What Can be Wrong with Rich Churches Helping those who are Poorer?

In our 5 Nov update, I wrote some strong words about church and foreign money.  One friend wisely questioned me about it, so I thought I'd quote what I wrote and explain my concern more clearly from the Scriptures:

One other fellowship here I was dismayed to witness laying on a big restaurant meal for Good Friday which we were not expected to contribute anything for.  The model is that the CEO of a church has lots of money coming in from abroad and he doles it out liberally.  I was particularly upset that that happened on Good Friday, when we are meant to reflect on the example of self-giving set by the 'CEO' of the church, he who gave himself up on the cross for the sake of his people.

My friend wisely commented that a Western church might in fact be inspired by Good Friday and give so that a poorer church can enjoy a free meal.  I agree that that scenario would not be a contravention of biblical teaching.  However, Westerners might like to know why I feel so strongly about what I perceive to be an 'entitlement mentality' in churches in this region.

1. What does it mean to aim at 'equality'?
   My friend referenced 2 Cor 8:13-14:
   "It is not that there should be relief for others and hardship for you, but it is a question of equality.[b] 14 At the present time your surplus is available for their need, so that their abundance may in turn meet your need, in order that there may be equality." (CSB)  However, I note that the Corinthians were being asked to provide need for those who were undergoing a famine in Jerusalem.*
   Suffice it to say here that I worry that a lot of money from well-to-do churches ends up going to middle-class people in countries where there is a well-publicised disaster or conflict.  We do have huge refugee camps here with people struggling to fill their stomachs.  But that Good Friday congregation was made up of plenty of 'middle-class' people.  The principle of 'equality' does not mean a crass income-levelling whereby wealthy churches should be striving to raise up the wealth of middle-class people.  We must labour to identify real need (see Paul doing this in 1 Tim 5:3,5) and then seek to feed the hungry.
2. I worry that Christians are being trained to come to church to receive not to give.  This was not a one-off observation.  I have seen so much up-ending here of the biblical maxim that 'it is more blessed to give than to receive'.
3. What I have witnessed so often in evangelical church culture here is an undermining of the culture of sharing food that is strongly present in non-Christian culture.  When a group of relatives go on a picnic together, each household labours to prepare food and bring it.  This happens in schools and universities too: people often bring a big tray of dolma  to share.  A key NT word that characterises the church is koinonia- fellowship, but since that word is often poorly understood, let's think of the church as a 'sharing-ship'.  So not only do I believe the model of the Big Guy at the Top doling out the Goodies is unbecoming of a Christian 'share-ship'; I believe it is even falling short of the standard of sharing that prevails in the communities of this world.
   
   * This is an assumption from 8:4- 'the relief of the saints'.  It sounds like pretty drastic need to me.  Acts 11:28 specifically mentions a famine, though about dates I have not researched. 

Hospitality is Not Burdensome

People wonder 'is it exhausting catering for 20 people at your home every Tuesday night?'  Joy discussed this and we want to spell out why the answer to that question is no.  Yes, it is a certain amount of work, but it is not too much to bear.

Let's use 1 John 5:3-4 to examine the matter. 

"And his commandments are not burdensome. 4 For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith." (ESV)

Yes, we are commanded to show hospitality.  And it feels right not just to worship together but to eat together each week.  But when we think of all that God commands, serving supper every week is not such a hard task.

1. Every member should be serving, not just us the hosts (Eph 4).  Praise God one of the baby believers comes early each week and helps cook.  The expats help humbly too.  Amazingly, we've even seen the K men help out with clearing up and making tea- usually the prerogative of the hens not the roosters!
2. We get the children to help.  This sometimes goes well, not always; but we see ourselves as a household serving the saints together (1 Cor 16:15)
3. We are 'reducitarian' in diet.  We think of meat as something special (cf Luke 15), not something to eat every day.  So we are content with rice and beans and salad.
4. Notice in 1 John 5: what is it that makes this kind of hospitality manageable?  Let's paraphrase these verses a bit:
   And his command 'show hospitality' is not burdensome. 4 For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world's demand that eating together always be fancy. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith that God is calling together a group who will carry eachother's burdens."

A Watermelon for anyone who Memorises the Beatitudes!

I know some others are currently in a sermon series on Matt 5-7.  Here are some thoughts as I go along; others may be able to sharpen my understanding and praxis.

Memorisation

I am offering a watermelon as a prize for anyone who can recite the Beatitudes from memory in Behdini Kurdish.  Maybe next week it'll be a bunch of grapes... then a punnet of peaches... and then a plain old apple.
I plan to produce flashcards and cut them up more and more each week, so people's memorisation deepens each week.  We sometimes forget that memorisation is not a black and white matter.  A good start would be to see two columns of flashcards and be able to match up mourn with ...comforted and hunger & thirst with ...be filled.  In reality, many mature Christians have memorised around 10% of the Scriptures.  Hard to quantify, of course, but just because we can't recite Isaiah from beginning to end doesn't mean that we haven't memorised a lot of it.  Some of us can have a fair shot at telling you some of the contents of any given chapter in Isaiah.  We should aim for memorisation in a whole range of ways; perhaps get people to memorise the contents of Mark, for example, or in the case of the Beatitudes, to know it word-perfectly, because it's kind of poetic: it's recorded in such a way as to make it easy to remember.

I used to know the Beatitudes a bit like a cricket line-up, (I always think of Hunger & Thirst as a solid No.4 Batsman :-) ), although it only gets up to batsman no.8!  Better, I suggest, to line up each Beatitude with a day of the week, with Persecution squeezed in to the events of a Friday evening, which frankly might be quite apt since people here sometimes get fired up to do dastardly things after hearing some chap get hot under the collar midday on Friday.  So, here it is with Saturday is the first working day of the week:

Sat Poor in Spirit

Sun Mourn

Mon Meek

Tues H&T for Righteousness

Wed Merciful

Thurs Pure in Heart

Fri Peacemakers

Fri night! Persecuted

Resources

Kent Hughes- Free mp3s of his sermons that became the Preaching the Word book on the Sermon on the Mount.  All of his books of expositions seem to be available in their original sermonic form.  As ever, good exegetical insight, some good illustrations and examples from Christian history, despite the messages being quite short.

One verse--and a world of difference

I've got to Isaiah 12 in my OT devotions and I recommend v6 as an incisive summary of how a the church differs from the majority faith all around us:
Isaiah 12:6 CSB
Cry out and sing, citizen of Zion, for the Holy One of Israel is among you in his greatness.”

Firstly, we love to sing passionately : Cry out and sing, citizen of Zion

and secondly, the reason why we express our doctrine in song: our God is GREAT, but he is great AMONG us. Our neighbours here loudly proclaim that God is great, but generally deny that he can be among us. They might object that this damages our reverence for the awesome transcendent God, and sometimes churches lose their trembling in order to make worship entertaining, but even here in this one verse there is an answer to that objection. Who exactly is AMONG us? The Holy One of Israel. Ultimately our Christian celebration, especially our weekly gatherings, centres on the jaw-dropping wonder that the Holy God in Christ has come to dwell among us, satisfying both his holiness by paying the price of our sin and his love by being willing to accept us as his people, dwelling among us and comforting us step by step as we make our way painfully to our destination where
"God’s dwelling is with humanity, and he will live with them." Revelation 21:3 CSB

Baptism & Baptism Certificates

What should we do about baptism certificates?

If you have wisdom you'd like to share with other readers that is not sensitive, you're welcome to comment rather than emailing me alone

1. Be honest with GodIt is disappointing when people ask for a piece of paper proving their baptism, as they seek emigration to a foreign country.  We should pray "Lord, raise up people whose baptism makes them all the more determined to serve amongst their own people.  May they have as their heart's desire and prayer to God that their fellow-countrymen be saved.  May they be determined, like Paul, to run the race and testify, even if prison and hardship awaits them"
2. Be understandingIn my situation, I have had to dispel my naivety and understand why emigration is an attractive prospect.  Firstly, these two guys are already displaced people.  We think of them as 'nationals', but they are somewhat foreign to mainstream society already.  Our city is especially discriminatory to people from the country west of here.  And secondly, would I want to give up my British passport and confine my kids to marriage and work in this Middle-Eastern country? 
3. Be thankfulTo seek legal emigration to the West is better than lying and colluding with wicked people-smugglers.  Good can be done in the West, especially if these dearly loved brothers of ours go and challenge the pluralism of the West and make disciples wherever they go.
4. Be faith-full
   Remember God is in control.  He is building his church.  No plan of his can be thwarted (Job 42:2)
5. Encourage locals to baptise one another, within the life of the indigenous churchHowever, sometimes they won't and I don't think it makes sense to delay active participation in the fellowship of the church because there is no one willing to baptise others.  We can feel guilty that we have 'tainted' the life of the local church by being the expat who does the baptising.  But Paul didn't seem bothered who did the baptising.  He was more concerned about preaching than baptising, but neither did he refuse to baptise according to a hard and fast rule that 'it must be a Corinthian who does the baptising'
6. Resist black and white methodologiesSome might say 'you shouldn't have baptised them'.  But they might have gone to someone else's ministry - this was a real possibility in one case - and had a much less biblically-instructive baptism service
7. Continue to teach baptism as a 'church thing'In other words, highlight 1 Cor 12:13- "For we were all baptised by one Spirit into one body"  In our case, we don't have a fully formed church.  This is the nature of baptisms on the cutting edge of mission.  But we should keep praying against baptism being seen as an individual attainment.  It is clearly a statement about an individual having come into the kingdom, but it is more than that: it is a sign by which the body of Christ welcomes a new individual believer into the family.  May that brotherly love abound in us and make it a sweet thing to join our fellowship!
8. Take note of this line from IOM RSC (Resettlement Support Center)
   Those "who can establish persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion may be considered for admission to the United States as refugees."  This is why baptism certificates might be eagerly sought after
9. We may prefer to write a letter to specific officials than issue a baptism certificate that could be used in who knows what kind of scenario
   However, this does seem to disappoint believers who feel a letter doesn't provide as much weight.
   I considered adding this as smallprint on any baptism certificate I issue:
   
   Baptism is not sure proof that the baptised is a genuine Christian.  The evidence that someone is a Christian is their changed character and ongoing, sacrificial participation in the life of the church.  If anyone would like to enquire whether someone baptised in this fellowship is continuing to live as a committed Christian, they are welcome to contact us.

Jesus' paralysis

Jesus the Paralytic

This is a very familiar passage for many of us - Luke 5:17-26 & parallels - but I wanted to share fresh insights I have received this week.  Perhaps it might help others to preach the cross from this passage.

What does it meant that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins?

We typically think like this: that Jesus is God, so he can forgive sins.  And we don’t go much further than that.

But, we must ponder this more carefully: actually, not even God the Father has authority to forgive sins, if by that cancelling of debts he is acting unjustly.  Remember “righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne” (Ps 89 & 97).  He cannot sweep sin under the carpet.

“The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).  If Jesus had come to earth and said ‘I wipe away sins’ - without paying the price for sin - he would have been rebelling against his Father’s just government of the universe.

So, he came to die, to pay the full penalty for the world’s sin.  And by means of the cross he gained the right to cancel sins, and to remove the consequences of sin in our lives.  It actually would have been unjust for Jesus to cure the man’s paralysis, because all of us deserve death and sickness.

Think of it this way: Jesus gained the authority to heal and to forgive sins the man who was stuck on that stretcher by being himself stretched out in a kind of paralysis.  Not carried on wooden poles with a cloth between to lie on in some sort of comfort but nailed to two Roman poles and lifted up to die in excruciating pain.

And...one of the criminals next to him said effectively ‘go on, get up and walk’.  Free yourself of this paralysis you’re stuck in! (Luke 23:39).  And he could have called on twelve legions of angels to save him.  But he refused to ‘get up and walk’.  He endured the cross, scorning its shame.  He drained the cup of God’s wrath to the end, crying “It is finished!”

TPR Lab - Total Physical Response

How it Works: 

1. Walk round the office, and the coach gives you instructions in the target language: Knock on the door, Shuffle the Cards.  In English OR Kurdish.  He marks you out of, say 100, for how many actions you correctly performed first time.
2. Watch the video of these actions, and repeat after the video.
3. You walk round with your coach and tell him what to do.  He marks you out of 200; you score 1 point for getting it roughly right, 2 if you get it spot-on
4. You and your coach retrace your steps and he talks in the past tense about what you did.  I knocked on the door, I shuffled the Cards.
5. You now walk round and talk in the past tense about what you did.
6. You now use the future tense, by going round and telling a partner what he will do.  eg You will knock on the door, you'll shuffle the cards.

The Niche in the Market: There are many people in Duhok who have a decent academic grasp of English, but very little experience speaking it.  And they are prepared to pay good money to get practice.  But I can only provide IELTS preparation courses in the evenings.  Some are asking for Saturday classes.  That's the opening for a whole-day experience.  No one amongst the hundreds of expat English teachers in Kurdistan seems to have offered this kind of immersion experience.

A local partner: Imagine a shopkeeper in a village.  He speaks his own language crisply, slowly -- frankly, like the kind of guy Blue Peter would snap up as a TV presenter.  He has no idea that he has a God-given gift that can help him provide well for his family.  He has land nearby, perfect for recreation - a short mountain bike's ride away -- and a sizeable house with a room where you could play table-tennis and darts.  

Who would be the coaches? Yes, this is a potential bottleneck, because expats don't want to give a whole Saturday to being an English coach.  But there are lots of Kurds who are fairly fluent English speakers, eg English students or returnees--they could be very adequate as coaches when they follow the TPR script.

Does TPR work, or is this just a bright idea?  TPR has been widely advocated and practised.  It really does work, because all five senses can be engaged, not just the eyes looking at letters on a page.  After all,  this is how we learnt our mother tongue as children.  And often, more complex vocabulary is rooted in basic everyday actions: eg in Kurdish 'complicated' is a metaphor - têkvedayî - and it comes from the literal world of shuffling cards and stirring tea. So...drink tea and play cards, and then you'll be able to move on to talk about 'shuffled' international relations!

Despite the acclaim TPR has received, I failed to find anyone who had developed a TPR lab syllabus that could be used in a particular location.  If successful, this syllabus could be sold to others.

To view the syllabus of actions as we develop it, look here