What is the greatest threat to Christian churches today?

In most of the world churches are liable to be swamped by the so-called prosperity gospel, and in the richer parts of the world churches struggle to guard the gospel against metamorphosing into what we might call the therapeutic gospel. These two closely-related pseudo-gospels threaten to displace the authentic Christian and Biblical gospel.
 
The prosperity gospel, in its crudest form, is the message that God wants you to be rich, and if you trust him and ask him, he will make you rich. Preachers tell the congregation how God wants them to be rich and then richer and richer.
 
What happens to the prosperity gospel when I already enjoy prosperity? It metamorphoses into the therapeutic gospel. In its simplest form, this false gospel says that if I feel empty and I come to Jesus, Jesus will fill me. The promise of objective goods (money, wife, husband, children) metamorphoses into the claiming of subjective benefits. I feel depressed, and Jesus promises to lift my spirits. I feel aimless, and Jesus commits himself to giving me purpose in life. I feel empty inside, and Jesus will fill me.
 
This chimes perfectly with prosperous twenty-first-century society. While writing this, I had a survey from our gas supplier asking for customer feedback after a repair job. The survey began with the words, “We want to know how we left you feeling.” That is very contemporary. Not “We want to know whether we made your gas heating work, whether we did it promptly and efficiently” and so on (objective criteria), but “We want to know how we left you feeling” (the subjective focus). Did we help you feel good?
 
The therapeutic gospel is the gospel of self-fulfillment. It makes me, already healthy and wealthy, feel good. The book of Job addresses in a deep and unsettling way both the pseudo-gospel of prosperity and the pseudo-gospel of feeling good.

--- Ash, C. Job: The Wisdom of the Cross.

 

When So Many Words Become Worthless

We hear jargon so frequently we don’t even realize how our brains treat it as static.

Strategically leverage platforms to scale growth. Turnkey solutions to optimize enterprise impact. Initiate cross-selling opportunities to improve share of wallet.

It sure sounds important—but it’s worthless.

Does it help people understand what they need to know? Working with professionals and executives, I see buzzwords pile up all the time. When people use “corporate-speak,” they’re trying to project knowledge and authority. It’s also a kind of shorthand suggesting, “I’m an insider.” They don’t even realize how they’re training others to ignore them.

Yet too often, these words don’t give listeners what they crave: a clear message with real meaning. Instead, they’re dished out like verbal junk food—empty calories with no nutrition.

The Wall Street Journal made light of this when they launched their Business Buzzwords Generator. Basically, the generator randomizes words. It’s scary how much some of these suggested phrases sound like real stuff we hear from people every day:

“We need to vertically taper our optics.”

“We need to strategically empower our wheelhouse.”

“We need to literally silo our value add.”

“We need to horizontally unpack our incubator.”

I dare you to drop one of these in your next meeting. I bet no one would even notice. Maybe that’s part of why we like jargon. Because we can say stuff with relative certainty that no one will take issue. But the real risk is that our audience will just ignore us and move on. We’re training them to tune us out.

What can we do to stop ourselves and others from becoming human generators of “custom-built meaningless business phrases” like that Wall Street Journal randomizer? I recommend two things:

1. Be more aware
2. Keep it simple

- Joseph McCormack, Noise: Living and Leading When Nobody Can Focus (2020)

Why Is It So Exhausting to Listen?

It is hard to stay engaged, especially when we have bad habits and lots of handy excuses:

• My mind is racing all over the place.
• My environment is all wrong.
• Technology is momentarily more interesting.
• People are way too hard to follow.
• I’ve heard all of this before.
• It doesn’t matter, and I really don’t care.
• I’ve got something better to do.
• There’s no end in sight; when is it going to stop?

Active listening means being engaged and involved, asking better, more directed questions. It’s far from passive listening, which is difficult but not that hard. Good listening is a powerful way to lower the noise and heighten focus and concentration on both sides. It jump-starts good conversations.

Listen with purpose, giving the gift of your individual attention and time, to lower the noise around you.

- Joseph McCormack, Noise: Living and Leading When Nobody Can Focus (2020)

Idleness

Idleness in this sense does not mean inactivity, but instead nonproductive activity.

 “Leisureliness,” says Daniel Dustin of the University of Utah, “refers to a pace of life that is not governed by the clock. It tends to run counter to the notions of economic efficiency, economies of scale, mass production, etc. Yet leisureliness to me suggests slowing down and milking life for all it is worth.” That’s the kind of leisure I hope we can all make time for. It’s what humans were meant to enjoy and what we need in order to function at our highest levels.

We can and must stop treating ourselves like machines that can be driven and pumped and amped and hacked. Instead of limiting and constraining our essential natures, we can celebrate our humanness at work and in idleness. We can better understand our own natures and abilities. We can lean in not to our work but to our inherent gifts.

- Celeste Headlee, Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving. 2020.

The Answer to Trauma

Because of Your indignation and Your wrath; for You have lifted me up and thrown me away.  Psalm 102:10  NASB

Notice who the actor is in this drama.  It isn’t the psalmist.  He is the passive recipient; God is the actor.  “Your anger,” “You lifted me,” “You threw me away.”  Still a victim of inexplicable divine reprisals, this summary says it all.  “I don’t know what I did wrong.  Everything seemed to be fine—with You and with me.  Now, suddenly, You have turned against me.”

All of this should sound familiar.  Perhaps it is personal, but at the least, it is gospel.  John 9 deals with the same emotional trauma, albeit in the story of another man.  The disciples act like the psalmist.  “What did this man or his parents do to deserve such punishment?”  They assume that because this man’s blindness is the result of punishment, there must be some horrible sin behind it.  The psalmist makes the same assumption.  “My life is thrown away like trash.  What did I do wrong?”  The psalmist searches for some answer—and gets none.  The blind man had no answer either, until Yeshua redirected the gaze from the past to the future.  It isn’t about why this happened.  It’s about what will result from it.  Like the disciples, we want to assign blame.  Like Job, the psalmist pleads innocence.  The answer to the question is not blame but purpose.  “Lord, I don’t know why You are doing this, but You know why and I trust You.  Go ahead.”  Not so easy to say, is it?

excerpt from: https://skipmoen.com/2021/02/gods-rollercoaster/

Reading a Passage in Context

 There is no doubt that Philippians 4: 13 is one of the most well-known and quoted verses. In fact, after John 3: 16, Philippians 4: 13 is often the most-searched Bible verse on the internet... What does Paul mean when he says he can do "all things" through Christ, who gives him strength?

Context is king. This means that when studying a passage of Scripture, the context of a passage is what determines its meaning. 

Jeannine Brown comments, “The method of reading select passages here and there, which is rather common in the Christian tradition, can lead to misreading if the literary context is ignored.”

Understanding the immediate context of Philippians 4: 13 is also vital to correctly understanding this verse. What precisely does Paul mean by “all things”? Certainly this cannot mean that Paul thought he could do anything through Christ’s power. 

Indeed, the preceding verses clarify Paul’s statement. In verses 11– 12 he declares, “Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need.” 

Paul states that he learned to live contently in any circumstance or situation. He knew how to be content with much (“ abound,” “plenty,” “abundance”) and with little (“ brought low,” “hunger,” “need”). The key phrase is found in verse 12, where Paul states “in any [παντί] and every [πᾶσιν] circumstance.”

- Benjamin L. Merkle, Exegetical Gems from Biblical Greek, 2019.

The Characteristics of Apostleship

 The characteristics of full apostleship—the apostleship of the Twelve and Paul—were as follows:

1. The apostles have been chosen, called, and sent forth by Christ himself. They have received their commission directly from him (John 6:70; 13:18; 15:16, 19; Gal. 1:6).
2. They are qualified for their tasks by Jesus, and have been ear-and-eye witnesses of his words and deeds; specifically, they are the witnesses of his resurrection (Acts 1:8, 21, 22; 1 Cor. 9:1; 15:8; Gal. 1:12; Eph. 3:2–8; 1 John 1:1–3). Note: though Acts 1:21, 22 does not apply to Paul, the other passages do apply to him. Paul too had seen the Lord!
3. They have been endowed in a special measure with the Holy Spirit, and it is this Holy Spirit who leads them into all the truth (Matt. 10:20; John 14:26; 15:26; 16:7–14; 20:22; 1 Cor. 2:10–13; 7:40; 1 Thess. 4:8).
4. God blesses their work, confirming its value by means of signs and miracles, and giving them much fruit upon their labors (Matt. 10:1, 8; Acts 2:43; 3:2; 5:12–16; Rom. 15:18, 19; 1 Cor. 9:2; 2 Cor. 12:12; Gal. 2:8).
5. Their office is not restricted to a local church, neither does it extend over a short period of time; on the contrary, it is for the entire church and for life (Acts 26:16–18; 2 Tim. 4:7, 8).

- Hendriksen, W., & Kistemaker, S. J. “Exposition of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans"