and laugh on Glory’s side

And fly to Jesus (Fly to Jesus)
Fly to Jesus (Fly to Jesus)
Fly to Jesus and live

In a world which screams at us to value many things—money, …

Continue reading…