On obedience and affluence, the spiritual crisis of the West and transparent evangelism.

Dear friends,

This is the fourth edition of my weekly newsletter with more personal writing and content curation on mission, discipleship, and spiritual renewal.

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Here are your weekly bullets:

On obedience to the Great Commission and affluence:

“…obedience to the Great Commission has more consistently been poisoned by affluence than by anything else. The antidote for affluence is reconsecration.”

— Dr. Ralph Winter, Re-consecration to a wartime lifestyle

or as Jesus said:

“You cannot serve both God and mammon.” - Matthew 6:24

On the spiritual crisis of the West and transparent evangelism:

It is no news that we are facing a grave spiritual crisis in the West.

Rod Dreher, American Orthodox journalist and author, wrote about this in his controversial book The Benedict Option.

He stated,

“The light of Christianity is flickering out all over the West. There are people alive today who may live to see the effective death of Christianity within our civilization. By God’s mercy, the faith may continue to flourish in the Global South and China, but barring a dramatic reversal of current trends, it will all but disappear entirely from Europe and North America.”

The effects of this crisis are evident across different categories - moral, social, political, and cultural.

At its core, however, it is a theological and philosophical crisis.

The West's problem is the death of the Christian conception of God and all that this entails. Atheism and agnosticism are on the rise, along with the lesser-known phenomenon of Moral Therapeutic Deism (MTD), a kind of dominant civil religion, prevalent in America but also across Protestant Europe.

Evi Rodemann, German Lausanne movement leader, when describing this kind of spirituality that characterizes German cultural Protestants, uses three memorable phrases:

1. God wants me to be a good person and not a jerk. (Moralistic)

2. God or religion should help me feel good. (Therapeutic)

3. God is a concept to decorate our lives with but not an agent who really does anything. (Deism)

Missing from this list is the popular idea found in the fifth tenet of MTD as identified by sociologist Christian Smith:

Good people go to heaven when they die.

All of this should by now sound familiar.

For followers of Jesus there are many issues with the quasi-gospel and moral demands MTD preaches. But at the root is its inherent view of God.

What MTD illustrates is that people in the West can still be religious but have a view of God that is shaped by cultural idols, rather than by the true and living God as revealed in Scripture and in the person of Jesus Christ.

Now, Rod Dreher speaks of the death of Christianity in the West as something almost inevitable and perhaps irreversible.

I do not ascribe to that view, and perhaps in another issue, we can discuss the move of God that is happening across the West. Spoiler alert: we haven't seen anything yet.

What is certain is that serious times, require a serious response.

There is in this crisis a dire need to boldly proclaim the God of the Scriptures, revealed in Jesus Christ.

To do this we need, among other things, contextual and transparent evangelism.

We are to be aware of the idols of our culture and proclaim the God of the Gospel as the only one worthy of our worship.

We do this by contextualizing our message in our cultures.

This is what the Apostle Paul did:

“To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law.”

We need our message to be clear, understandable and relevant to our culture.

As someone who spends much time discipling Gen Z, I'm many times approached with questions of apologetics.

In many cases, it is no longer sufficient to simply affirm the non-negotiables of our faith such as the authority of Scripture and the resurrection of Jesus.

They want answers to the hard questions they face in a context that is not only strange to their faith, but hostile.

It's precisely for this reason that we also need transparent evangelism.

We want our message to be relevant and clear in our contexts. But clarity also means transparency. We want to be both relevant and transparent.

This means that we do not succomb to our culture by avoiding the difficult things in our message in exchange for likes and non-confrontation. Jesus surely did not do so with the rich young ruler.

We certainly want people to comprehend our message, but that does not mean that our message must be adored by everyone.

The only Gospel that saves is about both the love and the wrath of God, life and death, grace and the judgment to come, eternal life and eternal hell. Jesus is the most brilliant teacher and the greatest of prophets, but He is also the Jewish Messiah, Lord of all, and God in the flesh. He's the Lamb that was slain and the coming King who will rule the nations with a rod of iron.

There is hope for the West. Crisis precedes renewal. However, this hope is contingent upon our faithful heralding of this message.

Let us unashamedly proclaim the Gospel with clarity and transparency.

On Gospel fire:

“The Gospel is not an old, old story, freshly told. It is a fire in the Spirit, fed by the flame of Immortal Love; and woe unto us, if, through our negligence to stir up the Gift of God which is within us, that fire burns low.“

—Dr. R. Moffat Gautrey, Scottish pioneer missionary to South Africa and fathe.r-in-law to renowned missionary David Livingstone.

On renewal and power:

“We need renewal not because we are bored, but because a powerless church cannot become a mighty army. Disciples who are discouraged and enjoy no intimacy with God will not be able to follow Jesus in costly ways.”

— Clark Pinnock, Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit

Thank you for reading and engaging with the content.

As always, I would love to know which content resonated with you and what you would like to see more of. You can let me know by replying to this email.

Much love and until next week,

Timo