Dennis Johnson on the (Corporate) Purpose of Christian Preaching

In his monumental book on homiletics (and hermeneutics), Dennis E. Johnson devotes an entire chapter to Col 1.24-2.7, a passage he describes as “encapsulat[ing] in brief compass much of the Bible’s teaching on the purpose of preaching” (pg. 63).  From this passage, he extracts/unpacks the following seven themes “that conveniently summarize the apostle’s theology of apostolic preaching” (pg. 64):

1. The purpose we pursue: “To present everyone mature in Christ”
2. The listeners we address: “To make known … among the gentiles”
3. The content we preach: “Him we proclaim”
4. The communication tasks we perform: “Warning and teaching … with all wisdom”
5. The price we pay: “Sufferings … Christ’s afflictions … toil, struggling”
6. The power on which we rely: “All his energy … within me”
7. The office we fulfill: “Minister according to the stewardship from God”

In his exposition of the first theme, “The purpose we pursue,” Johnson has the following gem about the corporate nature of term “everyone” (πάντα) of Col 1.27:

It would be easy to read Paul’s “everyone” in individualistic terms, as if his only aims were the conversion and sanctification of solitary believers.  This would be a serious misunderstanding.  Ephesians 4:13-16 shows that growth toward Christlike perfection is not an individualistic pursuit but a corporate, cooperative, community endeavor to reach a goal that none will reach until all have reached it: “until we all attain … to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ … the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.”  Paul’s “everyone” is intentionally inclusive of the Gentiles, who had previously been excluded from the Lord’s covenant community (Col. 1:27; Eph. 2:11-22).  The goal of God’s redemptive plan is not merely the rescue of individual sinners from their justly deserved eternal condemnation but also the gathering of a redeemed people, a community that together worships its Creator-Redeemer and that exhibits in the loving and trustworthy interrelationships of its members a reflection of the image of the Triune God himself…. Preaching is God’s instrument to elicit faith, thereby uniting us to Christ and to his community, the body that is growing together toward perfection and the bride who is being beautified for presentation to her groom.

Him We Proclaim, pg. 67.  (Bold emphasis mine.)

It is all too easy to reflect on our attendance at Lord’s Day worship and our membership in a particular Christian church in much the same way we do so about the rest of our lives: individualistically.  Yet the nature of the “communion of saints” is a radically corporate concept – more so than most other parts of our lives.

It is profound to consider that in worship, there is a real sense in which I need the brother or sister sitting next to me (whether he/she is a recovering addict, a repentant child abuser, a former prostitute, a redeemed thief or perjurer, etc.) so that together we can grow up into Christ out head.  To think that God saves for himself a people – albeit one that consists of individual persons – and feeds and nourishes them corporately in word and sacrament provides a wonderfully selfless perspective on what it means to gather together as part of Christ’s body, the church.

______________
Andrew

The Role of the OT Tabernacle and Temple in NT Worship

A comment Richard made sent me down a thought-tangent which ended by reminding me of a conversation I had a few years back with a friend about art in worship.

My friend was reminding me of how excellent and beautiful was the craftsmanship that went into the materials of the tabernacle and temple.  In light of this, he suggested not simply that our church buildings should be built beautifully, but that this gave warrant for the artists in the congregation to best utilize their talents in worship; i.e., they should be given a venue as part of the worship service to display their paintings, sculptures, clothing-design, fabric work, etc.  To be fair to my friend, this would not be an exhibit, rather these pieces of art would be a part of the worship service.

Though I find myself parting ways sometimes with how he works out what truly is and is not a circumstance according to the regulative principle of worship, Scott Clark has a really great quote regarding the role of the Temple that touches on what my friend was mentioning to me a few years back:

[I]t is ill advised to use the temple as the pattern for Christian worship, for the temple was instituted under Moses as part of the typological system that was temporary by divine intention.  It was at the center of the cultus that Paul describes as “fading” (2 Cor. 3:7-11).  Given the history of Christian worship and the language of the New Testament, it is hard to imagine a compelling reason for us to use the temple as the paradigm for Christian worship.  It is beyond dispute, of course, that the New Testament uses temple imagery to describe the new covenant people (e.g., 1 Cor. 3:16; 2 Cor. 6:16; Eph. 2:21; 1 Peter 4:14).  It is true that in Christ the temple, Christians are now said to be the temple of God.  It does not follow, however, that therefore we ought to pattern Christian worship on the temple in any but metaphorical ways.  The New Testament draws theological and moral, not liturgical consequences from our status as the temple.

Recovering the Reformed Confession: Our Theology, Piety and Practice, pg. 244

Clark totally nails it!  The NT does not draw upon Temple worship in the way most evangelicals do.  A great reminder for us who seek God’s will from his word in our worship as pilgrims between the already and the not-yet!

_________________
Andrew

Short but Sweet: Stellman on Liturgy

How many times have we heard evangelicals (especially of the Jesus-people variety) claim that they don’t get caught up in the “religiosity” of “churchianity” as expressed in things like “liturgy”?  While the simplistic notion that a church doesn’t have a liturgy is easy enough to refute, Jason J. Stellman puts it succinctly:

All churches have a “liturgy” (a word that comes from the Greek term that means “religious service”).  The real question, then, is not, “Is your church liturgical?” but, “Is your church’s liturgy biblical?“

Dual Citizens: Worship and Life Between the Already and the Not Yet, pg. 11.

Well put.  Very well put.  Looking forward to posting more on this nice little book about how pilgrims are to live in this “time between the times”  as citizens of two spheres – those of common and special grace!

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Andrew

Willimon on the Busy Church

While I’m studying/reading about the church and culture, let me share this jewel by William Willimon & Robert Wilson.  It is found in their Preaching and Worship in the Small Church (Nashville: Abingdon, 1980), 39-40.  To set the context, Willimon and Wilson lament the way so many churches have taken the spotlight off Sunday, the day of the Resurrection.

“‘What you do outside the church is more important than what you do inside the church,’ was how the slogan went.  Church school classes, youth-fellowship meetings, weekly prayer and Bible study groups, social action programs, elaborately designed educational activities, and seemingly endless committee meetings, all conspired to convince the people that worship was only one small part of the full program.”

“Such thinking had an undeniable appeal to the pragmatic, utilitarian, work-oriented society, such as we have in the United States.  Time spent in worship tends to be thought of as idle time–unused time.  We are a nation of doers and achievers.  How can the ‘acts’ of worship compete in importance alongside activities such as Christian education, counseling, youth programs, board meetings, Bible study groups, and charitable work?  The ‘active’ church with its doors always open, meetings in progress every night of the week, newsletters recruiting participants for a host of activities, insuring that every person is kept busy during the week (provided that person truly wishes to be an ‘active’ church member), has become the paradigm for any church that aspires greatness.”

“The ‘active’ pastor, with a full round of weekly meetings, community activities, and supervisory chores, which keep all the machinery oiled and running smoothly at the full-program church (provided that the church truly wishes to be a ‘viable’ church), has become the paradigm for any pastor who aspires to greatness.  Somehow the centrality of Sunday worship has been lost amidst these pragmatic, program-oriented, organizational images of success.”

That’s what happens when “work ethic” has a say in the church.  Good thing a huge theme of Scripture is “rest” instead of “do;” that is what we must emphasize, even though it goes against what is written on our DNA!  Actually, Willimon and Wilson say it better: they say such a busy church looks more like the local YMCA than a church, and the pastor looks more like a program director than a preacher (p. 42).  Here’s the deal-sealer: “Theologians have noted that our Pelagian busyness is frequently a works/righteousness cover-up for our spiritual emptiness” (Ibid.).

 For more on this, see chapter four in Hart and Muether,  With Reverence and Awe (Philipsburg: P&R, 2002).

shane lems

sunnyside wa

#1 Selling Beer, Rock Concerts, and Your Neighborhood McMegachurch

Now that I’m done with this book, I’m convinced that all Reformed pastors should at least skim through it – especially church planters in suburbia! As I mentioned in the earlier two posts on this book, Twitchell, who does not claim to be a Christian (he’s an “apatheist” in his own words) went to loads of mega churches and a lot of “wanna be” mega churches and wrote of his experiences and conclusions. Here are a few more snippets.

“…As I write this in 2006, there’s a new church reaching mega status in this country every few days. Why did they appear so suddenly? For a number of reasons…. Herd mentality is at the heart of fashion, rock concerts, teenage smoking, war, best-selling books, and numerous other endeavors that spread like the flu…. Consumers move in trickles, then droves.”

“Growth itself is a powerful selling tool. As any student of Branding 101 knows, being able to say you are the fastest growing has pulling power. It implies leadership. Leading is not a measure of quality, however, but consumption. Take beer, for example. There’s the leading light beer, the leading imported beer, the leading Mexican beer, the leading German beer, the leading microbrewed beer, and so on. Where taste is hard to measure, the invocation of leadership often substitutes for the real thing, even if leadership is in an unimportant category.”

“As I learned, megas depend on disrupting traffic flow. There is no better advertisement in mallcondo culture than an attraction so powerful that car traffic jams up before it. Very often the church even makes a display out of hiring local police, complete with flashing blue warning lights, to direct the flow, as well as having parking attendants wear headsets like air traffic controllers. To an audience that grew up on rock concerts, nothing is more powerful than a little jostling at the gate.”

If you don’t purchase this book, you should at least check it out (ILL?) from your local library. I didn’t post any of Twitchell’s comments on the first and second great awakenings; I’m afraid too many of our readers would have been quite offended at his penetrating critique of Whitefield and the like.

The above quotes taken from James B. Twitchell, Shopping for God (Simon and Schuster, 2006), 212, 230.

shane lems

sunnyside wa