An older colleague and I have been discussing an article that he found recently. The article, entitled, Five Kinds of Christians appeared online just over a year ago online at ChristianityToday.com. The article presented the findings of a survey conducted by Leadership Magazine. After some banter back and forth about the general topics found within the piece, my friend and I entered into an interesting discussion about the following statement:

Another necessary shift is recognizing that the old metrics of success may no longer apply. Wilkerson says, “We need to spend the next ten years investing in the life of our surrounding community and finding ways to regain a hearing for the gospel. Instead of going to the nursing home and holding a church service, we’re just going to go and love and serve people for years and years, until the staff and residents ask, ‘Why do they care so much?’ This won’t result in 150 decisions for Christ in a year. You might not see results for five or ten years.”

I resonated deeply with what he said. I became convinced long ago that the “build it and they will come” mentality no longer works, nor is it applicable to the way actual ministry works. That is if we really want to follow the mandate of Matthew 6:9-13, where we are taught to pray for the fulfillment of God’s Kingdom so that it manifests on earth as it is in heaven.

Jesus spent an extraordinary amount of time building personal relationships. Most of the salvation accounts in the Gospels took place after a personal encounter between Jesus and someone lost. Jesus reiterated this when describing the concern the shepherd has for the one sheep that had been lost (Matthew 18 and Luke 15). Make no mistake, I still think that preaching to a mass of people remains an important way to spread the Gospel, but when the time is ripe for the real life change - personal and intimate interaction is needed.

This is where my colleague and I differed in perspectives. His response to this shift in strategy was much more pessimistic: “Can you see the Army, or any church doing this?” He figured (correctly) that to make this shift we would need to “view forward beyond the end of the next fiscal or program cycle” and that this would be where such a shift would stall.

At the beginning of this discussion I noted that the conversation was between myself and an older colleague, and this was intentional because I don’t think most leaders of the older generations are able to look beyond the end of our cyclical calendars. We are unfortunately tied securely to such calendars and our operational systems are largely dependent on them for every facet and function of our existence.

We do not have the luxury of the time that is needed for such relationship building. And if we did manage to carve out the necessary time in our own schedules, certain other things would suffer to the detriment of not only our statistical tributes, but also our status (value, sense of worth) in the eyes of administration.

A large portion of our (outside) funding requires us to push for the ramped-up statistics because more people equal more dollars and more dollars equal more people. It is a never-ending cycle, it seems. My concern is that continuing in this type of activity pulls us further away from the mission Christ set us to reach the lost.

Can you see the Army making and promoting the necessary change?

Rob Reardon

© 2009 Rob Reardon, all rights reserved.

When the term “Christian” is used, it conjures up different images ranging from the shoeless, homeless man on the street holding a hand-made cardboard sign to the Mega-church preacher in his $3000 suit, driving around town in a Cadillac to Mother Theresa quietly serving in the streets of Calcutta to the loud and often obnoxious guy with the bullhorn loudly condemning everyone to hell on the streets of downtown on a Friday night.

As the word “Christian” brings many different images to mind, so does the term “Salvationist.”
Some think of the good old days, replete with brass bands, flags and open air meetings. Then there are the Primitive Salvationists, the Neo-Salvationists, the Liberal Salvationists, the Conservative Salvationists and the images of establishment and abundance at various Temples and Citadels and Tabernacles even juxtaposed with the contextual poverty of the 614’s and NEO’s.

Are such labels a bad thing? “Why can’t we just remove the adjective and call ourselves simply Salvationists?”, some say. But I’m not so sure we can. In a Movement (another label) as large as ours, in as many different countries and cultures, led by a new and different personality every three years or so, the word we place before the term “Salvationist” often helps more than it harms. In this case, the adjective is a good thing.

The adjective prefacing “Salvationist”, that I have been thinking about lately, is “Emergent.” Much is being said of late around the idea of the Emergent Church and Emergent Christians. Standard bearers such as Brian McClaren and Shane Claiborne and others seem to have started that conversation and many of the people in my life are involved in it.

What can be said of an Emerging Salvationism? Or of an Emergent Salvationist?
Do Primitive- or Neo- Salvationists get the last or, for that matter, the next word as it relates to the future of The Salvation Army?

Can a new movement of Salvationists rise up, take the wheel of the ship, and say, “We are not letting you steer us toward the iceberg any longer!”

But is there an iceberg? Is anybody even driving the ship?

It seems to me there are a lot of people jumping off into life rafts, and it is the thought of friends of mine jumping off that is keeping me awake at night. You know people like them - attracted to Jesus and to the Mission of the Army, but feel there is no room for them in what is commonly called ‘The Salvation Army’ unless they also swallow a lot of additional stuff they have no interest in or connection with. And I’m not even talking essential stuff here, but rather doctrinal and traditional distinctives, fine print added to the bottom of the contract of serving God through our mission.

Perhaps they simply need someone to say to them, “Don’t leave! Don’t give up! Don’t head to the nearest non-denominational church! There’s room for you at the Army!” But maybe I am wrong. Maybe I’m too idealistic. Maybe I am simply naïve. Maybe it is simply not true to tell my friends who are considering leaving the Army that there is room for them. The reality is that far too often, there is not.

The Salvation Army in my neck of the woods is often coolly unconcerned about people who are about to leave, or about newcomers and outsiders who feel unwelcome. Personally I have no desire to disturb that part of the Army in any way. But as someone once wrote: “One doesn’t want to disturb a hornet’s nest unless, say, it’s hanging right in front of your front door and the hornets keep stinging your kids and scaring away your guests.”

What would be said of an Emergent Salvationist who picks up a broom and knocks the nest down?

Cory Harrison

© 2009 Cory Harrison.
All Rights Reserved

Reaching the world for Christ is a task for which many Christians long. For those of you who take this task seriously, realizing that it means much more than knocking on neighborhood doors and asking, “Do you know Jesus?”, you are aware of the importance of communication.

It’s fairly obvious that a Christian who wants to share the Gospel in a foreign land must know the language of that foreign land. And you also know that sharing the gospel in the vernacular is the only way to effectively seed the gospel in a foreign country. Unless a people are able to receive and teach the Bible in their own tongue, Christianity is doomed to disappear. Even those evangelized by the great Augustine of Hippo no longer exist as a body of Christ, due to the fact that the North African’s to whom Augustine taught the gospel were expected to receive the Gospel in Latin and worship as Westerners. It only required the Christians there to be persecuted before they quickly gave up their “Western” religion.

Ralph D. Winter, General Director of the Frontier Mission Fellowship, spent many years as a missionary in foreign lands, and he has brought to the attention of his readers in his article, “The New Macedonia: A Revolutionary New Era in Mission Begins”, that language and oceans are not the only barriers that must be crossed. It is just as important to understand the boundaries of social differences within our own communities.

Interestingly, many congregations want to reach every person in their neighborhood, but they only have one songbook and one form of worship. I am not an advocate of blended worship, as this would be like trying to develop a congregation where Japanese and Hispanics worship together. As Winter says, “Some go as far as granting separate language congregations, but hesitate when the differences between people are social and non-linguistic.”

The next time you wonder, “Where are all the twenty-somethings?”, consider the culture of your congregation. The generational arrogance of the young and the old often separates us by assuming that we should be able to easily accept one another’s culture in worship. But is this reality? Even Paul argued over whether the Greeks must live like the Jews (see Acts 15). This is often read as if it means that Jews are not to live like Jews any longer either. However, this is a misunderstanding of the text. The Jews were free to continue following the Jewish commandments, but they were not to force non-Jewish Christians to do the same. And even with their cultural differences of Christian worship and practice, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free. “I personally have come to believe that unity does not have to require uniformity, and I believe that there must be such a thing as healthy diversity in human society and in the Christian world Church” (Winter).

As Dr. Steve Strauss pointed out, there is a group of Christians, north of Mecca, who were previously Muslims. Although they now worship the One True God, confess that Jesus is the only begotten son of God, read, study, and teach the Bible, they continue to pray five times a day and worship on Friday, the Muslim holy day. These practices are so embedded within their culture that to tell them to do otherwise would destroy the opportunity to see them continue in their Christian faith.

Although it would not be ideal to say that people of different generations, ethnic groups, and financial status cannot worship together, it would be just as wrong to suggest that they cannot congregate and worship with those of similar social norms. To worship in a context that is familiar, throughout history, has been the one overarching recipe for the survival of Christianity among people groups in any culture or nation.

Forcing earlier generational worship styles, music, and even times upon newer generations is just as ineffective a form of evangelism as asking non-English speaking citizens to worship in America’s mostly Anglo, middle-class congregations.

There is one territory of The Salvation Army where every divisional youth leader has been told that, at every Divisional Youth Councils, only songs from the official Salvation Army songbook are to be used in worship. This is a case of confusing nostalgia for legitimacy. In this case, the older generation (younger generations also commit the sin of generational arrogance) has placed such a high value on the preservation of their historical forms that they don’t recognize the underlying message of their generational arrogance—We are not as interested in your worship as we are in your preservation of our expression of Salvationism.

If we are going to reach the world, we must recognize that there are many worlds within our own communities, not just across the oceans and national boarders.

“I see the world Church as a gathering together of a great symphony orchestra where we don’t make every new person coming in play a violin in order to fit in with the rest. We invite the people to come in to play the same score—the Word of God—but to play their own instruments, and in this way there will issue forth a heavenly sound that will grow in the splendor and glory of God as each new instrument is added” (Winter).

In His dust,
Johnny

© 2009 Jonathan P. Gainey and Flock’s Diner.
All Rights Reserved