HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW ME?

Suzie Rowan, our National Director in the Republic of Ireland, wrote this at the start of the week - a heartfelt cry of pain for one of her young people that every youth leader can identify with.

"I gave in at last !!! I joined Bebo (an internet site you join for free and can connect to loads of people). I've been determined not to join until Wednesday when I got a regular "how well do you know me?" quiz from Bebo on one of the young people that I've worked with over the past few years when she was a teenager (she is now an adult now). Her questions intrigued me and I had to join in order to find out what her answers were - so I gave in. However, I'm sorry I did now! Sometimes it's better not knowing the answers to some questions. One question and answer in particular left me feeling numb and ill at the same time. It read, "when did I lose my virginity?" and because she's a lovely Christian girl (now), who attended girls bible studies that I led on and off when she was a teenager, I felt the answer would obviously be "not yet" - since we spent many studies looking at purity and I felt sure that she was wise enough not to mess around with herself in this way. Anyway, the answer was 15 !!!!! I felt sick. What is going wrong in this world? I've always known statistics of promiscuity in Ireland, especially among youth, but it's not until the statistic moves onto a person that you care about that it hits home. It made me wonder if things would be different if I'd had more contact with her during that phase in her life. Our teenagers need so much prayer, as satan prowls around looking for those he can devour and our churches and towns need so many more youth workers, who can instill and model values that are no longer common in Ireland. We need a movement of God. Please pray."

THE GOSPEL - DILUTE TO TASTE?

This snippet from A W Tozer just came in today from our International Prayer Co-ordinator, and I thought it was worth sharing. There is unfathomable power in the Word of God, but not so much in our thoughts on it. Last night in church one of my colleagues in YFC read two passages from Isaiah, from Chapters 61 and 58, and the words were like the voice of God speaking directly to our hearts.

From the works of A.W. Tozer
I Talk Back to the Devil, pgs. 30-31.

Preaching: Nibbling at the Truth

This is one of the marks of our modern time--that many are guilty of merely "nibbling" at the truth of the Christian gospel.

I wonder if you realize that in many ways the preaching of the Word of God is being pulled down to the level of the ignorant and spiritually obtuse; that we must tell stories and jokes and entertain and amuse in order to have a few people in the audience? We do these things that we may have some reputation and that there may be money in the treasury to meet the church bills . . .

In many churches Christianity has been watered down until the solution is so weak that if it were poison it would not hurt anyone, and if it were medicine it would not cure anyone!

CONVERSANT WITH THE EMERGENT

If you are at all interested in reaching this generation for Jesus Christ you are probably familiar with the "emregent church" movement, and the writings of people like Brian McLaren. They attempt to analyse western culture today and provide suggestions for how the traditional evangelical churches should change to impact the changing culture, and I can agree with quite a bit of what they say.
However, on the plane yesterday on the way to another Middle-eastern country I was reading a superb book by respected Canadian author D A Carson, called "Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church", which offers what seems like a most balanced critique of the movement - noting its many good points but taking issue with many others, in particular, their assertion that western culture has changed so profoundly that an equally-tectonic shift must take place in the way we do church and practice evangelism.
"Granted that the emerging church movement is driven by its widespread perception of cultural changes, its own proposals for the way ahead must be assessed for their biblical fidelity. In other words, we must not only try to evaluate the accuracy of the emerging church's cultural analysis, but also the extent to which its proposals spring from, or can at least be squared with, the Scriptures. To put the matter differently: is there at least some danger that what is being advocated is not so much a new kind of Christian in a new emerging church, but a church that it so submerging itself in the culture that it risks hopeless compromise?"
Dr Carson does find some things to praise, such as the renewed emphasis on authenticity (although sometimes it sounds like what the emergent folks mean by authenticity is not so much to do with holiness as with "being real") and says that "when emerging church leaders foster the kind of authenticity that builds a contagious church, thoughtful Christians will be grateful with their unease with the superficial and their passion for what is real."
However, he's totally unconvinced by their premise.
"I see the analysis of modernism itself within the emerging church movement so stylized and reductionistic as to represent a major historical distortion."
Further, "the almost-universal condemnation of modernism, and of Christianity under modernism, is not only historically skewed and ethically ungrateful, but is frequently theologically shallow and intellectually incoherent."
He illustrates the last point by summarising what tolerance is - putting up with someone or something even though you fundamentally disagree with them or it. "But in our post-modern world, tolerance is increasingly understood to be the virtue that refuses to think that any opinion is bad or evil or stupid. One "tolerates" everything because nothing is beyond the pale - except the view that rejects this view of tolerance: for that, there is no tolerance at all."

Anybody got any opinions on the above? Have you read this book, and if so, what did you think?

I'll finish with another review of one of Brian McLaren's books, ("The Church on the other Side") quoted by D A Carson, as it says brilliantly what I sense many young people I know are saying on this subject. This was written by a guy called Greg Gilbert.
"I'm tired of being told that we've never seen anything like this; I'm tired of all these excitable authors trying to one-up each other with their cataclysmic descriptions of how much the world has changed. On top of it all, I'm tired of being told that the church is on the edge of extinction if it doesn't have a complete overhaul to deal with these "tectonic" changes. I just don't believe it. And that's not because I'm an old codger who can't bring himself to embrace this brave new world. I'm 24 years old; I live this brave new world. Change is not a problem for me; I love it! I look forward to moving to a new city, meeting new people, seeing new cultures, learning new things. I relish the thought of casting off into the world and ministering to people who are not firmly grounded in, or even convinced of, truth. In that, Brian McLaren and I are on the same page. I like his chutzpah. But unlike McLaren, I'm also convinced that ministering to postmoderns does not mean diving head-first into their ocean of uncertainty. I don't want to commiserate with them; I want to offer them something different - something like Truth!"

COST/BENEFIT ANALYSIS IN PRACTICE

As an illustration of how cheaply life is held in some of the places where we work, the following story was pretty shocking to me. I was in a Middle-Eastern country last week and one of our staff told me how, some years ago, his father was talking to a man who had shot another man dead for the equivalent of about one pound sterling/$1.75. "How on earth could you shoot a man in order to get one pound?" he asked. The man looked surprised. "But the bullet only cost me three pence," he said. (About 5 cents.)