Survey of Church History LESSON · The Challenge of Ministry in a New Millennium 2 of 15 Lesson 24...

Transcript - CH505 Survey of Church History© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 24 of 24CH505

The Challenge of Ministry in a New Millennium

Survey of Church History

Greetings once again in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. With this lecture, as you know, we have finally arrived at the end of our journey through Christian history. Before we conclude our time together however, I would like to invite you to think with me for a few moments about our own period of Christian history, focusing for example on some of the recent developments that have helped to shape today’s church and on some of the enormous challenges that confront each of us as we seek to serve God in a new millennium, in our own 21st century. Before we do so, however, I want to invite you to join me in prayer, and for that prayer I’m going to use the words of John Bailey, a former principal of New College at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. They can be found in his wonderful little devotional book A Diary of Private Prayer.

So let us pray: Oh heavenly Father, give us a heart like the heart of Jesus Christ, a heart more ready to minister than to be ministered unto. A heart moved by compassion toward the weak and the oppressed. A heart set upon the coming of Thy kingdom in the world of people. I would pray oh God, for all those to whom Jesus Christ gave special thought and care; for those lacking in food or drink or raiment; for the sick and all who are wasted by disease; for the blind; for the maimed; the lame; for lepers and prisoners; for those oppressed by any injustice; for the lost sheep of our human society; for fallen women; for all lonely strangers within our gates; for the worried and anxious; for those who are living faithful lives in obscurity; for those who are fighting bravely and unpopular causes; for all those who are laboring diligently in Thy vineyard. Grant oh Father, that Thy loving kindness in causing our own lines to fall in such pleasant places may not make us less sensitive to the needs of others less privileged, but rather more incline us to lay their burdens upon our own hearts; and if any adversity should befall us, then let us not brood upon our own sorrows, as if we alone in the world were suffering; but rather let us busy ourselves in the compassionate service of all who need help. Thus let the power of the Lord Jesus Christ be strong within us, and

Garth M. Rosell, Ph.D. Professor of Church History and Director

Emeritus of the Ockenga Institute at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

in South Hamilton, Massachusetts

Transcript - CH505 Survey of Church History © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.


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may His Spirit invade our hearts, through Jesus Christ our Lord we pray. Amen.

During the past century, as Mark Shaw has reminded us in his book Global Awakening: How 20th-Century Revivals Triggered a Christian Revolution, a book published in 2010: “The growth of Christianity around the globe has been nothing short of amazing. While the Christian church has declined in parts of the West to be sure, it has experienced literally explosive growth in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In Africa, for example, the Christian church grew from about 10 million in 1900 to 400 million in the year 2000; and Pentecostalism, a movement that claimed only a handful of adherents in 1906, the year of the great Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, has now grown to at least half a billion by some counts, at the turn of last century.” Much of this growth of course was the result of dozens of revivals that broke out during the 20th century literally around the globe; from the East African revivals in the 1930s and 40s to the awakenings in Brazil, India, and China. In South Korea, for example, the exceedingly tiny community of Christians that existed in the year 1900, less than 2 percent of the population, grew to claim the religious allegiance of over one-third of the population. Hundreds of churches were planted throughout South Korea, including some of the very largest in the world. Over 290 schools and 40 universities, including three of the top-five academic institutions in Korea, were established by Christians; and hundreds of Christian missionaries have been sent out. Korea is now second only to America in the sending out of missionaries to spread the gospel around the globe.

How can one explain this astonishing growth? “Well it began on the great Korean Revival of 1907,” suggests Sam Moffett, himself the Korean-born son of missionary parents, “when God manifested His extraordinary power through the outbreak of revivals in Korea, not unlike those that visited England, under the ministry of John and Charles Wesley.” And the central characteristic of that remarkable awakening was without any question united prayer. The beginning of the great revival, historian Timothy Lee has argued, can be traced back to 1903, when a small group of missionaries gathered in Wonsan for a week of Bible study and prayer. Soon numerous prayer meetings and Bible studies were breaking out all across South Korea as Christians gathered to pray that God would pour out His special blessing upon the people. Five years later, the great revival arrived, sweeping literally thousands into the church and touching virtually every aspect of community life. In considering what occurred in Korea, it’s



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difficult not to think back also to mid-19th century America, with the arrival of the great prayer revival of 1857. In 1840, as some of you will recall, a deacon from Park Street Church in Boston began to pray for his city and for the world that the showers of God’s blessing might fall upon them once again. Others began to join them in the daily noontime prayers; and soon the group had grown quite large. For 17 years they prayed, and then in 1857, God poured out His blessing upon Boston, New York, and cities around the globe in what is often called the prayer revival of 1857 and 58, one of the most powerful revivals the church has ever known—no charismatic preachers, no unusual leaders, minimal organizational structures, just God’s faithful people pouring out their prayers to a loving God.

While we often bemoan the moral and spiritual decline of our own day, and we’re of course correct in raising these concerns, it is perhaps especially important for us to recognize that God appears to be doing something rather remarkable in our own day, namely, growing His church around the globe, renewing His people through fresh outpouring of His Holy Spirit. We might not see it directly in our own neighborhoods, since of course much of it is happening in the burgeoning Christian communities outside of North America; but we need to join in praise to our sovereign God that He is building and renewing His church in many regions of the world today. Historian Mark Noll calls this “The New Shape of World Christianity,” and he has written a book published by InterVarsity Press in 2009, under that title. And he gives these interesting statistics in that study: “This past Sunday, [Noll remarks] it is possible that more Christian believers attended church in China then in all of so-called Christian Europe.” Just think of it. “This past Sunday, [he continues] more Anglicans attended church in Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda then did Anglicans in Britain and Canada and Episcopalians in the United States, all combined; and the number of Anglicans in church in Nigeria was several times the number in those of other African countries. [He continues.] This past Sunday more Presbyterians were at church in Ghana than in Scotland. This past Sunday, there were more members of Brazil’s Pentecostal Assemblies of God at church than the combined total in the two largest US Pentecostal denominations combined: the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ. This past Sunday, more people attended the Yoido Full Gospel Church pastored by Yonggi Cho in Seoul, Korea, than attended all the churches and significant American denominations like the Christian Reformed Church, the Evangelical Covenant Church, or the Presbyterian



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Church in America. Six to eight times as many people attended this one church as the total that worshiped in Canada’s 10 largest churches combined.” It’s amazing isn’t it? And he goes on to say, “This past Sunday, the churches with the largest attendance in England and France were mostly black congregations. Furthermore, this past week in Great Britain at least 15,000 Christian foreign missionaries were hard at work evangelizing the locals, and most of these missionaries were from Africa and Asia. “In a word, [Noll concludes] the Christian church has experienced a larger geographical redistribution in the last 50 years then in any comparable period in history, with the exception of the very earliest years of church history when it spread out from Jerusalem to win a world for Christ.”

Of course as we have learned in some of our earlier lectures, God seems to take great pleasure in awakening and refreshing His people. Isn’t that wonderful? Walt Kaiser, in his little book Revive us Again, provides a powerful reminder that God has poured out His showers of blessings throughout the pages of Holy Scripture too in Old and New Testaments; and historians such as Earl Cairns, in his book An Endless Line of Splendor, tells of God’s continual work of renewal throughout Christian history: “For eyes that are able to see it, God is doing it all over again in our own time. So don’t despair, my dear friends and colleagues in ministry, God has certainly not abandoned His people, and His faithfulness is new every single morning.” In making such a bold affirmation, we need to be perfectly clear from the start that all genuine spiritual awakening is always, without any exception, the gift of our sovereign God. We can’t create revival. We can’t program spiritual renewal. We can’t schedule a religious awakening. It always comes, as Jonathan Edwards wisely phrased it, in his account of the 1734–35 revival in North Hampton, as “the surprising work of God.” We need to be equally clear that the transformative power of spiritual renewal is completely, again without any exception, the work of the Holy Spirit. We can’t change a single heart. We can’t redeem a single person. We can’t save a single wondering soul—this too is the work of God.

I’m privileged to have grown up in the home of a preacher, a wonderful evangelist whose day began and ended by his deep desire to winsomely spread the gospel wherever he could. Dad was a preacher’s preacher, and people loved to hear him preach; and I grew up listening to him preach to 10, 20, 30, 40 thousand people at a crack—quite an amazing man! But when he was called into evangelism as a teenager in his later teens, he was deeply



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committed to sharing the gospel with people throughout the Midwest. He was a Minnesotan, who preached in little churches all over Minnesota and down in Iowa and over in Wisconsin. And everyone loved to hear him preach. The churches were always packed, and people were anxious to have him come back. But he became increasingly desperate as his ministry continued over those early months. He said, “I’m entertaining the people, they love to hear me speak. I have the kind of gift for communication, but nothing is happening in their lives. I’m not seeing any transformation of life, and God called me to be an evangelist; and people aren’t coming to Christ, they’re coming to hear me.” And so he fell on his face, and I remember Dad telling me this story, a powerful turning point in his life. And all night long, he stretched out on the floor, face down, praying, asking God that He would confirm his call, if that was a genuine call, and if not, make it clear to him so that he could leave and do something else with his life. And he said after that night of prayer, he was asked to preach again in one of the next days in a church, again packed with people; and he began his sermon, but he was stumbling all over the place, and as has happened to all of us who’ve tried to preach or teach at times, our tongue gets wrapped around our teeth and we can’t seem to quite fit one sentence after another.

And he was having a terrible time, and he said, “Certainly, God is showing me this is not what He wants me to do, and I need to take another tack, go in to some other line of work,” and so he stopped in the middle of this sermon. He said, “I couldn’t go on, it was so bad.” And he blurted out, “I don’t suppose any of you want to meet Jesus,” and he was ready to beat a hasty retreat down the aisle and out the door . . . and then something amazing happened. One person stood up and came forward with tears in their eyes to kneel in the front, and then two more and then five more and then seven more, until the whole front of the church was literally filled with people pouring out their hearts in repentance to God and the Holy Spirit transforming their lives, right in the front of that little church.

God was teaching Dad two lessons: First, the call was genuine, and it’s one that he pursued for 70 years before his death. But the second, and perhaps even more important call and lesson that God gave him, was that it is God’s work that is going to transform lives by the power of the Holy Spirit. A person may have gifts for communication, but it’s not those gifts that will cause people’s lives to be changed; it’s the power of God working through them. And that lesson became the great turning point lesson of Dad’s



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life, and from then on I don’t think I ever saw him preach—and I traveled with him a fair amount in different parts of the world—without also witnessing the amazing transformation of lives each time he spoke. It’s very similar to his old friend Billy Graham, who did not preach the kind of sermons that you would say, “This is a sermon that should go into the Literary Annals.” It was simply the plain ordinary proclamation of the gospel. And God used the gifts of those two men and others, but they knew from the very beginning of their ministry to the end, as Billy Graham always says, “that if we take one small ounce of credit for what’s going on, our lips will turn to clay.” And they believed it profoundly, and we should too. In fact it should be an enormous blessing, a liberation that can wash over us when we realize that in fact God uses our gifts—those are valuable, and He’s given them to us by the Holy Spirit. But it’s not the gifts that He uses in genuine ministry, it is the power of God working in people’s lives; and when he discovered that, of course his whole ministry changed—and ours will too.

The work of God does not rest upon our shoulders, it is God who has secured our salvation, through the terrible cost of the cross. And it’s God who will sustain, sanctify, and renew His church, praise be to His glorious name. This does not mean of course that we’re to sit idly by as God does this work. On the contrary, God graciously invites us to participate in His continuing ministry here on earth, proclaiming the glorious gospel, caring for the needy, fulfilling our various callings with diligence and faithfulness. He equips us by the Holy Spirit with the gifts and graces we need to fulfill His calling and then urges us, whatever our circumstance, to prepare ourselves for the joyous outpouring of His renewing presence. And how are we to prepare for a fresh outpouring of God’s blessing? Well, I think it’s simple—by following the pattern that has been so clearly written in Scripture and throughout Christian history: namely, by humbling ourselves and praying, by seeking God’s face, by turning from our wicked ways. Then, as we read in 2 Chronicles 7:14, “Our sins will be forgiven and our lands will be healed.”

For many years now, my students and I have been studying the patterns of spiritual awakening around the globe; and we’ve made an amazing discovery, namely, that in every single one of them, without any exception to our knowledge, three elements are always present and only three. While spiritual awakenings differ from one another in many secondary respects, they are all marked by the faithful proclamation of the Bible, by united believing



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prayer, and by genuine repentance from our sins. We were able to explore these three characteristics, as you may recall, in an earlier lecture. But it’s helpful, I should think, for us to remind ourselves once again as we focus attention on the contemporary world in which God has called us to serve, that in fact what we need to be doing for God to pour out His blessings in fresh ways upon us again today is to continue to teach and live in obedience to the Scriptures by joining with any others of like mind in united believing prayer, this concert of prayer that God would pour out His blessings again upon His church, and of course by falling on our knees each day before the cross in repentance to have our lives cleansed so that we can be useful vessels in doing God’s work and in spreading the glorious gospel wherever God puts us.

Well, we rightly celebrate God’s amazing work around the world, this work that seems to be going on in so many interesting places in our own day, and we do so in full awareness that there are many significant challenges that face us when we try to do that work in a new millennium. Let me identify, if I may briefly, six important challenges that I think have emerged out of developments in recent church history. The first of these challenges, for those of us who minister in this era, in this century, is the challenge of relativism. In a so-called postmodern world that has largely abandoned any belief in absolute truth or any adherence to a kind of normative moral standard, we are faced with the reality of people who have desperate need for Christians to reaffirm the truth as united and one—centered in the God of the universe who is Himself truth.

Allan Bloom, in his influential book The Closing of the American Mind, opens the first chapter with these chilling words: “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: Almost every student entering the university today believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. The students’ backgrounds are as various as America can provide: some are religious, some atheists, some are to the left, some to the right, some intend to be scientists, some humanists or professionals or businessman, some rich, some poor. They are all united only in their relativism [Bloom argues] and in their allegiance to equality, and the two are related in moral intention. The relativity of truth [he continues] is not a theoretical insight, but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society as they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American ground for a free society. This is the virtue, the only



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virtue which all primary education for 50 years has dedicated itself to inculcating, namely relativism. Openness and relativism that makes it the only possible stance in the face of various claims to truth, various ways and kinds of life, is the great insight they believe of our time. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture [Bloom concludes] teach us that all the world was mad in the past, people always thought they were right and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, racism, chauvinism, and so on. The point is not to correct the mistakes they believe, and to be really right; rather it’s not to think you’re right at all.”

Gertrude Himmelfarb, in her book On Looking into the Abyss, echoes Bloom’s concerns. In fact, she includes a chapter in that book titled “Where Have All the Footnotes Gone?”: “A fascinating and revealing question to be sure. Who would need footnotes in a postmodern world? If you aren’t tethered to the past, if you aren’t tethered to truth, if there’s no moral standard against which to test what you do, why not tell the story any way you want to tell the story? You can make up the elements of the story at will. The story is all that’s important, and no one else’s story [Himmelfarb suggests] should have a claim on you.” These challenges, I think, placed before Christians a unique obligation, and that is to stand up, to speak up, to affirm once again the centrality and importance of truth. And Christian scholars, I think more than any others, should be vitally interested in truth, since we worship the One who is Himself Truth, capital T. This is especially important, I would argue, because number one, we believe truth is one, that is, we affirm the essential unity of the universe as God’s good creation and that therefore science and faith belong together. We affirm the essential unity of all reality, for all things were created by Christ, and for Christ, and in Christ. All things hold together (Colossians 1), and we affirm the unity of all truth since God is One. “Hear, O Israel,” the voice comes from the Old Testament, “the Lord our God is One,” and they who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. The very nature of God requires, I believe, that we recognize the essential unity of truth, for God is Truth.

Secondly, we also believe that the joyous wholehearted person of truth is honoring to God. In fact, it’s an act of spiritual worship. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts. Indeed, the gospel frees us to pursue our studies without the fear that such efforts might damage our faith. On the contrary, it’s precisely our obedience to God’s mandate to pursue truth that strengthens faith. The Christian historian therefore has an obligation to pursue truth



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wherever that search leads them; and the recognition of weakness or failure in ourselves or in the history of the church need not force us to despair or cut us off from huge chunks of our heritage. Rather, it should prompt us to embrace the whole history of God’s people, to learn from its mistakes as well as its successes, and to test all of them against our one normative standard: the precious Word of God, which in fact is our rule of faith and practice.

Sadly, however, it [has] often been the churches, those thousands of well-meaning believers, hundreds of local congregations that have stood most vigorously in the way of truth seeking. Mark Noll in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which has gotten a very broad reading, suggests this as one of our central problems. He said, in fact: “The problem or scandal of the evangelical mind is that there’s not much of an evangelical mind. Indeed, while evangelical Protestants make up one of the largest religious groups in the world, having great wealth, status and political influence, they have with rare exceptions contributed relatively little to scholarship and intellectual life. We’ve often criticized, rather than becoming truth bearers.”

Harold John Ockenga, who was the very first president of the National Association of Evangelicals, called us to that kind of commitment in his opening address at the NAE in 1943. He says, “This nation is passing through a crisis which is enmeshing Western civilization. Confusion is on every hand. We’re living in a difficult bewildering time. The hour has arrived and the people of this nation must think deeply or be damned. We must examine our direction, our condition, our destiny; we must recognize that we are standing at a crossroad, that there are only two ways that lie open before us. One is the road of the rescue of civilization by a reemphasis on revival of evangelical Christianity; but the other is a return to the dark ages of heathendom. So we have a now or never urgency in the matter. [Ockenga argued.] The time to strike is here, the iron is hot, the door is opened, the need is great, and that need, first of all, is intellectual. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if evangelical Christians would once again lead the way in genuine scholarship, honoring God through our allegiance to the truth? Because as we worship the God who is Truth, we do honor to Him by seeking truth in this creation which He has provided for us to study, to learn from, and to enjoy.”

So we have a formidable challenge today in the rampant relativism, which has swept not only the Western world, but other parts of the world as well. But a second challenge also faces us today, and that is the challenge of individualism. Robert Bellah in his book,



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Habits of the Heart, puts it this way, “In colonial New England, the roles of Christian and citizen though not fused were often closely linked. The minister was a public officer, chosen by the town and not only by church members. Even when dissent gradually came to be tolerated, the established congregational church was the focus of community life and its unifying institution. Sermons were preached annually on Election Day, and what’s been called the New England Communalism valued order, harmony, obedience to authority; and these values centered on the figure of the minister. Such a minister was both the keeper and prevailer of the public culture, the body of fundamental precepts and values that define the social community, and also the informer and enforcer of sure personal values and decorum.” And then he produces this striking conclusion: “Today, [Bellah concludes] religion in America is as private and diverse, as individualistic and privatized as New England colonial religion was public and unified.”

Most of us, I suspect, are not even aware of how deeply individualism has become a part of our own lives. My favorite example of this tendency comes from the experience of some good friends of ours as part of their graduate studies in anthropology at one of our universities. These friends, newly married, all went to a small rural village in another culture. In this village, the women used to do their work together sitting in a circle talking and working as they went through the day. A young wife of this couple would do her work along with the village women, of course as part of that circle.

But soon, after some weeks, she began to feel closed in and needing her space. So, as a typical American, she sought to get away for a time and find a little quietness by herself, so she climbed up the outward, outside steps to the top of a flat roof, which was the typical architecture in that area, and she sat there at the edge of the roof breathing, enjoying being alone for a moment. But it wasn’t long before one of the women came up the stairs and didn’t say a word but sat down across from her on the roof; and then two or three more and finally the whole group was up there sitting around. And finally she said in desperation “Don’t you folk have work to do?” and of course they answered, “Well you know we do, we work together every day. But it’s more important that you not be left alone then it is to get our work done.” And she said it dawned on her, for the very first time in her life, how individualized she was as an American; that in fact the community sense of this village where she lived was teaching her a lesson that became a lifetime lesson, where she now feels uncomfortable when she



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comes back to America and has to have her own separate room with the door closed and all of these kind of features of separate life. And we do that of course rather routinely: We sit together in congregations of other Christians on Sunday morning to worship God. And we often do that in splendid isolation, not knowing the people in the row even though we’ve seen them week after week and nod at them and smile. We don’t know if their children are sick or their family has lost a job. We don’t know anything about them, because in fact we prefer somehow to live these isolated lives—desperately lonely oftentimes, but unwilling to give up that privatized life, that individualized separateness that we cling to as if it were something precious. And yet the Christian church by its very nature is community. It’s the body of Christ. We need each other, not only for fellowship, but so that we can do our ministry and our outreach more effectively.

One of the challenges certainly that faces us in our day is this individualism that has crept up on us over these last centuries and combines with that relativism to form a challenge for those of us who are truth seekers and community lovers. But a third challenge is equally important, and that is the challenge of fragmentation. Among evangelical Christians, for example, this is perhaps especially evident. Gabe Fackre, a theologian, writing in his little book The Christian Faith and the Religious Right, lists five major groupings of evangelicals: “Old evangelicals, fundamentalists, new evangelicals, peace and justice evangelicals, charismatic evangelicals. And all of these groups seem to have their own subgroups and smaller arrangements and branches each with its own magazine, its own schools, its own circuit of speakers, often at odds with one another. Brothers and sisters in Christ, how can this be, since God calls us not only to purity, morally and doctrinally, but to unity? As we visit John 17, that great high priestly prayer of our Lord once again, we hear Christ praying that we as His people might be unified in exactly the same way that God is unified as the three persons of the Trinity, perfectly harmonious, perfectly in line with one another. And that is how we as God’s people are to be—a community on earth that reflects that glorious unity in the universe. Purity is important, and we must never forget the call of God to moral and doctrinal purity. But unity is also important and these two need to be held side by side.” So here is another challenge for us today, along with relativism and individualism. It’s a sense of fragmentation in a world where God calls us to connect with one another and to tear down those barriers that are artificial, that divide us.



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A fourth challenge can be added to this list, a kind of variant of the third, and that is the growing divisions within our own evangelical ranks between those who tend to favor the head and those that tend to favor the heart. J. I. Packer, a wonderful evangelical theologian, describes these beautifully for us in his little book A Quest for Godliness. He said, “There are two groups within evangelicalism, the first are the restless experientialists [as he calls them]. These are a familiar breed”—this is the way he describes them—“so much so that observers are sometimes tempted to define evangelicalism completely in terms of them. Their outlook is one of casual haphazardness, a fretful impatience of grasping after novelties, entertainments, highs; of valuing strong feelings above deep thoughts. They have little taste for solid study, humble self-examination, or disciplined meditation unspectacular hard work. They conceive the Christian life as one of exciting, extraordinary experiences, rather than resolute rational righteousness.” You know any of those folks? Over against them is the second group that Packer calls “the entrenched intellectualists. They present themselves as rigid, argumentative, critical Christians, champions of God’s truth, for whom orthodoxy is everything. Upholding and defending their own view of that truth, whether Calvinist, Armenian, Dispensationalist, Pentecostal, National Church Reformist, or Free Church Separatists; whatever it may be, that’s their leading interest, and they invest themselves unstintingly in the task. There’s little warmth about them. Relationally they are remote, Experiences don’t mean much to them. Winning the battle for mental correctness is their one great purpose.” That’s the description by Packer. Do you know any of these folks?

In our own seminary, the one where I teach, these two groups are often at odds with one another, and they even sit at different tables for lunch. Yet truth be told we desperately need each other. Indeed, the gospel breaks down those artificial barriers between God’s people. The apostle Paul talks about that as the end of the distinction between Jews and Gentiles, slave and free, male and female; and you could go down to a great many other categories as well. In our day, it seems that God is calling us back to a kind of unity that values those different gifts, emphases, and concerns; and particularly so since He’s raising His church around the world, where we need to hear those new voices speaking to us and calling us back to biblical fidelity once again. But let me add a fifth and sixth challenge briefly: A fifth challenge, which we could call self-centeredness. We often fail to see that the Bible calls us to a great commandment, which centers not on ourselves but upon God. We are to love the Lord our God with all our heart,



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soul, mind, and strength; and it is that path that allows us then to love our neighbors as ourselves.

I have an older sister and a younger brother, and we grew up in Minnesota. And I remember as we were growing up, in our young days our parents brought all of us together, the five of us in our living room of our small Cape Cod house in Rochester, Minnesota, one day, and told us about God’s missionary work around the world. We had known many of these missionaries, of course, since our home was a kind of gathering place for many who traveled through and would visit us. But when they told us about God’s work around the world, they added this comment. “We know that you children all have savings accounts” and of course we did. My sister had 10 dollars, I had 5 dollars, and my brother had 50 cents. These were our life savings. And then dad said, “Mama and I have discussed this, and we’d like you to go in to the other room and we want you to talk together, you three kids, about how much of that savings you want to give back to God’s work around the world through these great missionary friends we have.” So we trundled off into the next room, and I suggested right away that we give ten percent. I’d heard that somewhere in the church as a good tithe figure, but my brother and sister thought that that was too little. So then my sister suggested that we give all of it, and the two boys vetoed that very quickly. We finally decided on 50 percent, and we went back to tell my mom and dad. And I can still remember their faces, though it happened many years ago. They were both delighted of course, and then Dad said to us something that has been a great lesson for me: “Mom and I discussed this before we presented it to you, and we decided that whatever you chose to give, we would double it and give it back to you.” And of course immediately we saw the wisdom of my sister’s suggestions, but the opportunity had passed and we had learned an amazing lesson. We of course don’t give to God’s work, to God’s purposes, in order to receive anything back. But in God’s good grace and through His care for us when we give our money, our time, our energy, our focus, our interest, our thoughts, every fiber of our being, when we give ourselves to others for the purposes of God and His glory in His wonderful economy, it turns around somehow and blesses us many, many times over.

We think that our lives are at the center of the universe, but God tells us in Scripture—and we ought to know in our hearts—that God is the one who is at the center of the universe. He is the only one deserving of our praise, of our service, of all that we are and have; and it’s through glorifying Him that we are enabled, because



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He empowers us by the Spirit to serve our neighbors as we would like to be served ourselves.

Let me add a final challenge, I think, for those of us who are ministering within this century, and that is the reality of the growing hostility toward people of faith, literally around the world. The age of Christendom, which begins symbolically at least in the fourth century with the coming of the first Christian emperor in the Roman Empire, namely Constantine, that era seems to be coming to an end, and some have argued that it is already ended. In what is called a post-Christendom or post-denominationalism—whatever term we give to it, it’s a new era that in fact is a much more hostile era than we have experienced in the past. New persecutions are breaking out all over the world. New martyrs are being added to those that have marked the centuries of Christian history before us. And we need, especially today, to prepare and fortify ourselves for this new increasingly hostile world. And how are we to do that? I think there are several ways we must engage in by studying scriptures more diligently than we have in the past. We need to be memorizing those scriptures, so that they are laid away in our hearts and can shape us and can be drawn upon in those dark nights of the soul. We need to return to the great theological statements of the church—the creeds, the confessions, the catechisms—and teach them once again to our children, so that they will have a language of faith, they will have a perspective on which they can draw in difficult times ahead. And of course we need to root ourselves once again in the great hymns of the church that can sustain us, as the psalms sustain us when memorized. When in the middle of the night we wake up anxious and concerned because of the difficulties that we are facing, this calls us all to the very best we have to offer to faithfulness in our studies, to faithfulness in our ministries, to faithfulness in our outreach to spread a biblical Christianity, sound theology, to a world that is desperately in need of all of this.

So there are great challenges, and you can add your numbers to the list that I’ve given you briefly. But those very challenges always come with great opportunities to do our work for Christ in the world. Remember, God is continuing to build His church around this troubled globe, and we talked about that a little earlier in this very lecture. Therefore rejoice, my dear friends, my brothers and sisters in Christ, for the victory has been won. Indeed, as one of the great missionary statesmen, Adoniram Judson—who served for 37 years in Burma, what we now know as Myanmar—proposed in that famous line that we need to repeat regularly to ourselves:

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15 of 15

The Challenge of Ministry in a New MillenniumLesson 24 of 24

“The future is as bright as the promises of God.”

And so we come to the end of our course, challenged once again to face a needy world with the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ. And I want to finish also with a prayer, and I’m drawing that prayer as we have in earlier lectures from Paul’s prayer in the book of Philippians; and let me use that to finish our time together, not only today and this lecture but also in this course. And you can be sure I will be continuing to pray for all of you that in fact God will use you in wonderful ways through the gifts He’s given you by the Spirit, through the callings that He has made upon your lives to serve Him in this needy world today. So join me in prayer using the words of the apostle, “And this is my prayer [he writes] that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.” Soli Deo Gloria, to God’s glory alone, we pray and work.

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