Theological Vision for Ministry
This is not an outline of our doctrinal beliefs but a statement of how we intend to discharge Christian ministry and engage with our culture in biblical and theological faithfulness. It grows out of and interacts with the Statement of Faith.
1. How should we respond to the cultural crisis of truth?
The epistemological issue
At least since the Enlightenment in the 18th century, most of Western civilization has taken for granted that humans can know objectively what is true. This, however, has been called into question in the last few decades. Many now argue that we cannot have real, objective knowledge of the truth. Instead, what we call “truth” is always colored by our “personal experiences, self-interests, emotions, cultural prejudices, language limitations, and relational communities.” Any claim to the truth, then, is arrogant, a failure to recognize one’s biases. Even worse, it leads to conflict as people and groups use claims to truth as means to assert power over others. In response, we should be tolerant and inclusive of everyone’s “truth.”
This is the argument of postmodernism, and many Christians are persuaded by it, claiming that the Christian faith is “their truth” while others might hold to a different “truth.” This relativism, however, leaves us without any foundation upon which to base our lives and faith. If one could choose a certain “truth” to follow or create one’s own “truth,” this “truth” could shift with shifting emotions or prejudices. And an ever-shifting foundation is no foundation at all.
Three affirmations on knowing truth
1. Truth corresponds to reality. When we say something is true, we are not merely expressing our subjective opinion; we are saying something about the way things really are. God designed the world with wisdom and order, and he gifted us with the ability to think and reason, enabling us to discern what is real and true, at least in part.
2. Scripture conveys truth. While we can discern some truth as God’s image bearers, using our gift of rationality, God’s Word, found in the pages of the Scriptures, is always the final word of truth. The Holy Spirit inspired the original authors and today opens our hearts and minds to receive and understand these words and receive and understand truth incarnate, Jesus Christ. The truth of Scripture exists in propositions — statements about what is true and false, right and wrong, good and evil. But it also is evident in stories, metaphors, and poetry. While it may be more difficult to comprehend and communicate these truths as opposed to explicit propositions, the Spirit enables us to do so.
3. Truth is ethical, not just theoretical. God, through his Word and Spirit, does not communicate to us a list of doctrines to believe only. If truth accurately depicts reality, the way things really are, then this includes the reality about who God is and who he has made us to be. It includes how we relate to him and to each other. Therefore, to believe the truth means that you commit your whole life to living according to the truth — to the Way, the Truth, and the Life, Jesus Christ.
Three responses to this vision of truth
1. We respond with humility. While objective truth is real and knowable, we are finite and sinful. Therefore, we “see through a mirror dimly” (1 Cor 13:12): Our knowledge is rarely exhaustive, and our understanding is often skewed. The Christian life has no room for arrogance and contempt.
2. We respond with confidence. We are still image bearers, capable of knowing truth even if partially, and God is able to tell us the truth by his Word. At the very least, by the power of his Spirit we can have complete assurance that the gospel is true and that we are children of God.
3. We respond in belief, worship, and practice. We ought to have a passion not only for sound doctrine but also for genuine worship and transformed lives. Knowing the truth and growing in Christ are more than mental exercises and learning new information. Growth incorporates every part of us living in the Spirit, under the Word, within a Christian community practicing the way of Jesus together.
2. How should we read the Bible?
The hermeneutical issue
Christians, claiming the Bible as their authority, sometimes emphasize different beliefs and ways of practicing the Christian faith. This can create confusion and conflict amongst Christians. It even leads some to give up on Scripture as their final authority. We can sift through this problem of interpreting Scripture by identifying two main camps of interpretation and the way each reads the Bible.
The corporate-narrative camp
This first camp of Christians focuses on the cross as “the defeat of worldly powers” and the entrance of the kingdom of God through Jesus’ finished work. It tends to talk about sin as a cosmic power or something perpetuated by communities. Salvation, then, is an invitation into the “kingdom program of what God is doing to liberate the world” from the forces of evil. Practicing justice and seeking the renewal of creation preoccupies their action.
This follows from reading “along” the Bible. This way of reading Scripture focuses on the main plotline of the biblical narrative as God’s story of redemption and renewal of all things. This way of reading also focuses on tracing biblical themes throughout the story and how they climax in and are fulfilled by Jesus Christ. The gospel, then, is described using the Bible’s storyline of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration.
The individual-theology camp
The second camp of Christians focuses on the cross as a substitutionary atonement for sin. It tends to talk about sin as personal immorality or unholiness and salvation as justification from sin which allows those with faith in Christ to go to heaven. Strict morals (holiness) along with evangelism preoccupy their actions.
This follows from reading “across” the Bible. This way of reading Scripture gathers “its declarations, summons, promises, and truth-claims into categories of thought” to understand what the Bible teaches as a whole. The gospel, then, is described with more theological terms like God, sin, Christ, faith, etc.
A synthesis
These two ways of reading the Bible have their own pitfalls if taken on their own, each succumbing to its own brand of legalism and neglecting important aspects of the Scriptures. But they are not mutually exclusive ways of reading Scripture and, in fact, together bring out the full richness of God’s revelation to us.
By reading “along” Scripture, we are reminded of the big picture: that God is renewing all things in Christ and that he invites a new community to participate in his kingdom by doing justice, making culture, and more. And by reading “across” Scripture, we are reminded that individuals are sinners in need of the grace of Jesus’ blood-sacrifice in order to reconcile them to God and that people must be converted and united to Christ in order to experience the life of the kingdom of God. The gospel is individual and communal. It requires doing justice and evangelism. We emphasize the cross and the kingdom. Reading with these lenses can help us lessen the confusion and division amongst Christians and give us a fuller picture of the Word of God.
3. How should we relate to the culture around us?
The contextualization issue
A different question we might ask that approaches the same idea is this: How should individual Christians and Christian communities give expression to the gospel today? Or, once we have experienced the grace of Jesus Christ and the gift of his Spirit, how should we respond? We might answer with something like, “We should love our neighbors.” This is right, but it is abstract. Every response to the gospel must be real and concrete; you must love your neighbor with particular choices and actions.
This will look differently from one cultural context to another. This is why we say that the gospel must be contextualized. To communicate and live out the gospel faithfully, we must have some notion about how we will interact with the surrounding culture. Indeed, we see this contextualization occurring even in the New Testament; hence, the four gospel accounts to four diverse communities (not just one), the various ways Paul expresses the gospel throughout Acts, and the many different epistles carrying the same truths about Jesus with varying emphases and exhortations.
It is easy for us today to fall the way of either the Pharisees or Sadducees in this endeavor. The Sadducees, we might say, over-contextualized in their interaction with culture. They assimilated too much to the culture, taking on their beliefs and values as they desired and acquired cultural power and influence. This demonstrates a lack of faith that God’s Word leads to flourishing. The Pharisees, on the other hand, under-contextualized, focusing on their purity from the culture which transformed a desire of obedience to God’s law into a hard-hearted legalism. This reveals an undue love and preoccupation with their own subculture, neglecting God’s plan to love and save all peoples. In more extreme forms, it may even turn into withdrawal from the culture.
Our goal is to avoid assimilation and withdrawal, both of which hurt our gospel witness and lead to biblical unfaithfulness, and to promote proper gospel contextualization. Two images that Jesus uses to describe the kingdom of God are helpful in this regard: pearl and leaven.
Two principles for contextualization
1. Pearl: being counter-cultural. When Jesus says that the kingdom of God is like a pearl, this suggests that it has intrinsic value. It is worth calling people into, away from their current modes of living. Applying this to the ways in which we interact with culture, we recognize that faithfulness to God’s Word sometimes requires standing against culture. Every culture has aspects that have been polluted by sin, and we, as individuals and as a community being transformed by the Word and Spirit, must resist.
2. Leaven: for the common good. Resistance does not mean we may withdraw, nor does it mean we must interact with culture with fear or hostility. Indeed, when we approach the culture in this way, we often adopt methods of shaping and controlling the culture that are coercive and more fitting with the sinful culture we are supposedly fighting. Rather, we remember that the kingdom is like leaven, permeating the culture slowly for its good. To use other metaphors from Jesus, we are like salt and light, both preserving the good elements of the culture while improving and developing the culture in God-glorifying ways.
Remembering these two principles can help us remain faithful while creatively responding to our unique cultural issues, especially if we also remember to read “along” and “across” the Word of God. See also 5.3 below.
4. In what ways is the gospel unique?
“This gospel fills Christians with humility and hope, meekness and boldness, in a unique way. The biblical gospel differs markedly from traditional religions as well as from secularism. Religions operate on the principle: ‘I obey, therefore I am accepted,’ but the gospel principle is: ‘I am accepted through Christ, therefore I obey.’ So the gospel differs from both irreligion and religion. You can seek to be your own ‘lord and savior’ by breaking the law of God, but you can also do so by keeping the law in order to earn your salvation. Irreligion and secularism tend to inflate self–encouraging, uncritical, ‘self–esteem’; religion and moralism crush people under guilt from ethical standards that are impossible to maintain. The gospel, however, humbles and affirms us at the same time, since, in Christ, each of us is simultaneously just, and a sinner still. At the same time, we are more flawed and sinful than we ever dared believe, yet we are more loved and accepted than we ever dared hope.
Secularism tends to make people selfish and individualistic. Religion and morality in general tend to make people tribal and self–righteous toward other groups (since their salvation has, they think, been earned by their achievement). But the gospel of grace, centered on a man dying for us while we were his enemies, removes self–righteousness and selfishness and turns its members to serve others both for the temporal flourishing of all people, especially the poor, and for their salvation. It moves us to serve others irrespective of their merits, just as Christ served us (Mark 10:45). Secularism and religion conform people to behavioral norms through fear (of consequences) and pride (a desire for self–aggrandizement). The gospel moves people to holiness and service out of grateful joy for grace, and out of love of the glory of God for who he is in himself.”
5. What is gospel-centered ministry?
1. Empowered corporate worship
“The gospel changes our relationship with God from one of hostility or slavish compliance to one of intimacy and joy. The core dynamic of gospel–centered ministry is therefore worship and fervent prayer. In corporate worship God’s people receive a special life–transforming sight of the worth and beauty of God, and then give back to God suitable expressions of his worth.”
Because true worshippers worship in spirit and in truth (John 4:23-24), the Word of truth is central to the worship gathering. Preaching, for that reason, is expository (explaining the text of Scripture) and Christ-centered (pointing towards the climax of God’s story: the good news of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection). True worship is also spiritual; that is, it pours out of a heart enlivened by the Holy Spirit. The goal of the worship gathering, then, is not primarily to teach information but to glorify God by receiving and responding to his Word — so that as we worship, week after week, the Spirit of God renews our lives, conforming us more into the image of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.
2. Evangelistic effectiveness
The gospel proclaims that all are sinners and in need of Christ’s saving grace. Believers, therefore, have no grounds for boasting in their own works and showing contempt towards nonbelievers. For that reason, the gospel-centered church contains members who graciously speak the truth in love to those in their community, demonstrating how only Christ can satisfy their deepest hopes and aspirations. Without altering the content of the gospel so that people might be “comfortable” — the gospel is an offense and stumbling block (1 Cor 1:23; 1 Pet 2:8) — these churches seek to make the gospel understandable in their contexts. This call to faith should be communicated to all people, leading to churches that reflect their surrounding demographics (socio-economic status, education, gender, age, race, etc.). Gospel-centered churches will tend to plant other gospel-centered churches, one of the most effective ways to evangelize.
3. Counter-cultural community
“Because the gospel removes both fear and pride, people should get along inside the church who could never get along outside. Because it points us to a man who died for his enemies, the gospel creates relationships of service rather than of selfishness. Because the gospel calls us to holiness, the people of God live in loving bonds of mutual accountability and discipline. Thus the gospel creates a human community radically different from any society around it.”
Being a counter culture pertains in particular to sex, money, and power, all of which our present culture idolizes. When we place our identity in Christ rather than in these idols, we find immense freedom in living out the biblical ethic since we are not enslaved to the anxiety that follows seeking the next sexual thrill, accumulating and holding onto money and possessions, or maintaining control over others. In freedom, sex can be enjoyed in the security of a covenantal marriage between a man and women. In freedom, we can rejoice that we are only stewards of our possessions and can be generous with all that we have, ensuring that needs are met within the church and seeking the welfare of the needy and forgotten outside the church, especially the poor, orphan, widow, and immigrant, all who are oppressed. And in freedom, we have no need to grasp for power since we are in the hands of the All-powerful One. This allows us to build up historically marginalized and oppressed groups, creating a beautifully diverse community.
4. The integration of faith and work
“The good news of the Bible is not only individual forgiveness but the renewal of the whole creation. God put humanity in the garden to cultivate the material world for his own glory and for the flourishing of nature and the human community. The Spirit of God not only converts individuals (e.g., John 16:8) but also renews and cultivates the face of the earth (e.g., Gen 1:2; Psalm 104:30). Therefore Christians glorify God not only through the ministry of the Word, but also through their vocations of agriculture, art, business, government, scholarship — all for God’s glory and the furtherance of the public good.”
Too many Christians make faith a personal, private affair only; the gospel has no impact on their public life. The gospel, however, is good news for all of life and all of creation. God’s Word tells the story of his redeeming all things. This means that as the Spirit unites us with Christ and sanctifies us by his grace, we are empowered to do work that is excellent, creative, and beneficial for the common good. A gospel-centered church equips its members to do just that, thinking through the implications of the gospel in their specific occupations. Even though all things will only be fully restored at the return of Jesus, he invites us to participate in his kingdom now, and the church must be faithful to that calling.
5. The doing of justice and mercy
The full witness of Scripture indicates that God intends to deal with sin in all its manifestations. Sin manifests not only as idolatry against God but also as injustice against our fellow humans: All people are impoverished spiritually, and many are impoverished materially as well. In response, God’s compassion moves him to restore and enrich both spirit and body — to heal the spiritually blind and physically blind, to feed the spiritually hungry and the physically hungry, to dignify the spiritually destitute and physically destitute. As beings created in the image of God, humans are meant to live in fellowship with God as well as receive dignity in relationships, participation in society, and basic necessities. Jesus brings restoration in this full sense.
As people who recognize that everything we have is an unmerited gift from God, Christians ought to share Christ’s heart for mercy and justice, participating in restoring the image of God in our fellow humans. Therefore, the Christian who does not generously offer relief to the poor and amend systems of oppression in some capacity fails to grasp the grace of God in his or her life and exhibits a heart misaligned with Christ’s. Moreover, “we cannot look at the poor and oppressed and callously call them to pull themselves out of their own difficulty. Jesus did not treat us that way. The gospel replaces superiority toward the poor with mercy and compassion.”
Conclusion
Churches engaging in gospel-centered ministry (1) worship in spirit and truth; (2) evangelize the lost; (3) cultivate a loving, counter-cultural community; (4) equip members to be embody the kingdom in their work; and (5) participate in acts of mercy and justice towards the poor. This is a high calling, one that The Parks Church will often fail at. However, by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, the gospel will take root deeply in the hearts of our covenant partners and in the collective heart of our faith family, and we will display the full implications of Jesus’ redeeming life, death, and resurrection.
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This document has been adapted and modified for use at The Parks Church. Passages and statements in quotations are pulled directly from the original Theological Vision for Ministry adopted by the Council of The Gospel Coalition on May 22, 2007, and revised on April 12, 2011. Used by permission of The Gospel Coalition (thegospelcoalition.org), Austin, TX 78717.