The Ability To Look Beyond Us

Do your windows need washing--again?

Paul wrote to slaves in Colossians 3:23, “Whatever you do, do your work heartily as unto the Lord.”

A powerful word for when the work we're doing makes us feel like slaves. Vacuuming carpets (again)? Fixing the leaky sink (again)? If this work doesn't seem like “the work of God,” there is something we can do about it: we can think differently about work.

This is the power of the Word of God applied to our everyday lives: the ability to look beyond us. We don’t find meaning in our work, we bring meaning to our work when we approach work as something God wants done, regardless of how “mundane” it may seem at the time.  

Martin Luther, in his “Nineteenth Sunday After Trinity” sermon, exhorted his listeners to never separate God’s Word from their work. He advised his listeners to “inculcate” the Word of God into daily work, and that “by such work more is accomplished than if one had established all the cloisters and kept all the orders, although it be the most insignificant domestic work.”

“Our foolishness,” Luther maintained, “consists in laying too much stress upon the show of works and when these do not glitter as something extraordinary we regard them as of no value; and poor fools that we are, we do not see that God has attached and bound this precious treasure, namely his Word, to such common works as filial obedience, external, domestic, or civil affairs [and fish management], so as to include them in his order and command, which he wishes us to accept, the same as though he himself had appeared from heaven.”

“What would you do if Christ himself with all the angels were visibly to descend, and command you in your home to sweep your house and wash the pans and kettles? How happy you would feel, and would not know how to act for joy, not for the work’s sake, but that you knew that thereby you were serving him, who is greater than heaven and earth.”

“If we would only consider this, and by the power of the Word look beyond us, and think that it is not man, but God in heaven who wishes and commands these things, we would run full speed, and in a most faithful and diligent manner rather do these common, insignificant works, as they are regarded, than any others.” [Emphasis added.]

Posted by Dr. Christian Overman 

It Doesn't Come Easily To The Evangelical Mind

Our eldest son, Nathanael, is in full-time Christian service. 
He works as a fish biologist for the State of Washington. 

Nancy Pearcey, author of Total Truth, says many Christians fail to see work in business, politics, the arts, and science as ways to serve God. She notes that many young people think if they really want to serve God, they will go into "the ministry." To them, this means being a pastor or a missionary.

The problem, Pearcey maintains, is the "sacred-secular distinction," dividing life into "sacred" and "secular" categories. 

The Sacred-Secular Divide [SSD] is a mental stronghold that's hard to remove. Yet, ridding young people of SSD is an essential part of Christian education, whether formally at school, or informally at home. 

Our son, Nathanael, knows he’s doing God’s work by managing fish because we dismantled the Sacred-Secular Divide at the dinner table. We chewed it up and spit it out.

I don't want to be critical of pastors [they have a tough job], but when was the last time your pastor talked about how fish management fulfills God’s purpose for human beings to govern well over Planet Earth?

If you are a parent, when was the last time you talked about this at your dinner table?

When was the last time the car mechanics in your church were brought up front and commissioned to serve God through fixing broken automobiles?

All cars belong to Christ, but some are broken. The whole earth is the Lord's, and everything in it. Not just fish, but metal, glass and brake fluid. He's relevant to it all. Ruling well over God's stuff is the work of God. It's what God had in mind for human beings when He commissioned us to govern over this beautiful-but-now-broken planet.  

I'll say it again: repairing cars and fish management, done in response to the First Commission of Gen. 1:26-28, is the work of God.  

Yes, so is the work of pastors and missionaries. Yet, somehow, calling fish management and automotive repair “the work of God” is nearly heretical. It doesn't come easily to the evangelical mind.    

Jesus was a carpenter for most of His 33 years in Palestine, yet He only did what His Father showed Him to do. Was He doing the work of God before He became an itinerant teacher? 

He was doing exactly what His Father showed Him to do. Carpentry, for Christ, was the work of God.  

For a brief interview I did with Nancy Pearcey about these matters, click here.

Dr. Nancy Pearcey

Posted by Dr. Christian Overman 

Thinking In Decades

I received an e-mail from a local organization about their 30-year plan to care for a forest. The subject line read: “How To Think In Decades.” Great advice!

I thought about "thinking in decades" in connection with my friend Jon Sween, President of Marketplace Connections, based near Seattle.

Like the early Moravian missionaries, Jon has a passion to “multiply disciples through Kingdom-centered business and gospel expressions.” Marketplace Connections trains followers of Christ to develop Kingdom-centered businesses in distant places of the world such as India, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, as well as in the USA, working in cooperation with such groups as Youth With A Mission, and Children of the Nations.

Entrepreneurial Leadership Training courses are taught by Christian business leaders who share their acumen with local followers of Christ. They teach them income-producing skills, and help them to know how live out biblically-informed faith in the context of the "real world." 

As Jon puts it, “It’s so exciting so see western business people sharing their vast business experience around the world.  Christian business people are often underutilized in the local church, and this vision catches their heart. We are now training trainers in many countries so Christ-followers can do a more effective job of contextualizing their faith through Kingdom-centered business." 

Marketplace Connections has provided training in the cities of Hyderabad, Udaipur and Vizag in India, where 6 businesses have been started by graduates. In Rwanda, 6 other business have been started. 40 followers of Christ have been trained in Uganda. Others have been trained in Malawi, and the list goes on. Efforts are now being made to expand to Kenya.

In the process, people are coming to know Christ. 

The “Five Big Ideas” behind Marketplace Connections are:

1. God designs and calls us to use our gifts and creativity to expand his work and express his character.

2. God enables us to take risks to create something new for kingdom work.

3. God calls business people to create wealth and build enterprises that provide jobs and advance the gospel.

4. God uses transformational leaders to lead people to new places of living and uses profits from business to address social issues.

5. God shapes our character and ethics to express his love, grace and truth.

Visit http://marketplaceconnections.org/ for more information. 

Here is a short interview with two graduates of the ELT course in Uganda: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bFhFCzo5HYCU8r1C-6jYLNcOsjgv7jg0/view?usp=drive_web

Posted by Dr. Christian Overman 

The Chilling Disappearance Of Gnadenhütten

During the 18th century, Moravian missionaries came from Germany to work among Native Americans in the New World, sharing the Gospel of the Kingdom, which began with personal salvation, and spilled over into Kingdom-centered commerce.

Last week I wrote about Bethlehem, PA, founded by Moravian missionaries, and later dying "not of failure, but of success.” The Moravian's wholistic approach to missions created businesses that attracted many non-believers who didn’t embrace the theology but loved the profits.

The work of Moravians among Native Americans died for different reasons.  

The Moravians established a number of prosperous Native American communities, including Shekomeko in New York, Indian Pond on the Connecticut border, and Gnadenhütten in Ohio. 

William Danker, in Profit for the Lord, describes Friedenshütten, in Pennsylvania:

"The Indians lived in log houses with windows and chimneys like the homesteads of the settlers. The streets and alleys were kept scrupulously clean. In the center of the town stood the chapel with a school house as its wing. Behind the houses were fruitful gardens and orchards. Stretching down the river were cultivated fields and meadows. The converts had large herds of cattle and hogs, and poultry of every kind."

Moravian-founded communities of Native American Christians sold corn, maple sugar, butter, and white pine dugout canoes.

During the Revolutionary War, the Native Americans in these communities, along with the Moravians, tried to preserve neutrality. They were suspected by both British and Americans as double-dealing. Indian war parties were hard to trace, but the settled Native American communities were easy prey. Many Revolutionary War participants wanted Indians eliminated.

Danker describes the chilling disappearance of Gnadenhütten:

150 men "bound the peaceful inhabitants and murdered them two by two in two buildings they wantonly called 'slaughter houses.' White men, some of whom must have been baptized as Christians, scalped Christian Indians with biblical names who lived in white men's houses, wore white men's clothing, and used civilized utensils and tools in their homes and their work. Some of the Indians pleaded for their lives in fluent German and English. Yet the pitiless settlers spared not a single one."

Six missionary assistants and their wives were also butchered that day. In total, 96 defenseless people were demonically eliminated: 28 men, 29 women, and 39 children. 

In time, all Moravian Native American communities came to an end. William Danker concludes: "One cannot help wondering what the future of the Indian American and the future of Indian missions might have been if the Moravian experiment had not been choked in blood."

Think about this the next time you drive past a Native American casino.  

This is the mass grave of 96 Christian Native Americans and German missionaries who were scalped at Gnadenhütten, in Ohio, by 150 white men. The bodies were first piled in mission buildings by the monsters, and then the village was burned to the ground. No criminal charges were ever filed. 

Years later, a missionary by the name of John Heckewelder collected the remains and buried them in this mound, just south of the vanished village site. This burial mound is now listed in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, where an official marker reads: "Burial Site of Indian Martyrs." 

[This photo is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unreported license. Attribution: Bwsmith84 at en.wikipedia.]

Posted by Dr. Christian Overman