On the Rogue River

Our local river that runs through it, at the part of our rafting, has maybe 2, maybe 3 Class III rapids, but nonetheless, it's a blast. Around 25 attended today's river rafting. The folks were from Faith OPC. The older rafters' boat---the old geezers boat---supposedly a dry boat, got stuck on rocks 2 times. A few were dumped out in the drink! It was a great time. The stetch of the river that we float is about a 4-5 hour trip.

G. Mark Sumpter

Words and Christian Humanism

Taking a refresher in English Grammar and Creative Writing has the juices flowing. I sat in class thinking this is stout-hearted and stout-fingered sanctification, the real stuff. Our Triune God spoke creation into existence; Jesus Christ is the Word made living; God the Spirit carried men along as they penned the Book of the Covenant, the Bible. Man made in God's image speaks, writes and interpretes. He exercises dominion and in so doing, it's very creaturely. May this creaturely mandate be one that we do with faith and obedience in Jesus Christ. As we heard so often a few decades back, "Write On, Brother, Write On," or something like that.

G. Mark Sumpter

Homeschool Mothers, Shaping A Cult of Domesticity?

Have you seen this August 6, 2009 article about homeschoolers here?

Here’s one reader response to it that has a little kick…

…I see many women who have lived wild lives themselves come into the homeschool fold. I also know a couple who have taken their child no further than his 8th grade year and he is ignorant and lazy.

I agree that peer pressure in today's society, the drugs, and the bullying are enormous. But I think more universal educational standards need to be imparted on homeschoolers wherever they are. We as a society shouldn't be making it easy for parents to teach at home; we should be holding them to as high a standard as we do our educators. Yes, that system is flawed but I believe that studies will prove in the future that many of these homeschooled children of today are too sheltered from the world to be able to function well within it.

The mothers need to get a clue, deal with the fact that education is just that, and let their children help shape their own lives. In every case (except for a few women that were just lazy), homeschooling mothers whom I have met are in charge of their husbands, their families, and even speak for their children. It is a situation where they are shaping a new "cult of domesticity" and you'd think the 1970s Feminism is long gone. Forget the coastal influences, this is the reality of the American heartland and these people vote and they are increasing in number with their "babies for Jesus". Rather scary, don't you think?

This last thought: Mothers...shaping...a cult of domesticity….hmm. Two comments.

1) I have been aware of the susceptibility on the part of Christian homes to have a practice of a cultish-expression about the family. It’s idolatry of the family. This is when patriarchy of the home collides with the eldership of the local church. Why a collision? I believe because my generation of evangelical pastors has upheld the Word over the Sacraments. Rather than Word and Sacraments, it’s been Word over Sacraments. When we reduce the understanding of the faithful purpose and practice of the sacrament of infant baptism, when we reduce the importance of it or do away with it altogether, we lose sight of the role, support and mutually complementary function of the church and home. The practice of infant baptism keeps children before us; and it also keeps the mandate of their godly nurture before us. Lose infant baptism, and both the home and the local church lose. We lose and draw swords on the matter of the responsibility of the child's nurture. Conversely, when we practice infant baptism and take hold of its import, and the family and the local church take up and seize the covenantal context of a mutually beneficial role and function of each sphere, then we can keep working out the saving call of nurturing our children with fear and trembling. Infant baptism helps to draw the lines for the two spheres of the home and church and helps to advance the discussion and practice of nurture. Without infant baptism and it's reminder of our roles, it’s a free for all.

2) Fathers, reflect on this woman’s commentary above. There’s the on-going danger about our passivity or abdication regarding our charge to be shepherds in the home. Genesis 3 reminds us of our susceptibility to neglect the Lord's will about this. When God asked, “Adam, where are you?,” He addressed the man about his locality and proximity. As Steve Farrar reminded us years ago in his Point Man, we have to be creative with our faithful presence in the home. It might be early hours or late, a lunch hour, a Saturday morning, a Sunday evening, or maybe, it’s one morning a week you go to work late, or we take a child with us to work for a half-day, etc., etc. Men, we cannot be everywhere at the same time; we are limited by our finitude. We need a sound theology and practice of delegation, but we also need an intentional practice of domestic shepherding, of being there. We have to plan for it. Some weeks, we’ll hit homeruns and do well; and other weeks not so. Keep working at your kingly role, right alongside of your queen. Admit to her that you struggle with being torn between work outside of the home and your work within. Sort out your strengths, and harness them, to emphasize them. Make adjustments, ask for prayer and stay at it. Mothers are gifted nurturers, but they are not the head of the home. Praise God for faithful wives and mothers—they do have an eternally significant role in the lives of our children; they are builders for righteousness in the home. Let the world deride or pity the role of faithful Homeschool Moms, as this response above colors things. But men, we need to be there; we need to be present around our children as much as strength and schedule will allow. It starts with re-kindling vision.

G. Mark Sumpter

Getting Up Off Our Bach Side

The story is told of Johann Sebastian Bach and his own reflections about diligence. He was asked about his growth in skill, his proficiency and expertise as a musician.

Occasionally he was asked what measures he had undertaken to reach so high a degree of skill in his art. He usually replied: "I have had to be diligent. If anyone will be equally diligent, he will be able to accomplish just as much." He did not make much of, even as he did not depend on, his superior native endowments.

From the book, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Master and His Work

Dick Kaufmann, my pastor and professor in Escondido, often exhorted us to turn away from laziness and sloppy work. If you don't want to work, don't go into the pastorate. Exacting diligence is required. I often found Dick having 3 X 5 cards upright and visible, attached to his car dashboard; he was rehearsing, meditating on, and re-working texts and thoughts of sermon notes. It was like looking at a GPS. Diligence to the 10th power.

G. Mark Sumpter

Called to Something

Here are fresh footprints below by which all should follow. My own interpretation of my background and training was pretty much, Me and Jesus or maybe, Jesus and Me. I have thought for so long that the high ground against 1) spiritual dryness, 2) heresy and 3) want of fruitfulness in discipleship was personal, individualistic Christianity. I heard one of my fellow volunteer hospital chaplains say, "our patients need the church, they really need the church." I nodded in agreement; 8, 10, 15 years ago, I would have shaken my head in disagreement.

At the seminary bookstore, I used to sell this author--he was fairly popular from the IVP book rack.

The gospel call is a call to something, and that something is more than a doctrine or an experience or a heavenly juridicial transaction or the exercise of faith or even, exclusively, Jesus Christ. The gospel intends to call persons to the body of Christ, that is, the community of believers with Jesus Christ as its essential and sovereign head.

Howard Snyder, in his The Community of the King, IVP, 1977.

Lord, help me grow in my practice of the affirmation that when You save, You save Your people; it is Your church--the professing believers and their children--that is the divinely ordained context of Your saving power. Give me Jesus, Give me Jesus that I might stand alongside of others, within His body.

G. Mark Sumpter

The Reading of God's Word

This past week, I spent nearly 18 hours at a seminar on the basics of Christian growth. It's the first seminar I've been to where nearly half of it was the public reading of God's Word, the Bible. Genesis 1:1-Revelation 22:21, paragraph after paragraph, verse after verse, nothing but reading. The instructor introduced the topic, then called on the readers. We read the same English version. Moments were allowed for finding texts, and then there would be the reading. A moment or two was allowed for focus and thought.

The reading of the texts of the Bible was stunning. It was so very instructive and edifying.

Paul told Timothy: Till I come, give attention to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine. 1 Tim. 4:13.

G. Mark Sumpter

Together for the Gospel's Power

TAKE A WALK IN THE STREETS AGAIN IN YOUR MIND
AMERICA…REALLY BEAUTIFUL? SO MANY UNKIND
THE HOMES WITH PAIN, AND VARIED WITH NEED,
EDUCATION, BUSINESS, AND GOVERNMENT GREED
BIO-ETHICS, SAME-SEX UNIONS, GUNS AND DEATH
PASTORS AND PORNOGRAPHY, KIDS AND METH

IS JESUS REALLY RULING? REIGNING? WHERE IS HIS CHURCH?
I THINK SO….I SURELY HOPE SO… WE’RE ALL IN A LURCH.
IS THERE ANYTHING TO TRUST AT THE END OF THE DAY?
WHERE CAN I GO, WHERE CAN I TURN, WHAT CAN I SAY?

Jesus is addressing faith in John 14:12-following, “Truly, Truly, I say to you, He who believes in Me the works that I do, He will do also….” What is faith? Is it being positive about life? Is it an ability that faith itself has? Maybe it’s a quality that triggers the can-do work of God? What is this thing, faith?

Faith is the instrument, the means that God has appointed by which He places the gift of salvation and its fruit into our hands. More than a placement into our hands; it is the reality and security of being united to Jesus Christ. It is being in Him, and He being in us!

What is this salvation? What fruit? It’s the saving person and the saving fruit of the person and work of Jesus Christ. By the means of faith, He gives us Jesus Christ. It’s Christ being ours and at the same time Christ quickening us to abandoned fleshly works.

In having Jesus, our God provides the Holy Spirit (vss. 17-18), by Whom and through Whom there is fruitfulness. Please note the fruit as displayed in the Book of Acts.

Why fret over the world and its fruit? Our Master told us, Let not your heart be troubled. Let us go from faith to faith: asking, claiming, yielding, repenting, trusting and stepping out.

G. Mark Sumpter

Unfashionable, Four

When the church says to the world, “Hey, come up to God's high ground...,” we do this for the purpose of keeping the line of the applications of God's standards clear in order to press home the very matter that God has standards.

We don't want to de-fang the witness of faithful worship. Biblical worship has the teeth that the world is spiritually hungry for. People are spiritually hungry, but the reason for their hunger is because they continue to refuse to eat the food God has prepared. We need to serve up God's meal that meets man's need.

We must not shrink back from saying that the church's call is to have her worship culture out in front and center. Every church has a culture. Is it a biblical one?

Worship cultures are inescapable. And also, every realm of society has one---education, entertainment, business, neighborhood support groups, the medical community, volunteer clubs, athletic groups, charitable organizations, etc, etc, ----everyone has a culture (language, dress, rituals, forms of protocols and rules, leaders and followers, mission statements, etc, etc.).

The church is chiefly the organism to set the standards of her own culture that informs and transforms others. Every other sphere of society---relative to the home and to the state must take their cues from the church. She is at the center of God's witness. She needs to be different for the very purpose of being God's city on a hill; and to be His salt in the earth.

G. Mark Sumpter

Unfashionable, Three

Back to the matter of the church being a mimic to the world----back to the point relative to Paul's evangelistic methodology and missionary strategy: Our greatest downfall in making attempts to relate to the world happens while having well-meant intentions and sincere applications of practice, but lowering the bar of exacting discipleship.

Exacting discipleship is about being torn away from self, getting rid of self. First and foremost it is to tear self away from self in that we're to remember that we stand before our holy God.

For some examples with respect to public worship,

1. When we lower the bar about dress and clothing in worship and we say casual dress is OK;

2. When we lower the bar about suitable propriety in worship of the body's posture of standing, sitting or kneeling, and we say bar stools, lawn chairs and coffee bars are OK;

3. When we lower the bar on the primary means of the physical ear being what God over and over again addresses as the priority entry-gate into man for gaining His people's attention; and so we lower the bar and say it is OK to start making the physical eye disproportionately more important than the ear, so we have mini-dramas and skits, dialogs for sermons, and the like, and such things are OK.

In these cases, we lower the bar and right away, almost automatically, surrender our witness to the world. This is the primary danger of lowering the bar in the name of relating to the culture. The worldly culture already has her dress, posture and eye-gate interests. Why would the church want to mimic the world on like matters? When we do, we surrender God's moral high ground.

G. Mark Sumpter

Unfashionable, Two

I see public worship as the dominant, most important application and expression of ways and means to relate well, and to relate righteously, with the world. I think of the predominant and repetitive exhortations to Israel to be who she is in the world as a faithful worshiping people. The world is a worshiping community--either for God or against God. When God's people worship well, they both mimic the world and subdue the world.

G. Mark Sumpter

Unfashionable, One

In order to properly get in touch with the world, to be in it, to be like it, and to be immersed in it for witness and ministry's sake, the church is NOT to allow the isolated texts of Scripture about Paul's missionary methodology to drive our application. For example, when Paul had Timothy circumcised--Acts 16:3 or when Paul spoke of himself as being like those without the law--1 Cor. 9:21, I am not convinced that these texts ought to be the ones that should chiefly characterize our mimic and likeness unto the world. They may at times be the things that we do--and they might at times be the attitudes that we show forth. But I do not see them as the dominant orbit around which our relating to and our witness to the world spins. I do not see these as the dominant points of mimic from Paul. We, today, for some reason are enamored with these texts; we are given to using them as tell-tale dominant paradigms from which to derive or give shape to our ability to be in the world in a righteous way. I'm not persuaded of their dominant role.

G. Mark Sumpter

Oregonians, Waffle Stompers and Granola Bars

“We are finite beings and therefore cannot be self-sufficient. We are utterly dependent upon others, and the longer we live, the more we feel this fact. He is a fool who thinks he can live by himself. It is impossible. Nevertheless, many people are very attracted to the Romantic idea of escaping into the wilderness, living by themselves, and not depending on anyone else. It is attractive because God alone is self-sufficient, and every rebel wants to be like Him. There is something in the heart of sinful man which dislikes being indebted to anyone. If man is indebted, he is obligated to show his gratitude, and sinful man is not grateful. Instead, he wants everyone to be indebted to him. But God will humble and teach anyone who thinks in this way. He will teach him, one way or another, that he cannot be independent and that God alone is self-sufficient.” From “Friendship: Its Necessity and Obligations,” a chapter out of the book Face to Face, Meditations on Friendship and Hospitality by Steve Wilkins, Canon Press, 2002.

When is the last time you've thought of the hunger for a getaway to a cabin retreat as rebellious, typifying self-sufficiency with respect to wanting to have your space, ample distance from others? Maybe if I saw people more and more as God's good gifts to help me along in my growth in dependency, the foolish longing to escape from others would be properly corralled.

Life is not only coram deo; it is also very much coram populo.

G. Mark Sumpter