NB: I am not posting my sermon outline here because Dr. Peter Jones will be bringing the Word to us at Christ Church tomorrow. He is in town for our annual missions conference, which concluded this morning. Below is the outline for the talk that I presented at that conference, with which you will have …
Here and There Both
The Pharisees were characterized by missional zeal. Unfortunately, it was missional zeal for Pharisaism, but you can’t have everything. “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves” (Matt. 23:15). Actually, …
Gaming the Game
Inside each capable administrator, there is a petty bureaucrat, yearning to get out. Inside each visionary, there is a wild antinomian, yearning to get out. Each one is suspicious of the inner other guy, when they ought to be suspicious of their own inner guy. Mission cannot be accomplished without visionary leadership. Mission cannot be …
Five Degrees to the Left is not Upside Down
“Those of low estate are but a breath; those of high estate are a delusion; in the balances they go up; they are together lighter than a breath” (Ps. 62:9, ESV). The work of missions must be built on something more substantial than the need. The need, as Oswald Chambers put it somewhere, is not …
Fathers, not Sugar Daddies
Let us start with an obvious principle, and then go on to show that it is a biblical principle. Sometimes earthy observations are dismissed by Christians as having a carnal wisdom to them but, it is supposed, they somehow are not representative of the “way of the Spirit.” The principle is that you get more …
The Mission to Ramothgilead
A common way of reasoning in Proverbs is to contrast two options in order to illustrate for us what our priorities ought to be. For example, it is better to be poor and righteous than rich and unrighteous. But we have to remember that this is a choice between two when there are actually a …
Facebook Friend Missions
Just about all of us have been affected (and in good ways) by the communications revolution. But there are downsides, advanced in part by our ability to move our ignorance around the world at spectacular rates of speed. But there is another danger besides high-speed gossip and slander, which is the danger of mistaking a …
Thinly Disguised Brigandage
The Christian faith is inescapably political. Jesus is a king, and we are His polis. We are charged with bringing the gospel to every nation, and we are to preach that gospel in such a way as to topple the central idols of every people group. When those idols are toppled, the worship of God …
Unintended Mission Consequences
C.S. Lewis famously says somewhere that when Jesus tells us to feed the poor, He does not give us lessons in cooking. There are certain craft competence issues that we have to figure out ourselves, relying on industry standards and our own sanctified wits. Of course, industry standards of craft competence and our own sanctified …
Laughable, Right?
Whenever you build an organization (and this would include mission organizations), there is an inexorable tendency to have the mission shift from the original mission to the maintenance of staff positions. In his recent (very fine) book, David Mamet says something very important. He is not talking about mission organizations per se, but rather human …