One won’t wade very far into church planting waters without being bombarded with the importance of being “missional.” Writing for Acts 29, Scott Thomas says:

A church that is not missional is not really a church. A church exists by mission as the sun exists by burning. When the sun loses its burn it ceases to be the sun. When a church loses its mission, it ceases to be a church.

The problem is that the word seems to have become sort of a junk drawer. You know, I’m willing to get that you have a drawer in your house into which you just throw things you have nowhere else to put. The term “missional” has come to mean different things to different people. So it becomes possible to have a conversation in which you come to realize at some point that you’re using the same words but in very different ways (hopefully you realize this if its happening!).

Part of the problem in even trying to define a term like this is that you’ll likely gravitate towards those with whom you already agree, at least to some extent. That having been said, one of the resources I’ve found to be quite helpful in thinking through many of these issues is Ed Stetzer’s Planting Missional Churches (formerly Planting New Churches in a Postmodern Age). Stetzer begins his book by noting that:

Establishing a missional church means that you plant a church that’s part of the culture you’re seeking to reach.

Stetzer states what should be the obvious but often seems to be lost in such discussions: “The goal of church planting is to reach people.” Right away this will be a major paradigm shift to some. Some feel the desire to plant a church because they simply feel they’ve got their theological ducks in a straighter row than others. This does not seem to be a biblical reason for planting a church. Yes, doctrine is important and cannot be divorced from church-life, but it doesn’t seem to be the biblical thrust behind the impetus to plant new churches. While the church is certainly commanded to protect doctrine, this seems to be under the more broad command to make disciples. One cannot properly make disciples without engaging in every step of this process, beginning with bringing the Gospel to the lost.

Missional then, in the sense that Stetzer puts forward, is a powerful reminder that, as he puts it: “It’s possible to be a missionary without ever leaving your zip code.” I would add that not only is it possible, it is expected. But we need to be careful and make a distinction between “Mission(s)-Minded” churches and “Missional” churches. Stetzer clarifies between the two terms (italics his):

The first refers more to an attitude of caring about missions, particularly overseas. Missional means actually doing mission right where you are. Missional means adopting the posture of a missionary, learning and adapting to the culture around you while remaining biblically sound. Think of it this way: missional means being a missionary without ever leaving your zip code. You can see how a particular congregation or denomination can be mission-minded without being missional.

Practically, of course, this means that it is possible to have a church that does a lot overseas but nothing at home, as odd as that might initially sound. Stetzer argues that this arises, at least in part from a false dichotomy between “missions” and “evangelism.” Missions is for out there somewhere while evangelism is for here. He argues that “There is no basis, biblically or theologically, for the territorial distinction of missions and evangelism.”

This thinking seems to contribute to what I believe to be a faulty question in the life of many churches: “Is our primary duty to feed the sheep or win the lost?” I have become convinced that this is the wrong question because our “primary” duty is to make disciples of Jesus Christ. This includes every step of the process, beginning with missions/evangelism. It is a continual process rather than an either/or question.

Furthering the discussion, Stetzer throws one other term into the mix: “on mission,” saying that:

on mission means being intentional and deliberate about reaching others.

Seems simple enough, right? And yet, many churches fully support abroad what they run from at home. We equip foreign missionaries to carefully study the cultural context, encouraging them to “contextualize” (without sacrificing content) the Gospel in such as way as it is most effective to that given cultural context. Yet, churches seem scared to death of the idea of “American” culture, either isolating from it or drowning in it. Or, we simply see a church that seems to be succeeding and we decide to import, lock, stock and barrel, what they are doing, regardless of any cultural differences that might exist between where they’re at from where we find ourselves.

We expect our missionaries to analyze and adapt to surrounding cultures yet we become doubtful of churches doing this, labeling them “liberal” or “emergent” or both. Why? Is it because we fear change? I would like to think that it’s because we’re so protective of the Gospel, but research demonstrates that most Americans who claim to be Christians don’t live anything like biblical Christians, so that doesn’t seem to be it either. Could it simply but profoundly that we don’t think of ourselves as missionaries, especially while singing “God Bless America” under flag-draped crosses?

If anything wrestling with terms like these ought to encourage us to rethink and reapply our approach to how the local church lives in the culture it finds itself.

• Read the article “What Is A Missional Church” by Scott Thomas for Acts 29
• Read Planting Missional Churches by Ed Stetzer
• Read Simple Church: Returning to God’s Process For Making Disciples by Thom S. Rainer and Eric Geiger
• Read Planting Growing Churches for the 21st Century by Aubrey Malphurs
• Read 44 Questions for Church Planters by Lyle E. Schaller

I was thinking the other day about the movie No Country For Old Men by the Coen Brothers. The film is dark and sometimes troubling in its depiction of fallen nature and I know, “Christians aren’t supposed to watch movies like this, right?!” (See Jim’s insightful thoughts from yesterday and what “Christians” far too often partake of in the media).

Quite often, when Christians are confronted with movies containing violence, language and depravity, they respond with something like Philippians 4:8:

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things (Philippians 4:8).

But I worry that what many Christians mean by referencing this verse is not what Paul had in mind when writing it. Many Christians mean that we should focus on things that are warm and fuzzy and “family friendly.” You know, “safe for the whole family” types of things. So, of course it stands to reason that a movie like No Country for Old Men, with its “gratuitous” violence is not suitable, because it shows a lot of violence.

And yet, according to the way in which many well-meaning Christians apply Philippians 4:8 to popular culture, it should stand to reason that we should not think upon the Cross of Christ. After all, the Cross is certainly not lovely or commendable. To this day it remains one of the most horrendous and gruesome forms of torture the world has ever known. It was brutal and played on humiliation throughout. Certainly this is not warm, fuzzy or “safe for the whole family,” is it? Or is it?

In reality, what seems to have happened is that many well-intentioned Christians have reduced the art of media discernment to simply asking what is appropriate for an eight-year old or what makes you feel “spiritual,” warm and fuzzy.

These thoughts prompt the question of whether or not it’s possible to be spurred on to considering holiness by a movie depicting depravity. Of course it is. Much of the point of the film is the pointless nature of depravity and that, when left to themselves, men degenerate into something we can barely understand. We lie to ourselves when we try to say things like “mankind is basically good” and films like this help to remind us of just what we’re capable of; what lurks inside each of us.

The film also holds out the lure of redemption. Throughout, you realize that there is nothing the characters can do to break the cycle in which they’ve found themselves. That’s much the point of salvation itself, isn’t it? We cannot and will not do it on our own (Romans 3), but God, being rich in the great mercy with which He loves us, made us alive, together with Christ (Ephesians 2).

I wonder just how much hope I would be able to have if the Gospel were really as tame as some would have us to believe and I am thankful that there are films such as this to remind me of its power. Regardless of the filmmakers’ intentions. I will indeed think about these things.

• Read Eyes Wide Open: Looking For God in Popular Culture by William Romanowski
• Read Cormac McCarthy

By Eddie Exposito

I was raised in a moral home, high on religiosity and regulation, but low on gospel. In that traditionally Catholic meadow my musical foundations were developed around a monolithic console stereo with a turntable and an eight-track tape player that belted out everything from Carole King and Stevie Wonder to Janis Joplin and Elvis. I can remember sitting on the shag carpet in my add-on den in the suburbs of New Orleans with my back leaning up against the vibrating speakers imagining myself playing in the band and becoming enamored with what I would later find out is called “the groove”.

Years later I would learn to play percussion taking up the drum kit as my mainstay and forming a local band called Fresh Young Minds which became highly popular in the early 90’s around the New Orleans music scene. God converted me during that time translating me from a bitter atheist into a green believer and I no longer pursued music as a profession; however, my love of music has never died. After battling rabid non-beat Gothardites and a stint with radical fundamentalism whereby I almost literally burned about seventy-eight CDs that were not “Christian” enough, I landed in a confused marshland not sure of what to listen to or whether I could even listen to anything at all without feeling guilty or overwhelmed by hyper-analysis.

Fast-forward to the present: I have a wife and four daughters, over a decade in the faith, pastor a local church, and have found a new love for music. I had gotten burned out on the CCM rotations after they seemed to me to be generating more cheese than gold. At some point I also did not believe that I could stomach yet another love song to Jesus that sounded like a sensual ballad from the star struck to lovelorn. And so I began to uncover my old discs and listened to forbidden rock fruits and nibbled on jazz-ensembled nectar and asked myself exactly why it was that I almost burned all of this creativity?

For the first time I saw these songs as gifts rather than enemies. Sure, some were rotten but I quickly found out that even the rotten fruits were good in that they taught me how to think through the volatile topic of music biblically and became examples that I could use in teaching the proper use vs. the improper use of creative talent. I began for the first time to see that I didn’t have to throw the baby out with the proverbial bathwater as it were and could instead take each song on its own merit to see if it had any redeemable qualities. Suddenly my musical acumen was not about castigating an entire musical genre but in taking the opportunity and time to listen, analyze, and learn. Later, I would see the tremendous benefit in applying this approach to my children and their schooling.

I found a great sale on refurbished mp3 players and bought three of them; one for me and one for each of my oldest daughters who are ten and twelve. I loaded our players with a variety of songs and tunes including two albums by Anathallo, some Thelonious Monk, the White Stripes, and a few Verdi arias. Their assignment was to listen to the songs and be ready to discuss them with me. They were armed with notepads and pencils as we sat down in our den listening to a few tunes from the selection on our Bose acoustic wave machine. We discussed dissonance and syncopation and crescendos and dynamics and tone and timbre and harmony and bass and counterpoint and rhythm; every aspect of appreciation. I gave them print outs of the song lyrics and we combed over them biblically to see if their subject and message melded or conflicted with Scripture and we talked more about chord structures and arrangements and whether they even liked the songs at all.

What I discovered is that instead of making a long list of musical do’s and don’ts and tabooed types, we should see music as a tool: a tool to teach our children how to discern for themselves what is worthy of discovery and what is worthy of the trash heap. Far more productive conversations have come from this type of discussion and discourse than from me simply banning certain bands from our home.

Give your children the tools they need to figure things out for themselves and you’ve stimulating their minds to think biblically with a critical eye while equipping them for life. Simply ban, dodge, and restrict their choices and you’ll only end up stirring the flesh.

Eddie Exposito and his wife Michelle have four daughters (Elizabeth-Kay, Carlyn, Jeanne-Marie, and Ruby). They have been married for fifteen years living just outside of Slidell, LA where he serves as the pastor of Sovereign Grace Fellowship. He is also director of Sovereign Grace Homeland Missions (SGHM.org) which ministers to the greater New Orleans area, a rebuilding and evangelism outreach established as a result of hurricane Katrina, where the work to rebuild homes and lives continues to this very day.

• Read Music Through the Eyes of Faith by Harold Best
• Read This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin

Over the course of blogging I have found myself more than once being labeled as arrogant, close-minded, narrow-minded, bigoted, insensitive, judgmental and nearly everything in between. Sometimes this takes place in the comments and other times I receive e-mails. If they come in the form of a blog comment, I generally try to pass them along for you to read. I post critical as well as comments.

Yet, however the comments come, the issue is generally the same: I believe in Orthodoxy. That means that I believe there are certain key beliefs, without which, you are not a Christian. If you do not believe in the full deity of Jesus Christ, you are not a Christian. This, by necessity, means that you believe in The Trinity. If you do not, you are not a Christian. You may have a high view of Jesus, but you are not a Christian in any sense anyone within traditional church history has understood or used the term. These two points in particular, the deity of Christ and the Trinity have been a stumbling block for some readers over the years. The response is that, though they don’t hold these doctrines, they are, nonetheless, still “Christians” and I have no right to say otherwise.

The other day I was reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and came across a passage I had read before but forgotten about in which Lewis masterfully answers this objection who “who are you to say who is and who is not a Christian?” He does so much better than I, so please bear with an extended quote from Lewis (italics original):

People ask: “Who are you, to lay down who is, and who is not a Christian?” or “May not many a man who cannot believe these doctrines be far more truly a Christian, far closer to the spirit of Christ, than some who who?” Now this objection is in one sense very right, very charitable, very spiritual, very sensitive. It has every amiable quality except that of being useful. We simply cannot, without disaster, use language as these objectors want us to use it. I will try to make this clear by the history of another, and very much less important word.

The word gentleman originally meant something recognisable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone “a gentleman” you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not “a gentleman” you were not insulting him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there is now in saying that James is a fool and an M.A. But then there came people who said -so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully- “Ah, but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense Edward is far more truly a gentleman than John?” They meant well. To be honourable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing than to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing. Worse still, it is not a thing everyone will agree about. To call a man “a gentleman” in this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is “a gentleman” becomes simply a way of insulting him. When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker’s attitude to that object. (A “nice” meal only means a meal the speaker likes.) A gentleman, once it has been spiritualized and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. As a result, gentleman is now a useless word. We had lots of terms of approval already, so it was not needed for that use; on the other hand if anyone (say, in a historical work) wants to use it in its old sense, he cannot do so without explanations. It has been spoiled for that purpose.

Now if once we allow people to start spiritualizing and refining, or as they might say “deepening,” the sense of the word Christian, it too will speedily become a useless word. In the first place, Christians themselves will never be able to apply it to anyone. It is not for us to say who, in this deepest sense, is or is not close to the spirit of Christ. We do not see into men’s hearts. We cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge. It would be wicked arrogance for us to say that any man, is or is not, a Christian in this refined sense. And obviously a word which we can never apply is not going to be a very useful word.

• Read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
• Read Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense by N.T. Wright
• Read The Reason For God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Tim Keller

It’s in all the media lately, with he upcoming theatrical release of Horton Hears a Who, almost as a slogan. But I really noticed it a few weeks ago as we read the story to the boys one evening. But it’s one thing to hear the refrain in your sons’ bedroom and another across national airwaves.

The premise of the movie, of course is that Horton, an elephant finds a world on a speck of dust. No one believes him and after much struggle over the speck and Horton’s sanity, he is finally shown to be right, only as the citizens of the speck themselves find their own speck. But it’s the refrain that serves as the “moral of the story” that interests me the most: A person is a person, no matter how small.

This sounds remarkably like what I as a pro-life person find myself repeatedly saying. Who know that Dr. Seuss was also pro-life? If only Hollywood listened to the words they said deeper than the sound of cash registers.

• Read Why Pro-Life: Caring For the Unborn and Their Mothers by Randy Alcorn
• Read and Watch Horton Hears a Who for yourself

Last week I started what will most likely be a sporadic series. The goal is simply to present some of the sayings of Jesus while asking the question “What if He really meant it?” Far too often, we approach Jesus as if He didn’t actually mean what He said as He said it and that we are free to explain away the challenging parts. Not necessarily the parts that are challenging in a way that is hard to understand, but challenging in a different way, forcing us to ask, “would I live differently if I really believed Him at His Word?”

Though the focus of the series is not necessarily the Sermon on the Mount, this week’s saying (like last week’s) comes from that section. Often known as an address on “kingdom living,” the Sermon on the Mount contains many of Jesus’ most challenging sayings. What if He really meant what He said when He said in these two sayings:

You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire (Matthew 5:21-22).

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart (Matthew 5:27-28).

Both of these sayings demonstrate the true intent of the Law, that it was always about the heart rather than merely the external behavior. What even Jesus meant it? Do you live like you think He did? It’s interesting how the little question “What if He really meant it?” forces us to sometimes view the text a bit differently (or at least it should).

• Read Jesus and the Gospels by Craig Blomberg
• Read Jesus The Messiah by Robert Stein
• Read Studies In The Sermon on the Mount by D. Martin Lloyd-Jones
• Read Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and His Confrontation With the World by D.A. Carson