Course: Spiritual Life of the Leader

Lecture 1: Christian Activism

Christian activism is Christians seeking to be involved in the issues and needs of the day and time. Wesleyans in the 1700's in England sought to minister to people that others didn’t care about. To be called by Christ is to be called into the body of Christ. A biblical model is that every member is a full-fledged minister of the gospel without distinction between clergy and laity.

I. Personal Introduction

I was a pastor for twenty-eight years ministering all over the United States and I am now at Asbury Theological Seminary. After being a pastor for so long, now I am training pastors. We are going to ask the Holy Spirit to guide us and bless and use this for God’s glory and his kingdom. I pray that there will be something here that the Lord will use to help you wherever you are and whenever you are. I hope these lectures will better equip you as a minister of the Gospel whether ordained or not. I pray during this teaching series that the Holy Spirit leads and that God’s goodness will contain and keep everything from any error. We want to hear from God, his life and liberty and his great love for all of us.

II. Sociological and Ecclesiological Issues

A. 1800’s in English

I want to start out by looking back at some sociological issues and ecclesiological issues. Ecclesiology is the whole church and how the Lord works through his body, the bride. I want to look back at some trends that go back to the 1800's to get an overview of what happened in England at that time and why that matters to us today. There are dynamics behind the history that we find ourselves in at this moment, especially in how we work and think about ministry. I am going to post a sermon that was by a famous Baptist preacher by the name of Alexander Maclaren. He has a whole volume of preaching and teaching messages that is great exegetical work with solid material behind it. I want to go back and look at this closely. Maclaren lived until 1910 and was a pastor of Union Chapel in Manchester, England. It was a great leading church during of that day. This was a time of no electronic projection which would require him to have a booming voice. You had your main Anglican Church that wasn’t a part of the mainline church of that day. Keep in mind that key ministers during the time of Queen Victory; the whole world was getting better and better and England was expanding all over the globe. It was a great time. Yet, there were some issues then.

B. Rise of Christian Activism

Christianity made a sociological jump in Great Britain in the 19th century. This was the rise of Christian Activism. This word activism is part of some of the words they used then. In the century before this, there was a great revival that took place in the 1700’s, specifically from 1739 to 1790 in Great Britain that was led by John and Charles Wesley. Even during their day, there were no public schools and so John and Charles Wesley starting the public school system. They were literally kicked out of the established Anglican Church; they then preached in the streets and city squares and you can see historic markers today in where they preached. They led common people to Christ; people who wouldn’t necessarily end up in an Anglican Church. They didn’t have the clothes to go to an Anglican Church for one thing. Besides schools, they started Orphanages; medical dispensaries and they educated people on how to read. They developed ways to take care of widows and established other types of Christian ministry. These things were always tied to the presentation of the Gospel and in-cooperated into God’s church. Good works were never disassociated or cut off from the Gospel. Then by the latter part of the 1700’s, they were starting to send missionaries out as were the Anglicans. Actually, the Anglicans had been sending out missionaries long before this time.

C. Definition of Christian Activism

But now in the early 1800’s, this thing starts to expand and this business of Christian Activism; in other words, Christians seeking to be involved in the needs and in the issues of the day and time. This was all a very good thing. Are we not as Christians called to be involved in whatever the needs of the day and time are. The whole dynamic of the Wesleyans sought to minister to the poor, to the downcast, otherwise to people that others didn’t care about. There is nothing wrong with Christian Activism as such. But we are now going to see and also in the coming sessions that there are some issues in regards to who we are in Christ. So, there were organizations and missions and benevolent societies. A lot of people became involved in outreach into the lives of others in England. You can look back in registries in cities such as Bristol. Of the twenty-one such societies registered early in that century, by the end there were a hundred and sixteen registered religious and benevolent institutions. This was during the time of the Salvation Army with Booth which is even today in China. This was one of the great miracles that we have seen in the last decade coming out of the Methodist Church. Their target audiences were working with the poor. All of these institutions were doing good work in the name of Jesus. In that day and time, the high water mark of attendance in Anglian Churches happened in 1859. After this, attendance started to erode in these churches. There was an invention that came in 1859 that involved activity and movement; this was the bicycle. People started to disassociate from going to church on a regular basis. And today in the States regular attendance is around once a month. This trend started in 1859 with the dominant church in England, but at the same time mission activities increased.

D. Sermon by Alexander Maclaren 1901

On Monday, October 7, 1901, Maclaren gave the opening address to the autumn assembly of the Baptist Union. The address was a classic sermon which I was able to get. It is a beautiful address and definitely worth us looking at. He was in Edinburgh, Scotland at the time and at the beginning of the address, he starts off by talking about a sane and wholesome mysticism. This is not a word that we normally like to use today because of some of the present day movements in the Christian tradition which are not grounded and solid at all. But Maclaren was a solid biblical person and his understanding of mysticism includes that which is at the heart of Christianity. He is talking about a certain sense of what he would later define as the direct communion of the human with the divine Spirit. The Holy Spirit is at work in my life; I have a relationship with Jesus and I am following Christ and the Holy Spirit is pointing me toward Christ. He continued to say that we tend to think of Christ for us as the whole of the Gospel. Theologically, in talking about what Christ does for us includes atonement and substitution; it is anything to do with the Cross. This is a free gift to us.

So what did substitution accomplish for us? We are justified which paved the way for the use of the word justification. When we look at what Christ does for us, it really comes under this huge broad heading of justification. This involves the merits of Christ which has accomplished for us what none of us could do. This made possible a relationship back with the Father. But Maclaren is pointing at a historical classical Christianity here. He is going to try and make a case giving us a fairly sharp word and critique. He says that we must also take into account the other half of this business of what Christ does in us and what he accomplishes not only for us but in us. Because, what he is saying: this whole business of taking on the character and nature of Christ is paramount. You need both of these in your life, not just one. When we think about what Christ does for us in justification; so what is it that he does in us? This is sanctification. So we have justification, what Christ does for us and we have sanctification, what Christ does in us. This is the work of Christ which is his nature, his love and his goodness literally being poured into our lives, to where we are being conformed to his image. And that which destroys life, which is sin is no longer ruling and reigning in us. Justification breaks the hold of sin in our lives and allows for forgiveness to come and allows relationships to be restored.

Maclaren moves on when he talks about Christ in us. He comes to a climatic point which says that we must all rejoice in the manifold activity of the church. He is talking about all of this involvement that he saw throughout English, but this doesn’t just include Baptist Churches but also the Anglican Churches. There was a renewal movement happening in the Anglican church as well. He says that none of us would have these diminished but rather would wish that they would increase a hundred-fold until an inactive Christian was as much a rarity as people are always a walking contradiction. To be called to Christ is to be called into the body of Christ. This is not a two-tiered system where you have the pastors and the ministers doing all the work and the people receiving all the work and doing little. This wasn’t an early church model and it isn’t a biblical model at all. And regards to the reformation, the reformation isn’t finished for we have a long way to go in terms of understanding every member of Christ being a full-fledged full on minister of the Gospel. If you delineate it out where you have ministers and members; this is not a biblical mode of church. There will be some pastors and some that are called and hopefully gifted to specific things. This great old Baptist preacher is now pulling out a double edge sword and it is very sharp.

He says that life is the root of work and more important than work. We will be working on unfolding this in this teaching series. He is calling into question priorities in how we live and how we invest our time and how we walk and move. He is saying that life has to be hierarchical; in other words, there has to be a priority and what he is saying is that sadly our activities for God is not going to be at the top of the hierarchy. This is somewhat counter cultural. It was counter cultural then and also now. So life is the root of work and more important than work; and it is open to doubt that the abundant work of the churches, the local congregations, at present are the outcome of life that comes from God or whether they are not in some cases galvanic movements that stimulate vitality and mass death. He just puts the sword into the very heart of the world view of pastors and leaders in that day and age. When you galvanize something, you shoot an electrical current through it and it doesn’t rust or corrode. It takes a lot of energy to do this. So, he is saying that you are generating a lot of energy, you are burning a lot of fuel, pushing a large program but I’m not sure in the long run that this is kingdom work. So, we ask the Lord to give us this kind of prophetic courage in this day and age as well. The church still stands in need of reformation so we are asking for the ability to see the world views that are driving us to do the types of ministry and the kind of involvement that we have today. Maclaren goes to Luke 10 and says, ‘Martha has her own way now;’ we will look at this in the next session.