Will Willimon passes on four helpful questions for church leaders to assess their ministries:

In a recent conversation with my friend Lloyd John Ogilvie, he said that in his fifty years of ministry he has learned to ask himself four pastoral questions:

1. What sort of people does Christ want to deploy in the world?
2. What sort of church do we need to produce those people?
3. What sort of leaders do we need to produce that sort of church?
4. What sort of pastor do I need to be to produce that sort of leaders in that sort of church?

What wonderful questions I like the emphasis here on disciple-making as the point of pastoral work. Paul would probably call it “edification” of believers, but I like Lloyd’s stress on performance, enactment, and witness to the gospel as the purpose of it all. Ministry is known by its fruit and the test of my ministry is not only my fidelity to the gospel but also the production of saints. Truth to tell, fidelity to the gospel requires the calling and equipping of disciples, church turned inside out.

Just added a link to J. C. Ryle Quotes under the category “Discipleship & Spirituality.”  Judging from these quotes, Ryle had a wonderful capacity for expressing spiritual truths.  Makes me want to try out one of his books, a number of which are listed at this site.  You can also become a fan of this site on Facebook, which will enable the daily quotes to appear on your Facebook wall.

Reclaiming the Mind Ministries has performed a valuable service in posting papers presented at meetings of the Evangelical Theological Society.  The library appears to represent meetings  from 2001 to 2005 only, but that still represents hundreds of papers on topics ranging from systematic theology to biblical exegesis to church history to christian counseling and more.  As a pastor I am concerned with making disciples at Beaver Baptist Church, and I am interested in the relationship between spiritual formation and the disciple-making ministry of the church.  It turns out that there is a spiritual formation interest group in ETS, and the site has 12 papers on the subject of spiritual formation (the site says 15, but some are double-counted).

One of the papers that I have found to be helpful is “New Wine in Old Wineskins? The Relationship of Evangelical Thinking on Spiritual Formation and Theological Models of Sanctification” (html, or download the .pdf file here), by Steven Roy, who teaches practical theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.  In this paper, Roy compares the approaches to spiritual formation of two evangelical scholars: Dallas Willard as described in his book, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God, and Bruce Demarest, represented by his book, Satisfy Your Soul: Restoring the Heart of Christian Spirituality.  These approaches (which turn out to be fairly similar) are compared to three evangelical models of sanctification: (1) The Reformed or progressive model, which holds that progress in sanctification occurs over the course of the believer’s life, and which is never complete in this life; (2) the Wesleyan model, which holds that entire sanctification is possible, coming through a crisis experience, subsequent to regeneration; and (3) the Keswick model, which holds that the believer, through a crisis experience, comes to surrender to the work of the Spirit, resulting in a breakthrough, or turning point in sanctification,  although entire sanctification is not the result.  Roy observes that there is an affinity between the spiritual formation view approach (of both Willard and Demarest), and the Reformed model of sanctification, because there is a common emphasis on lifelong, gradual progress, and because they both are synergistic, that is, they both emphasize cooperation with the grace of God.  Roy assesses strengths and weakness in each author’s approach to spiritual formation, and in general is quite positive about benefits of spiritual formation movement in evangelicalism.  He concludes:

Spiritual formation and sanctification need each other.   Sanctification is not an old wineskin that must be discarded in order to profit from the new wine of spiritual formation.  Neither is spiritual formation a new and weird departure from tried and true discussion of sanctification.  No, both spiritual formation and sanctification need each other.  So, to quote the words of Jesus from another context, What God has joined together, let no one separate.

Yesterday, on the way home, I started yet another book: What Are Spiritual Gifts? Rethinking the Conventional View, by Kenneth Berding, professor of New Testament at Talbot Theological Seminary.  Berding challenges what he calls the conventional view:

Let’s begin by looking at the conventional approach to the so-called spiritual gifts. . . . This approach says that the spiritual gifts are abilities or enablements, given by the Holy Spirit to individual believers to help them serve others.  There are three main components in any conventional definition of a spiritual gift: (1) the entity itself is an ability or enablement; (2) it is given by the Holy Spirit; (3) it is to be used in building up the community of believers. . . .

In this approach, every believer who has a relationship with God through Jesus Christ has been given at least one special ability that he or she is to discover and use in building the community of faith. [pp. 25-27]

Berding claims that nearly all discussions about the spiritual gifts begin without defining from scripture what a spiritual gift is.  That is, all spiritual gifts are assumed to be abilities that are supernaturally given by the Holy Spirit.  Here Berding describes an alternative understanding:

In this alternative approach, the so-called spiritual gifts are not special abilities; they’re Spirit-given ministries.  According to the contextual evidence in the letters of Paul, the so-called spiritual gifts should be viewed as the ministries themselves.  Every believer has been assigned by the Holy Spirit to specific positions and activities of service, small and large, short-term and long-term.  These are ministry assignments that are given by the Holy Spirit to individual believers and, in turn, these individuals in their ministries have been given as gifts to the church. [p. 32]

Berding asserts that this is not a charismatic vs. non-charismatic issue in that both parties believe that spiritual gifts are abilities given by the Holy Spirit, it’s just that they disagree on whether the Holy Spirit still gives miraculous gifts, such as speaking tongue, prophecy, etc. [p. 29]  In arguing for the ministry-assignment view, Berding concedes that some ministries such as prophecy, but not all ministries, would have required a supernatural enablement.  [p. 34]

Berding argues that in Paul’s usage of the Greek word, charisma, every usage of the word can fit the concept of ministry, and that in a number of cases, that is the only viable meaning for the term.  The heart of the book, chapters 5 through 14, lay out Berding’s argument, but I have only read through chapter 7.

There are a number of practical implications if this view is correct.  For one, there would no longer be any need for believers to seek to discover just what gift or gifts they have been given by the Holy Spirit.  The believer merely need to seek where God would have him minister.  This could come in the form of some sort of inner confirmation by the Spirit, but it would also be informed by the believer’s identification of needs in the church, and wise counsel from others.  In addition, one would not be limited by the lists of so-called spiritual gifts found in Ephesians 4:11, Romans 12:6-8; 1 Corinthians 12:8-10; and 12:28-30.  They would be taken as a representative, and not exhaustive, list of ministries. [p. 49]

I know that in my own preaching and teaching I have emphasized that every on has a spiritual gift that they need to put to use in the kingdom work of the local church.  But I have not been helpful in showing how our church members are to identify those gifts.  I’m beginning to think that I should modify that to say that every believer has been called to at least one ministry in the local church.  I think it would be easier to give guidance to those who respond to such exhortations and who want to know what to do next.

I’m not always in agreement with Internet Monk, but often he says things that are not only true, but need to be said.  In a post titled Evangelism Won’t Cure It, Michael Spencer identifies a perennial source of self-deception among Southern Baptists, namely, that the problem of decline in the SBC would be reversed if only we would become more evangelistic, and therefore, what the SBC needs is an evangelistic campaign that everyone needs to get on board with.

Read the whole thing, but here is how Spencer wraps it up:

I love what the SBC does right.  I really do. My denomination can be awesome at some things, especially in the area of cooperative missions.

I’m not dogging evangelists.  I spend a significant amount of my time in evangelistic ministry. It’s one reason I will remain an evangelical.

Our denomination has some wonderful churches and some great people.

But let’s just say it:  We’re Johnny One Notes on evangelism because we don’t want to admit how flawed, hurting, confused and increasingly dysfunctional we are.

We need evangelism in its place, and that won’t happen till we stop and look at the whole, not just the parts we want to blame.

And 100,000 more baptisms won’t solve those problems.

Michael Spencer at Internet Monk, gave me food for thought with his post The “Real” Prosperity Gospel.  It is one thing to denounce the “name it and claim it” theology that promises that we can have health and wealth if only we have enough faith to believe God for it.  But Spencer responds to a commenter on his blog who suggests that those of us who reject the prosperity gospel often hold to a subtler form of it:

The real prosperity gospel isn’t the overt appeal to wealth. It is the more subtle appeal to God guaranteeing that we are going to be happy, and the accompanying pressure to be happy in ways that are acceptable and recognizable to the community of Christians we belong to.

The real prosperity gospel is the belief that God will- must?- keep things at a level where it’s still possible for us to follow Jesus without overt appeal to rewards in this life. The real prosperity gospel is revealed not in the promises of a yacht or a large home, but in the unspoken approval of a level of prosperity that allows us to live the Christian life on our own terms. It is the ratification of our private, sometimes entirely secret, arrangements with God of what his “goodness” means.

It’s the notion that, even if we are going through tough times, we can still be happy if we have Jesus Christ.  That if we ever lose our joy, we are somehow poor Christians.  We have to be careful not to teach, or give the impression, that if we are ever discouraged, sad or struggling, something is wrong with us or our faith.  God calls us to cast our cares and anxieties upon Him, He doesn’t promise that cares and anxieties with be absent from the lives of faithful believers.

Ray Ortlund Jr. shares a powerful quote from one his father’s books:

“Your danger and mine is not that we become criminals, but rather that we become respectable, decent, commonplace, mediocre Christians. No rewards at the end, no glory. The twenty-first-century temptations that really sap our spiritual power are the television, banana cream pie, the easy chair and the credit card. Christian, you will win or lose in those seemingly innocent little moments of decision. Lord, make my life a miracle!”

Ray Ortlund Sr., Lord, Make My Life A Miracle, pages 130-131.

Amen!

Mark Altrogge, who I know primarily from his songwriting for Sovereign Grace Music, has written a blog post titled “The Pastor from Gehenna” that really gets to the core of one of my inner struggles as a pastor: how do we motivate people to live like disciples of Jesus?  Quote:

My job was to whip the saints into obedience against their will. Since they really didn’t want to serve God, I had to guilt or pressure them into it. I’d say things like, “Come on, let’s worship God like we really mean it.” How self-righteous I was.

Read the article for what Altrogge understands as the solution (and I would agree).

I ran across an interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times titled Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind, written by two authorities on neuroscience, Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang.  They present two scientific discoveries that I believe to have interesting implications for Christian discipleship, particularly the value of asceticism and spiritual disciplines.

The first discovery is that people have limited amounts of willpower, so that at any given point in time, exercising self-control in one area tends to diminish one’s ability to exercise control in another:

The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. . . . The brain’s store of willpower is depleted when people control their thoughts, feelings or impulses, or when they modify their behavior in pursuit of goals.

That’s the bad news. 

The second finding is that self-control can be developed and increased over time:

The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity, so that in the long run, buying less now may improve our ability to achieve future goals . . .

Neither of these discoveries are particularly earth-shaking.  Perhaps I should call them scientific confirmations.  My point, however, is that I found this article helpful because I have pondered the value of spiritual disciplines in light of the following passage of Scripture:

If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations— “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh. (Colossians 2:20-23, English Standard Version)

In light of Paul’s teaching, what value is there in such disciplines as fasting, which might appear to be the application of “asceticism and severity to the body.”  Paul seemed to me to be saying that this kind of activity is useless in controlling the flesh.

On further reflection, Paul may not be saying that exercising self-discipline has no value.  Instead, he is saying that an ascetic lifestyle, which consists of rules which prohibit eating certain kinds of foods, or forbidding marriage (see 1 Timothy 4:1-5), or keeping certain Jewish laws based on clean/unclean distinctions, cannot control the flesh and its passions.  An all-or-nothing approach is incompatible with the way our souls/bodies work.

It may be that long-term, consistent work at self-control may work when it is part of a lifestyle that acknowledges the goodness of our bodies and of creation:

For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.  (1 Timothy 4:4-5, ESV)

After all, elsewhere Paul can speak of discipline positively:

But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified. (1 Corinthians 9:27, ESV)

What I am getting at is that use of spiritual disciplines is not the same as adopting an ascetic lifestyle.  It is the application of various practices which, over time, can be of assistance in our pursuit of becoming more like Jesus Christ.  That is to say, on the one hand, asceticism tends to be self-defeating because our capacity for excercising willpower is limited.  On the other hand, spiritual disciplines can be effective because they take into account the reality that personal change takes place over time.