During the morning session of our class yesterday we were fortunate to have Ed Stetzer join us for an hour. He is at Liberty for a conference and had some free time to visit our class. Our instructor this week is Elmer Towns, and he and Ed co-authored our text books. It was a great opportunity to ask Stetzer some questions about the books and about doing ministry in the 21st century.
Before our class ended yesterday I had to give a presentation on boundaries regarding practices that are acceptable in trying to minister to this postmodern world. Many pastors today use movie clips during their sermons for an illustration. Is it ever acceptable to use a clip from an R rated movie? One of the students reminded us that The Passion of the Christ is rated R. Another person mentioned that he had seen a very effective use of a clip from Schindler's List which is also R rated. Someone else said that it would depend on the reason the film was rated R. He would not use a clip from a film rated R due to sex or vulgarity. Of course, that would also call into question some PG films, but we didn't go into that.
We ended the presentation by stating that the challenge the church has is to understand the context in which we do ministry, engage that context, but that we cannot become one with that context. This is not always as easy as it sounds. Ministry used to be a lot easier because we operated with a clear set of boundaries. There are a lot more gray areas today in ministry, and there can be a very fine line between engaging the culture and becoming one with the culture.
What gray areas are you facing in your ministry right now? What boundaries are you coming up against, and you're just not sure which way to go? I think this would be a very helpful discussion for our blogging community of bivocational ministers.
1 comment:
I am a bi-vocational minister of a small inner city church. Attendance last Sunday less than 50. One of my lunch buddies was telling me the other day about a book he just finished reading titled "Velvet Elvis- the rewriting of christanity" or something very close to that title. This person professes to be a Christian and follower of Christ; but does it in his own way and style. He informs me that this is a book that I must read. He begins to tell me that he could not stop reading this book because it spoke so much to him. So I ask him what the premise of the book was about. He began to tell how this author compares Christianity to a velvet painting of Elvis. His actual words was "no one would ever believe that a velvet painting of Elvis was the best painting ever made therefore things need to change with time." He discussed how a pastor is packing his church becasue of his unconventional methods of preaching. I went to the library to check out the book because I wanted to discuss the book at lunch. The book had already been checked out. Bottom line for me is that the message of Christ is not for sale. We can not cross the boundry of theology for the sake of entertainment or even emotion. We can not dress up the goat to make it look like a duck and think that it is a duck. I wonder if my friend would feel the same way if the author had compared Christianty to the painting of the Mona Lisa.
Just my thoughts DDP
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