I have been part of the SOMA programme by Christian publisher Ekklessia Afrika, which seeks to encourage a reading culture among pastors and people in Christian ministry. I’m neither a church worker nor a pastor. But I stuck with the programme because it offered me a structured way of reading theological texts, it connected me to other readers with similar interests as mine and it made me read books I would never have picked up from the shelf.
Some of the books I would never have bought myself because they are not ‘my taste’ include one on Church membership, another on church discipline and another on church elders. I learnt new things from them.
John Piper’s Let the Nations Be Glad opened my eyes towards world missions and church planting and God’s glory as an overarching theme to all of life.
But then there are few books I loved and will keep in a coveted place on my shelf because they schooled me.
The first is Word-centred church by Jonathan Leeman. It’s one of those books I started underlining right from the foreword (which is written by Matt Chandler).
Leeman in this book boldly pushes the idea that God’s word is enough to create, sustain, save, empower, encourage, rebuke, change, grow a church. It’s a book meant to restore confidence in the power in God’s word and restore the ministry of the word in our pulpits, our evangelism, our music, our prayers, our home cell groups, our parenting etc.
Leeman advances the conviction that it’s not bright lights, dynamic music, hospitality and liturgy that make and build and grow a church but God’s word working through God’s spirit. God sustains all things by his word. Hebrews 1:3
Notables: The aroma of Christ will smell like death to some, regardless of how it’s presented. Yet there is no way around it: to introduce people to a saving knowledge of Christ, you must speak words and you must speak what are sometimes offensive words.
People will both accept and reject God’s word inspite of anything else that we might do in our ministry… You will will never be able to make Jesus cool enough for everyone to love and worship him.
God’s word needs to be massaged through the life of the church like yeast through dough. The ministry of the word doesn’t stop with preaching; it continues throughout the church- the discipling ministry, the youth ministry, the missions, the worship ministry, the friendships and families… All this operates on the same page of being word-oriented and Christ-centered. The church building should open and God’s words should echo out the doors, down the street and into members’ homes and workplaces… It should reverberate in dining rooms, kitchens, children’s bedrooms, off cubicle dividers, inside city bus windows, through emails and texts.
God’s word is what grows the church. Yet we are inclined to want to rely on market research, personal charisma, good music or other natural devices to attract people to church, keep them there and grow the church. We are inclined towards attractional ministry. On the flip, trusting God’s word to build our churches is an act of faith. It is trusting in the supernatural rather than the natural. The power of God’s word is a faith proposition.
God speaks through human preachers and human words. We must ask for faith to believe that: – encountering the Bible is encountering God. – God acts efficaciously through his word by his spirit. – God puts his power to work when Christians speak.
The pronouncement of God’s word effectively draws a line in the sand between two groups of people – those who accept god’s word and those who reject it. The work of the evangelist is to invite people to cross the line.You build a church from scratch throug the evangelist
God’s people are those who listen to his voice. Those who are not his sheep don’t listen or believe. God’s word therefore divides. It divides the Christian from the non Christian, and divides the Christian in half, separating the old man and the new man. People will either accept us or reject us depending on whether or not they are His.
Because God’s word divides, the temptation is to unite people around something other than God’s word, like music style or acts of service. Or we will be tempted to water down the word, soften it.
An individual heart is freed and given life exclusively through the word. The the priority of the local church must be the Word ministry — sharing the word, preaching the word, singing the word, reading the word and praying the word. Everything else should be a platform to share the word. We should optimize our natural resources to platform the word. Charisma, financial resources, community, acts of service, hospitality, music, eloquence, humour, church buildings… All are platforms and fall under the realm of prudence. Are they helping or distracting from.the main job? Everything else is supporting cast.
The church is to be united along the gospel of Christ, not around ethnicity, socioeconomic class, partisan politics, age, style or anything else. Attractional ministry works to build churches on something natural, not supernatural. It produces mostly white/black churches, and mostly college educated, mostly millennial churches…. A church that lives by the power of sociology and attraction and culture will die by the power of sociology and attraction and culture.
Lowering walls for one group raises them for another. You target the youth and lock out the old. You target urban hip and lock out another group.
In the second half of the book Leeman discusses what the Word looks like in the church, especially in the sermons, in what the church sings, how the church prays, and how we disciple. His argument is that for you to be a healthy eater, you need to know what healthy food looks like.
Scripture must be invited to come make a house in the church’s music. Singing god’s word is how a congregation tunes it’s heart together across the whole range of biblically driven affections. Something wonderful about the heart-reprogramming work of music is that it easily travels home with us, echoing out of the church into our lives together.
On prayer he says : Christians should pray according to scriptural priorities and patterns. Let the words and agenda of the Bible inform your individual and corporate prayer life.
BOOK TWO
The second book I’m keeping close is What is the mission of the church? By Kelvin DeYoung and Gilbert Gregg.
A lot of people will hate this book because it is anti social transformation and social justice, the current buzzwords among the woke. Well, those and Critical Race Theory.
The whole book is working to convince the reader in so many words that the primary mission of the church is making disciples for Christ – win people to Christ and build them up in Christ. Proclaim, baptise, teach. Every other programme in church should be evaluated in that light- is it bringing the church closer to its primary mission. For example, if the church decides to donate playground equipment, the path should be clear how this opportunity will help impact that community for Christ.
The authors argue that because our resources, time, energy are limited to spend in all the good we could think of, spiritual opportunism in all good works should always be the goal. We can’t claim to love someone by taking care of their physical needs and neglect their most important needs — spiritual needs.
Interesting ideas in the book: God is building his kingdom. Him, not us. We can enter the kingdom, receive the kingdom, stop others from entering the kingdom but we can’t claim to be building the kingdom. It’s God’s work from start to finish. The kingdom is what it is. God alone establishes and ushers it in. The primary task of Christians is not to build or establish the kingdom but rather be witnesses to it, representing the suffering forgiving king. We are subjects and heralds, not agents.
If we hope only for renewed cities and restored bodies on this life, we are of all people most to be pitied. DeYoung and Gilbert say they do not believe the mission of the church is to build the kingdom or partner with God in remaking the world. Therefore we should not overspiritualise social action by making it equivalent to God’s shalom. Our mission is not identical with Christ’s earthly work. Even less do we think we have to complete what the Son somehow failed to accomplish.
Abraham does not leave Ur intent on blessing the Cannanites. The blessing is not something we bestow on others as we work for human flourishing. Rather, the Abrahamic blessing comes to those who put their trust in Jesus. The Israelites conquer the nations by military force, not by any incarnational mission. The nations are more often threats to Israel’s religion than they are opportunities for service.
One of the biggest missteps in much newer mission literature is an assumption that whatever God is doing in the world , this too is our task… What if the work of salvation, restoration and recreation are divine gifts to which we bear witness, rather than works we collaborate? Pg 42 God does not send out his church to conquer. He sends us out in the name of the one who already conquered. Pg 46
It was not Jesus’ driving ambition to heal the sick and meet needs of the poor as much as he cared for them. He was sent into the world to save people from condemnation. He came to seek and save the lost. He came to give his life as a ransom for many. If anything, the clamour for meeting needs sometimes became a distraction to Jesus.
The Bible is the story of how a gracious God who is also perfectly just and righteous acted to bring sinful man back to his presence and favour. Why? The whole story of the Israelites, from Abraham, through Moses, Joshua, King David etc is certainly not a story of humanity finding its footing and working to restore creation to its Edenic state.
You cannot proclaim the full gospel if you leave out the message of the cross, even if you talk for an hour about all other blessings God has in store for the redeemed. Unless the blessings of the gospel of the kingdom are connected to the cross, you don’t have a gospel at all. To proclaim the inauguration of the kingdom and all other blessings without telling people how they may become partakers of those blessings is to preach a non gospel.
Pg 107, 108 The kingdom belongs to and is ruled by King Jesus. It is the kingdom of God’s beloved son. Jesus alone is the promised king. This keeps us from thinking that there are multiple pathways into the kingdom of God. There is salvation in no one else. The way to the kingdom us submission to the king.
Pg 123 We fear that over the years, as cities don’t become havens of virtue and justice, as poverty persists, as governments remain susceptible to corruption, Christians will find themselves discouraged and possibly questioning the goodness or power of God. A more biblically realistic way to think about the world in the present age is to realise that until Jesus comes back, we will always have the poor with us and that our societies will always be marked by corruption, injustice, even oppression. Bible-informed realism will keep us from getting crushed when it turns out we can not fix the world.
Pg 130,131 The principle of moral proximity. The closer the need, the greater the moral obligation to help. Moral proximity refers to how connected we are to someone by virtue of familiarity, kinship, space or time. Pg 183 When eternity finally comes, we will live in a land that was made and created for us, under a kingdom that was won and established for us by a saviour who died and was resurrected for us. The gospel is the good news of salvation in all its parts, that is for us and not in the least by us.
Pg 208 It seems clear from scripture that Adam’s mandate does not remain unaffected by the fall. The Noahic mandate has subdue conspicuously absent: it is no longer a matter of progression to paradise but preservation in a fallen world. The mandate given to Adam to rule the earth is fulfilled not ultimately by us, but by the last Adam. We still live in the Noahic version of the cultural mandate.
Pg 212-213 Pg 229 was touchy- that when we do good, we cannot claim to be fulfilling part of the church’s mission- we are not expanding the kingdom, we are not sharing the gospel without words… We are doing what redeemed human beings do. Even when our cities don’t change in a decade or two, we will stay motivated by loving God, loving people and being faithfully present. If our priorities mirror the MDGs, we will be redundant.
Pg 238 Worship is the end of the story, not human flourishing, not even a redesigned world. Christian mission must always aim at making, sustaining and establishing worshippers. We are not called to bring a broken planet back to its created glory. We are to call broken people back to their creator. It is not the church’s responsibility to right every wrong or meet every need though we have biblical motivation to do some or both. It is our responsibility, unique mission and plain priority that neighbors and nations may know Jesus and believe in him.
BOOK THREE
The final book I will discuss is “The whole Counsel of God” by Tim Patrick & Andrew Reid.
The book sets out to encourage preachers to preach the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation, systematically, because all of it is the word of God. Pg 22: a light hotchpotch diet of Scripture, even well-taught scripture, is not what God wants for his people.
The authors state that the books of the Bible were intended to be read as coherent wholes, not piecemeal. The Bible is God’s means of communicating to all people the fixed things he wants all to hear. All scripture is God’s word, not just Jesus words quoted verbatim.
The duty of the church leaders is to preach the whole counsel of God as Paul did, with the person and work of Jesus at the center, and a committment to expound everything that God has revealed through His Word.
We are a generation privileged to have easy access to Scripture everywhere — on our phones, we have all manner of translations within easy reach. Yet for many Christians in our generation, our knowledge of scriptures is scanty. We stand without excuse.
Many of us also struggle to read and understand the Bible. There are books I used to avoid, either because they are hard to read (numbers) or hard to understand (Ezekiel) or I fail to see their relevance to my here and now. The authors pose: could it be that our limited Bible knowledge is a product of limited biblical teaching in our pulpits? “Few church members rise above their leaders.”
What I learned: Scripture is educative and corrective for doctrine and ethics… That the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. Scripture is not an end in itself but a means of formation for people for the glory of God and the benefit of others. It has the goal of making those who receive it wise for salvation.
Newer translations of the Bible tend to be more accurate than the older.
Consequences of not preaching the whole Bible #Thinking that some books are more important than others #narrow or imbalaced theology that causes some important parts of the Word to be neglected. #Failure to grasp the overall message and shape of scripture.
We come to the Bible open to being shaped by its concerns, priorities, agenda, perspectives. On our preaching we must constantly orient our hearers to the larger story and it’s theology as we preach it in small sections, and we must always be showing them the resonances between the parts and the whole.
If we bring a biblical theological approach to our preaching, Jesus will always be at the centre. Every sermon from every text should throw more light on the message of Jesus, his death and resurrection. Every sermon can be a gospel sermon.
Systematic theology allows us to place every scripture in the light of a broader balanced context hence we avoid misinterpretation. What does the rest of scripture say on this issue? The gospel should be clearly presented in every sermon.
A preacher’s reading of the Bible shapes the reading of many other people. A narrow interpretation will be multiplied by the number of people that accepted it.
The book highly discourages topical sermons – Those drawing single verses across different books especially on the Sunday sermons because they are too jumpy and can be overwhelming and fail to wrestle with all the big and small things in a text. They also never rise above the knowledge of the preacher. “If we preachers value our people and the whole Bible, we ought to give time to preparing a balanced diet.”
While I understand their heavy inclination towards expository preachings of entire Bible books, I think their criticism of topical sermons is underserved.
The book has a detailed practical guide on how to preach the entire Bible in chapter 10. I highly encourage it for vocational preachers.
I loved the bits about flexibility in the lengths of srmon time, so a preacher can feel equally comfortable preaching a five-minute sermon and a one-hour sermon as need be. Our churches should have allowance for both.
We need to prioritize the ministry of the word in the service and structure the service around the word preached. Corporate worship must be word-centred. We should design all our programmes to flow out of the reading and preaching of the word.
God’s word should infuse everything, from our songs, prayers and sermons.
The work of feeding Jesus’s lamb’s with his word is intensely pastoral and missional and requires the local overseer walking closely and sharing life with his people. An internet preacher cannot do this. For the preacher, virtual preaching may lead to the temptation to tailor the message to a broader audience and sideline your primary audience. For members, relying on online sermons robs us of the experience of unity that comes from the local gathering of believers. We need to listen to sermons from a pastor that is in touch with our reality. Oonline church de-energises local gospel works, and we need preachers who know us and our needs and who can pastor us, not just preach at us.
Being in one place for a long time will enable you to know the congregants and their experiences personally and thereby be sensitive when tackling specific topics that touch them personally. Even if long-term ministry does not look feasible, the orientaion should always be toward the same. The goal should always be to work on new parts of the Bible. Pastoral benefits of long term ministry- it opens doorways into people’s lives. Pg 218 strong biblical pastoral ministry is not about career advancement but about self sacrificial caring for God’s people as God’s undershepherd.
It is important to offer children the whole Bible and also avoid censoring parts we may deem inappropriate. Instead we should explain these parts in age appropriate terms in order to avoid watering down God’s revelation to them.
Preachers should coordinate to avoid contradictions. Need for pastoral team to share theological convictions to avoid confusing the church. Need to vet guest speakers and their theology. Need for guest speakers to fit in the teaching agenda of the church rather than coming to set their own agenda…
The preachers’ clear focus is knowing and grounding God’s people in the truths of scripture so that these truths feed down into daily lives. This can only happen when the preacher himself is an ongoing student of the Bible. There is need for rigorous and widespread personal Bible reading programs that’s separate from sermon prep, and that engages the whole Bible, not just our favourite books. The perfect way to attain a biblical word view… “the object of sitting under the whole counsel of God is not just to learn a million separate facts and points of application, but to have our minds transformed to think God’s ways about all of life.” “Placing yourself under the whole counsel of God will make it less likely that you can hide from anything that God wants to speak into your life as you perhaps could if your ministry focused on only one subsection of the Bible. In the end, this is no more than you are asking of your congregation, and so it is entirely appropriate for a preacher to lead the way in submitting himself to every part of scripture.”
Ultimately, Christian ministry is not about program management but about people. The goal of preaching through the whole Bible is so that the congregation’s entire worldview is shaped by the entire of scripture. Our goal in preaching is to serve, not to impress (congregants, seminary teachers, critics etc). That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aim for excellence but our eyes are the people God has called us to.
Conclusion. Like Moses we should be able to feed the people of God the whole counsel even if we are not certain of bringing the task completion. “It is better to set the course toward our destination and chart it truly for as far as we can go than to not set out at all.”
Faith & Good Sense 