For the past two years we’ve been gathering together every church planter we know in Omaha for a quarterly lunch. At these quarterly events we pray together, talk about the city, and serve each other through teaching and training. We’re pleased to announce that Hugh Halter will be the featured speaker for the next Omaha Church Planters’ Quarterly on March 30.
Hugh is a missional-church pioneer who describes himself as “a mentor to church planters and somewhat jaded pastor of the Adullam church network in Denver.” He is best known for his recent book The Tangible Kingdom, which has become a must-read among church planting strategists and missional leaders everywhere. Hugh has been a featured speaker at dozens of church planting conferences including Exponential and Verge.
Hugh has been a longtime friend to Core and Coram Deo. What we love most about him is that he is both passionate and pastoral. He isn’t afraid to challenge your thinking, but he’s humble and charitable and disarming in his posture. And he isn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of guy. In his own words, “We’re about all forms of churches: Mega/Micro/Traditional/Contemporary/Mainline. We need them all, but all need to be led by Missionary thinkers and move beyond simply ‘doing church.’ God’s church must get back on the move and find the beautiful balance between gathering and scattering.”
Our goal in bringing Hugh in is to help church leaders think about how to create missional structures. How can you help people live out the gospel in everyday life? What must churches do to shape missionaries, not just Sunday-morning Christians? How can leaders create missional opportunities that fit their context? The theme of this quarterly will be “Your Church on Mission.”
The invitation has already gone out to the church planters we know, but we wanted to post it here on the blog to reach missional leaders we might otherwise miss. If you’d like to attend this lunch, please email kendal@cdomaha.com. We are accepting RSVP’s on a first-come, first-served basis, with priority given to pastors, church planters, and small group leaders. The event will take place from 11 AM to 2 PM on TUESDAY, MARCH 30, at City Church in Benson.
This is the first in a new series of videos called Redemption Stories that we’ll be showing at Coram Deo’s Sunday gathering. The goal is to tell stories of how the gospel is at work in the lives of actual people. God’s grace is transforming people throughout our church, but too often the stories of what He’s doing only get told within missional communities or smaller sub-sets of our church family. These videos exist to help us celebrate together, church-wide, the ways God is moving around us.
Special thanks to Jon Kayser, who is serving the mission of God by lending his considerable production skills to this project. (Also to Ben Lueders, who is the official “key grip” of the Redemption Stories video team.) And most of all, to Barb and the others who will follow: thanks for being willing to share your story on camera.
This is the second post in a series highlighting some of the songs we sing together on Sunday mornings. As I reminded us last time, when we gather as a church and sing, we are seeking to drive the truths of the Gospel down into our hearts and minds that it might overflow into a life of worship. Our singing has Gospel implications, and so it matters.
I Boast No More is a hymn written by Isaac Watts, who is widely considered the Father of English Hymnody, as he is credited with roughly 750 hymns. The chorus and melody that we sing and have become familiar with at Coram Deo were once again written and composed by Sandra McCracken. The verses of this hymn, taken almost right out of Phil. 3:7-9, speak quite beautifully of the righteousness we have in Christ alone. This righteousness is not due to any merit of ourselves, rather it is a gift of grace from God so that no one may boast (Eph. 2:8-9). The truth of the verses drive the response/resolve of the chorus.
Righteousness is a fundamental attribute of God which speaks of His perfection; He is right, just, and good in ALL His ways (Ps. 145:17). And because God is righteous, He also requires righteousness, which is set forth by His righteous law. This is God’s standard for all people. This is God’s standard for us.
Of course we do not meet this standard: “As it is written: ‘There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.’ (Rom. 3:10-12)” We stand condemned before a holy God; we are under His righteous judgment and wrath. This should produce in us fear and trembling. If it does not, maybe we have not truly experienced the character and nature of God. Before God, even our best acts are like filthy rags…
The best obedience of my hands
Dares not appear before Thy throne;
But here is the beauty of the Gospel: In Jesus, the righteous demands of God’s law are answered. The Gospel reveals to us the righteousness of God in a whole new way (Rom. 1:17) — not only is righteousness God’s standard, it is also His provision for us through Christ. This is called passive righteousness. God justifies us while we are still sinners, through faith in what Jesus has accomplished on the cross…
But faith can answer Thy demands,
By pleading what my Lord has done.
In the Gospel, not only do we receive forgiveness, we also receive the perfect righteousness of Christ so that we are acceptable before God. The cry of this hymn is that “we find all comfort in Jesus’ wounds and have no need to seek or invent any other means to reconcile ourselves with God than this one and only sacrifice, which renders believers perfect (righteous) forever.” We quit the vain things we turn to for hope, our self-righteous duties/acts, our constant striving for our own pride and glory. No more do we boast in those things, we have died to our former selves. May our lips sing and hearts boast only in Jesus Christ, and Him crucified!
And since you have made it to the end of the post, I will let you in on a little insider information: I Boast No More will be included on our soon-to-be released Coram Deo worship album.
Statistically, church planting is a suicide mission. Church planting books and conferences often observe that 80% of new church plants fail within the first four years (though this data has not been carefully sourced). A controlled statistical study by Ed Stetzer showed that out of 1000 churches planted between 2000 and 2005, only 68% remained viable after four years.
A number of factors contribute to this failure rate, but denominations and church-planting agencies often compound the problem by throwing money and opportunity at any young Christian leader with a dream and an entrepreneurial spirit. In our own city I have witnessed numerous church planters come and go, burning through hundreds of thousands of dollars while trying vainly to hold together a core team by the sheer power of their charisma.
From the outset, the Acts 29 Network has had a different model. We have held firmly to the biblical criteria for eldership given in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. No man can be approved to plant an Acts 29 church unless he is an exceptional man in every way: a strong husband and father, a sound theologian, a gifted leader and preacher, and a proven start-from-scratch entrepreneur. While others are looking for better methods, we are looking for better men.
And the numbers seem to indicate that God is blessing this approach:
From 2006 to 2009 Acts 29 assessed 414 potential church planters and approved 240 (58%) to go forward as Acts 29 Candidates. (Candidates must gather a core of 40 people before moving to Full Member status). Two hundred of those men are now Full Members who are active in church planting; the rest didn’t make it through the candidate phase.
Of church planters who are assessed, approved, and progress to Full Member status, the viability rate within Acts 29 is 98.4%.
Acts 29 currently has 204 Full Members and 85 men in candidate phase (including our own Will Walker), for a total of 289 churches affiliated.
With over 40% of applicants rejected, you’d think that aspiring church planters would be going elsewhere. But the exact opposite is happening: in 2009, Acts 29 had 470 new applicants – an average of 39 per month. God is raising up an army of men who want someone to shoot straight with them. They want to know if they’ve got the right gifting, calling, and experience to plant churches – and they’re coming to us because they know we tell the truth.
The purpose of this post isn’t to brag about Acts 29, but to celebrate what God seems to be doing. And to make the point that when we follow the Bible’s instructions for church leadership, surprisingly… it works. Please pray for God to continue raising up qualified church planters who will plant gospel-centered churches all over the world – so that people might meet Jesus, cities and cultures might be transformed, and God might be glorified!
This coming Wednesday marks Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Lenten season. Lent sometimes gets short shrift in evangelical Christianity because it’s seen as a Roman Catholic observance. But never fear: those most uptight of Protestants, the English Puritans, celebrated Lent. So we’re in good company. As long as Coram Deo has been around, we have used this season of the year to focus on repentance, humility, and simplicity. In 2007 and 2008 we posted prayers and reflections on the blog throughout Lent (you can view them by clicking “lent” in the category menu on the sidebar). Last year we preached through the book of Lamentations. This year we’ll bookend the Lenten season with our traditional Ash Wednesday prayer gathering at Evan’s house (9508 Spencer) at 8 PM this Wednesday and with a somber Good Friday service on April 2 at Suckau Chapel.
Around Omaha, Lent is well represented: almost every Catholic parish has a fish fry. But as is common with religious traditions, ritualistic obedience has displaced worshipful faith. We are seeking to recapture the spirit of the season: a time to head “into the wilderness” to contemplate our sin and Jesus’ suffering, so that we may head into Easter with a deep sense of celebration in the joy of resurrection.
If you’re new to Lent, I’d recommend the following three posts to whet your appetite:
If you have a family or some roommates, consider what simple observances you can practice to drive a rhythm of worship and remembrance. My family started a tradition last year of having “bread night:” once a week during Lent, we eat only bread for supper. We use this as a way of cultivating simplicity (no preparation), practicing sacrifice (less money spent on food), and spurring remembrance (building a tradition that “sticks” in our minds and hearts and prompts us to prayer and worship). Surprisingly (because they are voracious eaters), my kids have been asking this month, “When do we get to start having bread night?” The simplicity and consistency of the pattern has made a mark on them. May the same happen with all of us.
One of our great prayers and dreams as a church has been to facilitate gospel-driven, missional, Reformed theological education for developing leaders. Until now we’ve relied on good institutions like Reformed Theological Seminary and Covenant Seminary to educate our elders, interns, and church planting residents. But the seminary model has some drawbacks. It’s expensive, time-consuming, and generally feasible only for those who are already sensing a vocational calling to church ministry.
For quite some time we have been networking and researching some alternative models that would allow us to equip a broader group of leaders. So we are pleased to announce that beginning this fall, Coram Deo will launch a 2-year, cohort-based theological education program using the Porterbrook curriculum. Porterbrook was developed by some of our ministry partners in the UK. It’s a Reformed, missional, church-based curriculum that’s rich in gospel depth. Here are some of the distinctives:
Consists of 24 modules delivered over 2 years (4 modules per quarter, 3 quarters per year, 1 quarter off)
Requires 5 hours per week of dedicated study
Costs only $200 per quarter ($600 per year)
Beneficial for both formal leaders (elders/church planters) and informal leaders (church members seeking further theological development)
Training will begin in September 2010 and progress on a quarter system (Sept-Nov; Dec-Feb; Mar-May; summers off)
Participants must:
Be part of a local church and be recommended by their pastors/elders
Apply for acceptance to the program
Commit to 5 hours a week of study, with accountability
Pay for the entire year in advance ($600; dropping out will result in the forfeiture of fees paid)
All potential participants must be part of a cohort of at least 4 people from their church or geographical area (i.e. Coram Deo cohort, Core cohort, Lincoln cohort, Sioux City cohort; some churches may have multiple cohorts)
Each cohort will have a designated cohort leader who will be responsible to track progress, ensure faithfulness to schedule, and set up weekly cohort meetings for study and interaction
Each quarter will kick off with a day-long “residential” bringing all participants and cohorts together in Omaha for presentations, assignments, and introduction of new material
This format will allow for the synergy and momentum of large-group learning (quarterly residential gatherings) while allowing the flexibility and personal interaction of small-group learning (cohort format)
Below is a table comparing the strengths and weaknesses of the Porterbrook model and the traditional seminary model.
PORTERBROOK
SEMINARY DISTANCE
M.A. PROGRAM
Type of Learning
Functional Learning (you get out what you put in)
Formal Learning (pass or fail)
Format
24 modules delivered over 2 years (4 modules per quarter, 3 quarters per year, 1 quarter off)
50-70 semester hours
Time Required
5 hours per week
Up to 15 hours per week
Measurement
More Subjectively Measured – are you applying what you are learning?
More Objectively Measured – exams, papers, grading
Advantages
- Flexible and adaptable
- Communal, integrated learning style
- Functions within the context of a local church’s ministry and mission
- Missional and gospel emphasis – immediate application of theology to life
- Self-paced
- Smaller time investment
- Trains and equips a large number of people – any motivated spiritual leader can participate
- Fits within a “normal” life pattern (full-time job, church involvement, family)
- A more culturally established paradigm of learning
- You receive a formal degree
- More credible in the eyes of many people
- Develops academic disciplines – reading, writing, etc.
- Expert professors
- Standardized “body of learning” ensures familiarity with a broad spectrum of topics
- Better for those with an academic learning style (books, papers, tests)
Disadvantages
- No formal degree received
- Less credible in the eyes of many
- May not prepare well for pulpit ministry due to lack of language training, paper-writing, academic rigor
- Narrower spectrum of topics covered
- Significant investment of time and money
- Can be academic and tedious
- Application to life isn’t always clear
- Trains fewer leaders (not all can invest the time and money)
- Can take much longer to complete; harder to fit within a normal life pattern
Cost
$200 per quarter ($1200 total)
Upwards of $20,000
At this point we are seeking to gauge interest so we can plan appropriately for the size and scope of the program. So if you’re interested, please send us an e-mail and let us know. FYI: “Interested” means “I’d like to participate and I’m willing to invest the time and money,” not, “This sounds cool.”
Once we have a sense of the general interest, we’ll roll out a more formal application that you’ll need to complete. We’ll post more updates here on the blog as things develop. We’re excited about the future and thankful to God for the opportunity to provide theological education for our city and region!
Telos is a Greek word which means end, goal, termination, conclusion, final destiny. The Bible uses this word often. For instance:
1 Peter 1:8-9: …though you do not see Him now, but believe in Him, you greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, obtaining as the outcome of your faith the salvation of your souls.
2 Cor 11:14-15: …even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. Therefore it is not surprising if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness, whose end will be according to their deeds.
Telos also became a technical term in Greek philosophy to speak of the end, goal, or purpose of life. According to Aristotle and his counterparts, “Human beings… have a specific nature; and that nature is such that they have certain aims and goals, such that they move by nature toward a specific telos… There is a fundamental contrast between man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature (telos). Ethics is the science which enables men to understand how they make the transition from the former state to the latter” (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue). In moral philosophy this is known as teleological ethics: an ethic that argues for what we should do based on what we are destined for.
The Bible and Aristotle both held that human beings had some ultimate destiny. According to the Bible, the end, goal, and purpose of all things is the glory of God. According to Aristotle, the end of human life is blessedness, fullness, well-being – the good life. As MacIntyre points out, the whole point of ethics (in both the biblical and classical understanding) is to help us become the people we were intended to be. The virtuous life is a life oriented toward our proper end, our purpose, our telos.
However, in After Virtue, MacIntyre argues that it is precisely this concept of telos which has been lost in the past 300 years of philosophical discourse. This gap lies at the root of modern pluralism and emotivism: “Unless there is a telos which transcends the limited goods [of particular situations] and constitutes the good of a whole human life… a certain subversive arbitrariness will invade the moral life… The replacement of Aristotelian or Christian teleology… [is not] the replacement of one set of criteria by another, but rather a movement towards and into a situation where there are no longer any clear criteria.”
So, if we are to seriously cultivate the virtues extolled in Colossians 3, we must first rebuild our understanding of the purpose of human life and existence. We must be rooted in the biblical meta-narrative of creation-fall-redemption-consummation. We must have a clear vision not just of what God saved us from, but what he saved us for.
In other words, we must live with the end in mind. More this Sunday.
A few weeks ago, a relatively mundane post on singleness and busyness became the most-trafficked post in the history of the Coram Deo blog, thanks to some nice folks at Focus on the Family who linked to it and created a firestorm of chaos (apparently a number of people aren’t very busy and have plenty of time to blog). To quell the uproar they asked me to do a radio interview for their podcast, which aired last week.
So, for all who want to hear me clarify my thoughts on the matter, you can jump here to listen to the Boundless podcast. My interview takes place between 11:00 and 29:30 on the recording.
Colossians 3 and 4 are full of moral exhortation. In preparation for preaching through these chapters, I have been reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s seminal work of moral philosophy entitled After Virtue. MacIntyre is a highly respected Notre Dame professor of philosophy who advances a startling thesis: though in 21st-century Western culture we still use the language of morality, the actual substance of morality (i.e. the philosophical foundation we assume to be underneath that language) is in shambles. Reason: the philosophical foundation for morality relies upon the Judeo-Christian worldview and also the (poly)theistic worldview of the ancient Greek philosophers. Enlightenment rationalism, having discarded those worldviews, has therefore (unknowingly) thrown out the philosophical underpinnings of morality as well. Here is MacIntyre’s hypothesis:
Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe. A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general public on scientists… A political movement takes power and successfully abolishes science teaching in schools and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists.
Later still there is a reaction against this destructive movement. Enlightened people seek to revive science, although they have largely forgotten what it was. All that they possess are fragments: instruments whose use has been forgotten; half-chapters from books, single pages from articles… children learn by heart the surviving portions of the periodic table and recite as incantations some of the theorems of Euclid. Nobody, or almost nobody, realizes that what they are doing is not natural science in any proper sense at all… The contexts which would be needed to make sense of what they are doing have been lost, perhaps irretrievably.
The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit, the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described. What we possess… are the fragments of a conceptual scheme… we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have – very largely, if not entirely – lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.
[Objection:] If a catastrophe sufficient to throw the language and practice of morality into grave disorder had occurred, surely we should all know about it! It would indeed be one of the central facts of our history.
[Answer: Yes. Unless] the catastrophe of which my hypothesis speaks had occurred before… the founding of academic history, so that… from [modern history’s] value-neutral viewpoint, moral disorder must remain largely invisible. [In this case,] the forms of the academic curriculum would turn out to be among the symptoms of the disaster whose occurrence the curriculum does not acknowledge!
My thesis… [is that] the language and the appearances of morality persist, [but] the integral substance of morality has to a large degree been fragmented and… destroyed.
We’re a little slow on the take in posting this… many of you who are tech-savvy have already caught this video through Mars Hill or Resurgence. But in case you haven’t, this is Mark Driscoll’s special sermon last week chronicling his trip to Haiti. It includes graphic video of the situation on the ground. Please watch it to better understand the devastation and to get a sense of how the relief money we’re sending to Churches Helping Churches will be used.
I was pushed hard, so that I was falling, but the LORD helped me.The LORD is my strength and my song; he has become my salvation. (Psalm 118:13-14, ESV)
