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BestPractices
April 29, 2009
Loren6Welcome to the new Best Practices! Thanks to the team at Vervent, we've got a new look, and we're proud of it.

Do you ever feel uncomfortable with the way we talk about those we want to evangelize? Do we sound condescending? I've had those concerns. Even the term "non-Adventist" implies our superiority. Ryan Bell suggests that when we make our outreach plans, we have a few of "the lost" with us, to monitor our communication!

What do you think? Check out our Night Owl Forum, now hosted at the new Vervent website, to join the conversation.

Blessings
Loren Seibold,
Editor, Best Practices for Adventist Ministry
IN THIS ISSUE
The plural Ryan Bell
Media: Richard Wurmbrand, Bill McClendon, Ed Keyes
Why Christians support torture
New Hope Worship Conference
Quote: "The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist..."
Muslim demographics vid a hoax
Events: SEEDS and more
Best Practice Pastor
Ryan Bell In the Presence of the Other
by Ryan Bell

I'm a fan of pluralism. There, I said it.

Put another way, I love diversity. After all, the universe God created is a very diverse place.

In any medium-sized to large city and even in many small towns, mosques, synagogues and temples dot the landscape, along with the churches. From the beginning of my pastoral ministry I have made a concerted effort to be in community with other religious leaders. Most often that has been other Christian religious leaders, sometimes only Protestant. But in the past two years I have had the opportunity to expand my religious community.

Recently I was in Maryland and Washington, DC with a group from the Inter-religious Council of Southern California (IRC)-a group which I serve as Treasurer-to tour the General Conference and learn about Adventism with a very diverse group of people. We had one Catholic priest, three Mormons, one Sikh, one Buddhist monk, four Hindu monastics from the Vedanta Society, and two Seventh-day Adventists.

Toward the end of the week I had the chance to converse with one of the top executives in the church. We had both noticed how our language about ourselves changed when we were in the presence of people who weren't the same as us. We decided it would be a good discipline, whenever we are talking about "saving the lost" or "evangelizing" a group of people, to have a so-called "lost person" in the room with us. If we are talking about ways to reach Buddhists with the gospel, we should invite one or two Buddhists to sit in our group to listen to what we are saying and reflect back to us what they hear.

We can learn a great deal about our real motives and intentions by speaking in the presence of "the other." This goes for times when we're talking about our spouse or our kids, those frustrating church members, or those lost people we want to give the gospel to.

So, the next time your church or conference is discussing evangelism strategies and plans, ask your pastor, ministerial director, or conference president if it would be okay to invite a non-Christian to sit in and provide some feedback. At the right time and place, I think this would give us some priceless food for thought.

What do you think?
              Night Owl Forum
Ryan Bell discusses our use of language about the lost - and suggests we might communicate better if we made our plans in the presence of "the lost". What do you think? For discussion, go to our Night Owl Forum.
Featured Media
Reading For Pastors

Faith vs. hope: A thoughtful essay by Dr. Herold Weiss about the Bible, faith, and objective knowledge. Quote: "It is a fallacy to think that because the Bible is an object, all the information obtained from it is objective knowledge. The faith that affirms the action of God in the death and the life of Christ gives hope of eternal life. But what faith and hope know is not objective knowledge."

Believe it or not,
it costs more to be poor.

Can sex offenders come to church?
A North Carolina law, under review, said no. Quote: "If they want to repent their sins, sex offenders in Buncombe County and elsewhere had better do it at home. Some church services are among the activities that are off limits because of tough restrictions on registered sex offenders' movements, passed all but unanimously last year by state lawmakers who invoked a young girl's tragic murder."

Christianity Today has movie reviews, including this one of the Dan Brown religious thriller "Angels and Demons". (CT includes discussion questions about the movie. Could watching and discussing the movie be a young adult activity?)

Are we here to evangelize the culture or transform it? An ongoing question addressed on CT's site.

More Susan Boyle: Tom K. at Patterns of Ink has some Christian reflections on the Susan Boyle phenomenon.

Torture: Why do conservative Christians support it more than others? (More on the Pew Center study here.) At least one religious journalist thinks it has to do with our soteriology. Quote: "How violence is interpreted shapes how people respond to it. The comparison of the photographs from Abu Ghraib to crucifixion images suggests that the violence in those photographs has been seen through the lens of the crucifixion, and that this theological story has shaped how torture is understood."
 
Resource Review
David Anderson at REVEAL Conference
New Hope/Vervent Worship Conference
by Dave Gemmell and Mike Fortune

Another NAD Church Resource Center Vervent Worship Conference was held last week at New Hope Adventist Church. Click highlighted topic to read Mike Fortune's blogs of the REVEAL Worship Conference. What Precedes Good Worship? Don't Disciples keep learning? What's an Accidental Theology of Worship? How Do You Get People To Sing? Is God interested in Small Talk? Should We Be Christian First? What Makes Worship Good? Is worship a Way of Knowing?

If you didn't get a chance to attend, keep watching the Vervent website as many of the presentations will soon be uploaded to the online learning center. Then plan to attend the next Vervent Worship Conference in Atlanta, September 17-19,  or Andrews University in March 25-27, 2010.
To the Point
Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.
- Sir Laurens van der Post

Adam was not alone in the Garden of Eden, however, and does not deserve all the credit; much is due to Eve, the first woman, and Satan, the first consultant.
- Mark Twain

Christ is the glory of God. His blood-soaked cross is the blazing center of that glory. By it He bought for us every blessing-temporal and eternal. And we don't deserve any. He bought them all. Because of Christ's cross, God's elect are destined to be sons of God. Because of His cross all guilt is removed, and sins are forgiven, and perfect righteousness is imputed to us, and the love of God is poured out in our hearts by the Spirit, and we are being conformed to the image of Christ. Therefore, every enjoyment in this life and the next that is not idolatry is a tribute to the infinite value of the cross of Christ-the burning center of the glory of God. And thus a cross-centered, cross-exalting, cross-saturated life is a God-glorifying life-the only God-glorifying life. All others are wasted.
- John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life

There is no such thing as "fun for the whole family."
 - Jerry Seinfeld

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
  - Terry Pratchett

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
 - Herman Melville

Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.
 - Stanislaw Lem

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.
 - Eric Hoffer
Thoughts and Ideas
  • From Monte Sahlin: "Loren, I am not sure that you should have given publicity to the video on Muslim demographics. The data attached to the posting states that it was produced in Lebanon by "Friend of Muslims." The statistics in the presentation are questionable. No known research source suggests that the current population of Muslims in the U.S. is as high as it states nor that the growth rate is as rapid as it suggests. It is not a reliable piece of information. It is most likely political propaganda. It is unclear whether this is (1) Christian nationalist propaganda from a U.S. source designed to stir up sentiment against immigration or (2) Israeli propaganda designed to reinforce anti-Palestinian sentiment among Americans or (3) fundamentalist Muslim propaganda designed to suggest superiority over American Christians. Whatever the case, it is clearly not Christ-centered nor produced by anyone with a heart for reaching Muslims or any other group."
  • From SimpleChurch advocate Milton Adams, news of a House Church Summit at the Andrews University SEEDS conference, June 10-13, 2009.

Got a tool, resource, site, article, idea or seminar that you like a lot? Share it with us at BestPractices@ameritech.net.
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Best Practices is a Vervent publication of NAD CHURCH RESOURCE CENTER. Editor: Loren Seibold, Senior Pastor, Worthington Ohio Seventh-day Adventist Church. E-mail: Best Practices. You are free to republish pieces from Best Practices in your own newsletter or blog, with attribution to the Best Practices newsletter and the author of the piece.