Lecturship thoughts

Galatians 2:9-10 They (the apostles in Jerusalem) agreed that we (Paul and Barnabus) should go to the Gentiles, and they to the Jews. All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor , the very thing I was eager to do.

Luke 15:3-7 Then Jesus told them (people who had some religious stuff they thought was more important than lost people) this parable: "Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Does he not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders 6 and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, 'Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep .' I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.

I haven't posted in several days and I am beginning to go through some withdrawal. I spent the last couple of days in Abilene at the ACU Lectures. I used to make fun of them, but for the last couple of years I have found them to be extremely valuable and thought provoking. I hope to share some things with you about the future of our movement when I can get my thoughts together. I will just say this, we must not forget the poor. Larry James and Harold Shank taught on this and I was again struck by how often scripture calls us to care about the poor and how clear the connection is between our caring and the reality of our new nature (what the Bible calls righteousness). Harold Shank--"In the Bible, if you don't care about the poor you aren't a righteous person." I think this will be a place of emphasis in my own life for a while.

I also thought a lot about church planting and evangelism. I got to visit one of my friends who has planted a church that is focused on helping lost, hopeless, soul-starved people find life in Jesus Christ. It was a down week last week--they only baptized 8 adults. Do the math. In 5 years they have grown to more than 4,000. (By the way, the 8 is more impressive than the 4,000 to me because it happens so regularly and it means that people are finding Jesus, not just a consumer friendly church.) The problem? They are an instrumental church with a different kind of leadership structure. They teach the Bible and have story after story of changed lives, but they are excluded from our fellowship because they don't look like our churches. (I think it's funny that they are accused of not believing in baptism when they do so much of it.) We talked about the differences and challenges of being a disciplemaking church. You know what he said? "The bottom line is that you don't care about lost people. You have decided that a whole bunch of things are more important than lost people." I have no answer for that. Do you?

Most of the questions we had about the church plant were about making sure that we (saved, comfortable, already claim to know God, not going to be a part of the mission church anyway people) aren't offended by anything the new church might do. Is it going to be acappella? Is it going to be named "Church of Christ." There weren't many questions about how serious we were about connecting with 80,000 people going to hell. Is that because we don't care? Dear God I hope not.

Enough ranting. Sorry. Keep loving your little families of Jesus. Maybe God will be merciful to us and let us change to care about what he cares about.

Grace.