Ran across this article to which I replied, AMEN!  It has cross application to both child-rearing as well as to parish life and leadership:

A while back, I had a student with a serious attitude problem. Let’s call her “Sue.” On the first day of an art course in which I first encountered Sue, my antennae shot up. At the end of my opening presentation, when I asked for questions, Sue responded by launching a missile. Due to her internship obligations, she would be late for several classes. I reiterated my policy on lateness (it’s strict) and suggested it might be best for her to drop my course. To this Sue responded that she needed to take my course to graduate (translation: “Your course is the course that suits my schedule”).

See how it turned out.

Spectacular article by Eric Metaxas:

In the last century, many serious Christians have fallen into the trap of striking an anti-elitist attitude, and often an anti-intellectual attitude, too. We can see how this happened; after all, it was the educated elites who, in the late 19th century, undermined the Scriptures, embraced Darwin, and soon thereafter came to champion a social Gospel at the expense of true biblical theology. Many Christians felt themselves besieged and, in reaction, retreated into a kind of defiant, populist stance, one that had its dukes up, as it were, and was often prideful, rather than humble. In this process, many of the most theologically serious Christians abandoned the mainstream culture to the secular elites, who were now alone on the cultural field, with no real opposition. So, of course, the culture got worse, as we have said, and the unchallenged secular ideas of the elites and intellectuals came to dominate more and more, flowering, one might say, in the Sixties, in whose secular and socially liberal “Boomer” shadow we all still live. Which, of course, made serious Christians yet further hostile to the mainstream culture, and certainly to the elites and intellectuals who dominated it.

One result of this hostility to mainstream culture, and to the secular elites who dominated it, is that Christians more and more abandoned “worldly” centers of cultural influence, taking their salt and light with them like peeved children taking their marbles and going home. So the cultural centers like New York City only slid farther into secularism, and farther from the values of the rest of the country. And because of the rise of the media culture in the last fifty years, the influence of these increasingly secular cultural centers only increased. People who thought they could hide in small towns far from places like New York – found that their children were going upstairs to watch their own tv’s, and getting the values of New York and Hollywood elites anyway.

So Christians have become particularly hostile to cultural elites, whose unchallenged ideas were destroying the culture. And we have often behaved as though we somehow had God’s permission to hate these elites, because not only were they especially wicked, but also wealthy and powerful and famous. We have little difficulty bringing the love of the Gospel to exotic people groups, but elites are something else. Whom does Jesus love less? Which deserves hell more? Or is it that, like the Prodigal son’s elder brother, and like Jonah, it is God’s grace that we most fear? Have we seen the Pharisee, and is he us? If that’s true, then it turns out we are sinners, too, in need of God’s grace. Or did we think we could get to heaven simply by not watching HBO?

Of course Christians aren’t alone in their anti-elitism. Hating elites is as American as George Washington. The idea that they might hold the ideological keys to our culture is as distasteful as paying taxes to King George III. But scholars like James Hunter at the University of Virginia have shown it to be true, and the example of Wilberforce has proven it true at least once. But saying it’s true today is lonely and difficult, something like being a westbound ibex trapped in an endless herd of eastbound sheep. “The little people of history have been forgotten and stepped on and overlooked,” they bleat, “and it is their voice that must be heard! History has been written by the powerful few, and that must be changed!” And so we applaud Ben Franklin, the precocious candlestickmaker’s son who through sheer Yankee ingenuity rose to become an international celebrity and helped found this country. But we forget that only after he had risen was he able to help those who had not risen along with him.

Our history of anti-elitism explains much of why we’ve had little difficulty ministering to down-and-outers – or our own social equals – via evangelism, but have sneered at the elites who sneer at us, and at engaging the culture over which they have so much sway. But we should stop and ask ourselves what the world would be like if Wilberforce had done that. Among the most crucial moments in history was when Wilberforce, newly converted, went to talk with his old friend, John Newton, the slave trader turned pastor. Wilberforce was sure that becoming a Christian necessitated retreating from the world, and his elite circles. He knew that his friends in high society and politics would now mock him and his beliefs, and he knew that the temptations of the world were powerful, too, and would be easier to avoid if he retreated from the world. But Newton famously told him not to do this. Newton suggested that perhaps God would use him in politics and high society. Perhaps God had given him his talents and position for that reason. Wilberforce’s assent to Newton’s advice led to all that followed, led to the Clapham Circle, and to the end of the slave trade and slavery, and to the improvement of life among the poor, not just in Britain, but around the world. The social conscience we think of as a given among most people in Western societies can be traced back, in large part, to that conversation and that decision.

Read it all.

St. Andrew’s member Dr. Bill Sasser first began doing short term mission trips over 15 years ago.  Bill and his wife, Susalee, have traveled all over the world, offering dental care to those least able to care for themselves. Their travels have taken them from the jungle highlands of Southeast Asia to prisons in Rwanda to the squalor of Haiti. After serving solo for many trips, they felt led to reach out to students at MUSC’s Dental School.

Ten years ago, they helped organize Dental Community Fellowship (DCF – DentalCommunityFellowship.net). This is a student chapter of a national  organization called the Christian Medical and Dental Associations. DCF organizes yearly mission trips where students play an integral part of the care given in these locations. Students who go on these trips are responsible for covering all associated costs for their trips. These include airfare as well as incountry expenses. The trips not only benefit the patients but the students as well as they are able to provide hands on care at a rate and under circumstances that they will never see if their learning was confined to the school and its clinics. In addition, they are exposed to missions and serving those who are many times forgotten.

This Saturday,  January 21, they will hold two events to raise money for scholarships. The first event of the day will be a golf tournament at Stono Ferry. In the evening, they will have a banquet here at St. Andrew’s beginning at 6:30 pm. The DCF Banquet will feature a silent auction, bar-b-que dinner and a speaker, Dr. Stan Cobb. Stan is known as the Cowboy Dentist and hails from Spearman, Texas. He is a dentist, artist, writer, and occasionally, a cowboy.

I invite you to come and be a part of the banquet and hear the incredible stories of what our Lord is doing through and with our local dental school. To purchase tickets to the banquet, please visit the DCF’s website.

Found this very nice article over the weekend.  Quite a bit to think about.

When John Wesley was born in 1703, four million out of Britain’s five million people lived in absolute poverty—unless they found enough food for that day, they would begin to starve to death.

When John Wesley launched a Church Planting Movement in this context, he not only changed the eternal destinies of an estimated one million people who came to Christ through his ministry, he changed their economic status as well. Not only did the Methodists he led get saved, they got out of poverty and became a powerful influence in discipling their nation. Wilberforce and other “spiritual sons” of Wesley honored him as the “greatest man of his time.”

The Methodists made such an impact on their nation that in 1962 historian Élie Halévy theorized that the Wesleyan revival created England’s middle class and saved England from the kind of bloody revolution that crippled France. Other historians, building on his work, go further to suggest that God used Methodism to show all the oppressed peoples of the world that feeding their souls on the heavenly bread of the lordship of Christ is the path to providing the daily bread their bodies also need.

Could Church Planting Movements of our day apply these same teachings with similar impact?

Read the rest.

St. Andrew’s home grown missionary, Jean Berler Pereira, and her husband Pastor Francis Pereira are stateside for a brief visit.  Francis and Jean and their children, Esther (4) and Andrew (2), serve in Mumbai, India.

Jean was sent to India from St. Andrew’s in 2005.  There she met her husband Francis who has been pastor of Metro Church since 1998.  Together they are pastoring a growing network of churches which currently comprises eight congregations.  Metro Church is part of a larger Indian church planting movement called New Life Fellowship.

Jean and Francis would love the opportunity to spend some time with their friends and supporters from St. Andrew’s and the Charleston area.  You’re invited to join them for India Night on Friday, Jan 13th 2012 at Sams Hall, St. Andrew’s Church, Mt. Pleasant 6:30pm.  Indian dinner will be served.

Francis and Jean will be sharing about life in India, the incredible ways God is moving there and how you can actively participate in building the kingdom around the world.  Please feel free to invite friends and anyone interested in learning more about missions and our global God.

If you’d like to come please email us at jimnear@gmail.com so we know how much food to order (dinner is free).

I love this kind of information

The number of Christians around the world has more than tripled in the last 100 years, from about 600 million in 1910 to more than 2 billion in 2010. But the world’s overall population also has risen rapidly, from an estimated 1.8 billion in 1910 to 6.9 billion in 2010. As a result, Christians make up about the same portion of the world’s population today (32%) as they did a century ago (35%).

This apparent stability, however, masks a momentous shift. Although Europe and the Americas still are home to a majority of the world’s Christians (63%), that share is much lower than it was in 1910 (93%). And the proportion of Europeans and Americans who are Christian has dropped from 95% in 1910 to 76% in 2010 in Europe as a whole, and from 96% to 86% in the Americas as a whole. At the same time, Christianity has grown enormously in subSaharan Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, where there were relatively few Christians at the beginning of the 20th century.

These are some of the key findings of Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population, a new study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Read the full report for more details on these subjects:

Read the rest.

Trevin Wax has done a good job of thinking through what Francis Schaeffer might say to the gospel-centered movement within today’s church.

As I recently read through Crossway’s collection of the Letters of Francis Schaeffer, I was struck by how applicable Schaeffer’s insights are today, particularly in regard to evangelical movements, leaders, and doctrine. His counsel deserves to be heeded by those of us in the “gospel-centered” stream of evangelicalism.

With this in mind, I have selected some favorite excerpts from these letters and woven them together creatively. Using Schaeffer’s own words, I am imagining out loud what counsel he might give us today.

Read it all.

Following up on an article I posted in last week’s “Around the Horn” by Carl Trueman, and yesterday’s articles, here and here, I give you this article by Michael Horton on the multi-site church. A good read. Let me know what you think.

So I share Thabiti Anyabwile’s concerns about the multi-site model. I especially concur with his statement that you can’t have elders in a particular church without a pastor (and deacons). If you do, it’s basically (though imprecisely a “papal” model), where the local church’s main under-shepherd is not the local pastor (or teaching elder) but a minister who is known and loved by the congregation only as an exalted icon. He is not the servant of Christ who feeds you regularly with the Word and sacraments and leads you in corporate worship; who visits your home, catechizes your teenagers, and drops by the hospital to see how you’re coming along after surgery. If not papal, the multi-site ecclesiology is at least quasi-episcopal, with the cathedral (seat of the bishop) and its satellite churches (diocese). One way to know whether your church is following the New Testament pattern is to ask yourself the practical question: If I were struggling, could I call the pastor? Does he actually look after his local flock, beyond public appearances to preach and teach?

Read the rest.

Picking up on this morning’s previous post about the church, here’s a provocative article by Thabiti Anyabwile:

At bottom, I think the kind of multi-site churches that feature one pastor being beamed into several sites around a region—and in some cases around the country or world—is simply idolatry. It’s certainly cult of personality multiplied and digitized for a consumer audience. As a brilliant young man remarked to me this morning, “The pastor now becomes the new icon in the midst of the Protestant worship service.” I think that’s well said. Video multi-site tends to idolatry, pride, and self-promotion—even where the ambition of spreading the gospel is genuine. In other words, the ends do not justify the means because some of the ends produced will undoubtedly be odious in God’s sight.

Read it all.

Interesting article from Carl Trueman. See what you think:

This all takes me back to a question I have raised before: in a world where success is the ultimate sacrament of absolution, who is there with the credibility to call the successful to account? Not the man in the small church. Suspicion that he is motivated by envy will always undermine his authority in such a context. And, if we are honest, envy will likely always be a part of the motivation for such criticism. I preach total depravity, after all, and it is also the one example where I can honestly say I consistently practice what I preach. What pastor of a church of fifty does not want to be pastor of a church of five hundred? The church I serve has ca. 90 on a Sunday. Yes, I would love a few hundred more. If we ever got to four hundred, I hope we would plant a church, as long as I did not have to drink zinfandel and grow a soul patch. But yes, I would be lying if I said I did not have a twinge of envy at those whose ministries are – well, you know, successful. I guess that is the word.

Read the rest.