In my years with Young Life, I attempted to be a faithful student of adolescent culture. Speaking with teens, I found they were constantly driven by two questions. But I believe that it’s more than just teenagers who ask these questions. They are the questions that drive all of us.

The first question is, “Who am I?” It is a question of identity. People are trying to figure out who they are and what they are about.

The second question is, “Why am I here?” It is a question of purpose. For all the existential philosophy that has pervaded our culture, people can’t get past believing that they must have some deeper purpose.

But now I would like to add one more question to the list. “Do I belong?” It is a question of community. People are always looking, always searching, in the hopes of finding a place where they are welcomed, accepted and liked. People long to belong.

People look for answers for these three questions in a lot of places. Unfortunately, most people never find the answers they are looking for. Those three questions will continue to haunt them, leaving them as just a shell of a person.

The great hope and promise is that all three of these questions are answered profoundly in the Scriptures. We as Christians hold in our hands the answers to the questions that plague the people we know.

Who am I? First and foremost, you are the image of God on earth. There is no greater status a creature can hold than to be the likeness of the Creator. And what’s more, God invites us to be his children too. Image of God and child of God – that is who you are.

Why am I here? The first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism answers this question succinctly when it says, “Man’s primary purpose is to glory God and to enjoy him forever.” Your purpose to worship and honor the God in whose image you were made.

Do I belong? If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, you belong to his church. You are part of the Body of Christ and that Body needs you – your gifts, your passions and your personality. Every affinity group, PTA, country club, fraternity, sorority and civic club may offer membership, but not the unconditional acceptance that should exist within the church. And the cool thing is that the church is comprised of a bunch of images of God coming together to fulfill their purpose of worship with one another.

The people in our neighborhoods are asking questions. And you are holding the answers. Won’t you go and be a friend to someone today, assuring them of who they are, that they do have a meaningful purpose in life and that because of the shed blood of Christ, they can belong to his church?

On Friday night, I graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando.  It really was a great ceremony and I was honored to have Kim, my parents and Kim’s parents (and Nana) all there to celebrate with me.

During the ceremony, I was particularly struck by two things that I’d like to take a moment to share…

1. How beautiful is the Body of Christ – Twila Paris’ “How Beautiful” was sung.  The words of the chorus, “How beautiful is the Body of Christ,” ran through my head and heart the rest of the night.  See, I feel like there are times the things I write on hear come across as criticisms and frustration with the Church.  Really, that is not my intent.  My heart breaks precisely because the Church, the Body of Christ, is so beautiful.  It is God’s own people.  And he has given us an important mission which we dare not fail – to spread the glory of God to the ends of the earth, that the beauty of God’s people would shine throughout the earth.  On the night of graduation, I thought that song was an excellent choice to remind each of us that as we enter service to the King, we are going to find it ugly and painful at times.  But the Body of Christ truly is beautiful and we can hold to the promise the God is sanctifying his church, making it more beautiful each day.
2. In the commencement address, Rev. Sandy Willson of 2nd Pres in Memphis spoke on “Good News for the Poor.”  He asked a series of questions, but one in particular stuck out in my mind – Do our ministries have the poor in view?  James 1:27 tells us that “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this – to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.“  Does the way I approach ministry intentionally seek to minister to the poor and vulnerable, the outcasts and outsiders?  Isaiah 61 anticipated the coming of the Messiah as the one who would “preach good news to the poor.“  As one who was has called and commissioned to preach, am I preaching good news to the poor?

In his book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell describes the tipping point of a fad or trend as that moment when it takes on a life of its own and spreads like wildfire. His intended reader audience are corporate leaders looking how to take their product/message to the next level. For example, he describes an artsy group in Manhattan that took to wearing pennyloafers. What started as just a small group quickly spread all over the country till the shoe manufacturer had trouble keeping up with demand. At some point, the trend took on a life of its own and spread. Or consider the way that the flu spreads. If a kid catches the flu, it’s only a matter of time till the whole family is laid up in bed. We all remember days in high school when there were 200 students absent on the same day. The flu became an epidemic and spread in a hurry.

The internet has a term to describe when something hits that tipping point on the internet – Viral. It’s the point where a site/video takes on a life of its own and grows exponentially. I remember telling a friend several years ago about this new search engine I found – Google! Now, obviously, Google penetrates every aspect of the internet. The word Google can be used either as a proper noun or a verb. It tipped and, seemingly overnight, became one of the most powerful companies in the world. It went viral.

I had already been mulling over these things, but a recent post over at Church Marketing Sucks entitled, “Where’s the Church’s Ask a Ninja?” really forced me to think through the issue. In the last 2-3 years, the internet has experienced a tremendous change. There has been a move from static to dynamic content, from information giving to shared-content creation (that is, letting viewers, readers add to the content) and from reading to participating. What are the “big things” on the internet right now? YouTube, HomeStarRunner, Ask-A-Ninja, craigslist, Flickr, Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace, MeetUp, SecondLife, EHarmony.com, blogging and podcasting. And what do they all have in common? They are entertaining, interactive and have created communities around them. A blog, in its truest form, is designed to be a dialogue between the blogger and his readers. YouTube allows anyone in the world to be a movie star. Is there anyone alive who hasn’t seen the video about the “Star Wars Kid”? Wikipedia allows users to add/edit content in the world’s largest encyclopedia. Most of remember the first time a friend told us they fell in love with someone over the internet. But now it doesn’t phase us. Each of these sites have gone viral. The internet has a name for this new participative, interactive, entertaining, user-driven, community-centered internet – Web 2.0.

So here is my question. Where is Church 2.0 in the midst of Web 2.0? Why hasn’t the Church come up with anything like HomeStarRunner or AskANinja to reach people? Nearly every day I look at churches that are going live with new websites. Yet nearly every single one of those websites are really good Web 1.0 websites. They give service times, directions and tell people what to wear. But interaction is limited to, at most, a pastor with a blog and a maybe an iTunes-aware archiving of past sermons. These Web 1.0 websites about 5 years to late to really be effective ministry tools.

We hold in our hands and in our hearts the good news that Jesus is king and that in his love, he has atoned for our sin that we might know God. How cool is that!?! Yet, I look around, and it seems like Christians are just sitting on the side watching all this unfold.  We’ve never figured out how to leverage the power of the internet, especially Web 2.0, to fulfill the Great Commission.

Now, before I go any further, I should mention a couple of sites/videos on the internet that are close…

• The Brick Testament – tells Bible stories using legos.
• Christian vs Christ-Follower videos – see one in the previous post or check out YouTube
• Desiring God – John Piper’s ministry are doing a radio ministry without the radio. They completely eliminated radio broadcasts and are doing everything over the internet because they can reach more people for a fraction of the cost.
• LifeChurch.tv – Huge multi-site church has planted a campus within SecondLife

Yet even those have never really tipped. Each has some strengths and something to teach the rest of us, but they have never gone viral. I don’t know the answer, but I ask you to join me in asking the question, “How can the Church use the new internet to reach people for Christ?” Any idea that would tip would have to be genuinely funny, interactive, give viewers chances to create content, able to have a community form around it and share the love of Christ without being abrasive. I’m not yet sure what the answer is. Do you?

I just finished reading A New Kind of Church by Aubrey Malphurs. Before I go any further, let me preface this by saying that he is my favorite author on issues of pastoral theology and leadership. His passion for the church combined with academic pursuit of excellence make him both an enjoyable read and a challenge to me as a leader. In fact, he is at least partly responsible my desire to pursue a PhD in Organizational Leadership.

Now, with that disclaimer noted, he said something in this book that really bothered me…

Does the gospel in new-model churches fail to move people out of the world and into God’s kingdom? It depends on your definition of the gospel. Some believe that the gospel includes a commitment before salvation to let Jesus control one’s life after salvation. This is the lordship salvation view. Others correctly point out that this view mixes salvation with sanctification and adds works to the gospel, which is a false gospel (Gal. 1:6-10). They argue that salvation is by grace through faith in Christ alone (Eph. 2:8-9), and for a person to be saved, he or she doesn’t have to agree to behave a certain way after salvation… I believe there are some churches out there that fail to challenge their converts to make Christ Lord of their lives after they are saved (lordship isn’t necessary for salvation but is vital to one’s sanctification). –p147-8

Here is the problem. Jesus can not be your Savior if he is not also your Lord. We often tell people that they need to “accept Jesus as their personal Savior” to become a Christian. While not necessarily untrue, it misses the very heart of the gospel. Consider these verses…

“That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,” and believe in our heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 8:9).

“Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 8:13).

“Therefore God exalted him [Jesus] to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:9-11).

I could continue. The number one name for God in all the Bible, both the OT and the NT is “Lord.” In fact, it was the name that was so sacred, that Israelites would not pronounce it. And that name gets applied to Jesus as well. When Peter was walking on the water and began to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me” (Matt. 14:30). When Jesus passed by two blind men, they cried out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on us” (Matt. 20:30).

Again, Jesus can not be Savior if he is not also Lord. In fact, Jesus’ work to be our Savior was for the purpose of vindicating his claim to be our Lord. Lordship is the fundamental means by which God relates to us as his creatures and his children. Yes, the Lordship of Christ gets worked out in our lives not all at once, but progressively in sanctification as we learn to walk in holiness before God. But he doesn’t become Lord sometime down the road. It is as Lord that He saves us. He is the Sovereign Lord, we are his servants.

Over the course of my seminary experience, but especially the last 6-8 months, I have spent extensive time thinking about the nature of baptism. I don’t like to be one who “majors on the minors,” but I think, relatively speaking, that Christ only instituted two Sacraments for His Church and therefore they are not really that minor and should strive to get them right.

I have particularly been engaged by the question of baptism for two reason. First, pragmatically, I grew up in a credobaptistic (believer’s baptism) church environment and am at a paedobaptistic (infant baptism) seminary, so the differences there have been cause for reflection. But second, and much more importantly, as Leonard Vander Zee suggests in his book Christ, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper: Recovering the Sacraments for Evangelical Worship, baptism is the day of a giving of a new identity. Most people don’t look at it that way, but at its essence, baptism is a setting aside of a person as belonging to the Lord – that baptizee, in being washed in water in the name of the Father, the Son and Holy Spirit, takes on the name into whom he/she is washed. A new identity is given at baptism. That is so cool, that I want to understand fully the incredible nature of what is happening at baptism.

But as I have considered the nature of baptism, three questions linger in my mind…

1. Question 92 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism defines a sacrament as a “holy regulation established by Christ, in which Christ and the benefits of the new covenant are represented, sealed and applied to believers by physical signs. So the question is, how does the “applied to believers” correlate with the idea that “the infant children of church members should be baptized” (Question 95). For someone of the infant baptism persuasion, how do those two work together?
2. Question 94 (“What is baptism”) highlights something interesting as it ends with the phrase, “and that we are engaged to be the Lord’s.” Certainly, their is a future salvation that still awaits. Salvation may be assured at the point of justification, but Paul often speaks of salvation as a past thing, a present thing and a future thing. At the wedding supper of the Lamb, the Church will be presented as his bride. Right now, we are just “engaged to be the Lord’s.” As such, any baptism is anticipatory of that final salvation, whether the baptism of an infant or that following a profession of faith. From that respect, does the timing of the baptism (before or after profession of faith) really matter? It is not the conclusion of something, but the great anticipation of future salvation when we are presented as the Lord’s bride and take his name forever.
3. Why don’t I ever read about the John 3 concept of being “born again” in relation to the question of baptism. Paedobaptists (rightly so) discuss the relationship between circumcision and baptism. Why do credobaptists never argue the “born again” angle and say that just as circumcision was done at the first birth to identify someone as among the covenant people of Israel, baptism is to be done at the second birth (“born again”) to identify someone as a member of the covenant people of God?

Baptism is an incredible gift God has given to his church, not just as a nice word picture, but that in it he is actually at work giving the person a new identity. That is so cool that I pray that God would give me wisdom to honor and esteem baptism as the sign and seal of God’s grace which it is.

One quote from the “Homosexuality and the Church” conference I attended really struck me and I wanted to share it.

“The opposite of homosexuality is not heterosexuality. It’s holiness.” – Alan Chambers, President of Exodus International

What a profound statement. The reason Christians have failed in the way we interact with homosexuals is that we keep trying to “fix them.” But the “fix” isn’t someone becoming heterosexual. The “fix” is holiness. The fix is becoming more like Jesus.

If only we would approach all sins, not just homosexuality, with that grace and goal in mind. Do we want people to follow a set of rules? Or do we long for the grace of Christ to transform the hearts of people into the likeness of Christ? Do we call people to stop sinning, or to walk in holiness?