A Fishy Story

The atmosphere was heavy with heat and excitement as the disciples were on two boats, helping the local fishermen to pull in their nets. It was Abba Ah Beng’s new spiritual formation project to get his disciples involved with the local communities in the villages surrounding Sow-Lin Monastery. Whether the local communities wanted to be ‘involved with’ is another matter. It was late afternoon and the reflection of sunlight on the surface of the sea was dazzling.

“Watch it!” shouted disciple Ah Lek as he avoided the elbow of disciple Ah Kow which was on a collision course with his nose. “Ouch!” yelled exchange disciple Iskandar from the Middle East as the netting rope burned his fingers. This is the first time disciple Iskander was on a boat. The land he came from was mostly desert. “There must be a lot of fish in the net. It is so heavy,” panted another exchange disciple Muthu who was more skilled in fishing as he slowly pulled the net into boat. “Jiayou! Jiayou!” cheered disciple Ah Lian from the shade of the cabin as she urged her fellow disciples to work harder. “Careful, the floor is wet and slippery,” warned disciple Ah Lek as he turned, slipped and fell overboard. “Monk overboard!” shrieked disciple Ah Lian in her high-pitched voice. There was a commotion as the disciples rushed to the aid of their fallen comrade which nearly overturned the boat and ended with disciple Ah Lek entangled in the net along with the fish.

It was a while before the local fishermen were able to rescue disciple Ah Lek and brought the fishing boats with their catch to the shore. “So many fish! So many fish!” chanted the happy fishermen. Abba Ah Beng beamed and said, “God is good and has blessed us with a bountiful harvest.” “How many fish are here, I wonder?” mused disciple Ah Lek who did not seem worse for wear despite his dip in the ocean except for a distinctive fishy pong that seem to surround him. His fellow disciples were trying to hold their breath and turning blue, or breathing into small linen that were dabbed with fragrant medicated oil. “153!” exclaimed disciple Ah Lian triumphantly. “What?” shouted all the disciples and Abba Ah Beng simultaneously. “How do you know the exact number of fish caught?” asked Abba Ah Beng after they have all recovered from their initial surprise.

“Gospel of John, chapter 21,” replied disciple Ah Lian with a smug smile on her face, “read it in my Quiet Time this morning.” “Ooo…,” said the disciples as their contorted expressions reveal their inner struggle to remember the chapter.

“Ah, now I remember,” said disciple Ah Kow. “It is about the time when the disciples went fishing after Jesus died. They caught nothing until the resurrected Jesus came along and told them to throw the net to the right side of the boat. They obeyed and they caught…caught…153 fish.” “Clever!” “Actsy!” “Show off!” were some of the comments from his fellow disciples.

“Very good, Ah Kow,” said Abba Ah Beng with a gleam in his eye. “Now, tell me why the number of fish caught is exactly 153?” Suddenly the disciples were looking everywhere except at Abba Ah Beng as they tried to avoid eye contact with their teacher. “Remember that they were not catching any fish and were about to give up until Jesus came along and they obeyed him,” continued Abba Ah Beng.

“Remember, my disciple,” said Abba Ah Beng switching to his teaching mode and even the sound of his voice became modulated, “that success and bountiful harvest come from obedience to the commands of Christ.

“God loves all of us and wants us to love Him. He wants to bring more people into His church. The number 153 is his code for His intention to grow the church,” said Abba Ah Beng.

“Hmm?” grunted disciple Ah Lek as he suddenly realized that he was sitting alone and his fellow disciples were keeping a discrete distance and were standing upwind from him.

“In the book of Genesis, God opened Rachel’s barren womb and she gave birth. Rachel named her newborn Joseph (Gen. 30:24). Joseph means ‘May the Lord add to me another son’ showing her desire for another son. As you know, Rachel and Leah were in a reproductive competition to see who will give birth to more sons. When Joseph came of age at 17 years old and was kidnapped (Gen. 37:2), he became symbolic of God’s ‘increase another son’ who was Benjamin.

“God uses the same symbolism to show that he will ‘increase another son’ to Jesus’ disciples after the resurrection. The other ‘son’ will be the Gentile nations who will come to follow Jesus through the actions of Jesus’ disciples in obeying His Word and spreading the Gospel. If you add 1+2+3+4+5+ all the way to 17, you get?”

“153!” shouted Ah Kow who was very adept at working with an abacus. “Exactly! In letting Jesus’ disciples catching exactly 153 large fish, God was revealing to them that a new ‘son’ will soon be joining them. All He required of them is their obedience.” Abba Ah Beng stopped as the mouth watering aroma of freshly BBQ fish replaced the fishy smell of disciple Ah Lek. “Remember, it is in obedience to Christ that the disciples were successful in catching fish. Now, let’s eat!” said Abba Ah Beng to the cheers of his disciples.

Reflection Questions

1.      The key to success and abundant harvest in John 21 is obedience to the commands of Jesus Christ. Why do you think to be obedience to the commands of Jesus Christ is so important?

2.      God has left many clues in the Bible of His intention to save all people, not just the Jews. What are some of the examples of these clues that you can think of?

3.      Being obedient means sharing the Gospel. What are some of the ways you can think of to share the Gospel with your friends, neighbors or colleagues at work?

Dear God,

Thank you for your love for all the people. It is wonderful that you have hidden the clues to your redemption plan in the Bible showing us that it is your purpose all along to save all people. Help us to read the Bible carefully so that we can understand your master plan. Equip us too so that we can become agents of yours and serve you in this plan of redemption.

Amen.

Thanks to Dr Tony Siew for his post on 153.

Vinoth Ramachandra on Church Growth in Asia

The article was posted in The Christian Post and deserves some thought.

Much Christian Growth in Asia is Superficial: Theologian

Edmond Chua
edmond@christianpost.com

Thursday, Jan. 28, 2010 Posted: 10:12:49PM HKT

The perceived growth of Christianity in Singapore and other nations in Asia is not an unqualified blessing in the view of an Indian theologian.

"Much of the numerical Christian growth in our nations is superficial," said Dr Vinoth Ramachandra in a series of lectures he gave at Trinity Theological College which the college compiled and published as a book in 2009.

This was the same year a South Asian Christianity researcher who was invited to give the lectures that year had concluded that the quality of the large number of conversions in recent years in Singapore is questionable.

“Large churches (including those that send out many cross-cultural missionaries to other parts of Asia) seem to have little transformative impact on their neighbourhoods and culture,” said Dr Ramachandra, stressing that the primary task of the Church is not ‘missions’ and discipleship – what he described as activism.

Rather the Church’s task is “simply being the Church; a radically new community in which social, cultural and economic barriers between peoples are broken down and men and women learn to love their traditional and personal enemies,” the Secretary for Dialogue and Social Engagement for the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES) said in ‘Church and Mission in the New Asia: New Gods, New Identities’.

read more

About Lesslie Newbigin

Lesslie Newbigin's writing plays a large role in helping me to understand the missional role of the church and about the emerging church movement.

The Missionary Who Wouldn't Retire Lesslie Newbigin, born 100 years ago today, launched a new career at age 66 by calling Western churches to act like they were in the mission field. By Krish Kandiah

When I speak with students around the world, I find them confident in their ability to present the gospel. They tell me that God loves me, that I have sinned, that Christ died for me, and that I need to believe in Jesus to get to heaven. Their confidence is reassuring, but their content is worrying. Doctoral students and seminarians often seem to have no deeper grasp of the gospel than do Sunday school children. The gospel they present has been reduced to a personalized product that offers the ultimate bargain—exchanging spiritual poverty for eternal riches. The problem with much of our evangelism is not what we include but what we omit: the Holy Spirit, the church, persecution, obedience, mission, reconciliation, resurrection, and new creation.

The gospel according to Newbigin challenges this thinking in two distinct ways. First, he calls us back to a gospel that brings personal reconciliation with God, but also a gospel that connects us with God's reconciling purposes in conscience, culture, church, creation, and cosmos. Second, he calls us back to a gospel that is more than a series of bullet points, a story that centers on the flesh-and-blood character of the divine Christ.

read more

A Call for Spiritual Formation (8)

Paragraph Five

Spiritual formation is, by its very nature, missional. As we are formed into the likeness of Christ, we increasingly share God’s infinitely tender love for others. We deepen in our compassion for the poor, the broken, and the lost. We ache and pray and labor for others in a new way, a selfless way, a joy‐filled way. Our hearts are enlarged toward all people and toward all of creation.

There have been in recent years an expanded understanding of mission as not only sending out certain people to share the good news but also that the whole church is by its nature, according to theologian Darrell Guder (1998) is “God’s called and sent people.” The term missional is used to describe this expanded understanding of mission. In other words, God’s purpose is not just to call a people for himself but also in order that these people may become his instruments for his purpose of redeeming his fallen created order.

Christian spiritual formation is missional in that the process of growing into Christlikeness in communties of faith will deepen our compassion and love for others and lead to active involvement in the world. It will mean sharing the good news, helping the poor and sick, defending the oppressed, fighting injustice and healing the earth. Christian spiritual formation is the process of transforming and equipping us to discern where is God working in this world, and to align our lives to the achievement of God’s purposes. We become partakers of the missio Dei; the mission of God.

In summary, Christian spiritual formation enables us to become part of the larger purpose of God. It is not individualistic in forming just an I-and-Thou relationship with God, nor is it to form an exclusive community of faith where only certain people are admitted. It is not about us. It is all about God. It is about God’s purpose for the world.

.

Moltmann on Double Predestination

ESSAY:
Double Predestination: The Elected Ones and the Crowd of the Condemned
By Jürgen Moltmann
Professor of Systematic Theology at Eberhard Karls Universität, Tübingen, Germany

The strong points of Reformed Theology are at the same time her weaknesses. In order to become fit for the 21st century in the common house of ecumenical theology and in the universal house of humankind and the earth, it seems necessary to reformulate the strength of the Reformed Tradition. This cannot mean adapting our tradition to the others or integrating our originality into what is common to all, but to find our own profile in new communities of Christianity and humankind. “If two are saying the same, one is superfluous,” says an old Russian proverb. It is not the intention of ecumenical community and interreligious dialogue to make each other superfluous. The difference is interesting.

Since John Calvin and Theodore of Beza, the founder of the reformed orthodoxy in the 17th century, “Calvinism” is famous on the one hand and notoriously accused on the other hand for the doctrine of double predestination: Humanity is divided into the elected here and the rejected there. God is totally free to choose whomever he wants and to reject whomever he doesn’t want. Both serve the glorification of his majesty, and who can argue with the sublimity of the infinite God?

The belief in divine election was and is indeed the strength of Reformed faith. It gave believers an invincible certainty in their faith to know that one is not only loved by God, and not only justified by the grace of Christ and sanctified by the inspiration of the holy Spirit of God, but also elected by the will of God. From this belief in the divine election follows the trust in the divine perseverance through the ups and downs of personal life until the final redemption: I shall not fall and nobody and nothing can tear me out of the hands of God. God is faithful to his election, Christ has prayed for me “that my faith shall not fail" (Luke 22:32), the divine seed of the Holy Spirit in my heart will not die. This belief was the power of resistance in persecutions, i.e. of the Huguenots in France and Reformed Christians in the Netherlands. Marie Durand was incarcerated in the Tour de la Constance in Aigues-Mortes in Southern France for thirty-eight years, sustaining and exhorting her companions in captivity for the sake of their faith, and here she made her famous inscription in the stone “Register.”

But does this strength of belief in one's divine election mean that the rest of humankind is lost and damned to eternity as the crowd of corruption, the massa perditionis as Augustine called them? Must we tell the rest of the world: “According to the Bible and our belief those who do not believe in Christ will perish?” as the president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches Choan-Seng Sonq from Taiwan asked? There are always two different explanations of the simple fact that one and the same Gospel provokes belief in one, and disbelief in others. It is either due to the will of God or of human beings. Because believers confess that they owe their faith to the grace of God, they see in unbelief the disgrace of God. Since they feel in their faith “elected,” they can see in unbelievers only “rejected” people. The other explanation refers to the free choice of human will: Those who decided for Christ see heaven as their eternal future, and for those who decide against Christ they see only hell as their future—or more recently “total nonbeing.” The result of the view believers have of unbelievers is the same, whether one follows Augustine and Calvin in their doctrine of double predestination, or Pelagius and Erasmus in their doctrine of the double end of human free choice.

I think it is not characteristic of the Christian Gospel to confront people with the statement, “You belong to the crowd of the condemned and your future is hell.” It was terrible to see in the movie “Breaking the Waves” a Calvinistic pastor burying a person having lost faith with the words, “We now hand you over to hell.” It is certainly not in the Spirit of God the creator of everything to condemn 95 percent of the people he has created in his image, and it is not in accordance with Christ to limit salvation to 144,000 elected only, for whom he died. We need no theological explanation for the existence of unbelievers or people of another faith. Our only answer to the rejection of the Gospel is preaching and explaining the Gospel to unbelievers and people of other faiths.

Faith is not only human trust in God, but also and in the first place God's faithfulness. It is in this sense that I take every unbeliever as a person in whom God is trusting, in whom God is present and for whom God is waiting. God believes in every human person. This can be called “objective faith” (Christoph Blumhardt).

It was Karl Barth who—following Blumhardt—gave us an ingenious christological reformulation of the Reformed doctrine of double predestination (Church Dogmatics II/2). The sequence of his argument is this: 1. Before God elects or rejects anybody, God determines himself to be the God of the people: “I shall be your God and you shall be my people,” is the covenant-formula of Israel. This can be called the self-election of God. 2. In the passion and Crucifixion of Christ, God has put his righteous condemnation of sin, evil and death on his own Son. Between Gethsemene and Golgatha Jesus suffered hell and eternal death for all of us, when he cried out: “My God, why have you forsaken me?” 3. With Jesus Christ's resurrection from the dead, hell and eternal death are therefore overcome. The election of grace is revealed: “Hell, where is your victory!” (1 Cor. 15:55). Grace flowing out of the resurrected Christ is pure grace and as such unconditional and also universal, all-embracing and excluding no one. This is the content of the Gospel and there is no terror in the doctrine of double predestination anymore.

“The doctrine of election is the sum of the Gospel because of all words that can be said or heard it is the best: that God elects man; that God is for man too the One who loves in freedom,” said Karl Barth in § 32 of his Church Dogmatics (trans. is from Bromiley ed.). Why is this so? Because “God took upon himself the condemnation of sinful men with all consequences, and elected man to participate in his eternal glory (§ 33).” Is Barth teaching “double predestination?” Yes! But in a new dialectical form: God took the condemnation upon himself in order to embrace all in his election of grace. This is the new dialectical form of the old doctrine of “double predestination.”

Of course, this new formulation is not an explanation of the fact that some believe in the Gospel and others not. But do we really need a theological explanation of this fact, or can we best answer the fact that there are unbelievers with a new and better witness to the Gospel that God loves them with grace and is carrying all their sins and sufferings for them? Another question is whether universalism is the result of this reformulation. The answer is “No,” because we are witnesses of the Gospel not judges in the final judgment of God. Whether God will in the end embrace all with his transforming grace is His sake, ours is the witness of the Gospel to everybody. But if somebody dies in unbelief, is he then out, or is there hope also for him? The answer is: Our means of preaching and praying come to an end with death, but not Christ's power, because he was resurrected and has his possibilities with the dead, preaching the Gospel in the world of the dead. There is, therefore, no reason and no right for us to condemn and exclude anyone, living or dead. We are not the judges of faith, but the servants of joy.

PUBLISHED IN THE BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE FOR REFORMED THEOLOGY, SPRING/SUMMER 2001, VOL. 2, #2.

The Missional Character of the Christian Church

From Missional Journal, published by Biblical Seminary, April 2009, Vol.3, No.2


The Missional Character of the Christian Church

We believe the life and witness of the church should be thoroughly shaped by its participation in the mission of God to reconcile the world to himself in Jesus Christ, and by the call of Jesus to be the people of God sent into the world to proclaim and live out the gospel.[i]

Perhaps the first observation to be made is that a statement about mission is not usually the first point mentioned when seminary teachers present their theological convictions. The reason is that for centuries mission simply has not been central to the teaching and research that most theologians do.

read more

Conversations on Emergent, Missional and Monastics

Len Hjalmarson wrote a informative article on Missional, Monastic, Emerging: A Traveler's Guide in the August 2008 issue of Next-Wave Ezine.

It’s helpful to characterize the four conversations as Sine did, with four streams denoted by emerging, missional, monastic and mosaic (Find Andrew Perrimann’s summary HERE). It’s even more interesting to observe the convergence of these energies, all birthed by the Holy Spirit. Each brings their own renewal dynamic to the broader church, and I’m convinced that the convergence zone is where some of the most creative experiments will occur. Convergence is evident in places like Life on the Vine, where monastic is meeting missional and emergent, or in kingdom initiatives like ALLELON, where a similar dynamic is at work...

After these observations I was left running a structural taxonomy in my head, so I created it in PaintShop. What this requires is some kind of consensus on essential characteristics of each stream...

Worthwhile to read the whole article.

Ian Randall: Spiritual Revolution

Ian Randall (2008), Spiritual Revolution: The Story of OM, Milton Keynes, Bucks : Authentic Media

There have been many books on the history of Operation Mobilisation (OM) but this book is unique in that it was issued on the 50th anniversary of the organisation. Randall set out to tell of God's faithfulness in the formation, ministries and sustaining of Operation Mobilisation International. It started with George Verwer's conversion as a teenager in New York. Today OM has its presence in over 100 countries with more than 5000 workers.

The book highlights the various ministries of OM; short term missions, evangelism, literature evangelism, ships and sharper of young lives. It is especially meaningful for me as it has influenced me when I was a young Christian and I am in contact with others who have also been influenced by the organisation. One of them now teaches in a Bible school in Kuala Lumpur while another is a missionary in China. There is an appendix at the end of the book which records ministries started by former OMers and also another list of books written by former OMers.

OM is truly a spiritual revolution involving a team of people dedicated to missions and in the saving of the lost. I strongly recommend this book to those who want to know more about OM.

Update: Thanks Andrew Jones for pointing out that it should be George Verwer instead of George Weaver (already corrected in the text).

Alan Hirsch on Defining Missional

Evangelism

Defining Missional
The word is everywhere, but where did it come from and what does it really mean?
Alan Hirsch posted 12/12/2008


It has become increasingly difficult to open a ministry book or attend a church conference and not be accosted by the word missional. A quick search on Google uncovers the presence of "missional communities," "missional leaders," "missional worship," even "missional seating," and "missional coffee." Today, everyone wants to be missional. Can you think of a single pastor who is proudly anti-missional?

But as church leaders continue to pile onto the missional bandwagon, the true meaning of the word may be getting buried under a pile of assumptions. Is it simply updated nomenclature for being purpose-driven or seeker-sensitive? Is missional a new, more mature strain of the emerging church movement?

It's time to pause and consider the origin and meaning of the word that is reframing our understanding of ministry and the church. This tree diagrams the roots of the word missional and how its reach has expanded into different areas of ministry. Alan Hirsch, a self-described "missional activist," also provides a concise definition of the ubiquitous term.

read more