Charles

Here is a book that is well worth reading. Brad Bright is the youngest son of the late Bill Bright. In 1989, after a variety of work experiences, Brad joined the Campus Crusade for Christ staff and resides in Orlando, FL. For a brief overview of today’s culture, this book will be appreciated. Bright’s thesis is that the issue today is God and everything else is symptomatic. He joins a host of others who are critical of the church for failing to communicate how to know God and who he is; however, he does not advocate abandoning the church. Rather, he challenges the church to equip the members to know the Word and to understand the world. He says, “When a person desires to become a member of a local church, we should seek to ensure a biblical understanding of who God really is.” He makes an observation that happens all too often. In preparing people for membership in the church, giving them a good emphasis on doctrine, it is easy for God and his character to be shortchanged.

With all the good things that evangelicals and the church are doing, Bright contends that our impact on the world around us will only come as we focus on the real issue–God. Everything else takes a back seat to that one issue. Two good examples of the heart of the book follow:

1. “If we want our children to behave as if there is a God, we must as a culture teach them that there actually is a God. If we do not teach it, they will not believe it. And, if they do not believe it, they most certainly will not act like it.”

2. “We must take every opportunity to educate them, as well as reeducate those who have been marginalized by a system that portrays God as irrelevant to real life.” (page 128)

I appreciate Bright’s emphasis on discipling God’s children with an intentional understanding of who God is which he maintains is the only way to “inoculate them from the messages with which culture is going to bombard them.”

Another emphasis that is on target is his challenge for Christians who are growing in their understanding of God and his character to come together and develop a means of impacting the culture around them. For Bright, God is the environment in which we live and “if we continue to solely debate ‘behavior’ in the current cultural vacuum of moral relativism, we cannot win the war.”

This book will appeal to church leaders, family leaders, and individuals, especially the rising generation. He echoes the idea that our focus should be on a behavior that grows out of knowing God because that is the issue.

I regret allowing this book to get pushed aside for too long. I try to read everything John R. W. Stott writes. His unusual ability to expound upon the Scriptures, blending an understanding of the original and the contemporary, plus knowing how to bring God’s Word to us in a fresh and applicable manner, makes him one that embodies the very topic of this volume, Christian leadership.

One thing I appreciate about Stott is his balance, clarity, and his ability to apply God’s Word. He believes that one of the problems among those who are “Christian leaders” is that the world’s model seems to be favored at the expense of biblical teaching. More often, Christian leaders have bought into the “secular” models at the expense of not considering what the Scripture says about leadership. Of course we can, by God’s common grace, learn many things from the world, but not at the expense of ignoring his special revelation in the Scriptures.

Basic Christian Leadership approaches the topic from the perspective of the first four chapters of 1 Corinthians. As Stott points out early on, both Christians and non-Christians share the concept of leadership but they do not necessarily mean the same thing. In Corinth, a strategic city of Paul’s day, a religious center, a trade center, and a manufacturing city, Paul both taught and demonstrated the kind of leadership that we need today. The church itself was fragmented, not so much by a diversity of doctrines or principles, but by personalities. Some were saying, “I follow Paul,” “I follow Apollos,” “I follow Cephas,” and others “I follow Christ.”

In five chapters plus a conclusion, Stott opens up this epistle to us who are living in a world that worships power and control in so many ways. He examines the tendency and temptations to lead like the Gentiles do, lusting for power and control. Christian leaders must have another focus and objective. For example: Paul underscores the importance of humility in the life of a Christian leader. Humility and power are antithetical. For the Christian, the antinomy is that power comes through weakness. As he deals with both the message and the method of communicating the truth, Stott underscores how that applies to leadership as well.

This statement summarizes what Stott believes to be Paul’s focus:

“The Christian leaders needed in the world and the church today are those who have seen the Lamb on the throne and are determined to follow him wherever he goes (Rev. 4:4); they know that God’s power will be exhibited not in displays of power but in their weakness.”

Therefore he concludes our leadership must not be conditioned by the culture but by Christ whom we represent and serve.

He ends with a great quote from the Scottish minister James Stalker who talked about “falling in love with his congregation.” The reference was to the difference loving his people made in his leadership. Stalker said, “loving my people made it easy to do anything for my people.”

This would be a good study for a group of leaders in the church to bring into focus the biblical essentials relating to leadership. Stott has produced another valuable book for us that will be a blessing, especially if you are or are contemplating a leadership role today.

Attention all parents, teachers, youth workers, pastors, and even grandparents! This book is for you. You cannot afford to miss the thesis of this book. We have been focusing our ministry on the rising generation for years in CEP, yet I read this book with a fresh challenge that makes me pray David’s prayer, “So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me until I proclaim your might to another generation, your power to all those to come,” Ps 71:18. I have prayed that prayer daily for years and now after reading Chap Clark’s book Hurt, I pray it with a renewed fervency that has given birth to an even deeper passion to minister to the rising generation.

Buy a copy, read it carefully and listen to the plea of the rising generation as you read through it. Have you heard them? Are you listening? They are asking for help and what they are getting is not the help they are begging for.

Chap Clark teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary and has specialized in youth ministry for some time. His book is full of credible research on how the younger generations have been and are being abandoned by the adult generations. They are not abandoned geographically or materially. Yet the older generations are not helping them develop a biblical worldview to help them live this incredibly complex and difficult life.

It is amazing how young people are telling us they feel threatened, insecure, and unable to face daily issues. While parents are giving their children material things, even sacrificing their own resources to provide the best education and resources to create “superkids,” they are leaving them alone to design their own systems for life and it hurts.

While the younger generation seems to be normal and stable on the surface, underneath their feeling of abandonment is causing great upheaval. Clark includes many testimonials from high school students: “I have many friends and acquaintances, and my home life is more than I could ask for. I just wish sometimes I could find somewhere to belong.” Or, “I therefore suffer in silence, longing to be understood but refusing to share such a nightmare with the unknowing. It is a lonely place in the mind of an unwilling actor.” Or, “People think I have the ‘perfect’ life…They never see the real me. I have to put on a mask. I deal with struggles of beer and alcohol. They don’t know.” Are we listening?

Clark writes, “Adults who care for the young, however, can make a long-term difference in the lives of students when we allow ourselves to be involved, to engage their ethical and moral belief systems and behaviors. If adults commit to train the young to care for others instead of just themselves and reinforce this view with commitment to integrity and honesty, then we have the best chance of influencing their moral development in a positive way.”

The truth is that adults will influence the younger generations for good or for ill. We have the choice to influence them for good but it takes commitment, time, and energy to serve God’s purpose to this generation. Clark reminds us that the church has a calling to care for the young. I would like to be able to proclaim loudly and repeatedly to our youth, “help is on the way. There are adults, including parents, who really do care and are willing to listen and interact with you.”

This book is a must read for pastors, teachers, and anyone else who loves Calvinism and wants to communicate it to others. Some have caricatured Calvinism so badly that having meaningful dialogue about it is often difficult. Those of us who genuinely love our Calvinistic theology are our own worst enemy because in our desire and enthusiasm we do not always use good judgment in how we communicate that truth to others.

Sadly, the message people hear is often one of irrelevance or harsh dogma or unbending compassion. It often suggests a focus only on the mind and not the heart; hence Calvinism does not seem to have much curb appeal. Mouw challenges our thinking about what our life and methods communicate to those around us, and it is not always winsome and positive. You will have to read the book, especially the opening chapter “Hard Core.” The chapter title is from a 1980s movie in which a father, in a desperate search for his daughter, teams up with one of her acquaintances, who is a prostitute. In one scene the two are in the Las Vegas airport and he is trying to tell this young wayward woman about the five points of Calvinism. You can guess the results.

Mouw challenges us not to abandon our Calvinistic heritage, but also not to demean it by being insensitive in how we express its truth to others. I think this is an excellent book to read in tandum with the Os Guinness book also reviewed in this issue. Mouw has some fresh thoughts on the sovereignty of God, the five points of Calvinism, and how to and not to communicate those truths. Like this reviewer, Mouw has a strong appreciation for the Dutch Calvinist Abraham Kuyper. He uses him as a model of how we can learn how to express our faith in a life-transforming, kingdom oriented fashion.

Mouw writes, “I see these folks as having been working with good Kuyperian instincts. They knew in their heart of hearts that God wanted them to serve him in the places where they spent their day-to-day lives. But the theology they were hearing in their churches and in other places where they were learning about the Christian life was not helping them understand the sense of calling they were experiencing in their hearts.” He claims the kind of framework we need for serving the Lord is to be “worldly Christians” in the sense that every part of their lives are to be lived for the glory of God.

Mouw, like Guinness, urges us to be faithful, but not triumphalists. Instead we need a clearer, kinder, and more patient Calvinism, not an overbearing putting someone down version. It is no surprise that Mouw reminds us that people are lonely, hungry, lacking satisfaction and looking for answers. We as Calvinists have the answers, but we don’t always depict it in a compelling way. He even says, ” Frankly, I’m not sure TULIP (the five points of Calvinism) is ever a good topic for casual conversations with people who are not Calvinsits.” Sometimes, he maintains, people do not need a lesson in theology but a message from God who speaks in soft and tender tones. They need to here from the one who invites us to belong to him and experience his love and grace in our lives every day. Mouw also says, “Humility is an important virtue to cultivate in dealing with the basic issues of the Christian life. And when it comes to ethical issues, Calvinists do well to cultivate this virtue in large doses.”

Read this book. You will read it again and pass it on to those with whom you would want to share your Calvinistic understanding of the Christian faith. While Os Guinness reminds us that the message is sovereign not the audience, Mouw echoes that thought with the challenge to be a caring, sensitive, and a loving communicator.

Having recently written Making Kingdom Disciples, A New Framework, where I deal with the missing, transforming elements of disciple making, I’ve been especially interested in books on discipleship. I’ve read some good ones and not so good ones. I like this book. I think it deserves reading by anyone interested in making disciples. George Barna has written, “The Christian Church in America is comprised of many converts, but shockingly few disciples. Less than 1% of all believers perceived a connection between their efforts to worship God and their development as a disciple of Jesus.”

Glenn McDonald pastors a church in Indiana, which was named one of the 300 excellent Protestant congregations in America. His focus, like ours, is transformation. He deals with this in two ways: first, through discipling relationships and second, by the six marks of a disciple. They are “a heart for Christ alone, a mind transformed by the Word, Arms of love, knees for prayer, a voice to speak the good news, and a spirit of servanthood and stewardship.” McDonald definitely moves us in the right direction because he is not concerned with constructing a list of things to do during the week but that we become transformed people.

The author confesses, “It took crises in my personal and public worlds to convince me that the call to make disciples is not a clergy-dependent exercise. First, I had to reject the assumption-all too common in the mind of the program-oriented church leader-that if I should step back from my manic pace of life, the kingdom of God would be just one day away from collapse.” From there, McDonald developed the idea of moving away from the ABC churches that focus on attendance, building, and cash. He’s speaking of churches that emphasize programs rather than relationships. Churches tend to measure the wrong things in discipleship because they look at structure rather than relationships that transform.

The book actually deals with how to move from a program driven church to a disciple-making one where true biblical discipleship can be done. He also demonstrates how churches in the ABC mode are often the churches that are in a survival mode rather than growing vibrant churches. A church involved in transforming discipleship will focus on the sovereignty of God and the lordship of Christ. That’s the key to effective disciple making.

Each chapter concludes with questions for discussion as well as ideas on how to get started with the process. He gives the church a fivefold challenge: Stay centered through prayer and discernment, embrace discipleship as a singular focus, shift from a strategy of programs to a strategy of relationships, emphasize the marks of a disciple instead of behaviors, and cultivate a culture of personal discipline. Read this along with Making Kingdom Disciples with the prayer that God will enable you to be kingdom builders.