The Official Site of Andy Boucher

1 Peter 3:8

So finally I conclude with this:

all of you be like-minded and harmonious (like music that is please to the ear), feeling and expressing mutual sympathy, support, and loyalty back and forth to each other; be fond of each other with a brotherly love and have a deep awareness of and sympathy for each others suffering; and have a humble opinion of yourselves and a deep sense of your own moral littleness apart from Christ.

1 Peter 4:7 & 8:

Since the conclusion and termination of all things is approaching, you should certainly therefore be of a sober and sound mind, self-controlled in your opinions and passions, being marked by prudence, modesty, and wise self-restraint so that you can be earnest in your prayers and worship.

And more important than anything else, make your highest priority in everything to hold yourselves to be constantly intentionally, purposefully, and fervently intense in your self-sacrificing love and benevolent affection among the whole lot of you, because self-sacrificing love and benevolent affection covers over and hinders the knowledge of an indefinite number of sins, offenses, errors, mistakes, and unmet expectations.

(1) Because of what I just wrote about judgment in the church and about suffering, I want to call aside the presbyters (elders) who have been put in position in your local church and beseech them and implore them from where I sit as a co-presbyter (I too am an elder) as well as a witness of the hardships, pain, and emotions of our Messiah and as one who will also share the apparent glory when it is revealed:

(2) Tend to the flock of God which you are positioned among—supervise and feed them and beware to take diligent oversight of this flock.

Not because you are compelled to do so,

But because you have willfully volunteered.

Not because it pays well or advances your social status,

But with liveliness and eagerness of mind.

(3)And also without being domineering and subjecting the flock under your care like worldly overlords do,

Because these people are the portion of God’s flock that He has assigned to your care, be a model for them to follow.

(4)  And when the Head Shepherd comes and manifests Himself, you will be reward the honor of a crown of dignity and praise—the glory of which will never fade.

This look at Ephesians 4:11-13 is my part in examining those questions and trying to find answers to them. I would love any reader’s thoughts and feedback and additions and critique.

(11) Christ adventured to bestow on local churches:

1. those who are His delegated commissioners and messengers who are sent out by Him with miraculous powers on His mission to establish new works for Him on this earth;
2. as well as those who He has enabled to see His plans for the future and to clearly and eloquently speak His mind into specific situations;
3. and those He as enabled to preach the Gospel to those who have not heard the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ;
4. and those to whom He has given His heart for that local body of believers to care for them as shepherds care for their sheep;
5. and those He as enabled with knowledge and insight and understanding of both His Word and those in the congregation and the ability to instruct the body of Christ with that knowledge.

(12) Christ has given these to the church in order to:

1. completely furnish His chosen people for the toil and labor of serving and assisting others in ministry;
2. And for the planning, designing and construction of the infrastructure and all that is necessary for the Body of Christ to exist and function.

(13) All of this needs to continue until:

1. all of us reach the point where we all have attained unanimity and oneness in our commons faith;
2. and where we all fully know, recognize, and discern the Son of God;
3. and until we have together become as a man who has completely matured in his mind and moral character; a point of spiritual maturity where we are all properly aged in all that it means to be mature in Christ.

(14) We need to be spiritually mature, so that from this time forward, we will no longer insist on being immature like little children who can’t speak for themselves or aren’t allow to speak because they are immature and simple-minded. people who are like little children fluctuate back and forth like the tides of the sea and are like wayfarers who are carried here and there by winds of doctrine and teaching that blow in from the four corners of the earth and from every which direction of religious beliefs. They are carried away by religious illusionists who create erroneous doctrines that look true. And by those who develop invalid arguments that are ingenuously designed in their methodology with the hope of deceiving people and in their fraudulence to lead people away from what is orthodox and from living righteous lives that result from a reverence for God.

(15) Instead of being deceiving illusionists, those who Christ as given to the local church as apostles, prophets, evangelists, teachers, and pastors are to each live genuinely with self-sacrificing love and affection and are to teach what is true and not concealing any of the truth so that everyone in the Body will increase in their spiritual maturity and relationship with Christ.

Christ is the head of the body which is the church. In His body everything is closely-joined and fitted together and knit together with each connecting ligament (apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers) contributing its own part and support and working to the highest efficient that each is designed for. As each part performs its part with self-sacrificing love and affection, the body’s infrastructure grows according to its design and purpose.

A couple of weeks ago at our church’s prayer meeting, the Lord led me to Jeremiah 6:16:

Thus says the Lord:

“Stand by the roads, and look,

     And ask for the ancient paths,

Where the good way is; and walk in it,

    And find rest for your souls.

             But they said, ‘we will not walk in it.’”

As I’ve thought through this verse, I thought about a lot of the conversations I’ve had in recent years about church planting and leadership. I love talking about the church and what a new church could look like. Yet, I find that many times, our efforts to repaint the church and reframe Christianity are trying to come up with new things that will catch the attention of the unsaved masses and disgruntled Christians. However, as each new church plant goes out, these new churches need to be more than vision and personality. They need to be more in order to insure that their churches grow and mature and put down deep roots and grow strong branches.

For a church to have depth and breadth of impact and longevity of ministry there needs to be a difference more than one man/one personality driven structure of leadership. I believe that the personality and the vision and the passion and the Scriptural basis and the guidance and the decisions of the church need to be deeper and broader than and need to rest on more than just several men and their wives. This is a problem that so many churches in America and the western model of Christianity have employed for millennia and a model that is troubled in its results because of its lack of biblical precedence.

I am convinced that in order for any new church to be more than a flash in the pan and a quickly approaching memory in the spiritual history of a city or community, that the leadership of the church needs to revisit the Scriptures asking the question, how do we structure the leadership of this church that God has called us to plant and how to we structure it according to the Scriptures—not according to the traditions and wisdom of man.

I think that as we seek to minister to our communities—whether with new churches or old that we need to find the old paths and the ways of the ancients and follow them. I believe that the best and most obvious, but often overlooked ancient path is that of the Scriptures. These next several blogs are things I’ve recently rediscovered in the Scriptures or that have been refreshed in my mind.

One of the things that has captured my attention recently is the Scriptural phrase “your God”. Every people had their god or gods—their local gods—their elohiym. Each nation had their various gods—the gods of Egypt, the gods of the Philistines, the gods of the Greeks, and the gods of the Romans to mention a few. Yahweh introduces Himself to the Jews as a local god and promises to them that He would be their own elohiym or local god (Exodus 6:7; Genesis 17:7). As Yahweh reveals Himself to Abraham and the Jews and to us throughout Scripture, He reveals Himself as not just being the biggest and bad-est god on the block, but actually as being the God of the block.

Today we once again live in a society and culture where our god is not recognized as the one and only God. Everyone now has or is their own religion and god. Some are “self made” gods and religions of postmodernism and others are the age old established gods and religions like Islam and Buddhism. This is nothing new to history, the Bible, Christianity, or our God. I believe that our God is willing to begin with simply being our own local god. It’s ok with Him to be one amongst a number of local deities to begin with. He is secure enough with Himself in order to establish as such a relationship with us.

Yet, He does so desire to reveal His real nature to us. His character demands it and His relational love for us demands it (just like we desire to share the reality of who we are with those we love). He strongly desires to tell us: “I’m not like those other gods.” “I’m so very different from them. Here, let me show you the difference between Me and them.” Our God desires to reveal Himself to us, where many of the other gods of this world continue to seek and scheme to hide their true and inferior identify from their worshipers. Our God desires to reveal Himself as the God who actually created the endless universe that the other gods claim to be gods of and have authority over. Our God, will beat up any other god we put up against Him—not because He’s a big supernatural bully, but because He alone is the one true God. In fact, the other gods are the supernatural bullies who are bullying us so they can try to replace our God by stealing away our allegiance and keeping others from know our God.

Not only is our God (the God of gods) bigger than these other gods and can (and will) beat them into an oblivion, but our God loves us so much that He actually chose to die for us so that all the things we’ve done to offend Him can be covered and so that we can have a relationship with Him. Even more than that, He raised Himself from the dead—conquering death—and came to live within us empowering us to live a life that pleases Him. Not only have the other gods—Allah and Mammon among them—NOT died for us to remove our sins and restore our relationship with him or her—Baal and Gaia included—but, those other gods have no victory over death and do not empower their followers to live the life those gods demand of their followers.

So, when I read where Yahweh, my local god, says, “I will make you My own special people, and I will be your God (elohiym)” (Exodus 6:7; 1 Peter 2:9-10), I want that!! When I read that I can “know Jesus, our God and Lord, better and better’ (2 Peter 1:2) and I read “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty (omnipotent) reigns” (Revelation 19:6), I want to have Him as my local and personal god God. I want to be one who “knows their God and stands firm and does exploits” for Him (Daniel 11:32).

And I want Him to be yours too. It’s ok to say, “Come worship my local God”. He daily loads His followers with benefits and daily carries our burdens (Psalm 68:19 NKJV/NIV). In the words of the Desperation anthem: “This is our God! This is our King!”

This is the fasting (abstaining) that I’ve selected as acceptable and therefore require of you:

Loosen and open wide the painful fetters caused by your wickedness and iniquity;

Untie and shake off the yoke that you have strapped on;

Let those who are discouraged; bruised, and oppressed from their struggles be free from care;

And tear off every single yoke that burdens you and those under you.

It is to distribute your food to those who are going hungry;

To fetch the lowly, poor, humble and depressed who have been cruelly and inhumanely treated and cast out of their homes and them into your house;

And when you come across someone who doesn’t have clothes, provide them with what they need to be adequately clothed;

And do hide yourself and your generosity from yourself and your own kinfolk.

If you do this, then as a result, you will shine forth and your brightness will be made to break through your circumstances like at dawn the sun breaks through the darkness of night,

And the soundness of your health will promptly sprout and the duration of your service will be prolonged for a long time.

The prosperity of your natural, moral, and legally right, equity will precede you before the face of God

And the glory and splendor of Yahweh will haunt you and protect you from behind.

Then when you call out to Yahweh and bid Him to hear you,

Yahweh will pay attention and respond.

When you cry out for help, He will expressly answer you saying,

“Behold, I am here!”

If you pluck away and remove the heavy yoke of work and the unjust use of authority,

And the accusatory pointing of the finger,

And the troublesome and empty talking that brings to good with it but only wickedness

And if you provide your soul vitality to those who suffer from hunger,

And to fill up and satiate the soul vitality of those who are browbeaten, depressed, and afflicted;

It is then that your brightness will shine forth out of the darkness, misery, ignorance, and obscurity and provide spiritual insight as it spreads forth;

And it is then that the darkness and misfortune around you will be changed to the brightness of the sun at noon.

Yahweh will regularly and constantly lead you forth; transporting and guiding you as you go forward.

And He will fill your soul and vitality to satisfaction during times of drought.

He will equip and strengthen the substance of your life and arm you for the fight.

You will be like a well-watered garden

And like a spring of water whose water never fails.

If you do this you and your people will begin to build up and have children who build up and repair the ancient places that have been laid waste and made desolate and abandoned to decay.

You will raise up and cause to be raised up and strengthen the foundations that will be established for the sake of generations to come.

Your reputation and title will be the one who repaired and closed up the wall (Repairer of Broken Walls);

And the one who cleared the paths and streets to restore usefulness so people could once again live in their houses and open their shops for business (Restorer of Inhabitable Neighborhoods).

Oh that you would turn your feet back and return from breaking the Sabbath by busying yourself and going about your own busyness and purposes on the Sabbath—the day I’ve set apart and hallowed rather than My business.

Consider and refer to the Sabbath with delight

And as a sacred sanctuary Yahweh has created and set apart to be full of honor.

So honor Him and this holy day by making it your custom to not go about your own business and keep your own pleasure on this day,

Or see the Sabbath as a day that exists and has value only for your own pleasurable purposes

Or talking only about things that interest you rather than My things.

Change your attitude, perspectives, and actions regarding My Sabbath, then you will find that Yahweh will be your luxurious and gratifying delight.

And I will officially dispatch you to ride on the mountain tops of the land and to receive great honor;

And I will give you your allotted inheritance, a church endowment, and estate to occupy as your own with all of its assets and accompanying heirlooms passed down to you from your ancestors (specifically your father Jacob).

I, Yahweh, have declared this with My own mouth.

1 Adonai, You exist as our abode of refuge, our asylum, and our retreat throughout all our generations-in ages past and for our posterity.

(1 January 2010)

12 So cause us to observe, discern, be instructed in and have an understanding on how to weigh out, enumerate, count, number, prepare and appoint the days of our life times so that we may surely be granted, enter into and attain skillful wisdom at the center of our being.

(12 May 2007)

13 Turn back and return to us, O Yahweh, the Eternal and Self-Existent One!

How long will it be?

Feel compassion and pity upon Your bondservants!

14 Fill us to satisfaction at daybreak with the beauty of piety and kind favor upon us

So that we shout and sign triumphantly in joy and be elated and high-spirited in spite of our circumstances throughout all the days of our lives.

15 Give to us joy and elation in proportion to the number of days You have (or You have allowed us to be… browbeaten, depressed, chastened, and dealt harshly with us;

And the years we have seen and experienced adversity, calamity, distress, mischief, and ill-favor.

16 Let us behold, gaze on, and experience Your miraculous practices and work habits;

And let our children and our students behold, gaze on, and experience Your magnificence and the honor of Your glorious excellency!

17 Let the pleasant splendor, delight, and beautiful favor of Yahweh-Elohiym, the Eternal and Self-existent One who is our own God, rest upon us.

May it be that as it rests up on us, You would appoint, set up, and prosperously, and properly establish the transactions, products, poems and artistic works of our hands.

May our ministry and the things we’ve thrown our direction, power, and means into be prepared, ordained, and properly established as a result of Your beautiful favor upon us!

(9 January 2010)

written October 2009

My Summary: 

In this new economic and cultural climate, I believe that Christian education plays an even more important role that it has been given credit for in the church and even in the world of Christian education. As we move forward, I believe that Christian education needs to quickly transition from being another option of educating our children alongside the public and charter schools and homeschooling; and from an opportunity to provide better academic education and athletic state championships into a effective movement of preparing Christian students to serve the Kingdom of God both in and out of the church. Christian education doesn’t have the luxury of being mediocre or trying to be like other schools. Christian education must be unique in its target, focus, and outcomes. Christian educators must think beyond test scores, sports championships, buildings, and endowment funds (all of which are valuable and indespensible to excellent Christian education), and must focus on preparing our students to be active Kingdom leaders in a changing world. Christian students must learn to take a proactive lead in all areas of ministries both in the church and in the work place. We can no longer simply hope that our students understand how to be a physicist from a Christian perspective or a politician from a Christian perspective. They need to be blatantly instructed that Christian statisticians behave and analyze and report in this way; pastors act and live and preach like this or that, and so on.  This is just the beginning of the changes we need to make. 

In the bullet points below, I have pulled ideas and quotes from the Internet Monk's 3 blogs on the "Coming Evangelical Collapse" that I believe applly to the needed changes in  Christian education and the up and coming role of Christian education as Evangelicalism collapses.

Teaching Doctrine

Christian teachers need to teach their students so that their students are able to:

• Understand and articulate the Gospel with coherence;
• Understand and articulate the basics of the Christian faith in the orthodox form
• Understand and articulate why they should obey the Scriptures
• Understand and articulate the essentials of theology and experiences of spiritual disciplines and community
• Understand and articulate the strong core of evangelical beliefs
• Have a confidence in the Bible
• Understand and articulate how to follow Christ in a post-Christian, post-Evangelical, post-Protestant era
• Identify heresy (not just cults), relativism, and confusion within Christian doctrine
• Understand and articulate the value of Biblical authority
• Understand and articulate accurate Biblical views on the economic implications of the Gospel and Christian living and affluence and identify the difference between Biblical views and the adaptations of current cultural views into Christianity.

Teaching Ecclesiology

Christian schools need to teach:

• That church an approach to church that is more than “the pragmatic, therapeutic, church growth oriented mega churches”
• The value of the historical churches
• The basic call of the church
• The preservation and communication of the essentials of the Gospel and the church itself
• The importance of innovation, being missionally minded, being historically and confessionally orthodox
• How to be culturally appropriate

Teaching Leadership

Christian schools need to provide leadership training that:

• Teaches biblical authority and how it relates to leadership in the church
• The importance of strong Biblical leadership [Henri J.M. Nouwen/C. Clark]
• Teaches innovation in re-structuring churches and church organizations

Other Conclusions:

• With the predicted passing of the traditional seminary system, I (Boucher) see the role of Christian education as being an important baseline of preparing students to be lay and vocational participants in the church in the areas of core orthodox doctrines, practical methods of leadership, the Gospel, spiritual disciplines
• I see the role of the internship program and mentoring as being key
• Christian school can no longer produce a product that simply holds the line in the rising tide of secularism (blog 1, point 2) or simply be used by the Christian community to staff its own needs and talk to itself (blog 1, point 4)

In the last 6 months I’ve read the online commentary of the Internet Monk on what he calls “The Coming Evangelical Collapse” (this is the first of 3 blogs on this subject).  I recommend reading it and would love to discuss his ideas and its implications for youth ministry and especially for Christian education. Here is my summary of his three bogs. I’d love for comments to my summary and forthcoming analysis.

The Christian education response to “The Coming Evangelical Collapse”.

Big points:

• Evangelical Christianity’s association with the right-wing, republican, conservative culture war.
• Need for more intentional Gospel and ecclesiology training of our young people

The theme that captured my attention in this series of blocks/articles was the idea of the training of young people. To me, this appears to be both the problem that leads us to this predicted collapse and the solution to the reshaping of Christianity through this process. Repeatedly, IM mentions his concerns about the teaching and training of our youth.

1. “Massive majorities of evangelicals can’t articulate the Gospel with coherence and are believing in a cause more than a faith.” (blog 1, point 1)
2. “Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people the evangelical Christian faith in an orthodox form that can take root and survive the secular onslaught.” (blog 1, point 2)
3. Our “evangelical culture …has spent billions…. [and] has produced an entire…culture of young Christian who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it.”
4. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey Scripture, the essentials of theology or the experience of spiritual discipline and community.” (blog 1, point 2)
5. “Christian education has not produced a product that can hold the line in the rising tide of secularism.” (blog 1, point 2)
6. “….evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself.” (blog 1, point 4)
7. “A strong core of evangelical beliefs is not present in most of our young people, and will be less present in the future.” (blog 1, point 2)
8. “At the core of this collapse will be the inability to pass on, to our children, a vital evangelical confidence in the Bible and the importance of the faith.” (blog 1, point 6)

• Ultimately the question is: how do we teach our students to follow Christ and “do church” in a post-Christian, post-evangelical America?

What the church will look like (which poses the question, if we’re training kids to be involved in church as lay or vocational participants, how do we train them?):

• “expect evangelicalism as a whole to look more and more like the pragmatic, therapeutic, church growth oriented megachurches that have defined success….the result will be, in the main, a departure from doctrine to more and more emphasis on relevance, motivation and personal success…with the result being churches further compromised and weakened in their ability to pass on their faith.” (blog 2, point a)
• “An evangelicalized Catholicism and Orthodoxy….I expect the reviews of the influence of evangelicalism in these communions to be decidedly mixed.” (blog 2, point b)
• “I believe the emerging church will largely vanish from the evangelical landscape, become part of the small segment of progressive mainline Protestants that remain true to the liberal vision.” (blog 2, point d)
• “A small portion of evangelicalism will continue down the path of theological re-construction and recovery….a small, but active and vocal portion of evangelicalism will work hard to rescue the evangelical movement from its demise by way of theological renewal. …I do believe many evangelical churches and schools will benefit from this segment of evangelicalism, and I believe it will contribute far beyond its size to the cause of world missions.” (blog 2, point b)
• “Aggressively evangelistic fundamentalist churches [like the SBC] will begin to disappear…” (blog 2, point e)
• charismatic-Pentecostal Christianity will become the majority report in evangelicalism…who must decide whether their tradition will sink into the quicksand of heresy, relativism and confusion, or whether charismatic-Pentecostalism can experience a reformation and renewal around Biblical authority, responsibility leadership and a re-emergence of orthodoxy.”

•  “the key issue of leadership and the preparation of leaders leaves me with little hope that charismatic-Pentecostal Christianity can put its house in order…I see and hear little from this community’s younger leadership that indicates there is anything close to a real recognition of the problems they face.” (blog 2, point f)

Para-church ministries:

• “…parachurch ministries are going to become far less influential, and many will vanish…the same will likely be true…of Christian media to publishing.” (blog 2, point h)
• “I believe that the missionary sending agencies of evangelicalism will survive…but will be greatly weakened.” (blog 2, point i)

Predictions:

• “… the most basic calling of the church: the preservation and communication of the essentials of the Gospel in the church itself.” (blog 3)
• …innovative, missionally minded, historically and confessionally orthodox churches to “Emerge” in the place of the traditional church…developing new and culturally appropriate churches.” (blog 3)
• “…a unity where the cleavage between doctrine and spiritual gifts isn’t’ assumed.” (blog 3)
• “the ascendency of charismatic-Pentecostal influenced worship…if that development is joined with the calling, training and mentoring of leaders…and more…influence of the movement of the Spirit in Africa and Asia.”
• “Coming to terms with the economic implications of the Gospel [which has] proven particularly difficult for evangelicals. Perhaps the time is coming that this entanglement [of theology and personal affluence and success] will be challenged, especially in the lives of younger Christians.”
• “Christianity has flourished when it should have been exterminated.”
• “…new forms of Christian vitality and ministry will be born. New kinds of church structure, new uses of gifts, new ways to develop leaders and do the mission…will appear.”
• I expect to see a substantial abandonment of the seminary system…to church based seminaries to internet schools to mentoring and apprenticing arrangements.”

Resolved:

• I will let the peace of God which passes all understanding guard my heart and my mind in Christ Jesus;
• I will employ the joy of Yahweh as my strength
• And therefore, I will have a relaxed attitude which (apparently) will lengthen my life.

Therefore, I will not be grieved, worried, dejected, vexed, or angry about anything, but will instead pray about everything, listing my concerns to God and thanking Him for all that He has done.

Supporting Verse Analysis

Philippians 4:6-7

4 I tell you, be earnest and regular in being calmly happy in your inner man and be cheerful in your interpersonal relationships, greeting others joyfully. I say it again for emphasis: be calmly happy in yourself and cheerful with others. 5 make sure that absolutely everyone knows and has evidence from experience that you are appropriate, patient, gentle, and considerate in all you do. The Lord, our Master and the controller of all things is near to us and readily available. He will soon return. In fact, He has put a limit on the time until He intervenes. 6 don’t be careful; don’t be anxiously holding back; don’t delay your plans or activities because of distracting circumstances or concerns you have. instead, in absolutely every manner and issue, get away into God’s presence and earnestly pray to God and list your concerns before Him, earnestly begging and entreating Him for guidance, but with an attitude of gratitude, using actively grateful language, worshipping Him as God, and thanking Him for all He has done and is about to do. ask God for attention to your requests, making known to Him your heart and concerns I this way 7 and you’ll find that His prosperous peace, and His quiet soul rest—the kind that is so far above and superior to and more excellent than absolutely anything that our human intellect can decipher or our feelings and will can comprehend—will be your advance guard, the mounted sentinel that hems you in with a garrison of protection around the innermost places of your intellectual thoughts and feelings as well as your disposition, perceptions, and purposes through the work of our Messiah and Savior, Christ Jesus.

Nehemiah 8:10

…instead of grieving over the realization of your situation and being vexed, displeased, and worrying about it, remember instead that you are fortified, defended, and strengthened by rejoicing in Yahweh and finding your gladness in Him.

Proverbs 14:30

A sound, tranquil, yielding, placed heart that brings a relaxed attitude is a curative wholesome medicine that brings and maintains fresh life and strength to your body and even your family.

However, jealous and envious zeal causes rottenness and decay to your bones and the very substance of your life.