Last night I grabbed a dog-eared and battered copy of Radical, a book that a friend had loaned my Dad. One of the things David Platt talks about is how the Church in the USA has become big business and how the techniques of professional public relations are used in that business — from market research to multimedia.
And how he struggles with the poverty of the believers he goes and helps in Africa and Asia compared with the millions of dollars spent on his church. What Platt reminds us is that the gospel is simple, and the teaching of disciples is simple.
You do it with them. You teach someone bible study by studying with them. You teach prayer by praying with them. Nothing unusual there: it’s exactly how I teach my craft to students: they come onto the ward and work with me.
Besides, the gospel is simple. The doing of it is hard, and the implications of the gospel will challenge your intellectual limits.
1Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child. 2By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. 3For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, 4for whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith. 5Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?
6This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one that testifies, for the Spirit is the truth. 7There are three that testify: 8the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three agree. 9If we receive human testimony, the testimony of God is greater; for this is the testimony of God that he has testified to his Son. 10Those who believe in the Son of God have the testimony in their hearts. Those who do not believe in God have made him a liar by not believing in the testimony that God has given concerning his Son. 11And this is the testimony: God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. 12Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.
At the risk of quoting the current denizen in a repainted house that was burnt down about 200 years ago, let us be clear. Most people do not have Christ and will not have the motivation to seek God nor to attend to the business of discipleship. Many within the church do not have a clue that they are in desperate need of the gospel, for their actions have damned them.
[Not health insurance. The Obama coterie are becoming creepier by the month, and pyjama boy is a point where it has moved from creepiness into camp comedy]
They are walking, blindfolded, to their doom, having put the blindfold on themselves. For there is no longer no excuse. The gospel has been proclaimed in all nations, at great cost: one of the duties of the church is to continue to pay that cost so that people are confronted, again and again, with their desperate need for a God who is prepared not to wait for us to be perfect, but to bleed for us so we can become one with him.
Without the law and a sense of morality, the conscience is seared, people become feral, and they cannot see a need for the gospel.
But the church does not grow by big buildings and TV ministry. It grows by people spending their lives living for each other. Most of the time this is in families: we need to hang together and train the next generation in the way they should go.
This is, bluntly, one of the duties of fathers. For if a young man does not learn self-control and discipline from his father… he will ignore his mother and develop one of two forms of weakness — the hyper-masculinized pick up artist or the limpness of the liberal pyjama boy.
This is why ministry for most does not consist of attending church groups or services — though those things are good and important — but in spending our lives helping and living with others. This is why older women are commanded to teach younger women how to love their husbands and manage their households — by going over and showing and teaching young wives and mums how to do things. And this is why women teach their daughters the domestic arts.
[Here we should ignore the feminists. Clive James, in his autobiography, describes a bluestocking Aussie feminist who was clearly Germaine Greer loudly decrying the domestic skills she had used to run up a set of curtains for her lodgings].
In Christ, we can teach. Outside of Christ, we are but an empty religion. And therefore, at this time, with the churches packed, all preachers must do their duty.
They must preach Christ Crucified. Not the programmes that the church has, worthy and needed though they are.
They must preach the law of God, not the current political fashion.
And they must model disciple building, not leave that to the professional clergy and religious. For the cobbler needs discipleship as much as the Monk — as founders of Monastic movements — including the namesake of the current pontiff, knew when they set up lay arms of their movements.
The gospel is simple: believe in Christ and obey his commands which are but three: love God, love your neighbour as yourself, love your brother in Christ as Christ did. It is the doing that is difficult.