On Purposed-Driven-Church Methodology and "Repent and Believe"

Recently, there were quite a few things messing with my head and made me rethink a bit about the Seeker-Sensitive Church Movement. So far, I have always been on the look out for waterdown-the-Gospel but I read dilligently about stuff from both the proponent and the opponent sides. Here're some recent dialogs I had... (The first few are some backgrounds, my major thinking is the last item). 1) Peter Bogert linked to an article entitled The Gospel According to Rick Warren on his site. After I read the article, I took it out on Peter:

I am not a Warren's fan, so hear me out on this. The other day when preaching on Samson, I had to change the way I talked about "mixed-marriage". Realizing the significant percentage of seekers in the audience made me explaining to THEM why Christians are so "strict" in that regard. Without them there, I would exhort the same point differently to the church kids. I think Warren's message might be misunderstood because the lack of the surrounding context. Like instructions given to 3-years-old would be different to 17-years-old.

Graciously he replied:

Bumble: Thanks for your comment. The point of quoting the article about Warren was not to bash him, but to point out two very common aspects of evangelicalism's approach to evangelism. The first is that Christ solves your problems and that's why you need Him. Dealing with sinfulness becomes incidental to that larger point. The second is that repeating a prayer nets eternal life.

I then sent him my appology:

You are right. The "sinner prayer" is not very biblical. And you didn't bash Warren in your posr at all. I should have direct my comment to Slice of Laodicea instead. I guess I was chicken to do that and posted my comment here instead...

2) The same day as above, I started looking at the notes Tony Morgan offered at his Strategic Growth workshop for the churches. It feel a bit strange. (I downloaded a copy of the notes for further analysis if I have time later on in life).

3) Then last week Rick linked to an 11-parts short story of "Jesus Outed in Megachurch". After I read through the whole thing, I feel sorry for the PDC people. Implicate that Jesus was gagged and tied-up by PDC today are just plain mean!

4) After that, reading Tony Morgan linked to "Buzzmarketing" and I went off again:

So, do you agree that "Tony markets his church just like we market our products and services"?

How about his statement of "I’m a business speaker, inspiring and teaching. He delivers a sermon, inspring and teaching. Both Tony and I are on a mission to spread the word about spreading the word (in my case Buzzmarketing, in his case religion)"?

I am not saying that marketing is bad, but if the gospel can truly be advanced by just marketing appeal, then where is then the power of the Gospel? How are we really depending on God?

What then can we make of the following words from Paul: "Hasn’t God exposed [the world's wisdom] all as pretentious nonsense? Since the world in all its fancy wisdom never had a clue when it came to knowing God, God in his wisdom took delight in using what the world considered dumb—preaching, of all things!—to bring those who trust him into the way of salvation.While Jews clamor for miraculous demonstrations and Greeks go in for philosophical wisdom, we go right on proclaiming Christ, the Crucified. Jews treat this like an anti-miracle—and Greeks pass it off as absurd. But to us who are personally called by God himself—both Jews and Greeks—Christ is God’s ultimate miracle and wisdom all wrapped up in one. Human wisdom is so tinny, so impotent, next to the seeming absurdity of God." (The Message's rough equivalence of 1 Cor.1:18-25)

Please hear me out - I am not one of those who against mega-church. I read your blog daily because there are much to learn from your ministry. I just want to hammer out some of "in the world but not of the world" practicalities here.

And Tony clarified the matter right away...

Bumble, Bumble, Bumble... You don't really think I believe it's all about a slick marketing campaign, do you? Marketing can't transform lives. Only Jesus can transform lives. Where Mark and I are in agreement, though, is that we can help influence the dialogue people are having about our ministry. Remember, 75% of the people who show up for the first time are coming because of the invitation of a friend. We can call that "evangelism." Mark calls it "buzzmarketing." All I'm suggesting is that I learned some principles from Mark's book that might help our ministry remain relevant in today's media intensive culture. And, not to be arrogant, but I think the business world has the chance to learn some best practices from the church. So, I'm glad Mark was willing to point others to WiredChurches.com even though a couple of his facts weren't exactly accurate. For example, I don't do sermons...outside of my blog. :-)

And I acknowledged it immediately.

Phew! Thanks for the clarification...

I must have a case of recursive thinking, I read something from somewhere else, carried it in my head for some times, thene brought it up and argued about it with people who is not even related in the original context.


5) And now, to continue the processing in my head. I am reading N.T. Wright's "The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is" and D. Martin Lloyd-Jones's "Out of the Depths: Restoring Fellowship With God".

N. T. Wright in his book, The Challenge of Jesus, talks about our understanding of the words "repent and believe", and the first century’s understanding of the words repent and believe. We often understand "repent and believe" as renounce sins and take up religion. But it was not how the words was understood originally. Wright makes this case by talking about the Jewish historian, Josephus. Before Josephus became a historian, he was a military officer. He was sent to Galilee, the same place that Jesus’ questions come from. Josephus is sent to Galilee to quiet down a rebel group that is trying to stir up the populace against Rome. Josephus says to that rebel group, “Repent, and believe in me.” Translated what he is saying is, “Give up your agenda of bringing war against Rome, and follow my directions.” When Jesus says “Repent, and believe in me,” what he is saying to all who will hear him is, “Give up your agenda and accept my agenda, and follow me.”

And the topic of "repent and believe" was the topic of discussion in my last three Sunday Schools as well as the last few weekly Believers' lunch I had at work. In all of these discussions, we discussed "repent and believe" as how 21st century people understand it, and not as what N.T. Wright wrote about.

So this threw me in for a loop: "Did I misunderstood 'repent and believe' all along? Is dealing with sins a more recent theological construct?" Only a few days before, I was being critical of the the modern tendency for an "easy-believism" (believe without repentance). But now, I am not even sure about what does it mean by "repent and believe" any more.

Reading the second book from D. Martin Lloyd-Jones worked my brain the other way. The book was actuall four expository sermons on Psalm 51. It is about sin. It is about repentance from sin.

Then I came to the realization that both of them were talking about the same thing. Repentance of sin is a subset of the bigger "Give up your agenda" concept. Wright is not contradicting the historical theological interpretation of "Repent and Believe", he was just showing us a larger picture (for most of us, we will repent our wrong doings and keep on living according to our own agenda).

And if so, what if the PDC methodology was just reversing the process of "repent and then believe" to "believe and then repent"? If the ultimate goal was life change in Jesus, then does it matter if we get people to believe in Jesus first and then start renouncing their sinful lifestyle eventually? Wright made a startling remark that the church had never been this relevant to daily life as it is right now. Quite a different view on the good-ol-day isn't it?

To cap it off, since Jesus didn't say "repent then believe" and just mention the two components side by side, the PDC methodology may has some freedom in rearranging the order of the process. Even Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones wrote in the book, "We must be very careful that we do not insist upon various steps and stages [...] happening in a particular chronological order. There are some people who are always anxious to standardize everything and I am not here to contend for that. What I am saying is that in every case of conversion, in every case of repentance, there are certain common elements. There is a common pattern, but in some cases one thing comes first and the other follows, in other cases the second thing comes first and the first follows. I do not say it must happen in a standard manner, but I do say that in the absence of a certain things we have never repented, and without repentance we are not Christian." (p.45) So as long as a PDChurch didn't neglect the aspect of repentance, rearraging the order of the process perhaps plausible.

What do you think?