This weekend I taught a class at Western Seminary in Sacramento on Friday and all-day Saturday and then drove back to Santa Cruz and preached/taught the three sermons at Vintage Faith Church on Sunday. I was pretty pooped Sunday, but probably gave one of more intense sermons that I have ever given. This Sunday was the fourth week of the "Don't Be a "Christian" - Exchanging Religion for the Mission of God" series. The topic this week was "Don't Close Your Mind - Be a Theologian".
We had read part of Psalm 119 out loud all together, before I began and I started with sharing how I had memorized a section of that Psalm in my early Christian years and how powerful Scripture has been used in my life to change me. I told the story how I grew up outside of the church and I did have a Bible that in my room as a teenager, but I could not understand any of it as it felt like a medical book with weird words I had no idea what they meant like "Corinthian" "Thessalonian" and it had little numbers all over the pages and was all in columns which was not like normal reading. So I kept it on my shelf between Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Lord of the Rings. It seemed to fit there with those books in my teenage mind and understanding. It wasn't until several years later while in college when I began to read it and had an 83 year old man take me under his wing and help with learning how to make sense of the Bible - and how it then changed my life.
I then read the classic passage from 2 Timothy 3:15-16 and shared how it is the Scriptures which make us wise, which are useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, training so that we may be equipped for every good work. I shared how we see in various passages such as Romans 12:1-4 that the "mind" is what God renews, and we are to love God with all our heart, and all our "mind" (Matthew 22:37-39).
Then came back to our vision/mission statement about how we are asking God to turn us into a "worshiping community of missional theologians". I tried to define "theologian" and made a distinction between the true professional academic theologians (who are absolutely needed) but then said because there are "professionals" it shouldn't cause us to not strive to think theologically and strive to be a theologian. I used a dictionary defintion for theologian:
"A person who is well versed in the study of the nature of God and inquires into religious questions".
I shared that I felt that is something we all can strive for and why as a church we have included that in our vision/mission statement. I made a comparison of what we hope to see happen as a church in our culture - and used the well known Chinese quote (below) and then rewrote it with the twist for the church.
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
I switched it to:
"Give a man (or woman) a sermon and you feed them for a day. Teach a man (or woman) to study Scripture on their own and you feed them for a lifetime."
I expressed how I never want to see an unhealthy dependancy upon church leaders for "feeding". Yes, for new Christians of course. Yes, sermons are important and we preach every week in our worship gathering and we all need teaching. But as Christians become adults and more mature, we must learn to feed ourselves (Hebrews 5:14). Sermons are important, but we must teach people to be self-feeders - or churches can unintentionally set up an ethos for people to think they are babies (as adults) and constantly feel they need feeding from an outside person instead of developing skills on their own and self-feeding with others in community groups and studies during the week etc. Our dream as a church (we are now a little over 3.5 years old) is to be training and encouraging people to learn the skills to be self-feeders of Scripture. We want to encourage those who have teaching gifts (4 out of the 5 teachers of our School of Theology were non-paid staff this summer which was exciting to me). We will preach, teaching is needed of course - but boy that Chinese proverb of teaching people to fish and they will feed themselves for a lifetime and looking at it in terms of teaching people to feed themselves from Scripture is an exciting one to strive for.
From there we took a turn to provoke the importance of this, and shared the overall statistics of biblical illiteracy in the United States. Even among Christians who have grown up in the church. There are plenty of stats out there showing how in churches, especially among younger people there is a "crisis" (that was a word used in one article I read a part of) of not knowing basic doctrines and basic elements of the overall Bible narrative. Now, for those who immediately want to cry out how Bible knowledge is not what makes someone a disciple of Jesus, I did address that. I put on the screen the words "ORTHODOXY" and "ORTHOPRAXY" and walked through the relationship of both. I think the pendulum swings back and forth, as there has been times where the church taught Scripture and people were filled with "ORTHODOXY" (straight or right thinking/teaching/doctrine). But only having right doctrines doesn't mean that it will always produce Spirit-filled Christians. There are those who have great ORTHODOXY but it never seems to move to their heart and some become legalists and can become very mean Christians. Right beliefs (ORTHODOXY) without the Spirit changing us with those beliefs (even the devil believed there is one God - James 2:19) doesn't mean we will be a Spirit-filled Christian demonstrating the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5).
But then the other extreme is having good ORTHOPRAXY (straight or right living/action/practice) but losing ORTHODOXY. We can live good lives, be kind, gentle, help the poor - but we can have that if we join the Peace Corps or even be athiest and have good practice of living. So it has to be both. The Spirit should use ORTHODOXY to produce ORTHOPRAXY. One without the other is not good. I quoted Jesus and how He said "If you love Me, you will obey my commands" and I shared how we have to know what His commands are in order to obey them.
So.... I tried to express how as a church, we must strive to be theologians as part of who we are. If we are truly missional, and involved in people's lives outside the church, if we are thinking about the issues and challenges culture brings - we then will be forced to become sharper thinkers and forced to look at tough questions. The Bible should only become more and more alive to us the more we study and read it - not less. Yes, there are times when it may seem dry and we aren't motivated to to study it. But the men who influenced me the most in life were 68, 83 and 92 years old when I met them and they had been reading the Bible for most of their lives. Yet they were passionate about studying it even in their older age. So we never can think we have read all there is to know or to even say we are "bored" with it as I have heard said. If we are bored with it, perhaps we have never learned to truly study it and fully apply it. Or to think we have read it and know it all and know all the stories, means we are god-like and have His full knowledge now and don't need any more from Scripture.
I ended the message by showing this video clip from the TV show West Wing (above) to hopefully leave everyone thinking. (We tried to end the clip so that last little bit about the tight-club wasn't included). I shared how in 3 weeks, we will be walking through this video clip bit by bit and addressing each question that Martin Sheen (the president) raised. There are ways to respond to his questions, but it certainly is a little jolt and makes you uncomfortable listening to them. So my point at the end was to hopefully leave everyone with a sense of "How would I answer those questions?" and try to show an illustration of the need to be a theologion in our culture today as we are on a missional venture. We will re-visit this video clip and dissect it sort of a thing verse by verse in what is raised and show how to respond to the questions Martin Sheen raises in our "Hot Theology" series we are beginning in 2 weeks.
So, another Sunday has passed. I hope God uses it to continue to shape us as a church. I am thankful for the Scriptures and my prayer is as a church we do strive to be lovers of the inspired Scriptures so they melt our hearts, shape our minds and cause us to love God all the more as we serve on the mission.
