I ran across the following quote of Henri Nouwen on Len Hjalmarson's NextReformation website.

" There is a great difference between successful and fruitfulness. Success comes from strength, control, and respectability. A successful person has the energy to create something, to keep control over its development, and to make it available in large quantities. Success brings many rewards and often fame. Fruits, however, come from weakness and vulnerability. And fruits are unique. A child is the fruit conceived in vulnerability, community is the fruit born through shared brokenness, and intimacy is the fruit that grows through touching one another's wounds. Let's remind one another that what brings us true joy is not successfulness but fruitfulness."

Nouwen exposes the sharp contrast between success and fruitfulness. The dichotomy of success and fruitfulness lies in the fact that they are from different realms: the world and the kingdom of God. And yet, far too many Christians are being duped by the self-help gurus to buy into the whole success syndrome. Not once is success mentioned in the New Testament, but hear the words of Jesus in John 15:8: "By this is my Father glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be my disciples."

Success is by far more attractive and glamorous, as are all of the world's enticements. But fruitfulness, as Nouwen so clearly illustrates, comes out of such undesirable traits as weakness and vulnerability. Yet these are the qualities of the good soil that yields fruit, some thirty, sixty, and a hundred fold.

The following verse grabbed my attention this morning as I was reading in the book of Acts.

"For we cannot stop speaking what we have seen and heard." - Acts 4:20

As I read that statement of Peter in response to the religious leaders' demand that he and John stop speaking and teaching in the name of Jesus, a question arose in my mind as to why most Christians can't make the same statement.

The obvious answer is that most Christians haven't seen or heard anything spiritually compelling enough to cause them to have to speak in the name of Jesus if ordered not to.

So this question then needs to be answered: Why haven't they seen or heard such compelling things that would cause them to speak out?

Though I don't have time or space to address the host of answers that can be offered, (I'll leave that up to anyone else that wants to contribute to the conversation) a couple reasons immediately come to mind.

First, I refer back to the most recent post on this blog, Seeking God. To see and hear what Jesus is doing, we must be walking with him to behold his words and deeds. It's easy to rationalize, saying that Peter and John had Jesus there in person as they walked with him during those years of his public ministry. Remember, though, that Jesus said it was to their advantage (and ours) that he would go away so that the Spirit would be sent. Now, the same Spirit that empowered Jesus dwells within us, empowering us to do the same works as Jesus did. And this is precisely what took place as Peter spoke to the lame man at the gate of the temple, telling him to walk. What Peter witnessed Jesus doing he was now doing by the power of the indwelling Spirit. No longer was he a spectator to what was happening, but an active participant in the works of God. No longer did he have to refer back to the years of Jesus' earthly ministry, but could now also speak of what Jesus was doing presently through him by the power of the Spirit. There was just too much that he was seeing and hearing Jesus do presently that he couldn't and wouldn't be quiet.

Secondly, we who live in western culture probably don't realize just how much of an influence the intellectual movement of the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries has had on us. Reason was exalted as the supreme attribute in man's search for truth, rejecting faith in God as a source of truth. Therefore, Enlightenment thinking replaced faith in God with human reason. Western Christians are so steeped in the culture of reason that faith to see the compelling things God is doing has been crushed under the heavy boot of intellectual understanding. There is little, if any, expectation of seeing God's powerful works. Thus there is no faith for the works of God because faith is the substance of things hoped for (expected).

I hear a lot about the need to seek God in these times, and this is good. It's obvious that we need to seek him at all times. What I question, however, is the means of seeking him. It appears that we have a very truncated version of seeking God. My experience has been that the primary, and I might say, the only way of seeking him by those urging us to do so is to seek him in prayer and fasting, in praise and worship. And that is usually the extent of it.

Isaiah 58 addresses this very pointedly. God declares that his people seek him day by day, delighting to know his ways, asking for just decisions and delighting in the nearness of God. Yet God is not noticing them. A very significant element is missing from their "seeking" equation - their service to others.

God has a heart for the downtrodden and the oppressed, as so vividly seen in Jesus' earthly ministry. As was true in the days of his flesh, so it is today. He is "out there" where people are hurting and in need of the good news of the kingdom, both in word and deed. Therefore, if we are truly seeking him, we'll have to go where he is to find him.

I wonder if many of our attempts to seek and find God are unfruitful simply because we don't seek him where he is, amongst the oppressed, the homeless, the hungry, the naked, and the afflicted. I wonder if we got involved with such people if we would find Jesus there.

I stumbled across a statement that I have now been pondering for several days. It comes from Victor Choudhrie as he is describing God's change of venue from the man-made temple to the hearts and homes of his people. He says, "Now every place that we tread becomes the holy ground. He appointed elders in 'every city' to minister to the whole city."

"Elders ministering to the whole city" is not something that I remember having heard before. Usually we equate elders with the church, limiting their ministry as elder to the church. Choudhrie suggests that they not only minister to those within the fold but to those outside the fold as well.

As I considered this, it seemed to me that this reveals the difference between a church mentality and a kingdom mentality. Ministry and function is primarily church oriented, meaning that spiritual activity is almost always within the fellowship of believers. I have observed this church mentality as the modus operandi of the evangelical church here in the West.

However, the kingdom mentality is found in Psalm in 24:1: "The earth is the Lord's, and all it contains, the world and those who dwell in it." Instead of restricting ourselves to the Christian ghetto, we are called to the vast expanse of God's creation, to minister life to all people, not just those within the church. We are to be catalysts of the kingdom, leavening every segment of society and creation with its values. Yet we have fallen woefully short of being God's leaven in this world because we have functioned from an exclusive church mentality instead of the inclusive kingdom mentality of Psalm 24:1.

How might things be different if we would no longer function from the exclusive church mentality of "us" and "them" and begin to function from the inclusive kingdom mentality of "us". What if we were to see "them" as our brothers and sisters who are estranged from the Father? Isn't this why he has given us the ministry of reconciliation, to reconcile his children to him so they will not have to be separated from him not only in this life, but throughout eternity?

Our perspective will determine how we think, act and relate: in the all encompassing love of God for his defiled creation or in fearful isolation from that defiled creation.

I've been reading some of Victor Choudhrie's writings over the past several days, and I can tell you that you'll not see any major Christian publisher printing his writings anytime soon.

Choudhrie is a surgeon who gave up his medical practice to devote himself to advancing the kingdom in his native land of India by making disciples and establishing house churches. Just in one six-month period, they witnessed over 500,000 baptisms of new disciples. Thousands of house churches have been planted as a result, impacting the communities where they exist. And the movement continues to grow.

Following are some statements from his book, The Apostolic Gardens. This book isn't available in the U.S. After reading some of these statements, you'll know why. Though we may not agree with his confrontational manner, it just might be what we need to wake us up.

"Most of the 40,000 denominations are suffering from senility and out of date. Tens of thousands of their retail outlets (churches) have succeeded in keeping two billion Christians of the world unengaged and condemned to sit in the pews as cash cows until they are ready to shift six feet underground in the church cemetery."

"The ekklesia exists, not to protect man's traditions which are costly perversions, but to fulfill Yahweh's plan."

"Churching the unchurched is the bane of Christianity. Yeshua taught us to allow the yeast to leaven the whole community. We need millions of Crypto Christians who stay below the radar and quietly catalyze their communities. Churching them leaves the rest of the community not only unleavened but hostile."

"Yeshua never said, 'Go to church.' He said, 'Go and tell others what great things Yahweh has done for you.'"

"We are training the wrong people, with the wrong motives, in the wrong place, by the wrong teachers in the wrong traditions. Thousands of unemployed youngsters, driven by economics, are being trained in Bible schools to be cultural misfits... Millions are being spent to train and support them, but despite triumphalistic reports, the return on investment is just peanuts... They know the scriptures but not the mechanics of discipling or ekklesia planting. Entry points, bridges from other religions, spiritual warfare, mentoring multi-generational disciples and other relevant topics, which are powerful predictors of CPM, are not taught."

The Weary Pilgrim blog recently had a post that caught my attention: The gospel...an inconvenient truth. The author spent a year in which he read and meditated on the gospels only. He relates the following:

In the year I spent reading and reflecting on the Gospels only... I guess it ruined me. It was at that collision of heart, mind and life's events that my sense of belief in the gospels changed dramatically. They had to "be-lived." If I was to find the deepest truth of the gospels, the stuff between the lines, where the Spirit inspires life, I had to live the gospels. They had to become the fabric of my life... of what holds it together.

His conclusion is that the gospel of Jesus is an inconvenient truth. As I considered the implications of this, conventional Christianity as seen in our culture bears little or no resemblance to the gospel Jesus modeled and proclaimed. His is a gospel that invades our comfort and convenience with a way of life that is foreign to us. The Weary Pilgrim sums it up this way:

The inconvenient truth of the gospels are opting to be vulnerable; being taken advantage of; absorbing pain and suffering; realizing inconvenience is a gift; taking risks; being overwhelmed; learning to be content with questions more than a clever answer; building relationships, as the art of being a gardener, being patient to see something grow; the willingness to see forgiveness as a constant state of heart, mind and soul; that there really is no such thing as them, it is "us", we're all in this together; and Grace... more, and more, and more... it's endless.
The gospel... an inconvenient truth.

The catastrophe in Haiti has riveted the attention of the world on this poverty-stricken island nation. Political differences fade into the background as nations from around the world rally to come to the aid of the Haitians devastated by this earthquake.

The compassion pouring forth in behalf of the Haitian people is evidence of the image of God that is so deeply ingrained in humanity. Seldom is it seen however, due to the profusion of self-centered interests under which it is submerged. It's sad that it usually takes tragic circumstances to rip open the small world of self that encases us, thus releasing the image of God in behalf of others.

"Recent surveys in Britain have brought out the fact that great numbers of people have affirmed that the best years of their lives were those in which they shared the experience of the war. The bombing of cities, the destruction of homes, the absence of rest or holiday, the shortage of food and clothing, and the constant presence of death were all part of the picture; but what colors it all is the memory of shared commitment to a common purpose. That is what brings human beings to their very best, and most of us know it." - Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 122.

That is the kind of relatedness we've been created to walk in. Being stripped of the many things with which we cover ourselves liberates us in our nakedness to freely relate in our need for each other. How contradictory it sounds for people to say the best years of their lives were experienced under extreme duress. But isn't that just like the kingdom of God?

"And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force." - Matthew 11:12.

In his little book, Trinitarian Doctrine for Today's Mission, Lesslie Newbigin states emphatically that:

"...this recovery of a practical faith in the power of the Holy Spirit will lead us astray if it is not held firmly with an equally practical Trinitarian faith, a faith which discerns God's fatherly rule in the events of secular history, and which leads into full commitment to the life of that fellowship which is the Body of Christ in the midst of the world.

"Similarly it is rightly urged that missions cannot deal with the realities of the life of men if they cannot help men to understand what God is doing in the revolutionary changes which are everywhere taking place in the life of the world."

Could this last statement hold a key to the ineffectiveness of the Church's missional activity? The inability of the Church to help people understand what God is doing in the revolutionary changes occurring in the life of the world makes it irrelevant in the mindset of the people.

If the Church is unable to help people understand what God is doing, I think it's because the Church doesn't understand what God is doing. We can't give something we don't have. So why don't we understand? There are a whole host of explanations, of which I will suggest one.

The overwhelming emphasis on the church has made it a world unto itself, creating the mistaken impression that the church is the unique place where God's activity happens. Thus, the world is the arena of the powers of darkness exercising dominion in the absence of God.

Newbigin questions this kind of erroneous thinking:

"It is common to hear theologians speak of the Gospel as God's 'intervention' in human history. But is God absent from human history apart from this intervention? Is the world outside the Church, 'an atheistical patch in the universe'? Is God not at work in the affairs of the world outside the bounds of the body that confesses Christ as Saviour? The Bible does not allow us to doubt that he is. But how? In what terms shall we affirm the uniqueness, sufficiency and finality of Christ without either denying the reality of his working in the world or blunting the sharpness of the challenge which he puts to every man to choose?"

The following is a quote of Dave Tomlinson in a study guide of chapter 1 of Chasing Francis (which I haven't read).

"a young woman told me, 'Evangelicalism helped me to begin with, but now I feel I've outgrown it.' Arrogant? Possibly, yet she was voicing something which cropped up continually in my conversations with people: the feeling that evangelicalism is extremely good at introducing people to faith in Christ, but distinctly unhelpful when it comes to ...progressing."

Reading this statement reminded me of an observation made by Gordon Cosby, founding pastor of the Church of the Savior in Washington D.C. It is his contention that the present church structure keeps people in perpetual infancy.

If these statements are true of evangelicalism, then what is the alternative? What are the corrective measures that need to be taken to help the young woman, and countless others like her, to progress in their faith in Christ?

Though we've gone round and round on the deficiency of the present system, the crux of the matter is what do we have to replace evangelicalism? If it is another "ism", we haven't solved the problem, but have only created a new problem.

To the evangelical community, speaking of a departure from evangelicalism is tantamount to heresy. Recognizing that it is extremely helpful in introducing people to Christ may help us realize that its purpose is just that - introducing people to Christ. But to try and make it accomplish something it was never intended for only leads to frustration and possibly rejection.

So where to after evangelicalism?

This post is the result of watching several interviews at www.allelon.org/

The subject matter dealt with the question: "What is missional church?" That isn't the subject of this post however. I found the comments of the theologians being interviewed far more substantive than a mere definition of missional church.

Two primary thoughts surfaced in the dialogue pertaining to the western Christian perspective of Scripture. This perspective has been around for centuries, so it isn't of recent vintage.

It was noted that westerners read and interpret the scriptures from a personal, individualistic perspective. Thus, the scriptures are understood to be a manual for personal salvation and self-improvement in walking out the Christian life. Therefore, the reader becomes the central focus of the scriptures.

However, it was pointed out that the scriptures are not focused on the individual, but on a people, the community of God. But this has been missed in western Christianity with its individualistic approach to Scripture, resulting in a warped view of what the scriptures are really all about.

Secondly, though not necessarily second in importance, the scriptures are about the mission of God. If we don't read and interpret the scriptures from a missional perspective, we miss God's intention in his written word. The devastating result is that we don't understand the purpose of God, therefore finding ourselves out of sync with him and what he is doing.

A radical course correction is required if we westerners are to get back on track with God. Thankfully, there are pockets where this is taking place, but we have a long way to go if the scriptures are to be understood and interpreted in the communal and missional context that is intended.