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About the Author:
Ralph D. Winter is a senior mission thinker who has been actively involved from the beginning of the massive mission transition from simply thinking in terms of countries or individuals to thinking in terms of peoples. He is founder of the
U.S. Center for World Mission,
and is currently chancellor of
William Carey
International University. |
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[Ralph D. Winter, Tuesday, October 26, 2004]
Dear brother,
I have read all three articles, including the evaluation. What you have done is well prepared and reasoned. However, I was all along put off a bit by the amount of abstract words and phrases which lend to ambiguity in application. The very phrase "Christ-centered" is hugely abstract, and, in fact, is not at all logically linked with all of the many wonderful expectations of a church which your evaluation lists. By contrast, however inadequate, the "Three Selfs" are quite concrete.
But the greatest change I would like to see is for your emphasis to include, expect, require, the outworking of faith in the community. Your illustrations often showed how out on the job a singing cheerful person made a witness. And, presumably a good piece of work went along with that. But the holiness of the daily task doesn't come through as an essential feature of true faith in the Christ who called us not merely to witness but to be salt and light in a world of evil, corruption, and disease. Where does your Christ-centered congregation shoulder the
work of Christ to be done in the world as an end in itself, not merely to witness?
Today in the LA Times a half of a page is devoted to a report on tens of thousands of Mennonites in northern Mexico who moved down there a half a century ago from both Canada and the USA. They may have wished that way to avoid the evils of the world (rather than fighting them) and thus save themselves and their people from evil and maintain a Christ-centered church. But now today they are
(quite a few of them) well known for their immersion in the drug trade, the cartels, the smuggling of drugs into the U.S. One of the biggest drug busts in history in Oklahoma recently took down a Mennonite team, which with their blue eyes were able for a long time to avoid detection.
When souls are saved they are not merely supposed to be survivors singing of their salvation but soldiers deliberately choosing to enter into the dangerous, sacrificial, arduous task of restoring the glory of God for all to see. "Let your light shine in this way: that your good deeds may be seen by men who will thus be able to glorify your Father in heaven." (Matt 5:16--my own translation)
If "the Son of God appeared for this purpose, that He might destroy the works of the Devil" (I Jn 3:8), do you think it is good enough for our missionaries around the world to be content with getting people to trust Jesus for their eter- nal salvation, singing at church and on the job, teach each other the scriptures, raise up leaders, start more congregations of singing people who do not regard it their duty to work at the center of Christ's purpose of destroying the works of the Devil? Would not a Christ centered church take seriously His "as my Father sent me so I send you?"
Did Jesus just go around and lead in worship and Bible study? No, both He and John the Baptist tackled the evils of their day, commanded repentance from selfishness, focused on poor people's real needs, disabled people, sick people, excluded people. He demonstrated the nature of a God who was not merely a judge but a God of love and light and redemption-- not just from the penalty of sin but the power of sin. What would Jesus have said about fighting germs in the name of Christ had the people of his time know about germs? Not even Luther and Calvin knew about destructive germs thus our theology (unchanged from the sixteenth century) ignores that whole swath of the works of the Devil. And, when people get sick, whether in Africa or in California they commonly assume "God did it" for some unknown reason. That misunderstanding does not glorify God. And I don't see anything else coming out of the "radiant, worshipful" congregational life among Evangelicals today, nor in the long list of evaluation traits of a Christ centered church in your article.
Am I missing something?
Appreciatively,
Ralph Winter, Editor, Mission Frontiers |
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