Church ... #Rethink Discipleship & Your Cultural Apologetics
A Reimagine.Network Coaching Session
Phil Miglioratti Interviewed Travis Michael Fleming;?
"Apollos Watered: The Center for Discipleship & Cultural Apologetics"
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Most "ministries deal with the weather happening in specific places.
We recognize the importance of the weather, but we are looking at the patterns in the weather,
the processes which create specific weather conditions.
We are different;?we are looking at the climate."
the processes which create specific weather conditions.
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PHIL>>> What changes for a ministry?or church when the?leaders reset their focus on "climate" rather than "weather conditions?"?
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TRAVIS>>>
When I was being ordained in the early 2000’s, I sat before my ordination council with my doctrinal statement and various position papers. I had a position paper on alcohol, dancing, and various entertainments, which were the hot button issues at the time. I wasn’t asked to do so, but I felt it necessary to write a position paper on transsexualism, which later would be called transgenderism. At the time, no one on my council knew what it was or had any idea at what I was talking about. In fact, a couple of the men laughed, and then said, “No one struggles with this!” I smiled. He was looking at the weather, I was looking at the climate.?
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As we look around, the church is always playing cultural catch up. The church always struggles with one of two forms of theological expression. On the one side is what Michael Goheen calls a fossil-theology, whereby we have codified theological expressions against the backdrop of certain elements. On the other side is jellyfish theology whereby theology changes and gives way to whatever cultural wave comes along. It is imperative to hold the two in tension—to not cling to outdated forms within the fossil-theology, nor to give way to every cultural wave that comes along. Theology, and discipleship is moving and breathing, always seeking to understand how to live as a faithful and fruitful Christ-follower in whatever cultural climate we are in. That’s why we say that as evangelicals, we often find that we are "Unable to address the issues of our world and unaware of our own cultural captivity, we are caught between nostalgia for a past that no longer exists and a drive for the next new thing. Too often we settle for and sell a truncated Gospel and a truncated vision of the Christian life."
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For those of us who are older, we want to try and recapture the good old days, but as Warren Wiersbe said, “the good old days are the product of a good imagination and a bad memory.” So true. The past is rarely as good as it seems, and our cultural topography is vastly different than it was for our grandfathers and fathers.?
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"Unable to address the issues of our world and unaware of our own cultural captivity,
we are caught between nostalgia for a past that no longer exists and a drive for the next new thing.
Too often we settle for and sell a truncated Gospel and a truncated vision of the Christian life."
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PHIL>>> Unpack how your ministry name explains your ministry mindset ... What question launches each segment?
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TRAVIS: >>>
Apollos—Our name begins with our namesake—Apollos. He appears in Acts 18:24-26 as an educated Alexandrian Jew who comes to faith in Jesus. He crossed barriers, preached what he knew, but preferred a backseat to the limelight.?
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We really like him in 1 Corinthians 3:6, “I planted,?Apollos watered,?but God gave the growth.” We felt that we were great at watering the faith. In fact, someone said to me when I was leading a small group, “You are like drinking from a fire hose!” We have interacted with so many pastors, churches, and Christians and discovered that many Christians were dying on the vine and extremely dissatisfied with what they saw going on in their churches. So much of the teaching on Sunday morning was aimed at reaching the lost to the exclusion of helping the saints grow and mature. We felt that was a reduction of the gospel and wanted to correct that.?
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Apollos is the man of God for our church today. He loved God and served the churches and, in the process, earned quite the following, but rather than build up a greater following, he decided to step back and let Jesus take center stage, which is something largely lost today. We are all so concentrated on building our own platforms and getting our names out there that we fail to focus on Jesus—the entire reason for who we are and what we are doing. He was also a person who crossed barriers. We want to be able to interact with Christians from many different backgrounds and tribes. Apollos seemed to be the perfect representative of what we want to be.?
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Watered—There are many ministries out there that drive a hard line between reaching the lost and educating the believer, but we felt that salvation is a bit like a light switch. For some the switch is off and then it’s on. They can name the time and place that they came to know Jesus. But so many people were raised in church and their salvation story is much more like a dimmer—prolonged exposure and incremental growth over time. We felt that being a waterer would help that growth no matter when it happened—provided a seed had been planted.?
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Center—??Our goal is to be a place where people from different backgrounds can interact with one another and learn from one another. Ministry is not about one tribe or another, but the entirety body of Jesus. We need to hear from other voices today—as well as those from history, and from around the globe. Culture is changing so fast and the methods of bygone eras aren’t working. We need to hear and see what is working and why and then adapt that to the cultural stage that our gospel expression plays on.?
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Discipleship—?It all comes back to discipleship. Discipleship is a lifelong journey, but too many people see it as a program for other Christians, but it is not a program, it is a process whereby we strive to become more and more like Christ. It is life on life with prolonged exposure over time as we seek Jesus together.?
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Cultural Apologetics—??Cultural Apologetics is a relatively new field. The term was first coined by Paul Gould in 2018 or so. We took his definition and combined it a bit with the work of James Davison Hunter to create our own definition:?
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Cultural apologetics is the work of establishing the Christian imagination, conscience, voice, and practice within a culture so that Christianity can be seen as true and satisfying. This work requires: 1) analyzing the deep structures of both church culture and the broader culture; 2) seeking to understand how these structures affect the viability, authenticity, and communicability of the Gospel message both explicitly and implicitly; and 3) redeploying the church in a way that is both faithful to the Christian mission and message and meets the realities of the broader culture head-on.
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For us, cultural apologetics is a work because it is never ending. Because culture is always changing, we are trying to establish the…
This also happens “within a culture.” Culture is the missing lens that people often miss in their understanding of the gospel.?
In Disney's National Treasure (2004), Benjamin Franklin Gates, played by Nicolas Cage, embarks on a mission to save the Declaration of Independence from falling into the wrong hands. Hidden on the back of the document is a secret clue that only Benjamin Franklin’s special glasses can reveal. These unique glasses, with multiple lenses that can be raised or lowered to see different things, help Gates uncover a hidden message—but it only leads to another dead end.
Later, Gates is captured and questioned by Sadusky, a policeman played by Harvey Keitel. Sadusky presses him about the glasses and the hidden message. Gates explains, frustrated, that while the clue was revealed, it only led to more questions and confusion. As Sadusky flips one of the glasses' lenses, the camera zooms in on Gates, who suddenly whispers to himself, "There's more to it." He realizes he missed a crucial part of the message that only this particular lens could reveal.
Like Gates, we often look through our Biblical and personal lenses but overlook a key perspective—the cultural lens. The church cannot be understood apart from the culture that it exists in. In some respect, it is shaped by the culture in which it finds itself.?
This is where cultural apologetics becomes essential: it helps us understand the cultural factors that shape how we perceive and communicate truth, offering the missing lens we need to engage meaningfully with the world.?
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I recently heard of a pastoral staff who were going through the book of 1 Corinthians. They were discussing how much the culture was affecting the Corinthians in shaping their faith, but what was surprising to me was that they couldn’t see how much their culture was affecting their understanding of the faith and how it shaped their expression of it.?
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This work requires analyzing the deep structures of both church culture and the broader culture?
Culture is like an iceberg. Surface culture is what we see, it’s where we have agency, its in the language of our children and grandchildren. Deep culture is not what we see, but what we feel. It’s where people actually live. It’s like being at a wedding and you see the mother of the groom walk in wearing a white dress. A cultural rule has been violated and every woman there knows it, but no one has said anything. Deep culture can be noticed in the unapproving glances, it’s what happens when something is done differently. Deep culture comes at us from all kinds of places—family, friends, school, institutions, its in our media—it’s the underlying beliefs about how the world is and how it is supposed to work.?
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Think about when we pulled out of Afghanistan. The government collapsed overnight. Part of the reason it collapsed is that democratic government only took place at a surface culture level, but hadn’t at a deep culture level. Surface culture gets some change, but without deep culture change, it is fleeting.?
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Cultural apologetics seeks to understand how these structures affect the viability, authenticity, and communicability of the Gospel message both explicitly and implicitly. What we mean by that is structures within a culture (the unseen propositions, beliefs, and myths that uphold it) can enable the gospel or impede them.?
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For example, in the U.S. Government, when gay marriage was legalized. That influenced how we communicate the gospel message. What do we do when a gay couple come to the church? What about a couple that is in the church and is not married yet, but wants to have the church bless them? Or if we allow couples to use our sanctuary to get married and a gay couple comes and wants to use it, can we be sued for discrimination if we do not? How do we handle such things that the Bible clearly condemns? This is just one example, but such practices influence how people understand the gospel. Suddenly, once gay marriage became legal, Christians who adhered to the Bible were being called “bigots” or “homophobic” by those claiming a higher moral ground.?
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What about taking care of the least and the lowest? Most Christians would indicate that we should do that. But what about those who are undocumented and who are in the country illegally? What is our responsibility as Christian leaders who are called to help the most vulnerable all the while upholding law??
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All of these issues are complex and multifaceted requiring more than a headline. They require a deep dive into the Scripture, as well as an analysis of church history, and proper cultural exegesis.
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Part of cultural apologetics is redeploying the church in a way that is both faithful to the Christian mission and message and meets the realities of the broader culture head-on. It is imperative that both ar ein tension—we have to be faithful to the Christian mission and message, all the while making sure we are using the message of Jesus to answer the questions that this generation is asking.?
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Theologian Daniel Strange noted that the question that consumed the church in the first millennium was on the nature of Jesus—was He fully God or fully man? The councils convened to confront the question and the matter was decided that Jesus was both fully man and fully God. The question that dominated in the second millennium was what is the nature of salvation? That of course, led to the division between the Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Roman Catholic) Church in 1054 A.D. and then Protestants from Roman Catholics in 1517. The question of the third millennium is—what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be male? Female? What about transhumanism? What role does technology and its advancement play in our humanity??
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The gospel message shows us all of these things, but we must make sure that we are answering the questions of this generation—not answering the questions of centuries ago.?
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Our ministry "exists?to encourage and equip you and your church
in?your missionary encounter with Western culture
through resources and recommendations to water your faith so that you can water your world!"
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PHIL>>> How is a "missionary encounter with Western Culture" a different way of thinking for most congregations?
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TRAVIS>>>?
The old saying is true—if you want to know how the water is, don’t ask a fish. We are so accustomed to our culture that we don’t ever think to question it, but a missionary encounter ensures that we do. What do we mean by missionary encounter? It means looking at our culture in the way a missionary would. Or, if we were to put the show on the other foot, how would we see India if we stepped out of the plane in Delhi? It would be foreign to us and we would have to fid out how to behave, what to say, what not to say, what to wear, who to talk to and who not to talk to. All of those questions would have to be answered in order to know how to communicate the gospel effectively. By having a missionary encounter, it helps us to see that our world is not so tame and simple as we think. India has a pantheon of gods and goddesses, well, so do we. Except our gods go by different names: status, freedom, individuality, efficiency, progress, etc. These are the things that are shaping us and influencing how we see the world and even see our faith. The question is—how can we see them if we are unaware of them? This is where our unique missioholistic approach comes in. The Bible advocates for a distinctive, transcultural community, that we call the church. It is when we start to interact with those from different cultures, as well as examine church history (to correct as C.S. Lewis said our “chronological snobbery) that we quickly discover where our idolatries really are. It’s a long and arduous process, but well worth the wait.
Most churches though, are so comfortable between there four walls, have domesticated and synthesized their cultural idolatries to their Christian faith, which actually creates a different Christianity altogether. We have to endeavor to go back to the Word, but also engage with Christians from different cultures and from history to see where we might have blind spots and then allow them to correct us.?
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"Unfortunately, a lot of times conservative leaning people,?in order to protect the institution,
wind up, not intentionally, but they wind up defending rot.?
And unfortunately progressive leaning people in order to purge the institution,
wind up, blowing up foundational pillars."
Deep Conversation?podcast?episode, Travis spoke with Trevin Wax
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PHIL>>>?As different as they are, people?with conservative or liberal presuppositions?share the same blindspot: believing their viewpoints are not only Scriptural, but are the only valid interpretation/application of Scripture. It seems to me both sides are of the opinion their?opinions are inerrant (and all others are invalid) ...a terrible overreach of?"all scripture is inspired by God."?... Travis, do you agree?or disagree??... and either way, tell us?how we unlearn/disassemble the way of thinking Trevin describes.?
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TRAVIS>>>?
I agree. All Scripture is inspired of God and all is necessary to understand the full-flavor of the gospel. There are several issues that affect our understanding here and cause us to fall down on one side or the other. One is the theological system we are part of can actually deafen us to certain texts, or dismiss them altogether. We have to make sure to understand what the text says in its context and make sure that the theological framework we employ isn’t just causing us to dismiss certain texts without understanding the intent and purpose behind them within the overall system.?
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The second issue, and I believe probably the more potent and lived one is not about truth itself, but about belonging. God has created us with an innate desire to belong and identify with a group of people. If the group we belong to disregards, disagrees or villainizes another, it is very hard for us to even consider what the other group is saying because we are putting our own security and identity at risk. If our group condemns it, then we have to condemn it to because we are fearful of losing our security, identity, or status within the community therefore, we have to villainize the other.?
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The third issue involved is our inability to nuance well. The truth often isn’t one group or the other, but has aspects of truth involved in both as well as issues that we disagree with. We don’t like to nuance, we want blanket statements that allow us to see black and white, good and bad. We don’t like to think that one thing has good and bad. But the fact is that it does has both good and bad, we just have an allergy to nuance.??
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The fourth issue is that we have lacked a proper ordos Amaris—or order of loves. As Christians we believe in law, but that doesn’t mean we lack compassion or empathy. The question is what leads or prevails over the other loves? It’s my contention that both liberals and conservatives have a love that leads or directs the remaining loves. The question then becomes—how do we determine which love wins? That’s the question that is beyond the scope of our time.?
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"To?communicate the good news of Jesus, we need to understand how the culture impacts the cultural climate
both outside and inside the church.
The Church must?understand our cultural moment,
to ask the right questions and to show how Christianity offers better answers to the issues that matter to us all."
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PHIL>>>?Please expand on:
TRAVIS>>>?
>>>Why "understanding how the culture?impacts?the Church" is as vital as knowing?how it influences society -?
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I have written about this quite a bit recently. I like to look at the Panama Canal, which is an excellent illustration for your question.?
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The Panama Canal is a modern marvel and one of the greatest engineering feats in human history. Uniting the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans, each year some 14,000 ships pass through its locks, traversing its 51 miles, bringing goods to and from faraway lands. While almost everyone is aware of the Panama Canal, very few know the story of how it came to be. Its remarkable story perfectly illustrates cultural apologetics and why it is important today.?
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Completed on August 15, 1914, the idea of the canal had been entertained for almost 400 years. In 1534, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain commissioned a survey to see if a canal could be built to shorten the voyage from Europe to Spain’s holdings in the Pacific. By the 1800s technology had advanced and there was significant momentum behind building a canal, now under the influence of the French. In 1881 construction began under project leader and national hero Ferdinand de Lesseps who had overseen the development of the Suez Canal in Egypt.?
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On paper the Panama Canal should have been an easier project—it was less than half the length of the 120-mile-long Suez Canal and de Lesseps had the experience to lead such a monumental project. But there were three major problems from the time he hit the ground
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Leadership
The French engineers de Lesseps had brought in to oversee the project were not used to the heat, bugs, snakes, and mosquitoes, nor were they prepared for the isolation of the Central American jungles. Their families remained in France and there were almost no towns and nothing to do, further exacerbating their isolation and frustration. Many lasted only a few months, boomerangs that flew in quickly, circled, and headed out just as fast. It’s hard to get traction when you don’t have the right leaders or the infrastructure for those leaders in place to ensure the proper direction of such a momentous task.?
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Labor
While leaders were hard to keep in Panama, it was hard just to keep the men working on the project alive. Laborers came from across the western Caribbean to dig, but malaria and yellow fever killed thousands.?
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Landscape
While de Lesseps had great success in the desert building the Suez Canal, Panama was completely different—a dense and mountainous jungle landscape. It didn’t help that prior to beginning, de Lesseps had only visited Panama a few times to scout the project and that was during the dry season. Ignorant of both the landscape and the climate, de Lesseps and crew weren’t prepared to deal with the rainy season and the floods that collapsed cleared mountainsides washing away their hard-won progress.?
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Both the plan and the project itself seemed doomed: after 8 years, almost $290 million spent and 20,000 lives lost, the company went bankrupt and de Lesseps returned to France in disgrace. The rights to the project were sold to the US at a fraction of what had been spent.
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While not identical, the American plan initially took the same approach as the French. It was, however, plagued with the same problems: engineers kept leaving, workers kept dying, and the floods kept coming. Something had to change.?
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John Stevens, the chief engineer of the project, recognized that the project could not be completed without dealing with the underlying issues that had stopped the French. Stevens set about creating adequate infrastructure so that the American engineers and others leading the project could bring their families, increasing their well-being and drastically reducing the boomerang effect. Housing, hospitals, and whole towns were created.
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Second, Stevens appointed Colonel William Gorgas as chief sanitation officer. Gorgas, who held the then unconventional belief that mosquitoes were the primary carriers of yellow fever and malaria, went about implementing transformative measures to combat them. He established water and sewage systems, fumigated affected areas, and introduced mosquito nets for every sick person. Within two years he all but eliminated yellow fever, saving tens of thousands of lives in the process.?
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The needs of both leaders and labor had been addressed, but the landscape issue—especially the problem of flooding—remained. A sea-level canal like Suez was simply not going to work. A daring plan including locks and the single creation of what was then the largest manmade lake by creating the largest earthen dam, however, did. The massive undertaking reshaped both the country and the world. Stevens' plan used the realities of the rain and the topography to overcome what seemed an insurmountable obstacle.?
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Today, the church faces a similar challenge. Our mission is constant: we are trying to get the message of Jesus to a lost world, but pastors (leaders) are burning out, and Christians in the trenches (labor) are dechurching or worse, deconstructing. The technological world of postmodernity has shifted from the world we knew, pouring over our safety barriers like a flood, washing out what other Christians gave their lives to build. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Like Stevens, we need a plan that looks beyond the surface of the problems we face to the deep structures of our time and situation.
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Effective approaches from the past often don’t work when the cultural topography shifts, not because they were inherently wrong (though some might have been), but just like the Arabian desert is different from the Central American jungle, we are dealing with new and different deep structures in our culture. The timeless message of Jesus has not changed. Salvation is still only found through grace alone, faith alone, in the risen Christ alone. Our goal is the same, but cultural landslides, snakes, and disease—enemies within and without—threaten the mission Jesus has given us.?
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In the United States, we have more Christian organizations and resources than anyone else on the planet, yet Christianity is spiraling: more churches are closing than opening (more than 86 churches close every week), Christian institutions are shutting down or merging to stay afloat, pastors are burning out at record rates, Christians are deconstructing or disengaging including 40 million who have dechurched, and there is a sharp decline in Bible reading.?
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Like the Panama Canal, we need to rethink our problem, reimagine what it might look like, and then redeploy to achieve the mission. And that is why we need cultural apologetics.?
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Without a proper understanding of our cultural topography we will keep on digging, but never make progress. We need to adjust our approaches in order to reach and minister those living in today’s landscape.?
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>>>What you mean by?"our cultural moment"?-
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As I wrote about the Panama canal, our moment is different from Billy Graham’s era. He ministered mostly in a world that was familiar with Judeo-Christianity and had a Judeo-Christian framework, but today we are in a pluralistic world and exposed to more religions and belief systems than our forefathers could have imagined. Therefore, we need to examine and learn from those who have already been ministering in pluralistic environments.?
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I think it was Sam Chan who mentioned that when he was trained for ministry, he was taught three things about sharing the gospel. He was to show that it was factually true. And if it was true, then it was believable, and if it was believable, then it was livable. But today those three are inverted. People today want to know is it livable? If it is livable then it is believable. And if it is believable, then it's true. Many of us are ministering in the former approach, when we should be embracing the latter and that requires a re-shifting of our understanding of the Great Community which is a litmus test proving the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. My last book was about that, Blueprint: Kingdom Living in the Modern World is all about how the three go together and how they have become misaligned and distorted and how we can recapture it.??
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Our cultural moment is pluralistic, skeptical, flush in information and content, and skeptical of all kinds of things. It is imperative that we craft our gospel message to answer the questions of this cultural moment, not the cultural moment from 500 years ago.?
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>>>Why is "asking the right questions" important to having the right answers -?
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We can ask questions all day long, but they have to be the questions that lead us to the message of Christ and true change. That is where missioholism comes in. Missioholism is a combination of two words—missio which refers to the missio Dei or the mission of God. Holism means that the sum is greater than the individual parts.?
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Missioholism is then living the entirety of our life for the mission of God. It’s being holistic for a purpose. Missioholism, also known as the missioholistic approach, is a gospel-centered, mission-framed, and holistically healthy approach to life and ministry. Rooted in the transformative power of the gospel, it shapes believers to live under Christ’s Lordship in all aspects of life. Missioholism integrates four key elements that flow from this gospel: (1) the kingdom of God as the overarching narrative of all creation, (2) the church as the distinctive, transcultural community that embodies and extends that kingdom, (3) cultural engagement as the faithful outworking of God’s mission to reconcile all things to Himself, actively confronting cultural idolatries with the hope of redemption, and (4) the renewal of humanity as the evidence of Christ’s reign, where individuals and communities are transformed into a reflection of the new creation, anticipating the fulfillment of all things in Christ’s return.
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Missioholism holds firmly to the unchanging mission revealed in God’s Word while allowing for cultural adaptability– never compromising core identity but always adapting to maintain faithfulness in mission by confronting cultural idolatries. Together these elements give expression and shape to our witness within the world by equipping the church, empowered by the Spirit, to embody the virtues of the kingdom, proclaim the gospel, and confront cultural idolatries. This approach recognizes that we live in the tension of the kingdom’s “already/not yet” and equips the church to bear witness to Christ’s redemptive reign, offering a foretaste of the renewal of all things while measuring its faithfulness through the spiritual health and witness of its messengers and members.?
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This is not a new concept, in fact, if we were in the first century, this would have been considered normal Christianity. Unfortunately, in our world today we have separated the missio from the holistic and lost a proper understanding of the gospel in the process.
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There is a missioholism diagnostic tool that I have created that determines the holistic health of what we call as gospel expression. I am actually writing my next book on missioholism right now and it contains the diagnostic tool whereby we can evaluate our own gospel expression to detect possible deficiencies in order to make necessary changes.?
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"Christianity is not simply a set of beliefs, it is a way of life.
While “discipleship” may be just another buzzword in certain circles, we disagree.
Jesus called disciples, people who sought to model their entire lives on him.
From waning church participation to deconstruction, the church faces a crisis in discipleship and as our name change suggests,
we are going to be increasing our focus on “missioholistic discipleship."
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PHIL>>>?The desperate message?I am hearing from so many thought-leaders is for church leaders on the front lines to radically and fearlessly?rethink?how we make disciples in the 21st century. Coach us?on where to start that rethinking ...
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TRAVIS>>>?
I hear many Christian leaders who want to do things differently, but they don’t know what to do so they keep on doing what they already know. Right now, the attraction based ministry has been the defacto model, and the megachurches have fine-tuned that approach, but the megachurches aren’t the future. They will not disappear, but they will lessen in influence. The future of the church is smaller and missioholistic.?
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I think that we need to reevaluate our own hearts too. Too many pastors have taken a CEO and managerial approach to ministry and have lost their understanding of what spiritual formation is and why it occurs. Dallas Willard and Jim Wilder and extremely helpful here, as are historians like Alan Kreider, who have examined how transformation took place in the early church. It’s crazy to me how Scripture, church history, and neuroscience (specifically neurotheology) have come together to prove what the Scripture has talked about since the very beginning on how transformation actually occurs—in a community of authentic committed Christ followers. That’s how God works—through His people, the Church.?
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I have been chronicling many of these issues in my weekly substack and will continue to examine how we got to where we are as well as the proper steps needed to help change the trajectory.?
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"Unable to address the issues of our world and unaware of our own cultural captivity,
we are caught between nostalgia for a past that no longer exists
and a drive for the next new thing.
Too often we settle for and sell a truncated Gospel and a truncated vision of the Christian life."
PHIL>>>?What more would?you like to say/explain to?us about what drives your?mission?
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TRAVIS>>>?
The glory of God! That’s what drives our mission! Jesus desires the salvation of all kinds of people from all over the world. I pastored for over 20 years and each church was a restoration project of divine proportions. In my last church, I saw it go from 97% white church and be transformed into 46% majority world culture church. He showed me so much about Himself that I couldn’t have otherwise seen without interacting with people from different cultural backgrounds. I want others to share in that joy, because it is absolutely fabulous!?
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I want to see Him glorified by every single people group on the planet, but I feel pained that so many Christians only share and fellowship with those who look and sound like them due to fear and misunderstanding, but in doing so they miss something of God in the process. I want to help them plug into God’s plan for the world and for their lives so they too might increase in joy.?
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"Your ministry has been used by God to open my eyes and my mind
to dimensions of the faith that I had never before considered." (Feedback)
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PHIL>>>?Travis, please write for prayer church leaders who seek a Spirit-led, Scripture-fed, action plan as their response to?"our cultural moment."
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TRAVIS>>>?
Heavenly Father, we come before You today in the matchless name and by the finished work of our Lord and Savior, Your Son, Jesus Christ. We come confessing our sins for they are many. Sins of commission and sins of omission. You know them all. But I come before You today, not for myself, but for the leaders who long and thirst to see Your name glorified in their worlds. Lord, You know all too well the changing nature of our cultural landscape, but no matter what waves of culture come at us, no matter what form the spirit of the age may take, may we take refuge in You, standing upon the rock of Christ Jesus, boldly proclaiming the truth of Your wondrous grace to anyone who will listen. Forgive us when we fall and fail. Forgive us for being sacred and silent, forgive us for our distractions by innumerable pleasures. Quiet the restlessness in our hearts and fill us with Your Spirit and help us to boldly fulfill the purpose You have for us. Help us to reach out and befriend those who are different, help us to take care of the most vulnerable among us, and help us to stand for Your truth and love while battling the cultural idolatries all around us. Help us to cling to Your Word and proclaim the name that is above all other names. Grant us a willing and persevering spirit who does not look to man, but to You alone. Help us to do the hard heart work necessary so that Your name might go forth to the ends of the earth, Your Kingdom expand, and we grow in the joy we have in You. In Jesus’ name. Amen.?
apollos watered travis michael
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Travis Michael Fleming Founder and Executive Director Apollos Watered: The Center for Discipleship & Cultural Apologetics978.290.3021?|?[email protected]?
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