Background

For those of you who do not know I spent the last week in Peru. Before specifically addressing our trip, I want to give some background information on what we are doing in Peru. Porter Memorial Baptist Church is working with IMB missionary Mike Weaver, developer of the Rapid Entry Advance Plan (REAP). The current end vision for the Peru partnership is “to have a viable indigenous, reproducible church in every town and every person in the people group have access to the Gospel by 2013 (7 years)”. Simply put we will work ourselves out of a job by 2013 and then employ the plan elsewhere to plant churches among another people group.

Important Concepts

There are two concepts to define in order to gain a correct understand of the purpose and goal of this seven-year partnership. First, church planting is missions. If your idea of a mission trip is evangelism abstracted from the local church then you have an unbiblical understanding of missions. The Great Commission is not a call to evangelize but to disciple. The goal of REAP is to plant churches both through discipling and to disciple the people of Peru. Second, what it means to plant indigenous churches. I think the easiest way to understand this is through painting a picture of what an indigenous church does not look like. Imagine Sunday morning in northern Kenya where locals go to church wearing suits and ties, to sit in pews, and drink communion from little plastic cups. This is not an indigenous Kenyan church it is Americanization, the locals never wear suits any other day of the week, they never do anything indoors much less sit in pews, and they drink from a common cup whenever they eat at each other’s houses. The goal of REAP is planting indigenous churches that are methodologically and theologically Biblical but whose style is distinct to that culture; this means they may meet in huts and not cathedrals, they may play native instruments and not an organ, and they may wear gourds and animal skins instead of suits.

Personal Reflections

First, foreign countries such as France, Japan, Germany, and others had spent time and money investing in the areas that we stayed and visited; the problem was that their honest efforts ranged from helpful to laughably useless. One of the most helpful items was a hydroelectric station used to generate electricity. The most useless was a satellite TV receiver that rebroadcast satellite TV over standard UHF and VHF frequencies that the locals could receive via an antenna. The problem was that the locals did not have TVs much less the electricity needed to power one. As Christians, we often attempt to meet the needs of individuals before forming a relationship and understanding what an individuals specific needs are and how we can meet them best.

Secondly, we are surveying towns deep in the mountains of the world’s driest desert, they have had ¼ inch of rain in 700 years, and almost every town has a Catholic church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh Day Adventists. We are interviewing a woman in an abandoned mining town and she told us “I don’t want to learn Catholic, or Jehovah’s Witness, or Seventh Day Adventist; I want to learn the Bible. I know it is God’s Word and it is all we have, but there is not one to teach it to us.” I have never been to a place that is this open in my entire life, where you walk through the fields of harvest and the grain literally cries out “pick me, pick me, pick me.” At the same time, the situation bore an immense amount of shame; because these heretical groups had beaten us to the punch and I think every Christian should be ashamed of that. One thing is for sure, we must go back and I would encourage all of you to get involved in this anyway you can because amazing things are going to happen in Peru and inside PMBC because of Peru.

Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey is quickly becoming one of my favorite books of all time and I would encourage you to read Albert Mohler’s commentary on the book’s importance, “Total Truth”–A Bold Manifesto for the Christian Worldview.

For those of you who havenot heard of Jason McElwain or seen this video check it out because it is awesome. If you are blessed to know Wally and have seen him play basketball this video reminds me of him lighting up the net.

From the article:
Gov. Michael Rounds of South Dakota signed into law the nation’s most sweeping state abortion ban on Monday, an intentional provocation meant to set up a direct legal challenge to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 United States Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal.

You can read the complete New York Times Article here: South Dakota Bans Abortion, Setting Up a Battle.

4For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. 5We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ,

v.4 We live in a world at war, a spiritual war, a war that has been fought since the fall of man. While we may be persecuted and physically oppressed because of our belief in Christ, our fight is nonetheless a spiritual one. We fight the good fight of the faith with divine power, power from God. In I Corinthians 1:18 we find that the message of the cross is the power of God “to us who are being saved.” This means that the strongholds are ideological strongholds, in which men entrench themselves through self-deception.

v.5 in the first half of this verse, there are two conflicting ideologies man’s opinion, which is not founded upon objective knowledge but man’s sinful desires, and the perfect and objective knowledge of God. Through the word of the cross, which is the power of God, we destroy every opinion that conflicts with God’s word. I think that is where most of us stop destroy, destroy, destroy. However, Paul takes it one-step further by saying that we must subjugate their thought life. There is a definite difference between destroying an individuals thoughts and subjugating them. The subjugation of an individual’s thoughts implies that their thoughts will be useful when brought into captive obedience to Christ. This phenomenon is largely due to the role of general revelation, although perverted by sin, upon the formation of man’s thoughts (see my previous post “The Sin of the Monoculture” for more information regarding this).

In Acts 17 Paul is brought before the Areopagus so they might understand his strange new teachings. Paul both destroys their ideological stronghold and subjugates their thoughts.

Paul destroys their ideological strongholds by informing them that:

• God rules both heaven and Earth.
• God created the world.
• God does not dwell in temples nor is He served by man.
• God is the source of all life.
• Etcetera

Paul subjugates their thoughts by informing them that:

• There is a god whom they do not know.
• He even goes on to point out that; their own poets have made correct statements about God. Paul probably knew this because he spent everyday in the marketplace proclaiming Christ.

Too often we are so caught up in refuting an argument that we forget to listen to the individual we are sharing with. Like Paul, we should know their poetry, favorite band, or simply their thoughts on life. This allows us to understand and destroy their stronghold with God’s Word and it aids us in subjugating their correct thoughts to Christ. Presuppositional apologetics does not work in a postmodern age; after all the only thing you can presuppose about postmoderns is that, there are no presuppositions. We must form relationships and allow individuals to construct their worldview before us so that we can destroy the fallacies that support it and use what truth may exist in it to construct a Christian worldview.

I will close with a modern example that really hit me this week while reading. Immanuel Kant was a Newtonian Determinist, he believed that the universe was like a machine entirely determined by the laws of nature; this encompassed everything from the orbits of the planets to the synapses firing in your brain. At the same time, he maintained a paradoxical view that man was an autonomous free moral agent, or at least there is the illusion of such. After reading that I could only sit and think about what would have happened if an individual, like Paul, said to Kant; “you are right the actions of the universe are entirely determined by the laws of nature. Laws created and sustained by an absolute Sovereign God, and in Him, all things hold together, from the microscopic double helix DNA carrying the code of your genetic makeup to the rotation of the Milky Way Galaxy. Un-paradoxically your moral accountability is not an illusion it is real and one day the absolute Sovereign God who holds the planets in orbit will hold you accountable.”

In short, our job as apologists is not only to show corrupt ideology for what it is but also to confirm what man has gleaned from general revelation as true, once that thought has been freed from the false ideology, which suppresses the Truth. All of which must happen within the framework of a relationship.