SCRIPTURE: James 3:1-18 (The Message translation)

 When You Open Your Mouth

1 Don’t be in any rush to become a teacher, my friends. Teaching is highly responsible work. Teachers are held to the strictest standards. 2 And none of us is perfectly qualified. We get it wrong nearly every time we open our mouths. If you could find someone whose speech was perfectly true, you’d have a perfect person, in perfect control of life. 3 A bit in the mouth of a horse controls the whole horse. 4 A small rudder on a huge ship in the hands of a skilled captain sets a course in the face of the strongest winds. 5 A word out of your mouth may seem of no account, but it can accomplish nearly anything—or destroy it! It only takes a spark, remember, to set off a forest fire. 6 A careless or wrongly placed word out of your mouth can do that. By our speech we can ruin the world, turn harmony to chaos, throw mud on a reputation, send the whole world up in smoke and go up in smoke with it, smoke right from the pit of hell. 7 This is scary: You can tame a tiger, 8 but you can’t tame a tongue—it’s never been done. The tongue runs wild, a wanton killer. 9 With our tongues we bless God our Father; with the same tongues we curse the very men and women he made in his image. 10 Curses and blessings out of the same mouth! My friends, this can’t go on. 11 A spring doesn’t gush fresh water one day and brackish the next, does it? 12 Apple trees don’t bear strawberries, do they? Raspberry bushes don’t bear apples, do they? You’re not going to dip into a polluted mud hole and get a cup of clear, cool water, are you?

Live Well, Live Wisely

13 Do you want to be counted wise, to build a reputation for wisdom? Here’s what you do: Live well, live wisely, live humbly. It’s the way you live, not the way you talk, that counts. 14 Mean-spirited ambition isn’t wisdom. Boasting that you are wise isn’t wisdom. Twisting the truth to make yourselves sound wise isn’t wisdom. 15 It’s the furthest thing from wisdom—it’s animal cunning, devilish conniving. 16 Whenever you’re trying to look better than others or get the better of others, things fall apart and everyone ends up at the others’ throats. 17 Real wisdom, God’s wisdom, begins with a holy life and is characterized by getting along with others. It is gentle and reasonable, overflowing with mercy and blessings, not hot one day and cold the next, not two-faced. 18 You can develop a healthy, robust community that lives right with God and enjoy its results only if you do the hard work of getting along with each other, treating each other with dignity and honor.

MEDITATION

The Christians in James’ congregation had problems trying to live out this moral law to love our neighbor as ourselves. Specifically, James listed three problems that his church had as they tried to live out this moral law of love. What does it mean to you’re your neighbor as yourself and you do not care take of the widows and orphans? Christians neglected the widows and orphans; Christian people did not care of the widows and orphans in their midst. We find the same problem in the book of Acts; that is, people were not taking care of the homeless and hurting people in the book of Acts. And so James said, “Religion which is pure and undefiled is this: it is to care for widows and orphans in their suffering and to remain unstained from the world.”

A second problem that James noticed, as his people were trying to live out the moral law of loving your neighbor was yourself, was this: The Christians in his congregation were showing favoritism to rich people who were coming into the church. The richer Christians were ignoring the poorer Christians and were not being generous at all to the poor. One Christian said, “I have faith,” and the next Christian said, “Well, I have charitable love.” So James finally said, “Faith without works of charity is dead, just as a body without a soul is dead, so faith without works of love is dead.” You cannot separate faith from charitable love.

There was third problem that James noticed in his congregation. You are to love your neighbor as yourself. This is the royal law, the perfect law, the law of love. But what does this mean in terms of the tongue? This theme is found in chapters one, three and four. It is one of the most dominant themes in the book of James.

I would like for you to try an experiment with me.  We are going to exercise choice, make a decision and then watch the power of our words cause a physical reaction … thousands of neural circuits will be engaged as we do this.Repeat after me… “I love you.” Now repeat my words again… “I hate you.”Do you see? — We are entrusted with a great power here. We are given a gift that can create or destroy. We can build up or tear down with this gift. Do you remember that one of the strongest warnings Jesus ever issued has to do with the matter of how we use our speech?  Listen carefully: “I tell you, on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter…”  Matt. 12:36 Why is this issue so important to Jesus, and to his brother James?  The fact is, our power of speech is very close to the issue of our being created in the image of God.  Word is powerful.  It is by the power of the Word that God created the universe.  When God said, “Let there be…” there was!  It is the Word become flesh that brought us salvation.  The author of the letter to the Hebrews says, The Word of God is living and powerful — it is sharper than any two edged sword.”  [Heb. 4:12] We can draw people to the love of God with our speech or we can turn them off.  We can set the course of a child’s life with a careless word and turn a young person around with a positive nourishing word. Brothers and sisters, as we are called to participate in God’s mission of the world, our words are powerful tools in God’s hands as God creates, redeems, and reconciles all things to God’s self.  

Remember, when words spew out of our mouths with out great thought or care it is like trying to get the toothpaste back into the tube after it has spewed all over the bathroom sink. Be mindful, and listen to God to who gives us words, especially in the most stressful and anxious times, and let us not be quick to speak out so we may be more creative in the Spirit of God than destructive and contrary to God’s desire.

Church planting is hard, many pastors would say. But it’s where much of the church growth is happening in America at a time when most churches are dying.

Fri, Apr. 25, 2008 Posted: 13:30:24 PM EST

Church planting is hard, many pastors would say. But it’s where much of the church growth is happening in America at a time when most churches are dying.

“Two-thirds of all churches in America are plateaued and declining,” said Pastor Rick Warren after speaking Thursday to thousands of church planters at the Exponential Conference in Orlando, “and if it weren’t for the growth that’s taking place in church plants and megachurches, Christianity would be declining.”

Warren, founding pastor of Saddleback Community Church in Lake Forest, Calif., says the growth in church plants and megachurches has helped keep the Christian population in the United States from dropping.

His comments come as the latest statistics from the Southern Baptist Convention, of which his church is a part of, show baptisms have dropped for the third straight year in 2007 and total membership dipped. Some say membership has plateaued and is on a trend toward decline unless change happens within the 16-million member denomination. Southern Baptists are now being seen as one among many major Protestant groups that are declining.

News of the denomination’s decline was released during the April 21-24 Exponential Conference where over 2,700 church planters and leaders attended to analyze the DNA of successful reproducing churches. The annual conference has been touted as the “mother of all church planting conferences”

Today, church planting has reached an all-time high with approximately 4,000 new churches planted every year in the United States, according to the “State of Church Planting USA” study. Church plants are also starting out with larger crowds with hundreds joining the first worship service, and the survival and success rate of church plants is at 68 percent.

One of the biggest trends in church planting today is the multiple venue church, or the multi-site church. The idea is that one church meets in multiple locations which are fed video satellite preaching from the main church campus.

Dave Ferguson, pastor of Community Christian Church, is expanding outreach and already transitioning from a multi-site church to a “poly-site” church – reproducing different kinds of campuses to reach different kinds of people – where the mission becomes the priority rather than just reproducing the same church, he said.

While some believe the large church trend will soon die out, Warren says the next generation of churches is going to be even bigger.

“They’re going to be far larger than the boomer generation of churches because they’re not limited to one campus anymore,” he said in an interview featured on the Exponential Conference Web site.

Warren’s Saddleback has planted over 40 independent “daughter churches” in Southern California and it recently launched a multi-site initiative with a goal of 10 campuses by the year 2010. According to Saddleback’s multi-site church blog, its new campuses in Corona and Irvine drew 490 and nearly 2,000 attendants, respectively, to the first service.

“Reproduction is the mark of health,” Warren commented.

Meanwhile, Alan Hirsch, co-founder of Shapevine and the founding director of Forge Mission Training Network which focuses on developing missional leaders in western contexts, believes church plants in America need to adopt a more missionary stance.

“I think here in America, I think church planting is still very bonded to church growth methodology and ideas,” Australian-born Hirsch said in an interview featured on MondayMorningInsight, a Web site for pastors and church leaders.

“It (America) hasn’t really thought through … the nature of the church as a mission agency. We simply have to adopt a missionary stance in relationship to our culture,” he continued. “We’ve got to break the monopoly that church growth thinking has over our mindset. Because unless we do that we’ll never become a truly missionary agency.”

The Exponential Conference featured other well-known speakers, including Tim Keller, founding and lead pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian; Ed Stetzer, former church planter and director of Lifeway Research; and Andy Stanley, senior pastor of North Point Community Church.

Audrey Barrick
Christian Post Reporter

The pastor of Europe’s largest evangelical church gave advice on how to revive Christianity and the Church in the United States Tuesday evening during a Q&A session based on questions submitted by American Christians.

Thu, Apr. 24, 2008 Posted: 09:57:29 AM EST

The pastor of Europe’s largest evangelical church gave advice on how to revive Christianity and the Church in the United States Tuesday evening during a Q&A session based on questions submitted by American Christians.

Sunday Adelaja, founding pastor to the 30,000-member God’s Embassy Church in Kiev, Ukraine, was the featured guest of a teleconference hosted by Strang Communications, the publisher of Charisma and Ministry Today magazines.

God’s Embassy Church boasts more than two million converts and 600 church plants worldwide.

During the Q&A, Adelaja emphasized how the Church should not be pulpit-focused, but rather concentrate on how to reveal Jesus Christ to people if they want to experience growth.

The Nigerian-born Christian leader used his own church as example, saying that his church first experienced massive growth after four fruitless years when he started to go out and fed the poor and took care of the drug addicts and alcoholics in Ukraine.

He also encouraged every single church member to influence and impact the culture for God.

“Do not let your people get comfortable with sitting down in the pews,” Adelaja advised a pastor who submitted a question during the teleconference. “You have to literally push them out of the pews and strengthen them so they can go out there and invade the darkness of the world because they are the light of the world.

“You have to really keep on pushing them to believe in themselves that they can change the world for God.”

The influential European pastor said that the mayor of Kiev, the chief justice of Ukraine, and the prime minister of the country all come from his church.

Adelaja was also critical of U.S. churches, saying they were a “far cry” from real churches and that this generation of Americans have not seen the real church yet.

“The way things are now in America, the way we do church is kind of like a program,” Adelaja observed. “We are doing church as a club. We are trying to make people feel good, to entertain them, or try to keep them. So because of that concern – we don’t want them to go or to lose them – we kind of try to suit them.

“We are pleasing men instead of pleasing God,” the megachurch pastor continued. “I think we need to change our focus and our focus has to be ‘what is the heartbeat of God?’ ‘What does God desire?’ ‘Does He really want me to just make these people happy and keep them here forever until they die or I die? Or is it better for me to fire them up and encourage them to go and live their life truly for God and for kingdom?’”

Adelaja also diagnosed American Christians as egocentric and said that they need to be taught that the focus of their life is not themselves, but God. Adelaja said that as long as pastors teach that the purpose of believing in God is for them to be blessed then people will never influence their culture.

Earlier this year, Adelaja released his latest book, ChurchShift, which broke Amazon.com’s top 10 Bestsellers list. ChurchShift’s mission is to spark a revolution in American culture with the goal of reforming 10,000 U.S. churches so that they will in turn reform American society.

Adelaja grew up a poor orphan in Nigeria and was raised in a Christian home by his grandmother. He did not own a pair of shoes until he was 12 years old and had to earn a living from the age of six. Through the prayers of his Christian grandmother, Adelaja gave his life to Christ at 19 years of age. He traveled to the Soviet Union to study journalism on a scholarship and later founded Embassy of God Church after the Soviet Union was dismantled.

The Embassy of God Church is the largest church in all of Europe with some 100,000 total members, including those from all its satellite locations. Although Adelaja is African, white Europeans make up 99 percent of his church. The church has planted more than 600 churches in more than 45 countries, including 20 churches in the United States.

Michelle A. Vu
Christian Post Reporter

Was moved by this… Hope it will touch you, too. (Even the most cliche truths are still truths.) Blessings to you, Pam’la

Tue, Apr. 08, 2008 Posted: 15:19:18 PM EST

Non-Christians are more receptive to the Gospel today than at any point in recent American history, according to one research team.

“We are seeing a new level of curiosity among those who are seeking out religion – and we rejoice that people are willing to hear about Jesus,” said Sam S. Rainer III, who heads Rainer Research.

While Rainer said he finds the increased receptivity among non-believers encouraging, the problem lies with churches not being able to connect with them and the culture.

“Christians and non-Christians intermingle socially every day, at work, the ballpark, and in the grocery store. But we’ve lost a sense of urgency in sharing the story of Jesus Christ,” he told The Christian Post. “We rush home from work in our cars, pull in the garage by the push of the button, and disappear in our homes to watch two hours of TV, only to get up and do it all over again. We’ll stand for hours in line to purchase a Nintendo Wii, but we cringe at crossing the street to get to know our neighbors.

“Believers, me included, need to do a better job at building a sense of community in our own neighborhoods,” he added.

But there are churches that have contextualized the timeless message of the Gospel to the culture and are connecting successfully with their communities, Rainer noted.

“Nothing excites me more as a pastor and researcher than hearing about churches that connect with their communities and unashamedly proclaim the name of Christ in a way people can understand,” he said.

Ryan Bolger, assistant professor of church in contemporary culture in Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of Intercultural Studies and co-author of Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Communities in Postmodern Cultures, has found many churches that are expressing their faith in ways that resonate with those in the 21st century. And they go beyond outreaches and trendy worship that only aim to draw people to church services.

“Donald McGavran … said a person shouldn’t have to change cultures to find God,” Bolger said, referring to a former Fuller professor. “A person’s difficulty with the Christian faith is often sociological, not theological.”

After five years of research on emerging churches, Bolger discovered places that were expressing the Christian faith in cultural forms that made sense to a population that has become more urban. Churches that have been able to connect with their communities were more relational, focused on practices and less institutional, he found.

Such churches incorporated aspects of people’s daily lives – whether it’s ipods, art or music – into their worship to “weave together the sacred and the secular,” he said in a recent interview featured on Fuller’s Web site. Along with creativity, these emerging churches have refocused on the life of Jesus as a model way to live. Thus, inviting the outsider in, hospitality, forgiving, peacemaking and praying together daily are central, Bolger pointed out.

“It’s not extra, it’s not an outreach. It’s actually the Gospel. So it’s something they have to get right,” he said, noting that the emerging churches look to express faith in the workplace, neighborhoods and in everyday activity and are not necessarily looking for ways to bring people to church services.

“The reason they do that is to ground their faith in the practices of everyday so it’s not a detached other worldly only faith, but it’s something that connects to their everyday,” said Bolger.

Lillian Kwon
Christian Post Reporter

Last week after reading Pastor Christian’s note about Haiti, we invited him to help with Angel Food Ministries at the Shiloh Methodist church. We began helping with this ministry when it began a couple of years ago. When we started helping with it, we thought being involved was a “good thing to do to help others in need”. It is a win-win situation; we get food at a reduced cost, and we help others at the same time. When we order a box of food, it counts toward getting a “free” box of food to give away to someone in need. Any food we won’t use, we put in a box to be donated to the food pantry. We thought the kids would enjoy being involved in this ministry. We want them to learn that helping others is a privilege as well as a responsibility. These are all good reasons for helping with this ministry, right? When we get down to the nitty gritty facts, though, these good points are not the reason that we keep helping with this ministry. The truth of the matter is that we gain so much more by helping than we could ever give back.

I’m certain that each one of you already knows this truth: We can never out-give God. We keep helping with this ministry because of the relationships we’ve developed. People from many different denominations come together to help with this project. People from many different backgrounds purchase food from Angel Food Ministries. We’ve met people we probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity to meet otherwise. A smile here and there prompts a smile back. People begin to feel comfortable talking. Talk about the weather turns to talk about lost jobs and sick family. You might even find yourself mentioning your own concerns. Wait a minute. . . Wasn’t this endeavor about helping others?

Teresa of Avila is quoted as saying, “Christ moves among the pots and pans.” Somehow, while doing the work, words come easier, and more naturally. With a sense of camaraderie established between workers and guests, we both see our common bond, and each of us sees a glimpse of Christ in the other. In my mind, mission work is all about relationships. If we desire to be like Jesus, shouldn’t we be where the people are? What are your thoughts? Do you have a mission you feel passionately about?

 Beth S

Below is an except from Tony Jones’ new book. You can also read the whole first chapter on-line. What are your thoughts? Is he on to something? What does this mean for you? What does this mean for churches in the emerging 21st century?

From The New Christians - Chapter One, by Tony Jones.http://theoblogy.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/tnc-chapter-one.pdf 

Is there something in the air? Is there a spiritual itch that people are trying to scratch but it’s just in the middle of their back in that place that they can’t quite reach?

It seems incontrovertibly so. We are not becoming less religious, as some people argue.We are becoming differently religious. And the shift is significant. Some call it a tectonic shift, others seismic or tsunamic. Whatever your geological metaphor, the changes are shaking the earth beneath our feet… This was, of course, a natural consequence of God’s death, first declared by Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882 and touted again by Time magazine in 1966. Nietzsche himself wasn’t out to kill God per se, nor was he saying that no one believed in God anymore. He was announcing that that the modern mind could no longer tolerate an authoritarian figure who towers over the cosmos with a lightning bolt in his hand, ready to strike down evildoers. That deity, he said, had been murdered. With the death of that version of God, the Christian morals that upheld all of Western society had been undermined. We were, Nietzsche feared, on a fast track to nihilistic hell. So he went on a search for some sort of universal moral foundation that was not dependent on an unacceptable and medieval notion of God…  In the twenty-first century, it’s not God who’s dead. It’s the church. Or at least conventional forms of church. Dead? you say. Isn’t that overstating the case a bit? Indeed, churches still abound. So do pay phones. You can still find pay phones around, in airports and train stations and shopping malls—there are plenty of working pay phones. But look around your local airport and you’ll likely see the sad remnants where pay phones used to hang—the strange row of rectangles on the wall and the empty slot where a phone book usedto sit. There are under a million pay phones in the United States today. In 1997, there were over two million.2 

Of course, the death of the pay phone doesn’t mean that we don’t make phone calls anymore. In fact, we make far more calls than ever before, but we make them differently. Now we make phone calls from home or on the mobile device clasped to our belt or through our computers. Phone calls aren’t obsolete, but the pay phone is—or at least it’s quickly becoming so. 

Similarly, the modern church is changing and evolving and emerging. To extend the analogy a bit, no one is saying that the pay phone was a bad idea. Most people would agree that it was a good idea at the time—it was an excellent way to communicate. But communication was the goal, and pay phones were merely a means to an end. 

The modern church—at least as it is characterized by imposing physical buildings, professional clergy, denominational bureaucracies, residential seminary training, and other trappings—was an endeavor by faithful men and women in their time and place, attempting to live into the biblical gospel. But the church was never the end, only the means. The desire of the emergents is to live Christianly, to build something wonderful for the future on the legacy of the past.

[NOTE: Modern - As an adjective, modern can mean current or up-to-date. (For example, a highway rest area with ‘‘modern facilities’’ has indoor plumbing.) In our discussions, however, modern refers to an era in Western society following the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution and reflective of the values of those social upheavals.]

Reprinted from the Presbyterian Outlook:

Many thanks to Chris Walker, one of our Presbyterian mission co-workers (aka missionaries), for this link on You-Tube.

Thought the following article in Christianity Today was interesting. Thoughts?