By Ben Pfahlert

In January 2010 I set myself a goal that has transformed my diary, my thinking, my reading and the way my home operates.

In January 2010 I pledged to work at the goal, prayerfully and dependently, of bringing ten people into the Kingdom of God by 31 December 2011.

Several things inspired me:

• Col Marshall's exhortation at an MTS meeting in June 2009. Col said MTS Apprenticeships should be re-labelled ‘In-Ten-ships’ i.e. have the aim to win ten people to Christ in the two year period of the apprenticeship (Col wanted apprentices to re-commit to the great commission, not just fill in existing roles in churches)
• The realization that I was spending hardly any time at all with those friends and family outside the kingdom. Church commitments can fill your whole week, can't they?
• A builder mate called Steve who shares Christ with heaps of blokes every week … he's got a very open home and people constantly ‘drop in for a coffee’
• Mark Driscoll's visit in 2008. Mark said (paraphrased) that Bible colleges should make friends coming to Christ a core component of passing.

So my family and I have re-jigged stuff to hit the goal.

Things like:

• We still serve at church but our area of focus is outreach. We're committed to running a ‘Life of Jesus’ course every quarter.
• We have a list of friends we pray for regularly … in the past it was more sporadic.
• I'm trying to listen to my friends ‘stories’ better. I'm listening to hear their worldview: (i) what their hopes and dreams for planet earth are; (ii) what they think is wrong about the world; (iii) what they think is the solution; and (iv) where they’re heading. I'm trying to do twice as much listening as talking.
• We've got our kids doing the kind of sports where the parents come along and relate, e.g. Edmund plays soccer. The soccer community has created some great friendships.
• I asked the principal of my kids' school if I could run a Bible study for other Dads to help them find out what the school teaches their children about God.
• We work really hard at inviting people into our home, and we are trying to kill off that ever present Aussie tendency to think of our home as a ‘castle’ or a ‘refuge’ from the world.
• I try hard to get to know the friends of the men in my Tuesday night blokes Bible study, and they try to get to know my mates. It is much better to ‘hunt in packs’ (I wish I had a more positive metaphor … hunting isn't a very nice term, but you know what I mean).
• When the World Cup was on recently, I invited all my mates over to several 4:30am games. I cooked Bacon & Egg McWraps … we had a great time. Just doing normal stuff together with my mates, but constantly mixing friends together i.e. those who do and don’t have Jesus as their CEO.
• I'm listening out more intently for interesting ideas re: getting people together. I've heard some great ideas:
  • Youtube Parties—invite people over, and they have to bring a URL for a video (less than three minutes) they want everyone to watch. Christians can obviously choose one that means something to them.
  • Q&A—choose a topic, get some experts together and mimic the Monday Night ABC hit show. You might run something called ‘Politics and Religion’ and invite the local Greens candidate, an archbishop, an academic,whatever, the options are endless.

I know what you're thinking: “All those bullet points above are basic Benny. That's just loving people.”

Yep. You're right. Winnie the Pooh and I have a lot in common; he was referred to as ‘a bear of little brain’. I need to be reminded of the basics constantly.

I'm eight months into this endeavour. There's been some really good progress in relationships … some people look like they may have become believers. But the bottom line is that Em and I (and the kids) feel like we're on the job.

We’re trying to devote real concerted effort to being great commissionaires. We're praying heaps more, we’re depending on God in a new and deep way. We're loving people better.

10 in 2 is hard.

But perhaps you can chat with a couple of close friends and start working on something like this together in your neck of the woods.

It is my hope that 10 in 2 will help me do for others what was done for me. Rhys Bezzant met me and had structured his time so that he was ready to read through a chapter of Mark with me weekly. He was ‘on the job’, alert and ready.

Perhaps 10 in 2 is for you.

Guest blogger Mikey Lynch, one of the directors of The Geneva Push, talks about the network's approach to church planter assessment.

Jai and his wife Jay-Ellen are planning to plant a church in Mackay in 2011. Better them than me! It's a huge task. But that's the exciting thing about The Geneva Push: having a chance to rub shoulders with all these different people, with all these crazy plans, and being able to play a part in helping them on their way.

That's where the assessment of church planters and their plans comes in.

For Jai and Jay the most valuable part of the assessment was “…being able to lay out our plans and to have a couple of experienced guys run through it and at the end say, ‘Yep, you should go ahead with this’”.

“It just gave us that bit of encouragement that I needed from God to keep pursuing this path,” he says.

Church planter assessment is one of the primary reasons for The Geneva Push's existence. It is something we believe a national organization can do more consistently than any one church or denomination. As anyone who has started our assessment will discover, it is lots of work: a lot of paperwork, a lot of detail, and an interview panel that can be quite overwhelming to walk into. But as Al Stewart is fond of telling candidates, “We're interested in testing your eyes, not counting them”.

So why would a potential church planter submit themselves to such a gruelling process? We are convinced it is actually the best way to serve the candidates, as well as the wider network. Here are five quick benefits of a thorough church planter assessment:

1. Doctrine

Assessment digs in deep on big doctrinal issues to ensure that we are on the same page. Doctrinal agreement ensures healthy unity in the long term. Moreover, our doctrine flows out into the way we go about church planting. We want theologically grounded and evangelistically growing church plants. Sound doctrine is crucial for both.

2. Planning

The assessment process forces church planters to write out their vision and values. It forces them to do basic demographic work on the area they might minister in. It might seem cool to figure it all out organically, but experience shows most of the time that will just end in an aimless mess. The very process of assessment is setting them up with material that they will go on to use and refine from day one.

3. Coaching

The assessment interview is the beginning of an ongoing relationship between successful candidates and their Geneva Push coaches. Whether it's one of their interviewers, or someone else in the Geneva network, every church planter has someone travelling alongside them as they take steps towards starting a new church. Church planters are familiar with scarcity. They know there is no point going it alone when they can have a wise, sounding board, committed to them and their new work.

4. Creating confidence

There is real affirmation in having a group of experienced outsiders back up a candidate's interest in starting a new church. It's not just his crazy idea anymore. This affirmation also gives assurance to the planter's team and his financial supporters.

5. Issues

A thorough interview process also gives time to uncover any issues that need to be discussed and addressed. The struggles of starting a new church are great; personal problems have a way of rising to the surface under pressure. The assessment process is geared to identify and deal with these early.

The Geneva Push is so committed to the assessment approach that it made it the main plank of its first New South Wales and Victorian conferences, and will be offering it again to church planters at its National In The Chute conference in December this year. These are just some of the reasons we have begun the Push. They are also the reasons why many churches, networks and denominations are keen to use The Geneva Push’s assessment in their recruiting of church planters.

By Jennie Baddeley

There are so many reasons for losing sleep it's not really worth listing them. You're either getting enough sleep or you're not. And if you aren't, an awful lot of the Christian life can feel very difficult indeed. Shorter tempers, less self-control, sense of life being out of control, feeling sorry for oneself, irritable, unkind, not listening… Sleep is such a good gift from God if only because it makes so many, many things easier. Prayer is one such thing. What can we do when we aren't praying because we aren't getting the sleep we need?

Here are some ideas; please add your own. (And excuse the excessive use of the imperative, I wrote this first for myself and writing in imperatives helps me).

10. Stop feeling guilty about not praying well. Unless you're different from just about everyone else, you won't be able to concentrate, remember or prioritize properly. And all of these affect prayer, as much as they affect other areas of life. Prayer isn't about your performance; it's you, trusting God your Father, for all of life, out loud.

9. Thank God for things. Survival mode makes us demanding in all kinds of ways. God calls us to contentment via cultivated thankfulness. And one way to engender thankfulness in our hearts is to thank God for things; all kind of things, all the time. Don't waste time feeling guilty for not thanking God enough; enjoy his generosity and say ‘thank you’.

8. Don't stop be interested in your godliness. Tired people are grumpy, easily irritated, unloving people. We can only do this part of our lives in a way which glorifies our Saviour if he intervenes and transforms us here and now, in these circumstances. Praying for this demonstrates that you really need God to change you and are trusting in his kindness to do so.

7. Expect to pray short prayers. Face the fact that your concentration span is fragmented at the moment and don't use a strategy for prayer which involves long periods of time. Try and pray often and expect to pray for not much. And be encouraged by the Spirit's work in you that you are continuing to call God ‘Abba Father’ and come to him for mercy and grace in your time of need.

6. Pray for your friends, family, church and government leaders. Write a list somewhere you'll see it and let your eye pick one and pray for them. Don't try and do the whole list. But don't give up on praying for others because you're in survival mode. They need your prayers, and you need to love them in this way.

5. Choose a time when you might actually remember to pray and try and plan to pray then. Keep it simple. And if you happen to be a mother in this situation, you may find it helpful to choose something that doesn't involve anything complex, like pen and paper. My favourite is my hand. I can't lose it. I always have it; I even have a spare. It always has five fingers. Each finger has a ‘thing’. It goes like this: Praise God for who he is (choose something, there's lots to choose from); Thank God for something; Pray for a family member; Pray for a friend; Say sorry for my sin and ask God for what I need right now. But even this is more complex than the Lord's Prayer…

4. Keep asking God to help you to trust him, and to teach you how to trust him in your situation. It's just something we always need to do when we're his children. And ask God for comfort and the strength to endure; you need both and he is the source of both.

3. Read the Bible. Memorize the Bible. Don't be ambitious. Just go for two verses a day, and memorize one verse a month. And if that is too ambitious, cut back to what is slightly more than achievable. On very good days, you'll achieve it. And when the bottom falls out, just start again. But don't give up reading and thinking about Scripture. The word of God prompts us to pray, because it is the word of God, and by his Spirit through his word, God faithfully transforms us into the image of his Son.

2. Pray with someone. This keeps you awake, helps you remember to pray for things aside from your desperate need for sleep, and is in itself encouraging. And it means you are actually praying at some point in the day.

1. Pray. Whenever you remember you should pray, just do it. Don't mess around trying to think of what to pray for or wishing you prayed more. Start praying for something right now.

By Jean Williams

Are you a stress-thrower or a stress-absorber?

A stress-thrower blames things on others and expresses stress in anger; a stress-absorber blames things on themselves and expresses stress in anxiety (I think I've got that right!). This useful distinction was taught to me by Tom Cannon, a chaplain I used to work with in university ministry. In our family, we have both stress-throwers and stress-absorbers.

One morning last term we were having jacket issues. One of my sons refused to put on his school jacket until threatened with punishment; another forgot his jacket and had to go back inside for it. We were very late for school as a result.

By the time we pulled up at school, accusations were flying fast and furious (many of them maternal, I admit!). As they got out of the car, my two boys fought over who had made them late—but not in the way you might expect.

“It's my fault we're late! It's my fault!”, said one of my sons, at fault of nothing more serious than forgetting his jacket. “Yes, it's not my fault, it's your fault!”, said the other, at fault of disobeying his parents and refusing to wear his jacket. No prizes for guessing who is the stress-thrower and who is the stress-absorber!

I've found that stress-throwers and stress-absorbers require different parenting. To the stress-thrower I say, “Take responsibility for your own actions!”, “Don't blame others!”, and “Acknowledge and ask forgiveness for what you've done wrong!”. To the stress-absorber I say, “Everyone makes mistakes!”, “Mummy's bad mood is not your fault!”, and “I forgive you, and so does God, because Jesus died for you!”.

But in the end, both stress-throwers and stress-absorbers need to hear the same message (a message, oddly enough, also taught to me by my friend Tom Cannon): “Our sin is greater than we will ever know, but God's grace is greater still.” It's a message I repeat often to my children, and even more often to myself.

By Nicole Starling

This is the fifth in Nicole's series on ‘missional lifestyle’. Read parts 1, 2, 3 and 4.

In this series I've been working my way slowly through various facets of life (home, education, work, sport, etc.), talking about the opportunities that each presents for being involved in the lives of others for their good and their salvation, and the idolatries that have the potential to destroy us and our witness by luring our hearts away from Christ. In this post, having set out a general framework and taken a brief look at the opportunities and idolatries of the home, I want to turn to the topic of education (our own and our children's) and the opportunities that it provides for mission.

1. Equipping for the future

Education gives a person the chance to learn how better to think, read, write, and speak. Our own education is a gift from God, and it helps equip us to serve him and serve others. If we have kids then our kids' school education (or their home-schooling) can be part of the way we train them as parents to gain skills and understanding and attitudes that will prepare them to be useful in serving God and serving others in the future.

That's the big goal we ought to have in mind: how can our decisions about schooling and the way we approach our kids' education help to equip them to live for God's glory, to serve their neighbours, and to live holy lives, in the world but not of the world, seeking the good of others, that they might be saved? Our kids' formal education is part of a larger strategy we ought to have as parents to raise them up in order to send them out into the world as missionaries.

2. Relationships in the present

But education is also about relationships in the present. In our society, the education system is the gate that everyone passes through, and the experience of schooling can be a source of daily gospel opportunities for both kids and parents. The decision about whether to send the kids to a private or public school (or to home-school), to send to a school close by or a school several suburbs away, can make a significant difference to the kind and frequency of those opportunities and to the ability you have as a parent to help your kids make the most of them. The experience of school can be a wonderful training ground for kids to start learning how to share the gospel and interact with the non-Christian world as missionaries.

Sending your children to school (or participating in a well-functioning home-school network) can also offer opportunities for parents to get involved in the local community. For me, for example, I've found school the best place to get to know other parents because I'm there every day, morning and afternoon. Plus (again, in my experience) there are so many ways to get involved and volunteer and spend time with the other parents a local school.

The aim, of course, is not to abdicate the work of mission to our children, sending them off into the battlefield of the gospel as child-soldiers, untrained and unsupported. Our job is to train our children as missionaries, not to use them to do the evangelism we are too frightened to do ourselves. But the best way of training them is not by hiding them away from the world for the first eighteen years of their lives, instructing them in the safety of home about the theory of making Christ known in a world they know nothing about.

There are at least two sets of questions we ought to be asking, therefore, about the choices that we make for the education of ourselves and of our children:

1. How will these decisions assist in preparing us and our children for a future of serving God and serving others in the world, living as disciples of the Lord Jesus and making him known?
2. What opportunities will these decisions provide for us and for our children to be part of the work of the gospel in the present? What sort of contact will we and our children have with those who don't yet know Christ? What scope will we have for learning how to live good lives among the pagans (1 Pet 2:12) and to give an answer for the hope that we have (1 Pet 3:15)? How much involvement will we be able to have in the educational world into which we send our children day by day, and how much scope will we have to get to know their friends and the families of their friends?

Answering these questions is not always a simple task, of course—at times it can require the wisdom of Solomon. But—like Solomon!—we make our decisions not only as people who depend on the wisdom of God, but also as people who are beset by temptation from the idolatrous desires of our hearts within and the world without. But that's another whole post…

For now, I'd love to hear your thoughts about the opportunities. How have you approached the answering of those two questions? And what examples come to mind for you of people who've made the most of the opportunities that the education system gives us as missionary-disciples of the Lord Jesus?

By Scott Newling

Learning to pray for others is one of the first things we learn as Christians: we see it commended on every other page of the New Testament; we see it modelled in every other meeting of Christians we participate in; and Christian parents model it to their children from birth.

Have you ever stopped to think about why we pray for others, however? Or why we ask prayer from others? I was made to really consider the question when I first read through 2 Corinthians 1. And what the Apostle Paul says there continues to provoke me to thought and wonder every time I read it.

More of that passage in a moment; but I guess, at the most basic level, we pray for our friends because we love them. We desire their good, we desire their growth: we desire their conversion and conformity to Christ. And what more loving thing is there to do than to pray to the one who loves us with a love beyond our ability to conceive, a love that is accompanied by the ability to do it, and which nothing can thwart? Praying for others is more than just the best thing to do when I can't do any more for them—a last option for love when all other options are exhausted—it is always the best thing to do for them (though not the only, of course!).

It ought come as no surprise, therefore, that Jesus calls on us to pray not just for our friends, but also for our enemies, since we are called to love our enemies too: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:43-44).

Further, it should come as no surprise (yet so often it does, given our fallen minds), for the reason Jesus gives for loving (our enemies, no less!) with prayer is: “so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:45). If we are the children of God, then we need to live that out. And as we look at Jesus, the Son of God—our adoptive brother—we see one who died in love for his enemies (us), and whose life is in love characterized by prayer for others: in his earthly ministry, in the Garden before he died, on the cross, and now in heaven itself, where ‘he always lives to make intercession for them’ (Hebrews 7:25).

More so, within the Trinitarian life of God, the Spirit too intercedes for us (Romans 8:27). The one true and living God, who is love, is the God who prays for others. And so, as the children of God, in whom his Spirit dwells, we too are characterized by prayer for others.

Prayer is more than just love for our neighbour, however. Understood properly, prayer is love for God. For in prayer we acknowledge and rightly express both his place as the sovereign creator of this world, and our place as those who trust him in all things. In prayer we trustingly live out the reality that all good things come from his hand, that our lives are in his hands, that all things happen in conformity with the purpose of his will. Praying for others is as much about giving God the power and glory that are his, as it is about loving our neighbour.

This is made most abundantly clear to me every time I read 2 Corinthians 1:11: “You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many.” Did you notice how God-centred (‘theocentric’) Paul's request for prayer is? He wants people to pray for him so that, when the prayers are answered, there will be many people to give thanks to God. Paul's desire for prayer from the Corinthians is not just for thanksgiving, but for the multiplication of thanksgiving.

For what reason do we pray for others? For what reason do we ask for prayer? Is it because we love them? Is it because we love God, and want to spread the praise and thanks around, to magnify his name?

In a way, prayer letters make it easier to do this, since they tend to spell out answers to prayer and points for thanks. If it's not your habit to do this, however, can I suggest that your Bible-study group, as well as you yourself personally, develop a ‘prayer diary’ that can be reviewed, so that the prayers prayed in weeks previous can be remembered, and given thanks for when they are answered? If you lead prayers at church, to occasionally ask not just for prayer points, but for answered-prayer points?

As for me, as I've written this I've realized the danger of my current system: my prayer diary will fill up with friends and family, but my enemies are conspicuously absent. Pray for me, that I'd learn to pray well for my enemies, and give thanks when the prayer is answered.

By Mark Baddeley

(Read parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.)

Does God forgive us based upon our repentance? We covered a couple of problems with such an idea in our previous post. This time around, I want to canvass what I would suggest is the real killer to the whole idea: it overturns justification by grace through faith alone.

What does God require of human beings? What does his law require (whether contained in the Mosaic law, the wisdom literature, the Prophets, the teaching of Jesus, the book of James or Ephesians)? The Bible has various ways of articulating it: God requires us to worship him alone—to seek his glory. God requires us to love him with all our heart, soul and strength. God requires us to keep his commandments and fulfil his law. God requires us to serve him—to live our lives in his service.

What, then, is sin? Again, there are various descriptions that each correlate to the above requirements: sin is to commit idolatry—to worship someone or something other than God; it is to rebel against God and to be at enmity with him; it is to break his commandments and to be lawless (for sin is lawlessness); it is to seek our interest ahead of the kingdom of God.

That is, sin and the law are opposites. God's commands, exhortations, instructions and the like draw a picture of what he requires from human beings—what it means to be good. And those requirements are fundamentally the same no matter where you turn in the Bible. Paul and the Pentateuch are in fundamental agreement as to humanity's obligations before God. Sin is to not discharge those obligations. Accordingly, it covers the full gamut of human existence: it involves both our treatment of God in our fundamental attitude and our specific acts in the way we treat others. It is all sin.

So what, then, is repentance? Repentance is to turn from sin and to turn to God. It is to stop doing what is wrong and to start doing what is right. It is to amend one's ways. Just as godliness (or the law) and sin can be defined in many ways, so can repentance: we can stress the moral dimension of what we do, or the relational attitude of our stance towards God. But it is all of one piece.

As 1 John 4:20b says, “he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen”. If repentance means to stop being God's enemy and to start loving God, then that must also mean repentance means to start loving my brother or sister. And as 1 John 5:3a says (“For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments”), so loving God also means doing what God commands. Even if you try and limit repentance to just turning from sin (and not sins) and turning to God (and not to godliness or to morality), then you are still forced, by the teaching of Scripture, to include the latter aspects in the former. Repentance means to stop doing wrong and to start doing what is right—both attitude and action, both God and our neighbour.

So do we really want to say that God does not forgive us until we repent in this robust biblical sense of what repentance is? For the Bible's notion of repentance is, as I suggested in an earlier post, part of what theologians mean when they talk about ‘good works’. It is a good work to love God, to love one's neighbour, to fulfill the law, to keep God's commandments and to worship God. These are all ‘good works’—things we do that please God—and if they were done perfectly, they would lead to a judgement of ‘this person is righteous’ on the Last Day. Repentance means stop working evil and start doing good.

So do we really want to say that God's forgiveness is conditional on us beginning to do good works—even if it's “only” the good work of resolving to leave sin and to begin to love God? Why then the Reformation? Any Catholic worth their salt would be happy with a forgiveness from God that is conditional on us loving God first. Faith plus works (repentance) is the Catholic understanding of the basis of justification.

So let's run through the issues raised half a millennium ago. How much repentance is necessary to meet the condition? How perfectly does God need me to love him before he will forgive me? Are they linked? To the degree that I love him, is that the degree he forgives me? Jesus stated in Luke 7:47b that “he who is forgiven little, loves little”. But it actually works the other way: “He who loves little is forgiven little”.

Or perhaps it will be suggested that there's just some basic level of repentance that we need to meet and then we get full forgiveness. We can't do repentance worthy to merit God's forgiveness, but we can do repentance that is good enough, and God will treat it as though it has earned forgiveness; a mustard seed of repentance is enough. As long as we make just the first step away from sin to God—as long as we harbour just a small desire to be God's friend, say—then that is sufficient. Here too the scholastics already own this ground, with the medieval view that God's grace is shown by the way that he takes our inadequate efforts and treats them as though they are more than what they strictly are.

The Reformers considered this point to be so important that it was written into our confessions. Consider Article XIII Of Works before Justification from the Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican Church:

Works done before the grace of Christ, and the Inspiration of his Spirit, are not pleasant to God, forasmuch as they spring not of faith in Jesus Christ, neither do they make men meet to receive grace, or (as the School-authors say) deserve grace of congruity: yea rather, for that they are not done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done, we doubt not but they have the nature of sin.

Works done before the grace of Christ are not pleasant to God. Why? Because they do not spring from faith in Jesus Christ. So a repentance that occurs before salvation is a repentance that occurs before grace is received. If it occurs either at the same time as faith or before it, then it can not be caused by faith. And whatever is not of faith is sin. And so, the article goes on to stress, such works do not make men or women fit to receive grace; they cannot form a basis for God's grace. They are sin. So to say that God forgives because we repent—that he forgives because we try and turn from our sin and turn to him—is tantamount to saying that he forgives our sin because of our sin. That door isn't just shut; it has been welded closed, and blast doors thick enough to resist a thermonuclear explosion have been placed in front, with the whole construction being guarded by sharks with laser beams attached to their heads. You simply cannot pass that way. When it comes to us and God, we repent because we are forgiven, not in order to win it. As Article XII Of Good Works makes clear, even our love for God as regenerate Spirit-led believers is so corrupt—so far less than the perfect repentance that we should offer—it merits damnation on its own terms. Only in Christ is our repentance acceptable to God. So how could our repentance be a condition needing to be met to be able to be united to Christ?

I gently suggest that people reconsider their view of what we are capable of doing as sinners. This is because behind the idea that God's forgiveness is based upon our repentance is either a shrinking of the nature of repentance or a rejection of our inability to truly do something that pleases God in and of itself, and not only in Christ. We are either more confident in our abilities to please God than we should be, or we have reduced God's demands down to a point whereby we think that even we can fulfil them.

The irony (as is often is the case) is that this was all clearly and helpfully addressed by Calvin in the Institutes centuries ago—in Book III chapter 3. Anyone wishing to grow in their understanding of this essential teaching could do much worse than carefully working over his treatment of the topic there. It is, I would argue, directly following in Calvin's footsteps (even as he follows the teaching of Scripture), part of the glory of the gospel that it frees us from sin's hold on us. Both sin's guilt and condemnation, and its mastery of us is broken by the gospel. That means that repentance is not the precondition for the gospel, but its fruit. True faith produces repentance, just as it produces love. Because grace produces repentance just as surely as it produces a righteous standing before God, repentance is the surest sign that someone has been forgiven, and the absence of repentance removes any grounds we have to treat someone as a brother or sister in Christ. However, that correlation is not because our repentance causes God's forgiveness, but because God's forgiveness breaks the hold of sin upon us and so sets us on the path of righteousness. God's forgiveness causes repentance, and that's why repentance is the evidence of faith and of justification. Repentance is a gift of the gospel, not its precondition. It is part of the glory of the gospel. What God rightly demands of us but we could not do, he gives us to us when he forgives us and unites us with his beloved Son. We do not say no to ungodliness in order to prepare the way for grace but, as Titus 2:12 says, the grace of God “teaches us to say ‘No’ to ungodliness” (NIV). And for this, we praise God.

By Peter Sholl

Mexico in the 1940s was a country trying to come to grips with the 20th century. While discoveries of oil and a developing infrastructure encouraged foreign investment, basic social indicators like literacy rates, health care and basic wages demonstrated that for the vast majority of Mexicans, life was still a great struggle. It was in this context that Ávila Camacho was elected president in 1940.

President Camacho will be remembered for many things, but one particularly has stuck with me. In 1940, 58% of Mexicans were deemed to be illiterate, a figure which Camacho thought was unacceptable. In an attempt to improve literacy, he instigated the ‘Each One Teach One’ program, asking teachers and other educated people to give one hour per day to tutor a relative, a friend or a colleague. The program was a great success—illiteracy dropped to 43% by 1949 and the trajectory continued downwards to 9% in 2009.

As soon as I heard that my thoughts were immediately—what would happen if all Christians did that with 1-1 Bible reading! That would be a lot of people investigating the scriptures, asking questions and sharing insights.

But there is more to this story than a reminder of the great benefits of personal ministry.

President Camacho was so committed to this project that he himself spent one hour a day tutoring. Imagine being taught to read by the president!

As a leader, it's one thing to say a program or an activity or a habit is important. It's another thing all together to ‘put your money where your mouth is’ and to lead by example.

In 1 Corinthians 4:16 Paul urges the Christians in Corinth to imitate him. In the context of the chapter this imitation will take the form of being weak and foolish in the eyes of the world (4:9-10), suffering (4:11-12), blessing in the face of persecution (4:12) and enduring (4:12). We also see that Paul has made the personally costly decision to send them Timothy (4:17) to encourage this imitation.

Now if Paul was exhorting these qualities from the comfort of his plush study, untroubled by the pressures of a coalface ministry existence, the words would be encouraging and true, but perhaps easily brushed off. But as we read of Paul's time in Corinth in Acts 18:1-17, we know that these exhortations do not flow from theoretical reflection or idealistic dreaming, but from hard fought experience. Paul is not inviting his readers to imitate a theory he is postulating, he is inviting them to imitate the life he lived with them, and continued to live throughout his ministry.

(It's also worth keeping in mind that Paul is not trying to set up some sort of personality cult—1 Cor 1:12-17, 3:5-9 and 11:1 make that clear.)

As Christians, especially as Christian leaders we are often willing to give advice suggest ideas or think up a new program. In Ávila Camacho, and more importantly the Apostle Paul, we see the value of personal example.

By Mark Baddeley

(Read parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.)

We have been considering the question of whether we can or should forgive in the absence of repentance by the guilty party. We began by looking at whether we forgive in exactly the same way that God does, and then turned to consider the question in light of a series of pastoral issues. With this post and the next, we will conclude by addressing the really big question in all this—not what we do, but what God does. Is God's forgiveness of us dependent upon our repentance?

Let's run with the ‘yes’ case. God cannot, or should not, forgive when we do not repent. Well then, can we be in relationship with God and yet unforgiven? Hopefully, we'll all agree that no, we can't. God does not tolerate sin, and would have no fellowship with an unforgiven (and hence unrighteous) man or woman.

Well then, what happens with the uncountable sins we commit as we live life even after we become Christians? Do we drop out of a saved status with each sin we commit, and then as we repent and receive forgiveness, do we move back to a saved status—a never-ending cycle of apostasy and conversion? What happens if we die with some sins unrepented of? As God only forgives repented sins, I think such a scenario must be close to a nightmare.

If we say that God forgives each specific sin only when that specific sin has been specifically repented of, then we are well on our way for the need for something like Purgatory, and the need for a specialist confessor in a confessional-like situation who can walk us through our lives since our last session and identify each and every sin of omission and commission (good luck with that) so that each can be properly repented of. Heaven help (and I say that with all seriousness) the believer who commits even one sin and never realizes it in order to be able to repent of it properly.

To such an argument, I am sure someone will argue that God does not need us to repent of our sins, but of sin. We don't need to repent of each individual act of wrongdoing, but of the basic attitude of rebellion and unbelief against God that stands behind and produces the various acts we commit. So when it comes to God and us, one covers all. The first repentance we do when we turn to God covers all declensions from a repentant life as long as we don't deliberately revoke that primordial repentance. (For the record, I think that this theory, despite how regularly it is wheeled out in various contexts, is for the birds. Repentance in the Bible has to do both with sin and sins. Zacchaeus' repentance in Luke 19:1-10 is clearly aimed both at his specific actions against other people as well as the underlying attitudes and pattern of life. But once again, we'll let things stand for the sake of the argument.)

I'm not sure how such a theory, even if true, really helps the problem. If we forgive in the same way God forgives us, then we have two options, much as we had in the previous post. What kind of repentance does the person who sins against us have to offer to justify our forgiveness of them? I don't mean repentance for their specific sins against us, but for their underlying sin. So what sort of underlying sin do they need to repent of?

If it is their sin in the absolute sense that they have to repent of for us to forgive them, then we are again in the position where we have to forgive Christians and cannot forgive non-Christians. Christians have already repented of ‘capital S’ Sin and have been forgiven. That repentance covers any ‘small s’ sins they commit—of which their offence against us is merely one item in that set. God forgives them for that sin they commit against us because they have repented of their rebellion against him. So if we forgive just as God does, then we need to forgive them irrespective of whether or not they repent of their sins against us. And we cannot forgive the non-Christian of their sins against us, even if they repent of them. They have not repented of their ‘capital S’ Sin, so God has not forgiven their sins. And as we mimic God, we cannot forgive them either. So, let's agree that this isn't a good solution.

But let's say that it isn't sin in the absolute sense that needs to be repented of, but the attitude that stands behind the acts. God forgives sins when the attitude of rejection against him is repented of, and does not require repentance for each individual sin. In the same way, it could be argued, we don't need repentance for specific sins against us, but only for the basic stance of rejection of us. So once we are in a right relationship with God, we can't lose a right relationship with God unless we apostatize. Similarly, then, where we already have a relationship with someone, there is no need for them to repent of any particular sin they commit against us—as long as they don't deliberately seek to sever the relationship itself. In other words, no specific sin needs to be repented of by anyone in relationship with us, short of a complete rejection of us or attempted murder. Even adultery does not require repentance for those who do believe that marriage cannot be dissolved by anything other than death, because on that view, adultery is not an act that repudiates the marriage, merely a sin within it. So even adultery must be forgiven without repentance. Anything short of complete and absolute rejection (our analogy for apostasy) should be forgiven without repentance. Such a position has the distinction of combining almost every complaint people have against the idea of forgiving without repentance with every problem I've raised against the alternative. So it isn't a great way forward either.

That leaves three bad options: God requires repentance for every sin, or we only forgive Christians and do that without repentance for their sins against us, or we forgive every sin against us without repentance unless it is a total attack on the relationship itself. However, all this so far is merely waddling in the toddler pool. The real problem is that to make God's forgiveness conditional on our repentance is to utterly and completely deny justification by grace through faith alone (or, given the name of this blog, sola fide). It is to that issue that we'll turn in our final post.

Since this series was written a particularly excellent long article on the topic was published in the inaugural edition of The Catechist by Chew Chern. It is well worth checking out. Chern takes the reader on a different guided tour over different theological issues, and arrives at a location comparable to that argued in this series, but possibly distinct from it at some key points. For those who like something more integrated than the way I tend to blog, the article has the added advantage that it explicitly engages with several different scriptural passages at some length as it proceeds and is self-contained in a single article.

For the past three Saturdays, we've been looking at contributions to the old Briefing ‘People in Ministry’ column, which focused on evangelical ministry worked out in practice. First David McDonald told us about the impetus behind Canberra Christian Youth Convention. Then Ken Simpson talks about ministry to doctors. Then Michael Blake explains how he uses school Scripture to reach parents. This week, Archie Poulos discusses evangelism to Greeks in Sydney in the late 80s:

Hundreds of thousands of Greeks came to Australia in the post-war migration boom. They came in search of wealth and a better future for their children.

With this migration came a corresponding increase in the Greek Orthodox Church. The church became a symbol of what it meant to be Greek—a rallying point for Greeks in their new home. Unfortunately, Orthodoxy is a religion of ritual, mysticism and superstition, and does not preach repentance and forgiveness through trust in the death of Jesus.

Evangelical Greek Churches were also established in capital cities, and these churches saw many converted. Today they are dying: they are small in size, with elderly congregations that do not attract new members. The young people have become disillusioned with the legalism and irrelevance of their parents' faith.

You may ask, “What has this situation to do with me?” There are about half a million second generation Greeks living in our suburbs—many of whom have never heard the gospel. It is our privilege to share the gospel with them.

Read the full article online (495 words).

(P.S. As mentioned by Tony in his ‘In this issue’ for Briefing #382/3, I have left Matthias Media to expand my immediate family. My replacement, Rachel Macdonald, will be taking over the management of Sola Panel from here.)