Missions in Europe

While I was posting my series on Christian Nominalism in Europe, I ran across a post from Tim Keller about nominal Christians on his Redeemer City to City blog site. Dr. Keller founded and pastors Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, and is especially noted for his skill in helping skeptics understand faith in Jesus Christ.

Here’s the link to his blog post – it would be great to read the whole post: Questions for Sleepy and Nominal Christians. I’d like to share the end of his article here:

So how do you wake up sleepy Christians and convert nominal Christians? Let me give you what I would call my modernized American versions of the kinds of questions I would ask people if I was trying to get them to really think about whether or not they know Christ. These questions are adapted from The Experience Meeting by William Williams, based on the Welsh revivals during the Great Awakening. He would ask people to share about these types of questions in small group settings each week:

How real has God been to your heart this week? How clear and vivid is your assurance and certainty of God’s forgiveness and fatherly love? To what degree is that real to you right now?

Are you having any particular seasons of delight in God? Do you really sense his presence in your life, sense him giving you his love?

Have you been finding Scripture to be alive and active? Instead of just being a book, do you feel like Scripture is coming after you?

Are you finding certain biblical promises extremely precious and encouraging? Which ones?

Are you finding God’s challenging you or calling you to something through the Word? In what ways?

Are you finding God’s grace more glorious and moving now than you have in the past? Are you conscious of a growing sense of the evil of your heart, and in response, a growing dependence on and grasp of the preciousness of the mercy of God?

Put together, that is a growing understanding of grace.

I think these questions fit well with the strategy I outlined in my posts. They also fit with the idea that “God is carrying on a conversation with every person on the planet” – paradigm shifting words for me from one of my professors, Dr. Reggie McNeal.

What do you think? Do the questions fit with a strategy that revolves around the Word, life-on-life witness, obedience-based discipleship, relationship and community, in the power of the Holy Spirit? Do they speak to your heart?

Berlin Cathedral
from wikipedia

In part 1, I introduced a five-part strategy for reaching “secular” Christians:

The Word

Life-on-life witness

Obedience-based discipleship

Relationship and community

The power of the Holy Spirit.

This post will focus on the last two elements of that strategy.

Relationship and Community.

Relationship has two aspects – relationship with God, and with others, or community. In the Matthew passage, Jesus shows that people can do mighty works in His name, yet never have a relationship with Him. They say, “Lord, Lord,” and He says “I never knew you.”  We all have a desperate, created need for personal relationship with God. It is this intimate knowledge of Christ that allows us to take our focus away from the amazing works done in His name, and onto the hearing His words and doing what He says.

Jesus also proclaims His presence with us when we are together. “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.” ^[1] This communion of at least two or three is an irreplaceable part of our relationship with Christ. We sometimes take Mt. 18:20 to mean “at least two or three”, and Jesus may have had that in mind, but perhaps He meant exactly what He said – two or three – the basic building block of community.

In that small, basic community unit we have a real chance to see life-on-life witness and obedience-based discipleship with a true opportunity for application and accountability. As two or three people interact with one another, in real life situations, they can quickly see action and reaction, speak into one another’s lives, and experience true transparency.

When we read Christ’s words from Mt. 7:16 about fruit inspection, we see how much more workable this becomes in an intimate group setting. In addition, as we understand what a contemporary European, a “secular Christian,” thinks about church, we can see that the small, core unit may be the only way to woo him to Christ. He thinks that church is a big, old, empty building; or a political system that is hopelessly out of touch; or a gang of mutually enabling pedophiles; or – at best – a group of well-meaning, but naïve individuals. The idea of the Church being family, or a squad of fellow warriors, or a trio of bff’s (best friends forever) has never occurred to him.

Relationship with Christ and one another, in community, relies on the indwelling, transforming work of the Holy Spirit. A strategy for winning “lay liberals,” though, is also dependent on the power of the Holy Spirit, the final component of our strategy.

Power of the Holy Spirit

When we include the power of the Holy Spirit as a key element of our evangelism strategy, we give more than lip-service to Him, and He becomes more than just a spiritual magic wand to make sure we include God in the midst of our hard work to win the world for Him. We actually may need to re-learn the reliance on the Holy Spirit that our grandfathers possessed, but mothers and fathers lost through a poisonous mix of reason and science, charismatic frauds, and unbiblical reactions.

Today’s European continues to search for manifestations of power. Beliefs in myriad superstitions; visits to witches, miracle healers, and New Age practitioners and reliance on astrology and horoscopes cause some to claim that animism is far from dead in Europe. “Opinion polls in Europe show high levels of belief in quasi-religious ideas such as reincarnation, but also in folk superstition: horoscopes, clairvoyance, ghosts, and so on.”[2]

Of course, the Holy Spirit is far more than just another alternative ghost. He is far more than a cosmic Force that enables His Jedi to manipulate reality. Reliance on His leading in our lives, and on His power to change others’ lives, gives us boldness, though, to proclaim His existence and demonstrate His powers of healing and transformation.

In conclusion, although Europe is faced with a rising tide of secularism, it still hangs on to the vestiges of Christianity. But it’s not enough to be a “Golden Rule Christian.” We must enter in at the narrow gate, and we are called to be faithful teachers, who call others to squeeze through that tight passage onto the unpopular trail toward life.

In total reliance on the Holy Spirit, operating in transparent community, we live and proclaim an obedience-based discipleship that can be freely examined through our life-on-life witness. Instead of relegating the Bible to a book on the shelf, between Voltaire and Nietzsche, we boldly acknowledge it as our life authority. Hearing and doing Jesus’ words, we become wise builders, not only of our own lives, but of a new form of radical Christ-following that can be both attractive and challenging for nominal Christianity.

Frauenkirche, Munich
from wikipedia

This and the next post are the conclusion of a 7 part series on Christian nominalism in Europe

Taking Jesus’ words into consideration (parts 1 and 2), leaning on an understanding of what we know about “secular Christians” (3 and 4), and even using the Lausanne occasional paper as a starting grid (part 5), an effective strategy for seeing nominal Christians transformed by Christ must include the following elements:

The Word

Life-on-life witness

Obedience-based discipleship

Relationship and community

The power of the Holy Spirit.

Of course, these elements are present in any good strategy of Christian witness – and have been ever since Pentecost.  However, the application of such elements may be significantly different among “cultural Christians” from what it would be among tribal animists.

The Word.

It may be very tempting at times to avoid this point of our strategy. The average European practical atheist does not see the Bible as authoritative. So an attempt to bring the Bible into everyday conversation may be seen as fanatical, or at least weird. However, many Europeans think they know quite a bit about the Bible (even if they’ve never read any of it), and are more than willing to share their opinions. When we honestly and consistently refer to the Bible as our authority, we can work in an almost subversive way to change the way our nominal friends consider the Scriptures.

Of course, a one size-fits-all approach, which ignores the vast differences between various countries, will be inadequate. Whereas in France or the Czech Republic it may be rare to find someone who has heard the Bible read – let alone read it for herself – the average Pole, Greek or Croat has probably heard the Bible read many times in church, and likely has read a portion on his own, as well.

Of course, in humility and love, we need to recognize that the Bible is our authority – but it isn’t yet perceived as such by our neighbor. Demanding that our nominal friend submit to the Bible’s teaching is likely to produce a quite opposite effect than what we would hope for. Consistent submission to the Bible, and practicing what we read and hear, however, serves as a life-changing instrument, first in our life, and then by extension in the life of our friend – and such a witness leads us to our next strategic component:

Life-on-life witness.

The Lausanne authors referred to this as consistent life-style, presenting a lifestyle of growth, witness and caring. The key idea is that we would demonstrate Christian living in front of a watching world. We need to allow our neighbor

“to peer into our lives in order to see exactly how we are in the process of growth. We do not clearly model for others the process of change that is taking place in our lives as we apply the Word of God and learn obedience and submission to him in daily practice. This growth is demonstrated naturally if we are in the Word of God together and sharing our actions and reactions to it. This will allow those we are seeking to lead to look into our lives. It will help them to see how the hand of God is at work conforming us from faith to faith into his perfect image. It will reveal to them how we correct sin in our lives and repent from it.”[1]

We also need to model witness and caring. As we allow others to see us “in action,” we are able to live out a witness in front of them that is irrefutable. Who can argue with a life lived in obedience to Christ? However, such a life requires consistency, and especially transparency and openness. In this way, we allow others to be “fruit inspectors” in our life, following in the spirit of Jesus’ words from Matthew 7:16-20. Such a life-on-life witness demands that we take seriously the third component of our strategy:

Obedience-based discipleship.

We must first model such a discipleship in our own walk with Christ. We should not expect others to follow Christ whole-heartedly, when we ourselves do not make Him Lord of our lives. When we work as a wise builder, though, we build a life that can weather storms, and we show to others a storm-proof life.

Obedience, doing that which we hear from Jesus (Mt. 7:24), is a vital component of discipleship. In fact, it may be the one totally necessary ingredient in making disciples. After all, Jesus tells us in Mt. 28:20 that we are to “teach them to obey everything I have commanded you.” James 1:22 reminds us that a true disciple of Christ is a doer of the word, not only a hearer. Unfortunately, we have usually placed a far greater emphasis on hearing the Word. We have frequently unwittingly re-written the Great Commission to read “teaching them everything I have commanded you,” and left out the emphasis on behavior and practice. Especially in the West, we could probably scale back on the knowledge in exchange for a greater emphasis on application, action and accountability.

A couple of years ago, I was in a conference with others involved in theological training from around Europe. The presenter showed Mt. 28:20 on the screen, but left out the words “to obey.” He then asked us what was missing. No one caught the omission! We all thought, at first glance, “teaching them everything I have commanded you” was correct. Oops! Obedience, life application and accountability must be part of our discipleship.

Obedience-based discipleship, especially in the confrontation of accountability, is most effective in relationship and community – the fourth element of our strategy, coming up in part 7.