How should we lead the church? In this Pneuma Review conversation, Dr. Victor H. Cuartas describes how to expand the vision of the local church to reach the world.

Introduction

God’s plans for His beloved Church are marvelous. One of the most important aspects in the life of the church is leadership. Leadership is about serving and influencing people to advance God’s kingdom. This article will focus on important principles to lead missional congregations. What are the characteristics of a missional church? This article will begin with a brief description of the importance of the Trinity in both global and local (glocal) missions. Then, the author will describe significant principles of a missional church. Next, we will look at some considerations in regards to the life of the missional leader. This paper will conclude with some practical recommendations to lead churches glocally.

The Importance of the Trinity in Mission

God has a Missional Plan

God loves the families and nations of the earth. He has a missional plan with His creation. That is the reason why He sent His only Son to die for us on the cross. His plan was about redemption and salvation. “He sent His Son for this purpose and He sends the Church into the world with the message of the gospel for the same purpose.”¹

Jesus’ Missional Leadership

Jesus is our great example to follow in missional leadership. “One of the challenges that we may face is to be driven by personal interest rather than kingdom principles.”² There are several accounts in the Bible that describe Jesus’ urgency to meet the needs of the people. He always was willing to go and bless the needy regardless of the circumstances. Jesus went out and saw the needs of the people. Thus, every believer needs to follow Jesus’ example. “But when He saw the multitudes, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were weary and scattered, like sheep having no shepherd” (Matt 9:36, emphasis added).

Jesus called the disciples to fulfill His Father’s will. The verb “called” in the Greek is proskaleomai, which means (1) to call to, (2) to call to one’s self, or (3) to bid to come to one’s self.³ The NKJV translates the word as “called” (Mark 3:13; 6:7a). Jesus invited “those He Himself wanted” (Mark 3:13). The initiative lay not with the disciples but with the Master. Jesus chose and prepared normal people to change the world. Therefore, the disciples were called by Jesus for a specific purpose: “to preach the message of Christ and His love locally and globally.”

Craig S. Keener, “He Still Heals” Charisma (August 2010), pages 52-55.

Have you experienced a miraculous healing?

This brief article contains reports of significant healings and miracles from around the world, including: the Republic of Congo, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. Among the miracles mentioned are people being raised from the dead, something Craig Keener has come across more than 150 cases of. Some of the information that the author has gathered has come from people that he knows personally. Keener’s research indicates that these miraculous events are happening in our world more frequently than we might think. He believes that the miraculous is taking place on an even greater scale than his research reveals because his research sample is relatively small in size.

Reviewed by John P. Lathrop

At the time of publication, this article was available online at: strang.imirus.com/Mpowered/book/vstr10/i9/p32

Editor’s Note: In this special 35^th Anniversary edition of Charisma, you will also find these articles:

Fuchsia Pickett, “Introducing the Holy Spirit” strang.imirus.com/Mpowered/book/vstr10/i9/p21

Rachel Burchfield, “Baptism 2.0 Basics: The Most Frequently Asked Questions About the Baptism of the Holy Spirit” strang.imirus.com/Mpowered/book/vstr10/i9/p24

Matt Sorger, “Get Plugged In: 8 Ways to Connect with God’s Supernatural Power”       strang.imirus.com/Mpowered/book/vstr10/i9/p36

Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2008), 299 pages, ISBN 9781433501104.

Under review is the second unrevised edition of The Tragedy of American Compassion originally published in 1992. There is good reason for a second unrevised edition. The circumstances described by Olasky in this history of social work and charity in America as existing in 1992 remain much the same in 2008-10.

The title is derived from a phrase found on page 189 where Olasky writes of a “compassion fatigue” brought on by depersonalization. He identifies governmental bureaucracy in social work as contributing to the breakdown of personal involvement with the homeless and others in need. He quotes a social worker’s comment which appeared on page 17 of a February 8, 1971, Time magazine article: “…the paper work is just amazing … I have yet to solve any social problem.”

The author also noted a semantic shift over time from when compassion meant a personal act with another to a “feeling” requiring “a willingness to send a check” (p. 197). This, too, constituted a tragic breakdown of charity and personal social work in America.

The Tragedy of American Compassion is a chronological social history of compassion and caring in America from colonial times to the present noting the changes from a time of more personal involvement and action to the present situation of de-personalized help. A second stream of narrative in the book is the flow from discussions over who merits special attention as recipients of charity to full-blown arguments and policies over who merits care. The time when discussions turned into arguments was close to 1845. As the country’s urban areas became more populous and industrialized, those arguments got more energized and more developed as philosophical differences over private caring and governmental welfare. It went from “should we not do more” to universal indiscriminate welfare.

In chapter six Olasky lists what he identifies as “seven seals of good philanthropic practice.” These included Affiliation, Bonding, Categorization, Discernment, Employment, Freedom and God (page 101). Affiliation refers to family, ethnic ties, and church or synagogue. Bonding refers to the direct contact and personal relationship between volunteer and recipient. Categorization refers to identifying the type of help needed and what is worthy of relief. Discernment refers to the acknowledgment of any lurking deviousness or pretension in a person seeking help. Employment is self-explanatory but with a stipulation of “long-term” work. Freedom refers to the opportunity to work and worship without government restriction. God is the seventh seal on the social covenant of compassion.

Cover from the February 2011 revised edition.

Jim Wallis, Rediscovering Values On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street: A Moral Compass for the New Economy (New York, NY: Howard Books, 2010), ix + 255 pages, ISBN 9781439183120.

Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s former chief of staff, was quoted as saying, “You don’t ever want to let a crisis go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.” Jim Wallis is founder and CEO of Sojourners as well as editor-in-chief of Sojourners magazine; evangelical ministries promoting social justice. In his recent book, Rediscovering Values On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street: A Moral Compass for the New Economy he writes that the current economic crisis is a “transformative moment in history,” one where all Americans have an unprecedented opportunity to make fundamental and, hopefully, long-lasting changes that are not just economic and political, but moral as well. It appears that Wallis is as pragmatic as Emanuel.

Jim Wallis is also the author of recent bestsellers, including The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America (2008) and God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It (2006). Along with other writers such as David P. Gushee, author of The Future of Faith in American Politics: Witness of the Evangelical Center (2008), and sociologist James Davison Hunter in his recent book To Change the World (Oxford University Press, 2010), Wallis touches the ideological nerve center of the majority of American people and Christians. To one degree or another, they all advocate the reformation of the large ideological, political, and even spiritual center, moving away from the polarization between Left and Right.

For Wallis, the current economic crisis is the point where the social and spiritual combine to set the stage for combating not only the economic ills brought about by the crisis, but also to offer an opportunity to resurrect the human spirit: a spirit of compassion, creativity, community development and empowerment, and plain old neighbors helping neighbors. It is here at this crux that Wallis sees an opportunity for the wheels of political action, spiritual unity, and social justice to roll into high gear. He examines all three in Rediscovering Values.

Wallis contends that the more important question revolves around our moral compass, a compass that registers the direction of our moral deficit and shows the way toward our moral recovery. But this moral recovery is impossible if clergy, politicians, media and others continually ask the wrong question. “If we start with the wrong question, it doesn’t matter how good our answer is, we’ll always end up in the wrong place. If we only ask how to get back to the place we were before this crisis began, we will miss the opportunity to stop walking in circles and start moving forward” (6). For Wallis, then, the real question—“How will this crisis change us?”—goes to the moral and spiritual heart of social justice; a concept that the evangelical Left touts as its theological and ideological mantra.

Exploring Ecclesiology promises “an evangelical and ecumenical introduction” to the doctrine of the church. This subtitle to the otherwise aptly entitled book is multi-faceted and, judging from the nature of the book, intentionally so. On the one hand, the book is an introduction for evangelicals to the discipline of ecclesiology and the ecumenical discussions on the nature and purpose of the church. On the other hand, the book is an introduction for non-evangelicals to the problems and concerns of the church as they are perceived and discussed in the evangelical community. The authors define their use of “evangelical” with reference “to that post-World War II movement in Protestant American Christianity that prized the ‘fundamentals of the faith’” (p. 13). With that in mind, the combination of “evangelical” and “ecclesiology” is a welcome contribution to the growing debate about ecumenical ecclesiology.

The history of evangelicalism in America shapes the ecclesiological perspective of the authors. Emerging from the modernist-fundamentalist controversy of the early twentieth century, and shaped by the development of fundamentalism after World War II, evangelical ecclesiology exhibits a considerable diversity. While this diversity makes it difficult to speak of an evangelical ecclesiology, in a doctrinal sense, the authors lament the neglect of ecclesiology among evangelicals and reject the common perception that evangelicals have no ecclesiology at all. Instead, Harper and Metzger intend to make this diversity their advantage and propose that the image of a mosaic is perhaps the best metaphor for ecclesiology from a contemporary evangelical perspective.

Kenneth Berding, What Are Spiritual Gifts? Rethinking The Conventional View (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2006), 368 pages, ISBN 9780825421242.

After reading and re-reading this book (4 times now), I would like to thank Dr. Berding for putting together this in-depth single volume reference of the traditional spiritual gifts. There are 129 pages of appendices and notes with a detailed 24 page subject and scripture index. This extra effort makes it easy for any person to look up a particular item of interest. His verse by verse translation comparison (with Greek text) is beyond helpful. Most importantly, his message is clear: Christians waste too much time trying to discover their “spiritual gift” is instead of serving in the ministry God has for them. For Berding, “spiritual gifts” are the ministries themselves and not an enabler for ministry. We Pentecostal/charismatics will obviously object to his conclusion, but his one point is well worth considering. Do not ask, “God, how can I discover the special abilities that you have given me?” Instead ask, “God, where do you want me to serve?” (35).

Kenneth Berding is Professor of Biblical Theological Studies at Biola University.

A healthy tension does exist between viewing gifts as an empowerment or the ministry opportunity/office to serve. The whole point of Spirit empowerment is for witnessing, edification, encouragement, exhortation, and service. Thankfully, Berding gives a small concession by allowing 1 Cor.12:8-10 as a special ability, but this allowance is overwhelmed by the repetitive drum beating of ministry versus special abilities. Honestly, the purpose the Grace Gifts we receive is for ministry, so putting the purpose statement as the first priority should not alarm us. However useful this book is for the study of the traditional gifts, a vacuum remains in providing a clear picture of the ministry and work of the Holy Spirit through His involvement (gifting) in our lives. Let us look at the Berding’s agenda and bias.

Jana Childers and Clayton J. Schmit, eds., Performance in Preaching: Bringing the Sermon to Life (Baker Academic, 2008), 256 pages, ISBN 9780801036132.

While whole libraries of books have been written on the preparation of sermons, the art of successfully delivering them is much less studied. In this collection of articles, leading scholars on the performance aspect of preaching give us a welcome insight into not only the things preachers can learn from other performers but also what it means to examine preaching in this light.

From the first lines of the introduction, it is clear that we are not in the well-trodden territory of traditional preaching manuals. By comparing the variety found in preaching to that found in a circus, Childers and Schmidt make it clear that the emphasis in this volume will not be in making all preachers alike but in alerting them to ways of building greater self-awareness and improving their skills.

All this talk of circuses and performance might make us wary that preaching will be relegated to the status of entertainment and lose its power (cf. 1 Corinthians 2: 1-5). It is with this in mind that we should read Margaret Shuster’s essay entitled “The Truth and Truthfulness.” While outlining the importance of the spoken and listening aspects of preaching, Shuster is keen to stress that the primary role of a preacher is not that of a performer but that of a proclaimer of Truth. Performance is therefore the servant of the text and the preacher is above all a servant of God.

John M. Rottman’s discussion of the application of Speech Act theory to preaching reminds us of the limitations of using the tools of performance studies. God does, after all, work mightily through sermons that fail to fulfil the criteria we might set up for good preaching. Nevertheless, Dr Rottman is still keen for us to learn what we can from performance studies while still remembering that God is the senior partner in our preaching.

This partnership does, of course, include our responsibility to ensure that our delivery does not hamper the work of God in the congregation. This concern is reflected in several of the articles in this book, such as Todd Farley’s insightful chapter on movement and Richard F. Ward’s essay on the use of the voice. Both of these pieces contain useful ideas on improving the connection between what we say in the pulpit and how we say it.

In a similar vein, Alyson M. Mackenzie’s examination of the New Homiletics, which insists on the importance of the delivery of sermons, can be read as a useful bridge between the theological discussions of performing a sermon and their practical application. Given her perspective, it is no accident that this article contains a range of thoughts and questions that will guide preachers towards more effective delivery.

Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., Preaching and Teaching from the Old Testament: A Guide for the Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 222 pages, ISBN 9780801026102.

How do you preach a lament? A proverb? A law? Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., former president of Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, answers these questions and more in this book. His credentials for this assignment include his reputation as a prolific writer and as an Old Testament evangelical scholar.

In this volume on how to preach and teach from the Old Testament, the author divides the subject into two parts. First, he addresses the need, then the means. In so doing, Kaiser builds on the foundation of his earlier book, Toward an Exegetical Theology, that explains how to develop and interpret principles from the Old Testament text. In this newer book, he devotes a chapter to each of the major genres (i.e., types of literature) found in the Old Testament. He also furnishes a sermon in every case as well to provide an example of how that particular genre should be preached. It is, therefore, basically a hermeneutics book that specifically focuses on the following genres of the Old Testament: narrative, wisdom, prophets, laments, torah, praise, and apocalyptic.

The author contends that every biblical text has only one possible meaning, i.e. the meaning the original author intended. In order to arrive at this one meaning, the reader must understand how to interpret the various genres found in the Old Treatment. Otherwise, an ill-informed preacher might attempt to interpret Old Testament praises in the same manner as Old Testament proverbs.

The one main concern of this reviewer has is the unfortunate fact that the author does not address the narrative style of sermons (whether told in the first or third person) promoted by many homileticians today. On a less serious note, the author tends to repeat himself from chapter to chapter (e.g., compare p. 31 with p. 41). Some paragraphs even seem out of order (see pp. 57-8). And, at certain times, the explanation of how to interpret a particular genre seems too brief. A few more examples would also have been helpful in order to further see how his analysis applies to other portions of Scripture within the same literally genre.

Michael R. Milco, Ethical Dilemmas in Church Leadership: Case Studies in Biblical Decision Making (Kregel Academic & Professional, 1997), 192 pages, ISBN 9780825431975.

Are you facing a crisis? Need to make a sensitive decision? How you aware of how your personality affects how you make difficult decisions?

Ethical Dilemmas In Church Leadership is an intellectually oriented work on ethical leadership in the Church. The author, Pastor Michael R. Milco, includes a Myers-Briggs Personality assessment in the first chapter. He also references other tests and assessments that will help the reader understand their own psychological make-up.

Dilemmas include a case study in each chapter, including a completely fictional practice case in Chapter 11. A blank form of the Decision-Making Tower, a model or framework for ethical decisions, is included for the reader. A completed Tower is shown for the cases in the book, and illustrates the issues and considerations that influence each case.

The work is well written and well researched, covering a wide range of decision making areas. Appendices even address the difficult subjects of child abuse, AIDS and Pastoral infidelity. Pastor Milco writes with wisdom and compassion.

Dilemmas is intellectually rigorous and academically structured. This work has obvious Biblical influences and is intended to have a Church focus. However, it lacks the kind of Biblical rooting and Spirit-led foundation needed in order to live up to its potential. As helpful as it is already, a clearer reliance on Scriptural principles would give this book the strength it needs to be a powerful tool for the Pastor and Church leader.

Reviewed by Kirk Hunt

Preview this book: books.google.com/books?id=RDn1xmz_VksC

In the published world of often confusing or even misleading titles and subtitles, this collection offers clearly what its title promises: perspectives on constructive pneumatology. The authors of the ten chapters are well-known theologians from a variety of Christian perspectives and speak from these traditions to a common concern for a more complete understanding of the Holy Spirit. The editor provides both a general introduction to the book and a historical introduction to the range of existing theologies of the Holy Spirit that opens up the space for various themes of constructive pneumatology, touching on the relationship between Spirit and Scripture, the Spirit and world religions, and the Spirit’s presence in the world.

Essays by Amy Plantiga Pauw and Moly T. Marshall address the relationship of the Spirit and the biblical texts. Pauw connects with the editor’s theme of discernment and shows that a reading of Scripture without the Spirit can lead to a manipulation of the Word, and she suggests that Scripture itself needs to be exorcised from any false spirits. Marshall focuses on how the reading of Scripture can be understood as the Spirit’s activity that makes possible understanding and consensus, not only in our use of the Bible but also in our relationship with one another.

Essays by Roger Haight and Amos Yong speak to the question of the Spirit’s relationship to other religions and faith traditions. Haight explores how the “symbol of the Spirit of God” extends the important relationship between Christ and other religions and proposes that Christians must conclude that the Spirit is operative in other religions. His essay examines different strategies for using traditional theological language and shows how understanding the Spirit as symbol can inform a (cosmic) Christian understanding of God at work in the world. Yong’s essay investigates a pneumatological understanding of hospitality as a root metaphor for the Christian engagement of other religions. Engaging in dialogue the basic Christian attitudes of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism, Yong proposes that a hermeneutic of hospitality – from a pneumatological perspective – can offer clarity and invigorate Christian relations with the worlds of other faiths.

The concluding essays by Rieger and Cobb venture more closely into the world of political theology. Rieger analyzes the relationship of Spirit and empire and the possibility of resistance. The embodied Spirit, Rieger argues, overcomes the fragmentation of the postcolonial empire and bring a new sense of personhood and relationship. Cobb concludes the collection with a sweeping investigation of the Holy Spirit and the present age. Engaging economic and political tensions in today’s world, Cobb sees the Spirit as the power of balance, resistance, and transformation.