Don't be weary of the word

 Luther's commentary on Galatians, commenting on 1v11:

God creates faith in us through the Word. He increases, strengthens and confirms faith in us through His word. Hence the best service that anybody can render God is diligently to hear and read God's Word. On the other hand, nothing is more perilous than to be weary of the Word of God. Thinking he knows enough, a person begins little by little to despise the Word until he has lost Christ and the Gospel altogether. 
Let every believer carefully learn the Gospel. Let him continue in humble prayer. We are molested not by puny foes, but by mighty ones, foes who never grow tired of warring against us. These, our enemies, are many: Our own flesh, the world, the Law, sin, death, the wrath and judgment of God, and the devil himself.

What is a missionary? And some bigger questions

 On influential blogger Tim Challies' regular list of links to interesting articles or resources today, one entry is:

Missionary.com has launched a great new website. One of the best features is the glossary which provides definitions for many key terms related to missions. You might also enjoy the trailer for the forthcoming Missionary documentary.

The website looks like it has lots of good, challenging and challenging material. However, it didn't get off to a good start with me because its definition of the first word I looked up, "missionary", in its technical glossary, is quite wrong and even unhelpful. The glossary is introduced with an accurate description of what a glossary is for:

Like any area of study, missionary terminology can be complex and surprising. Sometimes seemingly straightforward or even biblical-sounding terms can have an unexpected meaning. Whether you’re new to missions or going deeper, this glossary can help.

But then, what is the definition of "missionary" ?

A missionary is a person who has been called (internally and externally) to leave their home and travels to share the gospel in a foreign nation or with a foreign language group. Their mission is to obey the Great Commission found in Matthew 28:18-20, where Jesus tells us to go out and make disciples of all nations. Characterized by an instinct to evangelize, ability to endure hardship, they know their Bible well, and love Christ and His church. A missionary also needs to have an aptitude for language acquisition and cultural analysis. They often risk great harm to themselves but go, despite the risks, in obedience to Christ. 

This is not how the word "missionary" is used, nor is there any reason why it must stop being used as it is actually used and instead used this way. The above is a definition of an ideal pioneering church-planting foreign missionary. Certainly that is one kind of missionary, and indeed the archetype of a missionary, what is at the heart of the overall missionary task. But equally certainly, not the only kind of missionary:

• There are also home missionaries - e.g. people in the London City Mission, Open Air Mission, missions to particular ethnic groups / migrant groups, etc. Such missionaries may be both living "at home" and may be working within their own culture.
• There are missionaries who are not working "on the front line" of pioneering evangelism to people who have never heard, but who are on the second or third lines. Missionaries may be building up an existing church; providing Bible teaching to allow converts to come to maturity, etc.
• There are missionaries in support ministries and mercy missions - medical missions, working with the handicapped, working in administration, providing logistical support and help to other missionaries, etc.  
• Missionaries doing evangelism to support existing local churches, and helping local churches to grow their evangelistic competence and confidence.

If the definition from missionary.com's glossary were taken seriously, then this could discourage a lot of people who are gifted and open to being part of forwarding the gospel in situations outside of their "home" situation (even in their own country), making them think that they cannot be missionaries. It would discourage a lot of people who could help the kingdom of God on the "mission field" because they'll believe that they have to have all the core gifts at the heart of pioneering church-planting or they can't be a "missionary". Today's world actually needs people with a huge range of gifts. Lots of lines of nation, culture, belonging, language and gospel reach are now blurred; there are still places that are a simple "they've never heard, there are no churches, there is no written language or Bible" situations; but there are also others which desperately people who aren't necessarily John Paton to assist churches comes to maturity in all sorts of ways.

Paul, being a pioneer evangelist, and one with a commission to plant across the Gentile world and not just in one place, moved on quite quickly after appointing other competent leaders in churches, in order to evangelise new places. But those who remained in a fixed place to bring a church to maturity (whether like Timothy for a longer time after Paul left, or as permanent elders in the churches) were still fulfilling the Great Commission, and everybody has always described them as "missionaries". Indeed Paul himself worked in a team alongside others. He was the great apostle, the pioneering evangelist, leader of the team - but others had different roles as part of it. As they travelled with him, they were also "missionaries", as that word is universally used.

The requirement for an "internal call" is problematic in this glossary. Is it a particular spiritual experience? A continuous burden? How heavy must the burden be, and how long for? Is the experience one that passes some test to authenticate it as infallible when considered alone, or does it require validation, and if so, how? Again, you can see how this could discourage someone whom the Lord has gifted and is opening the door to for kingdom work from moving out and taking action. Some souls are very sensitive, and unless this question is handled carefully, it could delay them for years or forever. Hence, in general, something of this sort belongs in a discussion in a book about missions, not unexplained in what's meant to be a technical glossary. This glossary does say under "calling", "Internal being the conviction that this is what God has laid on your heart to do". This, though, begs for further explanation; something may be laid on your heart, but this specifically requires that God laid it on your heart - is there a process to distinguish between this, or has the glossary just used unnecessary extra wording that has introduced confusion? And has there never been anyone who believed that God wanted them to do something that they actually revolted in horror and fear from when they first went to do it, but that they felt that they were the person God intended to do it anyway? To be fair, the entry does then point the reader to a separate article to discuss it - but as I say, this does stray somewhat from what a glossary should do, which is to define things sharply and clearly in a few words, and remove ambiguities rather than raise them.

Returning to the overall definition, I'm sure if (assuming you're part of a gospel church) you reflect on the "missionaries" that your church supports, you'll see that this narrow definition is unhelpful and inaccurate. A glossary should not re-define how a word is used, and should not do so when it says itself that it is seeking how to describe how a word is actually used in the circles and literature.

The website overall looks very good and run by good people as much as anyone could tell. But I'm sorry to say, dear reader, that the above wasn't the only part that made me sigh inside. And if you can take any more, here is some......

At the beginning there was also a link to a trailer video. Given the list of names below, I'd expect the trailer video to be edifying and helpful. But....

Interviews: Ian Hamilton, Mark Dever, Rosaria Butterfield, Nina Buser, Hezekiah, Michael Reeves, Conrad Mbewe, Kevin DeYoung, Me-Melar, John Piper, Wayne Chen

This is largely a list of well-known Western/English-speaking evangelical "Big Cheeses". How they got there and who appoints evangelical "Big Cheeses" isn't entirely clear, but there definitely seems to be a reasonably well defined list, plus some people who have tried very hard but didn't get admitted and ought to mortify their disappointment more than they have. In the trailer video, these "Big Cheeses" say entirely common-place things that any competent pastor or mature Christian who is not currently reading his first few missionary biographies should be able to say. Dear reader, please forgive me for studying maths in a rather earlier stage of my youth, but I begin to notice patterns, and there's one I began to notice a long time ago.

Not too long ago I saw that a large, well-known and influential church was having a "missions conference", and I couldn't help noticing that the main speakers were pastors and not missionaries and had never been missionaries. And (I've now watched the trailer from missionary.com which does this too), the main subject was missionaries who, being from the 18th and 19th centuries, they could never have met, but which it was clear that they'd read a lot about from their doubtless impressive book collections and praise-worthy reading habits (and may we all develop both of those!).

On the above list, I assume that "Hezekiah" is someone working under-cover who can't give his full name. I couldn't find out who "Me-Melar" was, so I suppose that he/she might be too. Wayne Chen was a cross-cultural missionary for 8 years. Nina Buser was for 13 years. The latter both now work for a missions agency and have no doubt learned a lot through that (7 and 8 years ago, respectively).

Again, don't get me wrong - I'm not criticising these people. They're on the right team. They're encouraging a great work. They're trying to stir up others to it as well. And yet I do wonder what is wrong with our evangelical sub-culture that you need a fancy video and "Big Cheese" names to say commonplace things about the well-known 18th and 19th-century missionaries with dramatic scenery, with "something very big is happening" mood music playing, and in voices that suggest that something very profound has been discovered and is now being revealed to us. Why do we need people with lots of strings to their bow in their on-screen bios, sitting in rooms full of books, to tell us that the church should send out missionaries who plant self-propagating churches? Do evangelicals today not actually believe anything they read in the Bible or from their bookshelves until this is done?

Again, don't get me wrong - it's all with the best of intentions, and may the Lord bless it to do much good. But it still is part of a sign that that there's something profoundly wrong with us. I do wonder to what extent we actually believe in the Holy Spirit. We are so used to having any new initiative headed up by the Big Wigs ("pastor, author, conference speaker, seminary teacher, he has travelled to 27 different countries in preaching the gospel, ...") that I begin to wonder if we actually believe that anything can be done without them. How about if instead of having a couple of days in which the important people are contacted by film crews and go through what they're going to say, and film the takes, etc., they spent 2 days in secret prayer for a few more missionaries to be raised up. Perhaps they did that too (by definition, they kept it secret!), but I don't believe it's what normally happens or what people in our evangelical sub-culture would expect to happen. I wonder, in our "heart of hearts", if we really believe that nothing can be done unless the Holy Spirit blesses, or that using the available means is to do with impressive promotional videos rather than seeking God earnestly and stripping what is hindering us in that away.

Don't misunderstand - I'm not picking particularly on the makers of this video or the people in it. I am talking about a "meta-level" trend, of something bigger that's going on. Something that we don't seem to talk about.

This is not a criticism of the website above, but is in a related area of our sub-culture. Why do so many pastors today appear to believe that part of their calling is to be a constant armchair pundit whose expertise extends to an astonishing number of subjects, and whose work as a pastor leads him to constantly share that expertise through various platforms, and develop a large following far beyond the reaches of his actual flock? Why does this strike anyone as normal, rather than a sign of a profound malaise somewhere not far beneath the surface?

This post has been long enough. But to return to where it began, I feel I at least owe you my stab at a proper definition of what the word "missionary" is used to mean in evangelicalism:

A missionary is someone who has been recognised as having appropriate spiritual gifts and evident Christian character, and set apart by the church of Jesus Christ to give themselves especially to work across one or more barriers (nationality, culture, language, etc.) or in a special outreach (e.g. to the unreached in a particular town or towns) in order to either directly work in the advance of the kingdom of God or in supporting/related tasks. At the heart of the missionary task is pioneering missionary work in forming new disciples and churches in places where they are not, but missionaries are commissioned to work in all kinds of domains behind the front-line as well as on it.

The importance of sex to the gospel

Tim Bayly has explained very clearly and directly here the importance to the gospel of manhood; the whole Christian world today has a vital need to be clear about these important truths: https://warhornmedia.com/2024/08/09/the-gospel-begins-with-sex/ .

Lying via selective truth-telling

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-68905041

The above article is a classic in the genre of lying via omission and careful selection of what truths are allowed to be mentioned (as well as the occasional straightforward traditional untruth). Consider (somewhat in the order of mention in the above article):

1. No discussion at all of why the state power company is failing to supply enough power. What factors might be involved? Is a state monopoly an inherently bad idea? What has the level of corruption been in the last couple of decades? How much has been lost over the years to human wickedness? How does level of investment match with growth in level of demand? Is anything being done about any of these issues, really, or is it "same old, same old, don't rock the boat"? Why are none of these questions worth investigating?
   Here, as with many issues, you suspect that the issue contains a substantial man-made component.
   
   
2. It's the hot season in West Africa. It comes every year, at this time, and the temperatures are in the 40s every single day. This, apparently, was also not a piece of context that BBC readers needed to be given. Where's the editor?
   
   
3. Note that the scale of the problem is related to urbanisation and development. People living in the village sleep outside and don't have back-up generators for when the state power company lets them down, and have thus slept and thus lacked diesel generators for several hundred years, since before any state power company existed. But in those days, it was easier to sleep on top of your house (best not to sleep on the ground if there are hyenas or other predators around), and there weren't huge numbers of concrete buildings (and air conditioners from those who do have them) emitting heat into the outside air. i.e. Some problems in developing-country cities are problems of development and symptoms of progress. This context gets mentioned.... nowhere.
   
   
4. "At night it can reach 46C" - no, it can't. That's absurd. How did this line get in the piece? You'd have thought that given that a few paragraphs earlier 48C was given as the maximum temperature reached anywhere at all, in the day, during a heatwave, a journalist or editor might have paused to wonder how it can be reaching 46C at night. Perhaps they could have looked at the BBC Weather page for Mali?
   
   
5. "Since March, temperatures have soared above 48C in parts of Mali, killing more than 100 people" - unlike an earlier, similar, BBC article, this article has slipped in a mention of Ramadan, a few paragraphs later, but you'll have to join the dots yourself. This is a month-long Islamic festival (and the majority of Malians are Muslims - the writer forgot to mention this) in which the Muslim faithful abstain from both eating and drinking (and even in many cases from swallowing their own saliva, which is seen as breaking the fast) between dawn and dusk. This year the festival has - the article omits to mention - coincided with the hot season. The temperature is over 40C in the day, every day. "We were seeing about 15 hospitalisations a day," says Prof Yacouba Toloba, who works at the university hospital in Bamako. "Many patients are dehydrated". Well, yes. And yet the article heavily emphasises that the message for its readers that it's human burning of carbon-based fuels since the Industrial Revolution that is the main reason why Malians have suffered during this time.
   
   
6. "Schools in some areas have closed as a precaution, and people in the Muslim-majority nation were advised not to fast during the Ramadan period which ended recently". Advised by whom? How widely known was this advice? How widely was it followed? Did the 15 hospitalisations a day come from people who followed it, or who didn't? Nobody reading the article will find out, because the journalist had no interest in these questions.
   
   
7. ""We need to plan more for these situations, which will perhaps come back. This time it took us by surprise," adds Prof Toloba." Words fail me.
   
   
8. We are then treated to the scientifically entirely bogus claim that it's possible to determine what the temperature would have been in Mali in March 2024, if we'd burned less carbon-containing fuels in recent centuries. Such claims are based upon computer models, whose results can tell you nothing other than how the computer model behaves. So, a modeller runs the model, then sees what the real-world results were, and then learns how good his model was. He doesn't learn about the real world from this. A perfect illustration of this is the UK Covid-lockdown-that-wasn't in December 2021, when the modellers predicted doom and health-system collapse in the UK if no (fourth) lockdown took place. No lockdown did take place, and the case numbers, deaths and consequences predicted did not happen. From this, any rational modeller learns that his models were severely defective. (Bit of a shame for those who endured the previous three lockdowns and their consequences, and we're still waiting for someone in authority to issue a few mea culpas over that, but I digress....). The idea that you can model the counter-factual of the weather in a particular city in a particular month is a complete inversion of the truth, and the BBC should be ashamed for making this the climax of their piece (the one that, we deduce, they want the reader to go away most impressed by).
   
   
9. "With temperatures expected to remain above 40C in Bamako over the next few weeks, people are trying to adapt to their new normal." The temperature is over 40C in Bamako at this time of year, every year, and has been for the last few centuries. It's West Africa, on the edge of the Sahara desert (where, being a desert, by definition, it's 50C every day) and this is the hot season. There is no basis at all for the BBC to tell its readers that temperatures over 40C are a "new normal". This is simply a gross untruth.
   
   
10. "As sun sets in the capital, Ms Konaté Traoré takes several large mats outside to her yard and lays them down." This is what many people in several West African capitals have been doing every hot season of their lives, or as much of their lives that they've lived in urban centres since moving there from the village. This is because people being able to afford electricity (whether via the state company, or solar panels with attached storage batteries) and afford fans is something that can only happen together with a certain level of financial progress and development. Without that privilege, in the city, you're surrounded by concrete, tin roofs, and other things not conducive to buildings being cool inside. The journalist doesn't deem these things worth mentioning.
    
    
11. "The heat is showing no sign of letting up" - which isn't that surprising, given that the article has been published in the last week of April, and the rainy season arrives at the end of May, or the start of June.

In reality, the principle thing that cools people down in the Sahel area at this time of the year, and has done throughout all the years of urbanisation, is the energy that comes from burning carbon-based energy sources. It's carbon-based energy that allows millions of people (not just 15 a day here) to live in the otherwise unnatural setting of the West African city at all. Even if they have got a solar panel and battery, then this was almost certainly produced in a mine and in a factory and with transport using a lot of carbon-based energy (which they may very well never generate as much power as used in the production and transport). Otherwise, they get cool using water and being outside, as they have done for many centuries. The real threat to people's ability to cool down in the context of current urbanisation is the refusal of Western banks, NGOs and donors to fund the development of better grids because they refuse to fund projects that aren't sufficiently green according to their new standards. But solar farms don't produce at night, and power storage is very expensive (whether in Africa or in the West). As such, in West Africa, "green" power is currently not economic, and not being able to access funds unless the power is sufficiently green means that grid capacity isn't growing at the same rate as demand is, resulting in more power cuts and being very hot at night. The BBC doesn't see this as worth discussing.

You may have different views about the some of the questions above to me. Perhaps you believe that mass-scale green power can be made available in West Africa, at night times, quite easily, in a short time. I'd be glad to have that explained to me, but that's not really my point. My point is that the BBC has an agenda, and they're willing to repeatedly lie by serial omission to push it. These lies don't concern small details. They concern massive gaping facts that are evident to anyone after a few minutes. If you're a professional journalist, these aren't the sort of mistakes you can make by accident.

Have you ever put anything at risk for the Lord?

1 Corinthians 15:30 And why do we stand in jeopardy every hour? 31 I affirm, by the boasting in you which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily.

In context, Paul explains that his ministry made sense, and only made sense, in the light of the fact of the resurrection of believers. Jesus Christ is already risen, and believers will also rise - and this is why they live as they do in the present age, offering their lives up for Jesus Christ. This is the rational way to live, because they cannot everything - even if they die, they shall be raised up again. Jesus is risen, and we shall rise too. Hence, risk makes sense - because ultimately, the victory is already won. It makes no sense for believers to jealously guard their comfort, their security, their peace, because these things are not in ultimate jeopardy: the resurrection means that these things cannot be lost in the end. And actually it makes no sense to try to cling on to them as the highest good, because they can't be kept. We shall lose this earthly body, so that we shall rise again in a glorious resurrection body.

I do wonder that if Paul were writing back to churches in the year 2024, if some of them wouldn't respond to him and suggest that he needed a break. "Paul, we're very concerned about you, and the extreme things that you are writing. In jeopardy every hour? This lies far outside the parameters established by our care committee and operational guidelines. You are taking yourself too seriously. Relax. Don't you believe in God's sovereignty? God doesn't need you to do this. We suggest you take a long period of leave for your mental health, and to reflect upon best practices." That is the atmosphere that we are immersed in in the modern West; these are the ideas that spontaneously come to us if we have lived there long enough. But Paul didn't believe in those ideas. He believed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and his own future resurrection because of it. Do you?

Meekness and Majesty

 I've been singing the beautiful hymn "Meekness and Majesty" since I was a small boy, but only in the last few weeks came across its inspiration.

"He is thy Lord, worship thou him... He is meek, but it is the kind of meekness that likewise takes nothing away from his majesty. The meekness and majesty of Jesus. I wish I could write a hymn about that or compose music about it. Where else can you find meekness and majesty united? The meekness was his humanity. The majesty was his deity. You find them everlastingly united in him. .... the majesty of the man who was God." - "Worship every day of the week", A W Tozer.

Are painless and comfortable deaths possible?

 I can't help noticing that in the media, two separate but linked debates go on in parallel:

• Capital punishment: the trend of opinion in our Western culture is that this is always inhumane, and that no effective means exist for putting someone to death that are not degrading and unconscionably painful.
• Euthanasia: here, we are told that a painless and dignified death is medically and scientifically possible for everyone, and that the only reason why euthanasia isn't generally available is because of cruel and arbitrary legal hurdles, which should be removed.

I'm not, here, going to rehearse the arguments in favour of either one or the other (though, for the record, I believe that capital punishment can be justified and is the proper judicial response to certain crimes such as murder or rape; and that euthanasia defined as the deliberate application of procedures or substances (as distinguished from the contrary declining to apply them) to cause death is morally wrong).

Rather, I'd just like to point out what you've probably already spotted: the things said about the possibility of a painless and dignified death in the case of the two debates are mutually contradictory. If such a death is possible in the case of euthanasia, then it is also possible in the case of capital punishment. Conversely, if such a death is impossible in the case of judicial punishment, then it is also impossible in the case of someone's elective decision to end their own life. Or in other words, in at least one of these two debates on this particular point, the proponents of the arguments for the popular position (against capital punishment, for euthanasia), are lying. They say that a thing is both impossible in one case, and possible in the other, in a direct formal contradiction. A painless and dignified death is either available or non-existent depending on what is being argued for and nothing else. This is deception. People making either argument should have this contradiction pointed out to them, and be challenged as to which of the two they believe to be true: pick one side and then accept the implications, not both or neither depending upon your goal.

Note that here I'm not claiming that you have to either favour both capital punishment and euthanasia, or vice-versa be against both. Either, neither or both could be argued for despite conceding that death either can or cannot be dignified and painless. My point is that if the argument is being made based upon this supposed possibility or impossibility, then the argument has to be consistent; and currently, the arguments are being made based upon the possibility or impossibility of dignity as a central plank of the argument.

The question in general of whether death can or should be made dignified or not, and to what extent (and whether the answer to that depends upon whether the death is a penal infliction or not), is worth exploring. So are the ideas of personal choice and freedom and control in Western culture and how they relate to death. But that will all have to wait for another day.