Greetings All,
This week's 'thought' is for those of you who love the Church, and because you love it, desire its health and
vitality. It's a selection which someone else came across, and when he handed it too me, said: "I think you'll like this." He
was right, I did. It resonated with something in me because
it expresses so well something I've always felt but have struggled to
express as well as the author of this selection does. 
It comes to you from Dr. Alan Jacobs, professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois and is taken from the book: "Wayfaring: Essay's Pleasant and Unpleasant."
Enjoy, and be challanged,
and never stop loving the Church Christ loves and for which Christ gave
His life (Eph. 5:25) -- Dr. Jacobs tells us one of the ways we can.
"We
Christians cannot set as our goal the becoming of a counterculture for
the common good. Nor can we directly seek the elimination of the vices
and illusions that constrain our attempts to love our neighbors as we
should. We will strip away our self-deceit and become a true light
unto the nations only by seeking and becoming faithful
to the call of the Gospel. If we eventually become a true
counterculture for the common good, that counterculture will simply be
the product of our faithfulness. 
All too often Christians think even of faithfulness as a
means to an end, that end being (usually) something called 'church
growth.' We think so because in our culture goals are always products;
quantifiable goods that, because they are quantifiable, can be produced
by techniques. Thus our true ancestor is Charles Finney, the 19th
century evangelist who believed that his evangelistic techniques were
fully scientific: 'The right use of means for a revival is as
philosophically sure as the right use of means to raise grain and a crop
of wheat.' It is truly wonderful that Finney and his many modern heirs
fail altogether to notice that whenever the Bible compares soul-winning
to agriculture, it invariably does so in order to emphasize the
inscrutable sovereignty of God: Paul planted. Apollos watered, but God
gave the increase. And we never get an explanation of why the ground on which the sower sows is so variable
in quality, in receptiveness to the seed of the gospel. Obedience, not results, must be our watchword. 
Last Christmas Day my pastor, Martin Johnson, spoke of his youthful
habit of walking in the forests of British Columbia at night, guided
only by moonlight. It was remarkable how far he could see, how
delicately beautiful the landscape. The only problem was that he
couldn't see where to put his foot for his next step. The light that is
Christ, said Martin -- is just the opposite: it illuminates with
perfect clarity your next step, but blots out the surrounding
territory. It's worth remembering that when people ask Jesus
cartographic kind of questions -- 'Will many be saved or only a few?' --
Jesus tells them to mind their own spiritual business. I think that if
we try to formulate a plan for becoming a counterculture for the common
good
-- if we draw up a map and an itinerary -- we may well receive a
similar rebuke. 'What's that to you? Follow me. One step at a time.' 
Yet there is a sense in which a focus on today's obedience makes a long
view possible: it does not yield a map, but it does yield a confidence
that He who has called us is faithful, and will conduct the whole church
to her journey's end. About a dozen years ago, Pope John Paul II
answered a question concerning demographic predictions that Muslims
would outnumber Catholics by the year 2000. To this inquiry the Pope
replied placidly. After all, Jesus Christ himself proposed a still more
frightening question: 'When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on
earth?' (Luke 18:8) The whole business of counting the adherents of
religions in order to find out which of them 'has a future' is a process
at
best distracting from, at worst hostile to, true faith... 
The
church must insist on the integrity of its witness, because only such
countercultural integrity will save the church -- and therefore serve
the common good -- in the long term. George Weigel points out that Pope
Benedict is fond of quoting the old Benedictine maxim, Succisa virescrit -- 'pruned, it grows' -- but as every gardener knows, the immediate
result of a vigorous pruning is an apparently lifeless remnant. It is
only in the next season that the luxurious growth appears...
How
delightful it would be to
drive past an
empty megachurch and tell an unbelieving friend that the congregation
couldn't pay their bills after they gave too much to rebuilding churches
in New Orleans... We must remind ourselves that we can insulate
ourselves from surprising uncertainties or setbacks only by the kind of
false prudence that insulates us also from surprising blessings.
Indeed, we need to ask ourselves what, exactly, in our prudence, we are
afraid of. Sometimes I suspect that it is God himself, or at least life
itself."
Duplicating
the ways and methods of the world in the Church only produces worldly
churches. Whatever good Finney may have done in his own lifetime, his
attempt to turn revival (or mass conversion) into a matter of
duplicatable human means, methods and gimmicks, rather than a sovereign,
miraculous and supernatural move of God
where we are entirely dependent upon His grace, has left us with scores
of people who have said a prayer under pressure from another, but never
experienced true, saving, supernatural heart change through the
implantation and germination of the seed of the Gospel in the soil of
their soul. Prof. Jacobs is right -- we are called by God to be
obedient and faithful, not successful by the world's standard of measure
(Rev. 3:7-13).
Loving the Church for the sake of the Lord of the Church,
Pastor Jeff
