The Resolute

So I said I’d write about this ABE/Evangelism thing… and I haven’t… sorry. Basically because it’s so nuanced I really want to make sure I say it the right way. So it will come but it might take a bit longer.

Just noticed that Fervr was an Official Honoree at the 15th Annual Webby Awards.

Nice work guys.

Was listening to Col Marshal¹ at college today discussing Recruiting and Training. As a side point he spoke of that missing ground in our congregations in evangelism: we know how to invite our friends to an event our church is running, and that’s great. But what about the rest of the year? How do we go at doing the evangelism all year round and not just at those big events? It got me thinking.

Think there’s lots of important answer: teaching good theology on evangelism/sin/etc, discipling, reading the bible with people, modeling evangelism, training, and many more. And we’ve got to be doing all that.

But let me also suggest something we came up with at St Andrew’s last year: Activity Based Evangelism (ABE).

Think of it like another tool in the arsenal for aiding and promoting evangelism. It’s not a silver bullet and it can’t replace all those other things I mentioned above. I also don’t think it’s the most important tool. But what it is is a tool to help those people who want their friends to hear about Christ but who struggle at doing it. Maybe they are shy, or not confident talking on their feet, or they are not one of those people who can just bring every conversation to the gospel. ABE might be for them. And everyone else.

So what is Activity Based Evangelism? Well you’ll have to wait for another blog post for that. Sorry. In fact before I get to that I think I’ll use my next post to talk a little about “big event evangelism”.

1. author of Trellis and the Vine [↩]

If you like science, and you like Genesis, then you’ll like Barry Newman’s posts discussing how the two relate.

Here’s the first post and the series.

I’ve been talking to a close friend recently about wisdom and where it comes from. It’s been really cool to think through some of the implications of what happens when we listen to wisdom that doesn’t come from God. Wisdom and foolishness is all through the bible, there is plenty of places we can turn to find out about it but it was the distinction between the two different types of wisdom found in 1 Corinthians 3:18-19 that we were looking at.

The passage reads “18Do not deceive yourselves. If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a “fool” so that he may become wise. 19For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight…” It comes in the context of the Corinthian Christians arguing about who they followed. Paul tells them that it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they are built on the foundation of Christ.

This passage identifies two types of wisdom. Wisdom that comes from ‘this age’ or ‘the world’ and God’s wisdom. We need to be so careful what we listen to because so much of it sounds like wisdom but really isn’t. Quite often it has the appearance of real wisdom: it’s well thought out or persuasively argued. Perhaps it appeals to another authority (such as experience, tradition or reasoning) to guide its conclusions. It starts to get really dangerous when the conclusions reached are those that we desire in our sinfulness.

The problem is when we put anything above what the Bible says. As Christians the bible must be our ultimate authority because it reveals God’s will for our lives. God has chosen the bible as His authoritative communication medium in this period and so we need to submit to it and hold it over all other wisdom offered by the world. We should aim to fill ourselves with God’s wisdom rather than the world’s wisdom. Or to put it the way the passage does if we think we are wise by the standards of this age we should become a fool (according to the world) in order to be wise.

So, how do we do this well? Any ideas?

We’re running a series of Bible Studies in January on the topics: Marriage, Singleness, Dating/Courtship/”Who to get from single to married?” and Divorce and Remarriage.

To help prepare for next weeks ‘dating’ study I borrowed as many books on ‘Christian dating’ as I could find.

There are so many, and so many ways I could categorise them.

There are those that completely suck and those that aren’t quite as bad.

There are those that advocate not dating (but some how you’ll just end up down the aisle and married) and then at the other end of the spectrum there’s the ’100 tips to get someone to say ‘yes’ to marriage’.

Here’s what I’ve read (or at least skimmed through) so far:

• I Kissed Dating Goodbye:¹ I get where he’s going but it seems to be a bit ‘don’t do anything so you don’t do anything wrong’, so it doesn’t really answer how you go from friends to married.
• Every Young Man’s Battle:² Some of what he says is good, some of it I’m less sure about. And I guess the authors don’t really set out to answer the dating questions.
• Religion Saves: Question 3:³ This is a good book. I like 95% of what he says in the chapter on dating. But it’s a bit short, doesn’t answer everything and I don’t always agree with everything in the book so I’m not sure it’s what I’d want to recommend without qualification.
• Boundaries in Dating:⁴ It’s more about the authors giving their 101 thoughts on everything. I might be a bit cynical of this one, but the chapter on setting boundaries really just says ‘don’t have sex outside marriage’ but doesn’t bother defining anything and barely mentions any of the Bible’s great content on the subject. Also the chapter following is on ‘setting consequences’ and seems to assume you will stuff up and almost seems to play it down for my liking.
• For Young Men Only: ((Jeff Feldhahn and Eric Rice)) This gets the award for the worst book on the topic. It’s more about figuring women out rather than acting in a godly way.

So anyone got any books they can recommend?

I really want a book like Pure Sex⁵ but written on the dating subject: a bit of history, God’s plans for the world, the general principles and how to live it out.

1. Joshua Harris [↩]
2. Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker [↩]
3. Mark Driscoll, was originally a sermon series answering common questions [↩]
4. Dr Henry Cloud and Dr John Townsend [↩]
5. Philip Jensen [↩]

Christian PodCasts

Number: 711
Total size: 12.16 GB
Total length: 20.7 days

Christian Books

Number: 69
Total number of pages: 26,282
Number of Bibles: 2 ESV, 5 NIV, 1 NASB, 2 Good News

Christian Conferences and Camps

Number in 2009: 9
Number from 2002-2008: 39
Humber of days 2002-2009: 199

Bible Reading

Number of hours actually reading the Bible: …

This coming Monday I start preparing my first sermon. There’s something more daunting about it than any other talk I’ve done before.

And I just read a post on solapanel.org which is actually a quote from Russell Moore’s blog. It goes like this:

Your first few sermons are always terrible, no matter who you are.

If you think your first few sermons are great, you’re probably self-deceived. If the folks in your home church think your first few sermons are great, it’s probably because they love you and they’re proud of you. If it’s a good, supportive church there’s as much objectivity there as a grandparent evaluating the “I Love You Grandma” artwork handed to them by the five year-old in their family.

This is my first sermon, I’m not aiming for self-deception, and I’m preaching it first at 8:00am which is kind of like preaching to 50 grandparents.

Looks like Russell could be spot on.

He goes on…

Great preachers are the ones who preach really bad sermons. The difference is that they preach really bad sermons when they’re young, and are sharpened for life by critique.

Bring on the critique.