Ban ministers in Santa Fe, NM, a beautiful and difficult place to live. The city is 40% Caucasian. There is a large lower (working poor) and upper class (movie stars) presence, but not much of a middle class.
Ban began by noting that as we try to do neighborhood evangelism and church planting, wanting to feed the nations with the pure milk of the Word, we are rejected by the community who thinks we’re trying to push “pig’s milk.” Ban showed a picture here of a pink bus with pig’s ears, the “mama pig” pushing her milk! So we either burn out from talking with too many people who don’t want to hear what we have to say, or we feel guilty for not talking to people enough.
Is there another way to go about this?
Cornelius Van Til used to emphasize the equal importance of two truths:
1. God is one God.
2. God is three persons.
In other words, God is a community, and yet He is One. Our identity, if we are made in His image, is both as an individual and a community too.
Like Adam, we only know ourselves truly, while hearing God and gazing at others. Our identity is analogous to God’s individual and communitarian nature.
This helps us overcome our fear of getting to know certain types of people who naturally intimidate us — people that are different from us. Try to get to know them since they, too, are made in God’s image. And we can learn something more about ourselves through them.
Ban embraces John Frame’s Tri-perspectivalism.
Gospel — Community — Gospel Engager
God sends — Son accomplishes — Spirit applies
I. Normative Perspective
The Gospel is an unchanging and acoustic message of redemption that composes a holy community of different others. (I Cor. 15:1, 3-4)
If you have only 30-seconds to share the message of the gospel, use original language (i.e. the actual biblical text, like 1 Cor 15:1, 3-4) — objective facts. Christ lived, died, and was resurrected.
We tend to think of gospel engagement as a linear engagement process. Goes from God to us, then from us to the community. But the truth is bigger.
The gospel is both unchanging and acoustic. To be “acoustic” means that the truth reverberates, as a sound wave would, in all three directions (God, self, community).
Pre-Creation: There was holy communion in the Godhead.
Post-Creation: He foreknows us in Christ, and we join the inter-Trinitarian fellowship. So the gospel goes OUT from God but it also penetrates Him deeply. (Mark 14:3-9 the forgiven woman had gained access to Jesus by virtue of the gospel having penetrated her life.)
We are to love “different others” to be like Jesus. Jesus loved us, and we are very different than Him. We should imitate this. The church is a new community of redeemed “different others.”
Recommended Book on this theme:
Christine D. Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality As a Christian Tradition
Ban says that the young adults with lots of tattoos are the ones who most want an adopted dad/mom or grandpa/ma.
Reflection Point
What are some relatively easy ways for you to make room for different others now?
One idea: Have a birthday party for your kid, and invite all the kids his age in the neighborhood.
Ban intentionally chose a musical style for his church that was culturally appropriate to reach his community in Santa Fe — appealing to people of all ages and stripes in that community.
(Ban is continuing this message in the next hour. He’ll be looking at the situational perspective and the existential perspective.)
