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Showing posts from March, 2015

Issues Facing Missions Today 31: Post-Christian Culture and Changes in the Workplace

Issues Facing Missions Today 31: Post-Christian Culture and Changes in the Workplace In this post, I would like to compare the challenges facing Christians in the workplace around AD 200 and today.  Both contexts involve Christians living as a minority group within a larger society.  The former period is represented in the writings of Tertullian, who advised Christians how to live in a pre-Christian society.  Does Tertullian give us some food for thought as we increasingly realize in the West that we live in a post-Christian society? The Christian author, Tertullian, addressed the issue of how the minority Christian group should maintain its convictions in the pagan workplace.  He wrote in an era of idolatry and persecution.  In On Idolatry , Tertullian discussed certain types of work that he believed Christians could not do because they involved a compromise of their faith.  While some occupations were acceptable to Christians, others were clearly not. Obviously, Christia

Issues Facing Missions Today 30: A City on a Hill; But Jack Fell Down and Broke His Crown

Issues Facing Missions Today 30: A City on a Hill; But Jack Fell Down and Broke His Crown  Three news items regarding the Church and its mission this month stood out as examples of churches giving up their position of being a city on a hill for the nations.  Each is a Jack or Jill tumbling down the hill, leaving behind the water of life above in order to have fellowship with the world below, giving up its witness.  The path taken by three churches caving to cultural pressures does not seem to be a lonely one, however.  I will simply report the stories to the extent that I know about them and then juxtapose an alternative, Biblical vision for the witness of God’s people to the world. The first story comes out of San Francisco, a city that shares some of the notoriety that was once the dishonor of ancient Corinth.  As we might imagine John would have written to the church (cf. Rev. 2-3), ‘To the angel of the Church of San Francisco, write, “Stand fast in the city of sexual permi