Romans 1:1 & 1:5 and the Direction of the Minister’s Work
God’s grace in the gospel…must lead unto the obedience springing from faith. God wants obedience. He wants heartfelt allegiance. He wants submission. He must take the place of Lord and be sovereign over one’s heart and life.
Romans 1:1 and 1:5
1:1—Παῦλος δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ, κλητὸς ἀπόστολος ἀφωρισμένος εἰς εὐαγγέλιον θεοῦ,
1:5—δι᾿ οὗ ἐλάβομεν χάριν καὶ ἀποστολὴν εἰς ὑπακοὴν πίστεως ἐν πᾶσιν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν ὑπὲρ τοῦ ὀνόματος αὐτοῦ.
[Author’s translation: Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart unto the gospel of God…(1:5) through whom we have received grace and apostleship leading unto the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for His name’s sake.]
The preposition εἰς (into) has the notion of moving into a certain direction. It can have the indication of moving away from one thing and moving towards something else.
As a minister of the gospel, I learn from Paul in 2 areas in these opening verses from Romans. Paul described himself as a slave of Christ, sovereignly called/summoned as an apostle, and then set apart unto the gospel of God.
This describes a whole new direction of life. It speaks of a new purpose, a new mission, a new ambition, a new calling. Paul’s calling consisted of the reality that the Sovereign God, the Lord of heaven and earth had set him apart away from living life for himself (even as a Christian) and doing his own mission and he must now live for the new directional mission, the purposeful ambition, the submissive lifestyle pressing hard after and proclaiming fully the gospel of God.
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Recognize Your Leadership Biases and Know How to Respond
The sunk cost bias appears when we’ve invested considerable time and effort into something that is not going well, but we simply can’t give it up. If we did, we’d feel like a failure. This often happens in churches when we keep a ministry alive when we need to kill it. Suggestion: What ministry or project is not working and draining your soul? If you could magically make it go away, how would you feel? If, as you imagine it gone, you feel a great weight off your shoulders, you may have succumbed to this bias. It may be time to kill that program or project.
Leaders would like to think that they lead in unbiased ways. However, that’s easier said than done. The fall of man affected every part of who we are, including our thinking. Brain biases abound. A Google search reveals almost 200 different biases. Among those 200, what brain biases poses the greatest threat to effective leadership? In this post I explain five and suggest an idea for each to counter its potential negative impact.
Scientists call these ‘brain’ biases cognitive biases, judgment errors that rise from our tendency to mentally jump to conclusions. Daniel Kahneman, Nobel prize winner and author of the book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, calls them heuristics, mental shortcuts we use when we make decisions. Because our brain has limited energy, we can’t consciously ‘think’ before every decision.
Therefore, we intuitively make many decisions (over 40 percent of what we do is habit) that require limited mental resources and allocate our brain energy only to those that require our immediate attention. As a result, we sometimes don’t make the best decisions, which can impair our leadership.
Here are my top 5 brain biases and suggestions for responding to them.
The confirmation bias. This bias reflects our preference for those who agree with us. We subconsciously look for people and information to confirm our preexisting beliefs, actions, and attitudes. As a result we spotlight only the information that supports the decision we want to make and we tend to discard negative input that we need to see the full picture and make the wisest decision.
Suggestion: Do a pre-mortem on a planned ministry or initiative. Before you make the decision, gather your team and ask, “Let’s assume we did (such and such) and it gloriously failed. What would we say contributed to the failure?” Allow full and frank discussion.
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What’s the Impact of Asbury’s Outpouring? John the Baptist Offers 3 Lessons
John the Baptist was always clear that his role was to point to the one coming after him: “He must become greater; I must become less” (John 3:30). He was also keenly aware that his ministry was a preparation for a movement that would follow. In the same way, Asbury kept Jesus at the forefront with a countercultural message of “no celebrity except Jesus.” Asbury leadership hopes that their experience will one day be part of a plethora of chapters about how many met God.
We often only realize that we are living through historic events by looking back on them.
Consider the Moravians. In 1727, this group of Christians fleeing persecution in the modern-day Czech Republic began a 24-7 prayer vigil. They couldn’t foresee that their non-stop prayer session would ultimately last for 100 years and launch a global missions movement.
Or take the example of John Wesley and George Whitefield. In 1738, in a New Year’s prayer meeting, where the men and others were gathered, at “about three in the morning, as we were continuing instant in prayer, the power of God came mightily upon us, insomuch that many cried out for exceeding joy” later wrote Wesley in his diary.” The preachers likely had little idea that in the ensuing months, they would start traveling across the UK teaching the word of God, a campaign that would mark the beginning of the Wesleyan revival and the First Great Awakening in the US.
Church history has taught us to never underestimate the long-term impact when God’s tangible presence comes upon a group of people; this understanding has led me to closely track the aftermath of the 2023 outpouring at Asbury University.
For those who need a refresher: One year ago this week, as a seemingly ordinary Wednesday morning chapel ended, 18 or 19 students lingered to worship and pray. Though the school in rural Kentucky has a history of revivals, few likely believed that this meeting would continue for the following 16 days, drawing over 60,000 people, including students from 300 university campuses and Christians from almost every continent.
While we have yet to see a global revival since Asbury’s concluded, there is more going on than our eyes can see. I believe that we have entered a season of spiritual preparation. I’ve observed parallels between this event and a biblical preacher who also hailed from the countryside and who also drew a crowd: John the Baptist.
Prophesied by Isaiah as “the voice of one calling in the wilderness” (John 1:23; Is. 40:3), John called the people to repentance and consecration. He was the embodiment of answered prayer and devoted his ministry to proclaiming that something greater would soon be following him. Seeing evidence of these elements all around the world provokes me to wonder what next global move Asbury might have heralded.
A Call to Repentance and Consecration
From the wilderness, John the Baptist earned his nickname by “preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4). Crowds followed him into the desert to confess their sins, get baptized, and reconcile themselves to God.
In a similar way, crowds entering Hughes Auditorium were confronted with the state of their own hearts. Here is how David Thomas, who was in the core leadership team stewarding the outpouring, described it to me in an email interview:
For the first few days of the Outpouring, it seemed that repentance and forgiveness were almost all we could do. All over the room, people were making their way to another, tumbling over one another to make the first move of offering apologies, owning mistakes, forgiving grievances, and explaining misunderstandings. The front steps of Hughes were populated by people on their phones sending texts of reconciliation and restoration.
Thomas’s remarks were echoed by one of the transatlantic visitors. Al Gordon, a London pastor, reported feeling a weight in the air even in the parking lot.
“I was met with an overwhelming sense that I have to get right with Jesus,” he recounted. “Before I stepped into the chapel, I was crying out in repentance, confessing my pride, humbling myself before God.”
Asbury students led the way in modeling this wave of repentance. From the stage, hundreds shared their testimonies. Their stories would vary from simple things like, “I sensed Jesus inviting me to text a friend asking forgiveness for something in our relationship that was not quite right,” to dramatic transformations such as, “Three days ago I renounced witchcraft and gave my life to Jesus.”
Student leaders would also not allow anyone to lead worship who was not “authentically right with Jesus,” said Thomas. Instead of offering them and the guest speakers who came a standard green room, they created a “consecration room” where they were asked to receive prayer and ask for God’s forgiveness for any sins, prior to sharing anything from the platform.
A Call to Prayer
John the Baptist was born out of prayer, specifically those of his elderly parents. When the angel appeared to his father, Zechariah, his first words were, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard” (Luke 1:13).
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Not Whether, but Which
Written by P. Jesse Rine |
Monday, March 11, 2024
The question is not whether a college or university should be civilizational, but rather which sort of civilization it ought to cultivate and how that project can be pursued most effectively. Although the cultural fragmentation of our age has rendered these questions highly contested within the secular academy, the answers are far more straightforward in the Christian college context. In fact, the Christian intellectual tradition provides a storehouse of resources for defining the true, the good, and the beautiful in clear and compelling ways, and then applying those judgments to the pressing issues of our day. This requires, however, that Christian colleges be staffed with faculty who are confident enough in the Christian vision to make those applications amidst a hostile culture.Can a college be both confessionally Christian and civilizational in its emphasis? This question lies at the heart of a recent essay by Jay Green, Professor of History at Covenant College, which caused a stir among pastors serving in the college’s sponsoring denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). Green warns of the rise of “civilizational” colleges “lurking in the background” of the sacred/secular divide, places that use Christian faith to attract Christian families but don’t actually embody a Christian identity. The singular example he cites is Hillsdale College, where “faith is ‘honored’ rather than necessarily believed” and where “less time and attention are given to using Christian insights to critique things like Western Civilization and the American Founding.” In Green’s telling, Hillsdale essentially uses Christianity as both an enrollment marketing tool and a curricular garnish to achieve its real mission—advancing a decidedly conservative political agenda.
Now, it is true that Hillsdale does not fit the traditional definition of an evangelical Christian college. That descriptor has been historically reserved for colleges and universities like Green’s employer, Covenant College, that hire only professing Christians as full-time faculty members and senior administrators. This hiring policy is a baseline requirement for membership in the two national associations that serve Christian postsecondary institutions, the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) and the International Alliance for Christian Education (IACE).
Yet it is impossible to ignore the dramatic reassertion of faith that has occurred at Hillsdale over the last decade, a renaissance made all the more remarkable when placed against the backdrop of secularization that has afflicted most American colleges originally founded by Protestant denominations. In recent years, as many Christian colleges softened the edges of their identities in an attempt to appeal to a broader pool of prospective students, Hillsdale took the opposite approach by more emphatically embracing its institutional mission as a “nonsectarian Christian institution” that “maintains ‘by precept and example’ the immemorial teachings and practices of the Christian faith.” The most striking example of this reassertion was the 2019 opening of Christ Chapel, which was placed in the heart of Hillsdale’s campus as a visible—and costly—marker of the college’s identity. The last decade has also witnessed the expansion of the college’s free online course catalogue, the topics of which—Genesis, Exodus, King David, Ancient Christianity, the Western Theological Tradition, and C. S. Lewis, among others—also testify to the institution’s renewed emphasis on its Christian identity.
On their own, an aesthetically impressive chapel and faith-based public curriculum do not a Christian college make. They do, however, represent the sorts of investments one would expect from an institution serious about its faith-based mission, particularly because both require significant resources and swimming against the cultural tide. Their existence also suggests an educational environment where Christian students and faculty can thrive. To his credit, Green acknowledged this reality in a follow-up piece that walked back some of his most egregious assertions while simultaneously doubling down on his original “distinction between ‘confessional’ and ‘civilizational’ ideas of a Christian college.”
Green’s distinction fundamentally misunderstands both the societal function of higher education and the unique mission of the Christian college.
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