Perspectives- Bruce Koch

This session started with a screening of "Ee-taow" a pretty remarkable documentary of missions to Papua New Guinea. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSBLLuzqfBQ&feature=related (part 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyOBPvZSjtE&feature=related (part 2)) Part 2 at 3:45 is what this is all about.

Bruce Koch is a co-editor of the Perspectives course and part of the staff. He took us through "Unleashing the Gospel," a lesson on how the gospel spreads across cultures and people groups, with a focus on Acts 15:19- that the early church deliberately decided that people are free to follow Christ in their own cultures.

• The Old Covenant required sacrifices every year, which still didn't relieve the conscience. The New Covenant is once for all, enabling us to freely come to God. The Old Covenant dealt with external issues (cleansing, rituals, behaviors), which is why it was hard to accept that outsiders were coming in to enjoy what they had come to know for thousands of years.
• The term "Christian" was first applied to Gentile believers as a derogatory term.
• Evangelicals should not try to "convert people" as Jews tried to convert people to their religion and culture, but see people come to know Christ and the freedom He brings.
• In Peter's encounter with Cornelius, the Roman soldier (Acts 10), Peter is the one that is converted. The Gentiles come to Christ and receive the Holy Spirit, which converts Peter's mindset to that of a multi-cultural missionary rather than an ethnocentric Messianic Jew.
• Christianity is not a religion because there are no rules. It is wrong for some to eat meat sacrificed to idols and ok for others. There are guidelines not to indulge in sin and to have to conform to some leadership, but the whole body is diverse in the way it follows Christ. It is God that purifies men's hearts, not our teaching or conformity to the practice of our religion.
• We need to be slow to judge- "do not call anything impure or unclean that I have made clean." God can change traditional cultural practices to bring Him glory.
• People do not need to become "Christians" as we use the term, which has negative connotations of loose morals and greed to many Middle-Easterners.
• It is the believer's responsibility to become like another culture to get past communication barriers, and allow an audience to remain like their cultural norms in their belief and obedience to Christ. Following Christ is not about how you dress, what songs you sing, and how you worship.

This session closed with a cross-cultural worship experience where we learned some Arabic words and prayed as Middle-Eastern Christians might. It solidified that Western worship styles are no better than those of other cultures, but that all worship in Spirit and in Truth brings God glory.

Perspectives- Jim Rhodes

Jim Rhodes is a 30-year Campus Crusades missionary that has planted ministries in the USSR, Japan, Africa, and most recently the Middle East. His introduction to Middle Eastern ministry came when his friend convinced him to join him on a trip to Cairo in the mid-1990's, dropped him in the middle of a crowded plaza and took a taxi to take care of some things. The crowd turned and shouted "American!" and though he thought this would be the end, he really just had to work his way through the crowd buying trinkets and sharing personal space. He said that though it was a new strange place, he felt at home like never before, and his ministry has flourished there. The topic was "Mandate for the Nations," which dug into the Great Commission and related commands. We walked through the history of Judaism and how the These points struck me:

• Every kingdom has a king, so Christianity is not a democracy.
• Al Qaeda is the modern-day Ninevah, where Jonah tried not to go. What is our response for today's "evil empires?" Are we praying for those people?
• God's heart is to bless and save, ours is to curse and destroy.
• The Israelites were under 700 years of military rule, 400 of which God was quiet, and into this world Jesus came.
• To protect their core tenets, Jews were ethnocentric (our culture is best), legalistic (built 6,000 hedge-laws around the 613 laws of Moses to protect against serious infractions), and had a fortress mentality (protect blessing by keeping others out).
• Accountability, a popular Christian discipline, can protect against sins but does not change the heart.
• Street interviews have revealed that Christians are perceived to be against lots of things, which is exactly like the Pharisees of Jesus' time. Christ was against the Pharisees most of all.
• Matthew (a tax collector that took Jews' money to pay Rome, i.e. a traitor) is used to proclaim the Messiah to the Jews. He explains that Jesus has a clear blood line to Abraham and David, but also has blood of other nations mixed in. Therefore, He is the King of the Nations.
• Jews of His time were not as mad about His claim to be the Messiah, but that Gentiles were in God's favor. The Samaritan woman, a line descended from mixed-blood Jews, was the first that Jesus told that He was the Messiah.
• In Mark 4, Jesus goes across a stormy lake where the disciples nearly drown to a really bad town where the disciples are attacked by a demon-possessed lunatic. Jesus heals the guy, then they turn around and go back. This one guy was important enough to Jesus for the whole trip.
• If people really know who Jesus is, they will want to follow Him. But so few know Him.

Jim closed with two points. First, if you are going to walk with Jesus, you have to go with Him, to seek and save what is lost. We were created to have a place in the Kingdom, we just have to find out what it is. Second, it is impossible to say that the Spirit indwells you and not be involved in evangelization. We are blessed to bless others. The question is how we will follow Him.

Perspectives- Scott Simmons

This week we heard from Scott Simmons, Assistant Pastor at Chapelgate Presbyterian Church in Marriottsville (http://www.chapelgate.org/), on "Your Kingdom Come," which bridged the Old and New Testaments. This quote kicked off the teaching:

"North American evangelicals tend to read the Bible through an individualistic and spiritualized lens. Built into that lens is the idea that future-individual-salvation of the soul is the center of Christianity. The lens causes many evangelicals to interpret all else in relation to this center... As long as this lens is in place, much of the Biblical holistic gospel will either be spiritualized, rejected or considered an appendix to the gospel."

• The gospel is both individual and global. Both the individual blessings of justification by faith, forgiveness of sins, and eternal life and the global blessings of reconciliation with God, reclaim of creation, and social justice are immensely important.
• Jesus proclaimed the radical idea that salvation has nothing to do with race and nationality but just faith, which drove His contemporaries nuts.
• The Old Testament scripture foretold the coming Christ (Isaiah 61), but when Christ preaches on this (Luke 4), He makes it clear that only part of the prophecy was fulfilled at that point. It had become, and remains today, "the favorable year of the Lord," though when Christ returns it will be "the day of vengeance of our God."
• Similar to D-Day (when the war turned to an inevitable win for the Allies), the victory for the Kingdom has already been won, but VE-Day (when the soldiers came home victorious) is not yet here. We need to continue fighting for the Kingdom until there is a witness in all people groups.
• The Lord's Prayer acknowledges that God's name is hallowed too irregularly, his Kingdom has come too little, His will is done too infrequently, and that God can change this situation. Our prayer, as a rebellion against the status quo, should reflect this.

The session closed with this clip: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJtSWqedMK4).