The Lord of their lives

Paul Hiebert makes the following very helpful points about how to understand a person's conversion and new life in Christ. The only thing I would want to add (and he may well have addressed this elsewhere in the book - I only read part of it), is that the information the person understands and believes about Jesus from the outset needs to be true - so that it really is Jesus Christ he is following and not some crazy teacher's idea of him.

Who is a Christian? It is a person who believes certain things (orthodoxy) or lives a certain lifestyle (orthopraxy) . . . . In the Bible the fundamental categories are relational. A person is a person because she is a mother, sister, wife, and friend. A Christian is a person who is a follower of Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior . . . . The test is not what they believe or do but who is the Lord of their lives. New believers often know little about Christ, but they are seeking him. So-called old believers may make Christ a part of their lives but live mostly for themselves.1

Conversion then is a point - a turning around. This turning may involve a minimal amount of information regarding Christ, but it does involve a change in relationship to him - a commitment to follow him, however little we know of him, to learn more and to obey him as we understand his voice. But conversion is also a process - a series of decisions that grow out of this initial turning. Viewed in this way, Papayya can become a Christian after hearing the gospel once, but those who lead him to Christ have a great responsibility to disciple him, to root him solidly in his new faith.2

Justification and sanctification "are part of the same process - turning around and following Christ as the Lord of our lives."3

Hiebert also explores how the use of rituals can help us be more clear about conversion, as well as helping us throughout our spiritual life. Again I have a couple of things to add. The first is that you want to make sure that your service isn't so ritual-heavy or the rituals aren't so bizarre that a non-believing visitor feels alienated, bewildered or disgusted. Second, you also need to work hard to show how this religious part of life intersects with ordinary everyday life, where there is nothing of this.

In rituals we bracket ordinary signs in ritual format to show that we are speaking of extraordinary realities. By singing or chanting ordinary words, we raise the level of their significance and enable them to integrate beliefs, feelings, and moral commitments. We put on special clothes and go to special places at special times. We bow our heads, kneel, or raise our hands and say, "Our Father . . ." and "Amen" to show that we are talking to God, not to one another about him.4

Our Western antiritual stance is reflected by our attitude to Sunday morning services. We say, "I go to church in order to worship." Worship is what we get out of the service. If we do not "feel" like we have worshiped, we call the service a dead ritual. People with a high view of ritual, as is true in many cultures around the world, say, "In going to church I am worshiping." . . . .  

We must ask, has our modern view and practice of conversion become truncated and weak in part because we have no real rituals by which we can express the realities of life meaningfully to ourselves and to the world around us? With no clear living ritual, religious conversion becomes simply another ordinary decision, like the many other decisions we make every day. There is nothing to mark its life-transforming nature . . . .

In much of the world, decisions, especially religious conversions, are public affairs and must be marked by signs that both perform and communicate. That is why baptism, not an inner personal affirmation of faith, is often the crucial issue in mission churches. People may express a personal faith in Christ and remain in the community, but when they are baptized, they are excommunicated from their old group.5

1 PG Hiebert, Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 282.
2 Ibid, 311.
3 Ibid, 326.
4 Ibid, 322. 
5 Ibid, 323.

A faithful life

I think I'm going through what I've heard about from many friends who are Mums - a special sort of guilt and sorrow from not being able to serve the people around you as a 'normal person' might. While I understood what my friends were saying, I never really got how it felt - and I'm surprised at how difficult it is. I'm a loyal, hard-working type so I always want to be pitching in, being a really involved part of the church, using every gift I've got. But right now I just can't. I can understand most things and can be a successful part of even a long conversation if the other person takes the lead, but I can't initiate and I can't speak with any nuance. So I can't get going on making friends and discipling people. I have to wait.

I see things that I could be doing all around me, people I could be caring for and teaching, and it pains me that I can't do that for them. And all these unanswered needs lean on me, staring at me with their puppy-eyes, stressing me out. I don't know why - in the three years of ministry I've done so far I've learned that you can only do what God gives you the ability to do, and it is prideful to assume responsibility for all the rest. So I don't know why I'm forgetting this now, or rather, why it keeps slipping from mind and I need to say it aloud to get it back.

Anyway, in the midst of this smalltime guilt, I met with the woman I am discipling, who's from Australia and is here for a year. We're at similar stages, but instead of focusing on what we can't do (and feeling bad about it not doing it - and then still not doing it - and feeling bad), we thought concretely about what we can do. Are there people at church, locals or foreigners, who speak good English? Yes. Are there Spanish-speakers who don't notice or care if the conversation flounders, or who love to talk? Yes. Well, there we are then, that's what we can be faithful in for now. This has been a help.

A joy

Heading along to church each Sunday shouldn't be a burden; rather it should be a refuge from the world. Come, be reminded of the more important things, spend a little time with your unlikely family, one in heart and mind. I know it's not always like that because sin wipes its dirty hands across everything, but it is a bit, isn't it? Gosh I hope so, and I hope that bit helps you get through the week, not so much in style, but in goodness. If it's not, re-read those stories of what Jesus did on that old time electric chair - that's the remedy to most things. And pray, but like you mean it, because you do. And be willing to change, but then I don't need to be telling you that if you've read the stories.

H/T James

Great replies

What happens to people who have never heard about Jesus?
It's important to say that Jesus himself said, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No-one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6). So the question is if people who are isolated or from the East have had the possibility to hear about Jesus, and the answer is that, on many occasions yes, this has happened in surprising ways, through missionaries, or dreams (that have awakened the desire to know the Bible). Today the church in China, a communist country, is where Christianity is growing the most . . .

I believe in God, but I just don't believe in Jesus. 
Ask what their God is like (because if he's not the God who sent Jesus to die for humanity, then he's a different God altogether - distant or cruel).

H/T Juan Esteban & Juan Carlos

Too. Many. Words.

Just had a little brainwave. In theory I'll all fine with Bibles with sections every now-and-then explaining some historical context or suggesting a point of application, but in practice I think they suck. Now I never had one of those Bibles growing up, but I do know that I didn't know what to do with the one I did have, other than to ponder the intriguing line-drawings, and I know that if I had have had one I would have devoured every sectioned word and kept well clear of the actual biblical text. Maybe this isn't so for everyone, so I suppose they might not always suck.

But what to do for someone like me with no idea of how to read the Bible? I think what would really help is to make the format like that of modern literature - and different for each genre. So, lay out the narrative sections as you would a fiction novel, the Psalms and other poems like books of poetry, and the letters like emails perhaps. I think that this would stop the whole thing just being a mass of words and complexity and signal to me what to do with each part. ("Oh look, this must be a story, let's get comfy and dive into that world til I'm done."; "Oh and there are poems - I don't really know what to do with them, but I guess maybe I should read them out loud and slow."; "Ooooh look it's an actual letter from this guy Paul.")

Keep the pattern of sound teaching

 . . . these institutions are founded by a pastor-visionary-entrepreneur. That is, somebody with a real grasp of the Gospel, and who's got entrepreneurial smarts - they know how to get things done, and plant something. So it's driven by a certain Gospel vision. But eventually the thing is successful enough, with enough people, that you've really got to get some good managers involved, and eventually the Board appoints a President who is not a visionary, who is entirely orthodox, but not a visionary, and who really does know the mechanics of administrative leadership and that is perceived to be just what is necessary at this stage in the institution's development, and in some sense that's right.

But when you ask, 'Who is orthodox?', you are always asking that as measured by debates in the past. Orthodoxy is measured according to the debates that have been worked out in times past. Whereas the confrontations that we face today are never exactly the same, such that unless a person is theologically-equipped, biblically-informed, discerning and so on, he or she may really not see today's dangers even though they're entirely orthodox by yesterday's dangers.

So that today for example, in Christian seminaries and Christian colleges, I don't think that there is much chance of a Board coming along and appointing as President somebody who's a flat-out liberal . . . . But does that mean that the contemporary leaders today are well equipped to handle any number of things that are on the agenda today that are argued over . . . And most of them aren't - they're going to appeal to unity . . . . Which means that it becomes institutionally wise to preserve in the top slots, people who are pastorally, theologically driven, and under them hire all the administrative smart people . . . But don't give the top slots to people who are not driven by biblical, theological, discerning comprehension so as to be able to keep the pattern of sound teaching.

from D.A.Carson, "'What is the Ministry and Mission of the Local Church?' Foundations from the Pastoral Epistles" from 40:44

Maximum security

Hanging off the nails rammed through his hands and feet, the women watching from afar, Jesus' closest friend and the only person who understood what was going on, was a death-row crim who had committed such heinous crimes he deserved to die this slow, cruel way. Jesus' twelve protégés deserted him when he needed them most and fled, although Peter turned back and followed him at a distance, only to later baldly deny his master and friend. John must have repented too, for, hours later, we see Jesus speaking to him from the cross.

The disciples are no examples for us here. It's only later after Jesus' resurrection, that they become great men. Our true example and Christian brother is the maximum security crim who looked at the guy hanging next to him, just as hideous and pathetic in his blood and sweat and shit, and asked mercy from the King.

Atrocity

If you grew up going to church like me, you will know well the story of the two days leading up to the moment Jesus died. Because of their familiarity, it takes a special effort to comprehend the seriousness of those days, but even when we manage this I think we miss something still more important. We overlook the evil of those days. Perhaps this is because we have grown accustomed to the mundane evil coursing through each day of our lives. But it wasn't that sort of evil - it was the sort that sees millions of Jews gassed to death, a woman beheaded in front of her two kids in a suburb of Santiago the other day, and a young homosexual guy slowly tortured to death by skinheads who carved swastikas into his flesh. I hope you have no personal knowledge of this sort of evil. The closest I have come is a man on the train in Sydney one day who stared at me from across the carriage with such penetrating malice and brutal arrogance that I knew to get off at the same stop as him would be to invite rape and violence. It was a horrible and eery moment - I could almost see the evil emanating from the heart of him.

We shouldn't read the accounts of Jesus' death lightly - in fact, we should almost be unable to bear reading them at all.

  . . . You handed him over to be killed, and you disowned him before Pilate, though he had decided to let him go. You disowned the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released to you. You killed the author of life . . . (Acts 3:13-15)

The known world

It's so hard to move from your childhood reality, from the world as it presented itself to you when you were young. Of course there's always a push upward, but, generally speaking, middle class people stick with middle class people in middle class suburbs, upper class with upper class, and lower class with lower class. Of, even if we are able to make their way up, it's always a little otherworldly there.

The middle class may look different here, but their level of prosperity is familiar to me - having all they need and more, but unable to live in luxury. My sort of people. I admire those missionaries who can go up or down - I would find this very hard, though I do dream of discipling women from all spheres...

Adoption

I am fifteen sixteenths English. On both sides of my family, my forebears came out to Australia after the First Fleet as free-settling farmers. Though in many ways I am wholly Australia, the blood of another land runs in my veins. And though they did not desire it and it was done with violence or the threat of it, the true Australians adopted my people. I am deeply grateful for the privilege of being part of their land. And now, I have landed in another foreign land, expecting its people to adopt me as their own. I look forward to being Chilean, or as nearly as I can.

But I have experienced yet another adoption, even more unlikely and marvelous. I, a Gentile woman, once without God and without hope in the world, have been grafted into the people of God. Their stories, their ancestors, their GOD, have become mine, and all for repenting and believing in the Messiah Jesus. Such a simple act has brought me so much. And one day all of us will live together in heaven in our complexity and harmony, at home.