Way of Life Village » discovery process

People notice what you focus on

Phil — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:43:25 +0000

My neighbor Devon* pointed to his and my Bibles on his kitchen table and smiled. “You are the first person who has shared the Word of God with just the Bible in front of you. Everyone else has told me about their religion.”

Devon said this with a tone of relief this afternoon when I trained him to facilitate Discovery Bible Studies for his household. In a Discovery Bible Study, scripture is the teacher, not the people. The person facilitating doesn’t give answers but rather asks questions that help the group to discover and apply truths expressed in God’s Word.

I’m relieved, too, that Devon would make this observation. We want to help him and his family to discover for themselves “What is God like?” (not “Why is our church or religion the best?”).

When you talk, people notice what - or Whom - you are focusing on.

[*Name has been changed. All other details are accurate.]

Recycled Love for Neighbor

Phil — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 17:52:30 +0000

Hector and Roxy said they had a surprise for us. As a way of expressing Jesus’ love for fatherless children and poor, at-risk families in their subsection of Hollywood, they have been making toys with a single scripture and giving them away with no strings attached. They are identifying families (usually through their daughter’s school) that they want to pray for and befriend. Then they ask to come over to their home so they may give them these homemade gifts of neighborly love. This is an effort on their part to build spiritual friendships that can provide hope to neighbors in desperate situations and can eventually lead their neighbors to Christ.

This is amazing to me on several levels. (more…)

De-culturalizing the message

Phil — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 21:56:13 +0000

To U.S.-born Christians visiting their own country’s immigrant-saturated urban centers, I say, “Behold, foreign mission fields.”

Since we are living and serving cross-culturally among immigrants from multiple countries, we are treating this church planting ministry in East Hollywood, CA as we would a foreign missionary adventure. What does this mean?

To help me talk about this, I’m using some terminology I picked up from missionary David Watson a few weeks ago…

It is the missionaries’ task to de-culturalize the gospel when sharing the message with peoples of other cultures – that is, we do our best to remove our own cultural biases from the message, thereby reducing the gospel to its irreducible minimum. We would be fooling ourselves if we said we could achieve this with perfection (but then there is no aspect of our ministry we are doing with perfection). I believe that just the fact that we are faithfully attempting to distinguish the gospel from our own cultural ways of living it out will convey an important lesson to the new believers.

Then it is up to the new believers (not the missionaries), empowered by God’s indwelling Spirit, to determine how best to contextualize the gospel – that is, they will decipher how to faithfully live out the message in their own cultural contexts. Missionaries can guide this process of contextualizing the gospel but never short-circuit it by taking it into their own hands!