I am Second

If you haven't already seen it, you'll see it soon.

Just launched in Kansas City is the "I am Second" campaign (http://iamsecond.com). The movement started in Dallas as a local outreach, but quickly caught on across the nation and around the world, so they are now launching campaigns in various markets, and the KC market has just begun. "I am Second" is a phrase that comes from putting Christ first. (For those "I am third" fans from years ago, I think there's plenty of common ground here to not get tripped up by the differences.)

The idea behind IaS is simple: draw people to the website, which is then intended to draw people into the Church (not just a church building, but the Church, the body of believers). It's a very media-savvy approach, using billboards, TV, radio, and the Internet to pique the interest. I've seen at least three billboards already in KC - a black background, with someone's face, and the words "I am Second: iamsecond.com." That's it.

On the website, there are dozens of testimonies from both famous and non-famous people. All they do is tell their faith stories - the story of what God has done in their lives. Some stories are dramatic, some less so, but all are stories of what God has done. They also have a few videos from KC-based people to go along with the KC launch. The Benders and I attended the launch at Union Station a few weeks ago, and several of those featured on the site were there to share in person.

The testimonies are intended to draw people to find out more, and eventually get connected with a church, or even a specific small group within a church, that has registered with I am Second (we are registered as church). They are not competing with the local churches - they are very clearly trying to aid the local churches.

The power of their approach is very simply the power of story, which is far more effective to the current generation than the previous (who are more impacted by propositional truth).

The organization offers training and support for believers to join in the effort. One of their main goals is to encourage all of us share our stories as a way to help others want to know more about what it really means to be a follower of Christ.

We see the website in action on Sunday morning and talk more about the power of story. I recommend checking out the website, and thinking about how you might recommend it to others.

Glory or Help?

Every once in a while as I'm praying for the Lord to provide help for something going on in my life, I can feel a twinge of selfishness and doubt. Perhaps my prayers of late have only been to ask God to give me something. Perhaps the thing I'm asking for is selfish. Besides, I don't deserve God's favor, so how dare I even ask for Him to give His favor to me - especially after He's already given me more than I deserve?


Recently during my morning quiet time, I came across Psalm 31:3 (NET):


For you are my high ridge and my stronghold;
for the sake of your own reputation you lead me and guide me.


King David, who wrote this psalm, credits God for being his stronghold, and then acknowledges that God had provided him with the same kind of help that I feel selfish asking for (in this case, guidance). But this guidance was given "for the sake of your own reputation." For God's "reputation," the glory of His name among the nations. In other words, the help God provided was for David's benefit, but ultimately it was for His own glory.


This gives us helpful, simple advice on how to ask God for His help. Consider praying this way: "Lord, help us, but only if it glorifies You."


Ask for God's help in areas that are good and within His permissive will. Pray for God to help not only "me", but "us" - for the benefit of others besides yourself, too. But whatever help you are asking for, ask only if the answer would truly glorify God. Submit your desire for getting what you want to God's glory. Refuse answers to your request that do not glorify Him. Ask God to use the answer to your prayer as a means to glorify Himself or else deny the request entirely.


Keeping this in mind has helped me to pray for help more humbly. It has also caused me to not pray for some things that I might have otherwise. And it has lifted my prayers beyond my own self-concern to the things that concern God.

What is Success?

What is "success"?

This question gets asked a lot in leadership seminars, self-help books, and "positive confession" teachings. But I'm not asking the question in those ways. I'm not asking in a theoretical or philosophical way, either. I'm asking in a simpler way.

We sometimes experience disappointment because we don't feel "successful." We haven't accomplished something we wanted to, we haven't performed to someone else's expectations, we see people who have done better at something than we have, we assess our lives and don't find a very big sum total. (It's worse when the more successful ones are younger than we are!)

We know what it's like to feel unsuccessful. But one question I've learned to ask of those who feel unsuccessful is to ask them what success would be. Too often, they don't know.

I ask you - how can you expect to feel anything other than unsuccessful if you aren't sure what success would be?

I try to avoid definitions of success that rely heavily on factors I can't influence. For example, if I have a estranged relationship with someone, I can't control how the other person will respond. So for me to define "success" in this case as full reconciliation, my definition of success would be based in large part on something I have no control over. But if my definition of "success" is to do everything reasonable to seek reconciliation, to remove all stumbling stones within me that block reconciliation, to be the kind of friend I should be, then I can be successful in things that I have influence over (with the Spirit's strong help and guidance). Paul says in Romans 12:18 "If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all people" (emphasis added).

Now, full reconciliation would always be the goal, but my personal success would be in fulfilling my part of reconciliation, and doing what I can to foster it in the other person.

If you feel unsuccessful, ask what success should really be. Make sure your definition of success is something you have major influence over (again, with God's help). Most often, success will be defined as obedience and submission to God's will. Don't let anyone other than God define for you what success really is - otherwise, you're almost certain to feel unsuccessful, and not even know why.

Return to Kenya

The plans are coming together! From June 24 through July 8, a team of four of us are planning on going to Kenya to serve for a couple of weeks. Our team will be: Joe Graham, John Harrison, and Janette Jasperson, and me. The "Three J's" will be going for the first (and I pray not last!) time; it will be my fourth visit to beautiful Kenya. We will spend one week in Ahero and one week in Wachara.

Our mission will be varied: teach Bible to orphans (from "baby" class up through 6th grade), teach ministry and leadership principles to seminary students, minister to the teachers and guardians of the orphans, teach at a pastors' conference, collect updated information and pictures for 300 orphans, and perhaps even introduce a new crop! Whew! Plus, we'll likely have some role in at least one church service.

Our team asks for your prayer support. We need prayers for:

• Safety
• Health
• Preparation (not only our lessons, but our hearts)
• Boldness
• Team unity
• Spiritual vitality, sensitivity, and growth
• Effectiveness in ministry
• Ability to communicate cross-culturally
• Finances

If you would like to support us financially, you can make a check out to Grace Fellowship Church (10201 W. 127th St., Overland Park, KS 66213). On the memo line, please write "Kenya 2011." If you want to support the whole team, that's sufficient. If you want to contribute to a particular team member's fundraising effort, include a note with your check with the team member's name on it.

Janette deserves double kudos for taking care of all the trip planning necessary. And our families deserve medals for their willingness to send us. The Missions Committee, Bob Graverholt, and the Elders have also been very helpful and supportive. The ministry team is more than just four people. Would you please consider enlarging the team by supporting us in prayer?

For more information on our ministry in Kenya, see http://hungry4him.com.

The Latest NIV

The 2011 update to the NIV translation of the Bible is due out this month (the online version has been available since last Fall). One of the major goals of this translation was to provide a more "gender-inclusive" translation. The issue is that original languages (Greek and Hebrew) often used masculine pronouns ("he," "him," "his") and related words in ways that were intended to include both genders. The new NIV, along with the earlier TNIV and the NRSV, attempt to provide a version that doesn't grammatically exclude women.

This is a noble goal. For those passages that are clearly intended to apply to men and women alike, we want the text somehow to reflect that. No one should feel like an afterthought in God's plan. But this approach to translation is not without its difficulties:

• Many gender-neutral translations change passages that really should be left in the masculine. For example, being a "son of God" is not exactly equivalent to being a "child of God." Not that sons are better than daughters, but that there were certain unique aspects to the sonship relationship in the culture of the author that get lost in these translations - the idea of inheritance, responsibility, carrying on the family name, and so on. Those ideas are part of the imagery of the phrase, but we lose it when the translation only focuses on the more generic child relationship.
• In order to make a passage gender-neutral, often times the translator has to resort to an awkward phrase (for example, using "sons and daughters" every time "sons" occurs). The extra wording can clutter up a sentence easily. Using the masculine, with an inclusive meaning, reads more smoothly.
• Or, the translator will use a plural ("they," "them," "theirs") instead of the singular in order to neuter the sentence. This effectively takes gender out of it, but then you've changed the nuance of a phrase, losing the personal touch of an individual relationship with God, and sometimes sounding grammatically incorrect.

The noble goal has plenty of landmines. An attempt to clarify the meaning of a passage can actually skew the meaning of the passage, which by definition would be a poor translation.

For more information about the new NIV and the translation choices they made, see the following websites: http://www.cbmw.org/Blog/Posts/CBMW-Responds-to-New-NIV2011 and http://galvestondailynews.com/ap/bee3b4/.

The NET (http://net.bible.org) does a very reasonable job of indicating when a passage is meant to be gender-inclusive. They make pretty good choices of when to retain the masculine wording, and every time they choose a more gender-inclusive phrase than the original language, they make a clear note of it. So, you always know what the original said, plus you get a good indication of which verses are meant to transcend gender.

The interesting point for me in this is the translation principle - if the text says "men," but the text means "men and women," what's the best way to translate it? If it says "men" and means "men," then the answer is simple (but some translations still change it!). But should a translation mirror the verbal text or the meaning of the text? The answer is that both can be good choices, as long as the reader knows what you've done. The translator should either leave the text alone and let the readers and commentators decide, or they should change the text with a clear note of what the original says. That's why I like the NET - they do this well. Only when it's obvious to be inclusive should the translator even consider a more inclusive phrase. When in doubt, the translation should leave the text as is.

Translating the Bible is filled with difficult choices. With the hub-bub around the new NIV, I don't want to immediately criticize it just because some gender-loaded terms got translated in an inclusive way. That can be a valid translation. However, as the CBMW article above notes, there are enough of unnecessary changes in the new NIV, changes that skew the meaning, to be a very strong concern. (Furthermore, there are enough difficulties with the current NIV that I choose not to use it, and especially not for teaching.)

We should all know that the original languages used the masculine for a convenient and clear style, not to exclude women from God's grace. A good friend of ours, Dr. Fred Sanders, made the recent observation that it's not just the women who have to tolerate being called "sons of God" - we men have to tolerate being called the "bride of Christ"!

Overwhelmed!

The images from Japan are overwhelming. Not only the largest earthquake in an earthquake prone country, not only thirty foot walls of water washing in, then washing out, entire neighborhoods, but living on the verge of a catastrophic nuclear disaster. I watched one video clip showing house after house being picked up and carried away like they were made of Styrofoam, and the only sound was that of dozens of people wailing as they watched their material lives float away and then crumble to bits.

It's so overwhelming. It's too much to see, too much to fathom, too much to feel adequately. I can't comprehend four nuclear reactors each in crisis. I can't imagine entire neighborhoods gone in seconds. I can't (and don't want to) envision thousands of casualties, let alone the likely hundreds of thousands. The years it will take to recover are too complex to consider. I feel badly for the victims, but I also feel badly because I can't feel badly enough. What I'm able to feel is far too small compared to what needs to be felt.

My tendency, like so many, is to shut myself off emotionally. Since I can't feel it adequately, my first reaction is to feel nothing. Then I won't feel so inadequate. I know there have been many tragedies of this scale in the past, and there will be more. And that thought makes me shut down all the more, because if just one of these overwhelms me, dozens of them absolutely bury me.

Part of the reason we feel overwhelmed is because we want to be adequate for whatever faces us. We want to have adequate solutions to the problems that arise. We want to provide adequate help - at least enough to make a real difference. We want to be adequate emotionally, that we can feel enough for the magnitude of the tragedies we face. And when we don't feel adequate, we feel overwhelmed. We feel the devastation of the tragedy - and on top of that, we feel the inadequacies - and on top of that, we feel overwhelmed.

But, does God ask us to be adequate? Does He expect us to provide all the adequate solutions? Does He expect us to provide adequate help to make things better? Does He expect us to have adequate enough feelings to match the magnitude of the situation? Or perhaps He expects to just do a little token something so that we can feel like we've done something?

God does not put on us the responsibility to be adequate for monumental tragedy. He does not call us to fix world catastrophes. What He does ask of us is to give ourselves to Him, especially when life situations are too big, especially when we are inadequate. He even asks us to give Him our inadequacies themselves. There are problems He allows that are bigger than we are, and in them, He wants us to give ourselves entirely to Him. So, when we pray and when we find ways to help, our goal should be to give ourselves to Him, not to feel like we've done something, or to presume that we're adequate to solve it.

We should give all of ourselves. We should pray fervently, give generously, and even help selflessly. But not in an effort to feel adequate or to escape being overwhelmed. We pray, give, and help as an act of giving our inadequate selves to the God who is completely, overwhelmingly adequate.

Universalist?

Rob Bell is causing quite a stir in the blogosphere this past week. The pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, MI, and author of the controversial book Velvet Elvis is releasing a new book on March 15 called Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.

Bell is part of the emergent church movement, which is a widely varied group, marked primarily by questioning traditional views of propositional truth, epistemology, and church. Bell embraces a number of post-modern tenets. Some of his questions are thought-provoking and worth discussing. Some of his thoughts, in my opinion, lead Christians away from knowable, Scriptural, propositional truth.

What has caused the stir is Bell's own promotional video for Love Wins (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODUvw2McL8g). In the video, he asks question after question that call into question our traditional views about Heaven and Hell. The words are carefully crafted - he certainly seems to be promoting universalism (i.e., all will be saved, no matter what they believe), but he never comes right out and says it plainly. But he clearly wants the viewer to at least suspect that he's a universalist.

The buzz in the blogs is whether he's truly embracing universalism, or merely perpetrating a clever campaign to sell his book. If he's embracing universalism, he's clearly promoting an unscriptural view. If his book is orthodox, but he's promoting sales with a provocative ad, then he's running dangerously close to deception and manipulation. Either way, the ad is disturbing. (I find some of his counterarguments in the video to be unfair "straw man" arguments - inaccurately representing the opposing view, then tearing down the misrepresented view.)

Either way, we should wait until March 15 to see what's really in the book before leveling specific criticisms. Many have launched severe criticism based on the video, without having the book to read. We should wait, but the early indications don't look good.

The challenge, however, is that views like universalism are easier to swallow than the harsh reality that some will endure God's wrath forever for rejecting His revealed grace. Because universalism is easier to swallow, people are embracing it. Meanwhile, Jesus is clear about the reality of Hell, with passages like Matthew 8:11-12. It's not an easy truth, but it's the only way that Scripture's call to believe in Christ has any importance.