I have to admit I was a bit taken aback when a former elder from a church I’d pastored in the Wheaton area announced to me over dinner that he and his wife had left the Baptist church to join an Anglican church. Their reason had to do with a desire to “get back to the center of faith and true worship.” He said that he was tired of praise songs that “express faith on a 101 level.” This friend has two PhDs and took early retirement from the corporate world at age 45.

My friend and his wife are not alone in this migration toward more liturgical traditions. A recent article in Christianity Today, “The Future Lies in the Past,” explores “why evangelicals are connecting with the early church as they move into the 21st century.” The article traces the spark of this interest in patristics (the study of the church fathers in the first seven centuries of the church) to 1977-1978, a period “which saw the publication of Richard Foster’s bestselling Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth and Robert Webber’s Common Roots: A Call to Evangelical Maturity.” Webber, a professor at Wheaton and later Northern Seminary, is considered the elder statesman of this “ancient-future” movement. In Common Roots he declared, “My argument is that the era of the early church (A.D. 100-500), and particularly the second century, contains insights which evangelicals need to recover.”

Lest you think this movement is reserved for scholarly types nearing retirement age, the article notes that some 400 Wheaton College students are drawn to four Anglican and three Episcopal parishes for worship each week. The article explains that “many 20- and 30-something evangelicals are uneasy and alienated in mall-like church environments; high energy, entertainment oriented worship; and boomer-era ministry strategies and structures modeled on the business world. Increasingly, they are asking just how these culturally camouflaged churches can help them rise above the values of the consumerist world around them.”

If you would like to become more informed about this movement among American evangelicals to return to the church fathers and the more liturgical denominations, I recommend this article from the February 2008 issue of Christianity Today.

It took my friend and his wife only two Sundays to decide to join this “new” church. I’m not sure how I feel about that, as I remember it took them six months to decide to join the church that I was pastoring! He mentioned that they immediately felt at home in this Anglican congregation because they ran into several young people from their previous church and some friends who had “transferred” from other local churches. Is this merely the swing of the pendulum, or should it be an indication to us of a hunger for something more substantial than what is being served up every week in many of our churches?

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The results of a new survey have been released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The survey takes a look at the U.S. religious landscape based on interviews with 35,000 Americans. I think you'll find the following articles interesting and insightful. You can also view the survey itself at pewforum.org.  - Dave

Protestants Verging on Becoming Minorities | U.S. News & World Reports

More in U.S. Jump to New Faiths, Poll Finds | Los Angeles Times

Americans Change Faiths at Rising Rate, Report Finds | New York Times

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TO GOD’S ELECT, STRANGERS IN THE WORLD, SCATTERED…
I know that I’m writing to people who know how it feels to be a stranger in a strange land. Have you recently considered that being a stranger is a Biblical theme?

The Hebrew people in the Old Testament could certainly testify to that. They wandered as strangers for over 40 years as they made their way from Egypt to the land of Canaan. Even as their collective “strangerhood” gave them an identity as a nation, they were often victimized by the peoples of the lands they passed through. They lived as strangers, always looking for the day when they would reach the place that God had promised would become their new home. Many centuries after they had arrived to dwell in that land, they would lose it to the Assyrians and Babylonians and become exiles—strangers—once again.

In the New Testament, the motif of “strangerhood” is picked up most powerfully by Peter. Peter uses this theme of being a stranger in his first letter. When you read this little book, you need to remember that it was written to Christians who were suffering horribly for their faith.

Peter begins his letter, “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to God’s elect, strangers in the world, scattered…” and then he lists a number of places whose names mean little to us today, but each place contained pockets of Christians who had been dispersed over an incredibly large geographical area, known today as Turkey and part of Iraq. All across this area were clusters of Christians being increasingly persecuted for their faith. They were strangers in places where the people of the land did welcome them, did not understand them, did not want them.

It’s to these people Peter writes. They were strangers not just because they were living in a place that was not their home, but because they were God’s elect—His chosen people—called to be holy, set apart. Peter exhorts them to conduct themselves in accord with the calling they had received—to walk as obedient children, to set their hope on grace, to trust God out of their love for Christ. Living in this way automatically put them at odds with the people of the lands to which they’d been exiled, heightening their sense of isolation and strangerhood.

Though they could not avoid their identity as exiles, Peter was clear that their faith called them to strangerhood on a deeper level. Christians in the U.S. today don’t seem to understand this. In fact, most of us—and I put myself at the top of the list—would rather do whatever it takes to avoid being viewed as or feeling like a stranger. Instead of being set apart, of accepting our role as strangers here, we’d rather blend into the woodwork of society.

I would suggest to you that your faith and mine will never know the power and joy that Peter writes about until we are willing to accept the role of stranger in this world. Check out Peter’s exhortations in 1:17 and 2:11 –

Since you call on a Father who judges each man's work impartially, live your lives as strangers here in reverent fear. (1 Peter 1:17)

Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. (1 Peter 2:11)

The people to whom Peter wrote this letter understood this notion that when you walk with Christ there is going to be—there should be—some resulting separation from the world around you and its systems.

A first century writer observed, "Christians are not marked out from the rest of mankind by their country or their speech or their customs. They dwell in cities both Greek and barbarian, each as his lot is cast. They follow the customs of the region in clothing and in food and in the outward things of life generally. Yet they manifest the wonderful and openly paradoxical character of their own state. They inhabit the lands of their birth but as temporary residents thereof. They take their share of all responsibilities as citizens and endure all disabilities as aliens. Every foreign land is their native land and every native land a foreign land. They pass their days on earth but their citizenship is in heaven."

The Biblical theme of being a stranger is as real today for those who follow Christ as it was for the people to whom Peter wrote over 2,000 years ago. How are you doing with accepting your role as stranger?

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"What must I do to be saved?
       "Believe in Jesus. Yes. Believe in Jesus, so that your sins will be forgiven and your name written in the Book of Life. Please, let us never, in the name of any fashion or fad in theology, make the gospel less than this.
       "But what do we mean, what should we mean, by saved? Does it not also include freedom and power, here and now, to live a life so transformed that others glimpse in it the possibility of their own transformation? Please, let us always, in the name of the God who saves us, mean this by the gospel as well."
       - Mark Buchanan, in "Singing in the Chains" from CT Feb 2008

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The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World edited by John Piper & Justin Taylor
2007 Crossway Books
Reviewed by Bruce MacPherson

Absolute truth is an elusive dream—or even an absurd proposition—for most people in our postmodern, multi-ethnic and religiously diverse world. As good missionaries, we need to understand both scripture and culture. I highly recommend this book, edited by Piper and Taylor, with contributions from David Wells, Voddie Baucham, D. A. Carson, Tim Keller, and Mark Driscoll. The chapters are based on messages delivered by these men at the 2006 Desiring God Conference, with a bonus question and answer session with the contributors, moderated by Taylor.

In Supremacy, these theologians discuss truth, joy, love, the gospel, and the church, all in light of our changing world. They assure us the bottom line must remain the person and work of Christ, and following his example: Jesus was in the world but not of it. He was criticized for being a friend of sinners, for partying, for enjoying a good meal with all sorts of people, for participating in much of culture—yet he did so without sinning.

We can’t return to the “good old days” of monoculturalism, the world of Niebuhr when he wrote Christ and Culture. Every major city in the world today is increasingly multicultural, with many tribal people leaving their ethnic regions. The U.S. is host to increasing religious and “spiritual” diversity, exhibiting many varieties of exotic religions and resurgent paganism. And add to those conditions the global ambitions of radical Islam. Postmodernism and globalization clearly do not mean everyone is on the same page. The gospel—Jesus Christ and him crucified—is still foolishness to many people, but it is still the power and wisdom of God.

The chapters in this book examine how we should relate to this changed milieu. Christian reactions to postmodernism run the gamut from syncretism to sectarianism, from naïve denial to an unquestioned embrace. We can go to the extreme of arrogance, thinking we know everything (even what God alone knows!), or to the opposite extreme of thinking we can know nothing for certain, a growing tendency in the “Emergent movement.” This book points out both positive and negative tendencies of this movement. While a hallmark of the Emergent movement is its attempt to engage missionally with our postmodern world, this text cautions that “the emerging church represents a kind of post-conservativism...it’s moving away from evangelical orthodoxy.”

In his chapter, Baucham contrasts Christian theism and postmodern secular humanism as they deal with life’s ultimate questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What is wrong with the world? How can the wrong be made right? Christ must be supreme, not merely an omnipotent power for me to manipulate.

Piper calls us to return to who God is, via propositional revelation: “God’s absolute, independent, eternal being.” He gives us “ten steps” that highlight essential biblical doctrine.

Carson examines Jesus’ five petitions for his followers in John 17: protection from Satan, spiritual unity that enhances evangelism, sanctification via God’s Word, fullness of joy, and being with him forever so as to experience his glory. Ecumenical voices, denying the supremacy and exclusivity of Christ and his role, return us to “idolatry under a new guise.”

Keller proposes six ways the church must change in order to “get the gospel across in a postmodern world,” a world of no truth, no guilt and no meaning. Keller sees parallels with Jonah’s mission to Nineveh. He gives a helpful, historical overview of today’s shift from a Christian-thought framework to a post-Christian secular one that has become increasingly immunized to real Christianity.

Driscoll emphasizes ten theological issues that are at stake—starting with Scripture as inerrant, timeless truth—and contrasts those with some of the heretical ideas of emergent church leaders. He charges that we need to follow the example of Jesus, who “lived for God in culture, without falling into the pitfall of liberal syncretism or fundamental sectarianism.”

All the contributors challenge us to lovingly confront and engage our postmodern, pagan neighbors with the supremacy of Jesus Christ. The text wraps up with a conversation between these six contributors, which in my estimation is alone worth the price of the book.

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