Looking both ways...a word study

Preached on Acts 3 on Sunday. It is the story of God healing the crippled beggar through Peter and John. Luke says that "Peter looked straight at him" which is an interesting word in the Greek pronounced a-te-NEE'-zow.

It is used 14x in the NT, twice by Paul, twice by Luke in the Gospel and 10 times in Acts. Every usage in Acts seems instructionally significant. The first two times a-te-NEE'-zow is used is the believers "looking intently" up into heaven. Godward. Second time - Peter and John "looking straight" at the beggar. Toward human need.

Good lesson here. To look Godward is symbolic of the first of Jesus' two great commandments "Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, strength." To look toward human need seems symbolic of "Love your neighbor as yourself."

I once thought it was easy for Christians to think heaven all day without being moved toward those in need of our compassion. I no longer think so. The vast majority of those who call themselves "Christian" have no vital prayer life, are largely scripturally illiterate and are theologically inept. Most also don't take seriously the hurting in their midst.

But the abundant life is found right there taking looking intently with eye and hand with the weekly warp and woof of our lives.

The LA Times on House Churches

I was saved in a house church. I like them. I am a part of a body that has chosen to have a great contemporary worship service in our current location of a couple hundred people with home cells on Sunday evening to replace the traditional Sunday school. It seems to work.

House churches have a lot going for them and the most exciting part is the intimacy, the low cost and the easy proliferation possibilities. Worked in the New Testament!

At any rate, the LA Times piece.

The trend goes by several names: house churches, living-room churches, the underground church, the organic church, the simple church, church without walls. Although they disagree on whether it's a good thing, proponents and detractors say that going to church in a home has the potential of forever changing the way Christians worship.

"We are at the initiation point of a transformational shift," said George Barna, author of the book "Revolution," about the changing nature of worship, and founding director of the Barna Group, a Ventura-based research firm that tracks religious trends.

A 2006 survey by his firm — tracking developments for use by researchers and the media — concluded that 9% of U.S. adults attend house churches weekly, a ninefold increase from the previous decade, and that roughly 70 million Americans have experienced a home service.

Those most likely to attend house churches, according to phone interviews with more than 5,000 adults nationwide, are men, families that home-school their children, residents of the West and nonwhites, while those least likely to attend include women, people older than 60 and Midwesterners.

"We predict that by the year 2025, the market share of conventional churches will be cut in half," Barna said. "People are creating a new form of church, and it's really exciting."

Funny stuff - emerging church motivational posters

If you are emergent or wondering why you are not - here.

I fought the good "jihad?"

Yep. That's what Paul said...

A legendary missionary who smuggled Bibles behind the Iron Curtain is calling on Christians worldwide to join the “good jihad” for the souls of Muslims in the Middle East and in other Islamic nations.

Though the term jihad carries a negative connotation – especially after the 9/11 attacks and current events around the world involving Muslim extremists - Christians have a biblical mandate to wage a “good jihad,” according to Brother Andrew, the founder of the international ministry Open Doors.

“It is literally quoting from the Bible because Paul said, ‘I fought the good fight’ and in the Arab Bible it says, ‘I fought the good jihad,’” said Brother Andrew during a recent interview with The Christian Post.

Evangelism?

ROME (Reuters) - Catholic missionaries have always trekked to dangerous parts of the Earth to spread the word of God -- now they are being encouraged to go into the virtual realm of Second Life to save virtual souls.

In an article in Rome-based Jesuit journal La Civilta Cattolica, academic Antonio Spadaro urged fellow Catholics not to be scared of entering the virtual world which may be fertile ground for new converts wishing to better themselves.

"It's not possible to close our eyes to this phenomenon or rush to judge it," Spadaro said. "Instead it needs to be understood ... the best way to understand it is to enter it."

Second Life is a simulation game where players can create a virtual version of themselves -- an avatar -- and interact with other people in the three-dimensional world.... (more)

A question: Why not more pastors?

"Why aren't more pastors involved in this?" asked one of my friends this morning standing with me outside an abortion clinic. I told him we were happier preaching and staying respectable in the eyes of the world and our parishoners than we were in activating the faith.

Then we asked someone else who was standing out there. Doug said that most churches are outreach oriented in the first place and, second, most churches who are will start ministries that are easier and more compatible with traditional emphases than, say, abortion clinic ministry. If that is ever added, it will be added to a much larger mix of outreach and compassionate efforts.

He is probably right.

But the abortion clinic ministry was our first ministry at DaySpring. Then we added all the rest.

What a backward bunch I serve with!

Evangelical scandal

Ron Sider wrote a volume called The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience. In his chapter on “The Depth of the Scandal” he starts off with a quote by Michael Horton: “Evangelical Christians are as likely to embrace lifestyles every bit as hedonistic, materialistic, self-centered, and sexually immoral as the world in general.” Then come the statistics and other data from the research:

• Conservative protestants are more likely to divorce than the rest of the population and the rates are higher where conservative Protestants make up a higher percentage of the population in the country.
  
  
• As evangelicals have gotten richer, we have spent more on ourselves and given smaller percentages to the church. Evangelicals give about two-fifths of a tithe.
  
  
• Born-again adults cohabit with members of the opposite sex without marriage only a little lower than the general public.
  
  
• 26 percent of traditional evangelicals do not think premarital sex is wrong and 13 percent says it is okay for married persons to have sex with someone other than one’s spouse.
  
  
• The percentage of Christian men involved in pornography is not much different than that of the unsaved.
  
  
• Coach Bill McCartney of the Promise Keepers thinks a major reason attendance dropped dramatically in his organization’s stadium events was their stand on racial reconciliation.
  
  
• Husbands who attended conservative Protestant churches or held conservative theological views were no more or less likely to engage in domestic abuse than others. Theologically conservative Christians commit domestic abuse at least as often as the general public.
  

Sider also quotes Peter E. Gillquist who says that “All the evangelism in the world from a church that is not herself holy and righteous will not be worth a hill of beans in world-changing power.” Modern evangelicalism, is in a “modern Babylonian captivity and we do not yet know it.” But Sider ends with what he deems a “ray of hope.” Cited is research in the early nineties by George Gallup Jr. and Timothy Jones called The Saints Among Us. A twelve-question survey was used to identify heroic and faithful individual Christians.

1. My religious faith is the most important influence in my life.
2. I seek God’s will through prayer.
3. I believe that God loves me even though I may not always obey him.
4. I try hard to put my religious beliefs into practice in my relations with all people, regardless of their backgrounds.
5. I receive comfort and support from my religious beliefs.
6. I believe that Jesus Christ was fully human and fully divine.
7. I wish my religious beliefs were stronger.
8. I believe in the full authority of the Bible.
9. I do things I don’t want to do because I believe it is the will of God.
10. God gives me the strength, that I would not otherwise have, to forgive people who have hurt me deeply.
11. I try to bring others to Christ through the way I live or through discussion or prayer.
12. I wish my relationships with other Christians were stronger.

“Saints” were those who agreed with every question. “Super-saints” was the name for those who agreed “strongly” with every question.

The “saints”, found Gallup and Jones, lived differently:

• 42 percent of the strongly uncommitted (answered all questions with disagree or strongly disagree) spent “a good deal of time” helping needy people compared with 73 percent of the “saints” and 85 percent of the “super-saints”
  
  
• 63 percent of the spiritually uncommitted reported they would not object to having a different race neighbor. But 84 percent of the “saints” and 93 percent of the “super-saints” said they would not object.
  
  
• 71 percent of the spiritually uncommitted believed it is important to forgive people who had hurt them. 98 percent of the “saints” and 100 percent of the “supersaints” agreed.
  
  
• 71 percent of the spiritually uncommitted and 100 percent of both the saints and supersaints “try to follow a strict moral code.”
  

The idea of “saints” for Gallup and Jones are what we call, in this volume, “witnesses.” The content of the “witness’” character is different and uncommon. And it makes a difference in life. Gallup/Jones says that

There appears to be a great deal of self-centered, provincial faith – extrinsic religion…that makes little difference in people’s lives. Extrinsic faith tends to be more institution-centered, and primarily something to be called on in crisis.

But, say the authors,

For a society tempted to think that only a highly visible few – the Billy Grahams and Mother Teresas – make a difference, our research shows otherwise. Our interviews with the friends, associates, and neighbors of the saints among us lead us to conclude that they have an impact on society far out of proportion to their numbers.