People Sharing Jesus

Hanging around places where pastors gather can be very interesting.  In the last ten to fifteen years, it has become more and more common to hear pastors say that knocking on doors doesn’t work anymore.  What they mean is that visiting people at their homes is no longer effective.  I dispute that.  This very week I have had a wonderful visit in a home where God’s Spirit moved powerfully as we talked of Christ.  I had never met these people and knew nothing of their story until ringing their doorbell and being invited inside their home.  That experience has been repeated thousands of times in dozens of communities all over Texas.  I have even had this experience in numerous foreign countries.  So here is my question for those who dare to listen.  What do you mean by “doesn’t work”?  If you mean that it does not grow the church which you serve, that is not a worthy motive for visiting homes.  As strange as it may sound to a culture that has reduced the cause of Christ to increasing attendance in churches, there are more important issues.  Visiting people is about going out to sow the seed of the good news.  It is God’s business what he does with our faithfulness.  Even if my visits resulted in growing a church across town, I will glorify the Lord that He allowed me to serve Him.  Sometimes our visits may simply change a person’s perspective of the church.  I have had people come and make professions of faith as many as five years after I shared Christ with them in their home.  There are thousands in my community who will never even consider visiting a church unless we close the gap by bringing our witness onto their turf.  The attitude and manner of our communication is critical.  We should go praying.  We should go in the name of Jesus.  We should go in love.  We should offer blessing.  We should rejoice whether we are well received or rejected.  We should show respect.  We should offer to serve.  We should listen carefully to what they say to us.  We should trust God to use our visits for His glory.

Those who say that home visits do not work are primarily those who no longer make visits.  The rest never really understood the proper way to approach people in the name of Jesus.  Count me among those who consider visiting homes as one of the most important things that I do.

Dan Wooldridge

The desperate need for rain that exists in South Central Texas reminds me of the time of Elijah the prophet.  God began to prepare the people for the showdown at Mount Carmel by sending a terrible drought on the land.  If this difficult time would cause us to turn our heart toward God, it would be well worth the pain.  As desperately as we need rain, we need revival more.  I am talking about more than just seeing people trust the Lord.  We actually have had a very good season of people making professions of faith in Christ.  I am talking about the kind of revival where a culture is deeply challenged by the hand of God.  Back to Elijah and Mt. Carmel.  God had their attention.  They asked the gods they had been trusting in to send fire from heaven and found them powerless.  Elijah asked God to send fire from heaven and the fire fell.  Shortly thereafter the rain came in a mighty torrent.  It was not so much that everyone turned to the Lord.  They didn’t then, and they won’t now.  It was that the reality and presence of God was powerfully demonstrated to a decadent culture.  That is what I mean by revival.  How we need it! 

Imagine that one day you look around at the parched earth in this part of the state and cry out to God for rain.  What if God asks, “What will you do with the blessing?”  “Will it cause you to draw closer to me?”  What would be your answer?

Shannon and I both love books.  We visit a wide variety of bookstores when we have time.  This vacation week was no exception.  The most interesting read that I had was a book by Anthony Flew entitiled, There is a God.  What made the book so interesting is that Anthony Flew has been one of the world’s most widely quoted athiests throughout all of the years that I have been in ministry.  It is a fact.  Anthony Flew now believes in a supreme being.  He is actually in touch with N. T. Wright who is the Bishop of Durham.  N. T. is a conservative, bible believing Anglican.  He is sharing with Anthony Flew and according to an appendix in the book has at least led Flew to greatly respect the Christian faith again.  Flew may put his trust in Jesus at some future point.  What a story that will be!   There is hardly any living student of atheism or agnosticism who has not quoted Flew or looked to Flew to help frame a philosophical basis for their unbelief.  Most of the current athiests such as Richard Dawkins are not nearly so schooled in philosophy and actually put forward very weak and unconvincing arguments in their presentations.  Even those who debated Flew in the past had to admit his prowess as one who could fashion an argument.  Flew often was obviously impressed with the rise of many intellectual Christian thinkers with whom he participated in debates.  I personally am inclined to think that each of them had some role in helping him process his own philosophy.  To his credit, Flew was intellectually honest enough to admit that he no longer could find a sound basis for rejecting the existence of God.  He still questions that God is interested in our daily lives.  He also is uncertain as to which, if any, religious expression of faith is accurate.  That is why it is so exciting that he respects N. T. Wright.  There is hardly a greater mind in Europe with whom he could dialogue.  N. T. Wright has written the most exhaustive scholarly treatment of the Resurrection of Christ to be found in the world.  He builds a strong basis for the idea of resurrection among the Jewish people and then expounds on the overwhelming body of evidence that underscores the bodily resurrection of Christ.  Wright is an Anglican, and represents a new kind of Anglican that may be emerging in the Christian world.  I am told that the Anglican Church in Africa also has some strong conservative voices.

   Finally, I should say that Anthony Flew grew up in the home of a Methodist minister.  Somewhere along the way his education undermined his understanding of God.  This need never happen.  When someone feels that they have outgrown God intellectually, they ususally have far too simplistic of an understanding of who God is in the first place.  Flew’s story is a reminder to be sure and intellectually engage our children as we teach them God’s word.  It is too bad that Flew’s parents could not have lived to see this day and to have read his new book.  Somehow I believe that God in His grace has allowed them to know what is going on with their very famous son.

Dan Wooldridge

When we use the word “supernatural”, we are alluding to an event or person that reveals authority to break the natural order of things.  By definition such a reality would be rare.  The rarity reveals why a given person or event is to be regarded as supernatural.  For the sake of integrity every effort should always be made to discover natural causes behind what happens.  Integrity in my own view requires that one never totally rule out the possibility of the supernatural.  The only way to do so is to claim omniscience for oneself which in itself is supernatural. 

Imagine two boxes sitting on the floor.  Those who are naturalists could be represented by the idea that everthing that exists is inside the box and their is a lid on the box.  All things can be explained in terms of the interaction of matter and energy inside the closed box.  Beside that box is a box without a lid.  Let it represent the idea that much of what happens in the box is somewhat natural.  There are any number of natural causes and effects.  However, an unseen hand can and does reach into the box from time to time and redirect certain events.  For those who consider such a notion to be ridiculous, I point to the Resurrection of Christ.  No event in history has so changed the world as has the resurrection.  The burden of proof that it did not occur is on the skeptic.  The evidence is quite overwhelming.  Modern examination has only enhanced the view that Christ rose from the dead and left the tomb empty.  He rose in a body unrestricted by things of the natural world and yet his material body somehow was gloriously transformed in his resurrection.  How is that for supernatural?  If this happened, anything can happen that the unseen hand of God chooses to do.

Dan Wooldridge

I did not attend the Brown Symposium on the campus of Southwestern University, but I did view the complete set of dvd’s from that event.  The title was “Science and Religion:  Conflict or Convergence.”  One fact that was clear was that the scientific community is a bit bewildered that the people of America are unwilling to accept the traditional views of evolution.  Almost every well educated Christian leader that I know accepts that there is a certain amount of evolution at work in the world.  A simple illustration of this would be the variation within a species over time.  What is not accepted by a strong majority is the notion that all of life has come from a simple cellular beginning.  There is no real evidence for this.  We are asked to believe by faith that because there are slight variations within species that given enough time entirely new species will emerge.  You pick your faith and I will pick mine.  I choose to put my faith in a God who created everything.  Science can do its best to answer the questions about what things are and how they work, but God is the who behind the what and how.  His fingerprints are all over creation and all over history.  Some of those prints were made by Jesus Christ, who settled forever that in the midst of the natural there is the supernatural.

Dan Wooldridge

   Sunday morning and night I shared important facts from the history of American Christianity in my messages.  I mentioned the first Great Awakening and pointed out that it played an important role in turning the colonies into a nation.  The common spiritual experiences that swept up and down the colonies caused this nation to have a consciousness of God that was not at all prevalent prior to this visitation of the Spirit.  There was a Second Great awakening that began after the Revolutionary War and the adoption of the Constitution.  This awakening had many components.  It involved the universities such as Yale where Timothy Dwight was named president just before the turn of the century in 1800.  Dwight was a devout, bible believing Christian and took on a new skepticism which had invaded America via the philosophers of the French Revolution.  A revival broke out on the campus of Yale and had its impact among many of the leading thinkers of the day.  There was also a western component in which the untamed lands to the west of the Allegheny Mountains experienced camp meetings that lasted for days and sometimes weeks.  Thousands heard and responded to the message of the gospel and the development of strong churches began to spread across the land.

    We need a third awakening.  We have had other revivals and movements that have touched us, but none that changed the course of the nation or resulted in new institutions or transformed institutions.  It is my firmly held belief that only a true awakening like our nation has already seen can reverse a decline in our culture.  It will not come unless we truly turn to God with our whole heart. 

    Allow me to boldly put in print my thoughts on what is currently happening in American Christianity.  I believe we are now in an era of consumer driven church life.  Churches are competing with goods and services against other churches.  Those inclined to attend and participate migrate around sampling the various churches largely without respect to doctrinal teaching.  A recent study revealed that the megachurches are not really reaching the unreached.  It was found that they largely reach people with a church background and only periodically reach those not previously involved.  The study further pointed out that churches with extravagant and appealing programs tend to cannibalize smaller churches.  In some situations churches have virtually disappeared due to the outward migration of members to megachurches.  In my opinion Christian leaders need to take a fresh look at the mission and purpose of the church.  Instead of seeking to market the Christian faith, we need to trust the Lord to move by His Spirit.  Real awakenings begin with prayer.  They reach into the surrounding pagan culture.  They influence the established powers that be.  They alter the course of history.  When will we cry out to God for a fresh moving of His Spirit?

Dan Wooldridge

When our family arrived in Georgetown fourteen years ago this month, I had no idea that I was entering a totally different cultural setting.  Having pastored for ten years in South Texas, I knew that culture pretty well.  The balance of my years prior to Georgetown were spent in the Abilene and Brownwood regions including as far south as Mason and as far north as Baird.  I was largely unacquainted with metropolitan churches other than an occasional invitation to lead in evangelism training or preach a series of services.  In one of my first pastor’s meetings in Georgetown, I was amazed to discover that most of the pastors wanted to get rid of Sunday night and Wednesday night speaking responsibilities.  What really brought this into focus was a visit by Richard Jackson.  Richard had just retired from pastoring North Phoenix Baptist Church in Phoenix, Arizona.  He was invited to speak at a rally at Crestview and then meet with pastors at a conference the next day.  One of the first questions he was asked was what to do about Sunday night.  The implied sentiment was that it ought to be discarded or at least adjusted.  Richard Jackson was a football star at Howard Payne in his youth and has a “take no prisoners” style of speaking.  He turned the question around and asked, “Tell me about your attitude toward Sunday night?  Do you bring enthusiasm to the task?  Do you prepare?  Do you expect God to do something?”  I was elated at his challenge.  To me that is the real issue.  I delight in the variety of emphases that Sunday night affords.  I delight in the opportunity to see people enter the fellowship of the church as they did last Sunday night.  I delight in Sunday night baptisms.  I delight in special events.  By keeping the doors open on Sunday night, you create a climate for churchwide events so that when you have a special program you already have a base of people for whom Sunday night is a regular experience.  Wednesday night is also an additional opportunity for people with particularly challenging schedules.  In addition to sharing information for ministry and prayer purposes, there are outreach realities afforded on Wednesday to people we will almost never see on Sunday.  This is especially true in youth and children’s work.  It is also true in our ESL programs.  Last night I had a wonderful visit with a guest who is searching for a church home.  Wednesday night allows such conversations.  A number of Wednesday night services have seen professions of faith and baptisms.  One family in our church worked on Sunday several years back.  They became faithful attenders on Wednesday.  They were baptised on Wednesday night.  What if we could not have offered them that avenue of fellowship?  Small groups are very useful, and I welcome their creation.  I see them as complimentary to everything we do.  However, in my view the corporate experiences of the church afford the best opportunity for people to make commitments not just to a few peers, but to the Body of Christ.  I am aware of several strong churches who have shut down their Sunday night worship and replaced them with small group opportunities.  If I were in such a setting, I believe I would allow the small groups to meet concurrent with an evening service, but offer an evening service for the sake of those who may sense a need for that additional opportunity for worship.  I would not see this as competing, but rather complimenting components.  Best of all it would allow that person with no awareness an opportunity to walk in on a Sunday night without any previous information as to the location of groups and find the people of God at worship and in the Word.  To those pastor’s who complain that it requires too much study time on their part, I can only listen in bewilderment and reply, “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!”  (1 Corinthians 9:16)

Dan Wooldridge