Rings of Fire

Walking in Faith through a Volcanic Future

Leonard Sweet

• Publisher: NavPress
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781641581356
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What Lies Ahead for Christians around the World? If you follow the works of bestselling authors Malcolm Gladwell, Faith Popcorn, Daniel Pink, and other trend forecasters, you'll appreciate learning about over 25 rings of fire that lie ahead for Christians around the world. Len Sweet once again maps the future for the church in this sweeping survey of the twenty-first century. In the face of eruptive and disruptive culture changes from economics and communications to bioethics and beyond, how do we fight fire with fire, not only catching up to our culture but leading our friends and neighbors toward the feet of Christ? No one has done more to startle the church from its slumber than Len Sweet, and no one has equipped the church as effectively. This is a benchmark book from a seminal leader of the modern evangelical movement. Mark Chironna provides incisive questions to stimulate creative thinking for individual or group study and an afterword that ties Len's expansive work together and sets us on the right course for decades to come.

1: HOSTILE CULTURE

I created every one of you with a burden of sin —guilty from the moment of birth. Then I loved you so much that I made a woman pregnant so she would give birth to me and I would become my own son so that I can have myself killed as a sacrifice to myself in order to save you evil sinners from the burden of sin that I created you with in the first place.

SALAFIST TRACT HANDED OUT BY SUNNI ISLAM EVANGELISTS IN 2018 ON THE STREETS OF BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND, SUMMARIZING CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY

THE EDITORS OF GQ MAGAZINE selected some of their favorite writers to challenge “received wisdom” about classic pieces of literature. The panel was instructed to select twenty-one books they believed were overrated and could be struck “from the canon.” Number twelve on the list of “21 Books You Don’t Have to Read” is the Bible.[45]

The GQ editors chose to ban the Bible from any required reading lists because “it is repetitive, self-contradictory, sententious, foolish, and even at times ill-intentioned.” In the Bible’s place the recommended reading is Ágota Kristóf’s novel about a world without empathy, The Notebook (1986).

Welcome to our (new) world, church. It’s a world we helped create. We asked for it.

The volcanic twenty-first century will call for the most creative evangelism and shrewd apologetics the church has seen since the first century. If ever the time is ripe for tilling, planting, and watering the soil, it is now. But best not to underestimate the challenge. We may be the least “formed” and worst prepared generation of Jesus disciples in history facing the greatest challenges the church has ever faced.

The life of Christian faith is now lived in an unfriendly environment. But “unfriendly” means different things in different times. For example, parochial schools and private Christian schools are under attack in Great Britain for promoting inequality by their existence. It is not uncommon now for weddings to be officiated by someone with no more than a notary public authority. But this is low-level “unfriendly.” Christians in the West have no idea what it means to suffer for one’s beliefs.

We will. Soon.

“Whom You . . . Denied before the Face of Pilate”

It is not easy to face or outface the “face of Pilate.”[46] Never has been. How many times have we shrunk back in fear, even repudiated our faith under the pressure of power and the peril of authority. “The face of Pilate” can be religious authority, political authority, or pop culture. But Jesus as Lord often takes a pass, a back seat, or even a sycophant sit-down when faced with the powers of the state.

Not until the fourth century did the early church talk about the “cross” so much. Prior to then, this symbol of torture and death was a daily reality for them. The first Christians loved the symbol of the fish (ichthus in Greek, its letters standing for “Jesus Christ Son of God Savior”) and clung close to cheerful, culinary images of Jesus partly because persecution had made life so difficult. Followers of Jesus today don’t seek out crosses to carry, but when you cross the grain of culture and church, you get splinters and splintered, which become our “thorns in the flesh,” and even sometimes, if they become cross-spangled banners, our “crosses to bear.”

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Paper cannot wrap up a fire.

CHINESE PROVERB ON HOW TRUTH WILL ALWAYS WIN OUT

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Most recent estimates are that one in ten Christians worldwide (200 million+ brothers and sisters) are being persecuted or discriminated against.[47] Between February 12 and 15, 2015, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) beheaded twenty-one “people of the cross,” Egyptian Coptic Christians kidnapped in the city of Sirte, Libya. They were slaughtered on the beach opposite Al Mahary Hotel in Sirte. Their last words, spoken by each as their heads were cut off, was “Lord Jesus Christ.”

Do we know any of the names, even one, of the Coptic Christian martyrs? The early church passed on the names of the martyrs and spoke them out loud as part of the Cloud.[48] The world needs to hear these names, famous or not. They deserve it. We deserve it. The air deserves it —not just to clear the air but to clean the air.

Words like Asia Bibi are air cleaners for every household. Asia Bibi is the name of a Catholic woman sentenced to death under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. At the same time, we also need to remember those of other faith traditions who have been or are being persecuted for their beliefs, such as the Syrian archaeologist and director of antiquities who was beheaded trying to protect the Palmyra museum from its destroyers. ISIL hung the body of Khaled al-Asaad from a pillar with a placard on it reading, “Director of Idolatry.”[49] Why are we not weekly in worship lifting up prayers for “all persecuted Christians” and referencing some by name?

Some scholars have noticed the sharp contrast between the relative indifference of Christians to the fate of fellow Christians around the world and the care and concern of Muslims to the plight and predicament of fellow Muslims, as Muslims, or Jews, as Jews.[50]

It is time for the church to toughen up in dealing with the world today. Jesus sent his earliest disciples out into a world that killed them. He sends us out to a mocking and maligning world, but most of us are still alive. In the language of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, we must learn to be an Antifragile Church that can embrace vulnerability and weakness and celebrate the positivity of stress.[51] To be “antifragile” is to trust the order behind the chaos, to flourish from random environments rather than established settings, and not to be afraid of antifragile preaching that can take place outside the normal patterns (systems) of church. YouTube, Facebook, podcasts, and other digital formats (screens) are a few antifragile ways to preach in a hostile culture.

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That feeling of wanting to jump up and down is one of the ways that scientists measure joy.

DESIGNER INGRID FETELL LEE,
“WHERE JOY HIDES AND HOW TO FIND IT”

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“Blessed are you when people hate you,” said Jesus, “when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets.”[52] How many Christians are jumping up and down in the good times, much less in times of persecution and suffering? Maybe we do not leap and jump for joy because we’ve forgotten the reward now and the future reward? As we see in the Beatitudes, joy is one of the ways God measures faithfulness.

Different tribes engage in the practice of dog-whistling —sending out signals that only those who know the lingo and liturgy of the subculture will recognize. The twenty-first-century church has its own equivalent to this: the God-whistle.[53] As the future unfolds, we will need to practice the God-whistle so our distinctives are clear and conformed to what God is whistling over us and for us.

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Tears melt God’s heart and bind his hand.

PURITAN THOMAS WATSON,
THE BEATITUDES

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A medieval fable tells about a young woman who died early in life but was a troublemaker in heaven —so much that she was expelled but told that if she would return with the gift most valued by God, she would be welcomed back.

So she searched the ends of the earth for what God might value most. She brought back drops of blood from a dying patriot. She brought back some coins that a destitute widow had given the poor. She brought back a leaf from the Bible that one of the greatest preachers had used over a lifetime. She brought back some dust from the shoes of a missionary laboring on a remote island. She brought back many things such as these but was always turned away.

One day she saw a small boy playing by a fountain. A man rode up on horseback and dismounted to take a drink. The man saw the child and suddenly remembered his boyhood innocence. Then, looking in the fountain and seeing the reflection of his hardened face, he realized what he had done with his life. And tears of repentance welled up in his eyes and began to trickle down his cheeks. The young woman scooped up one of these tears in a lachrymatory and took it back to heaven . . . and was received with joy and celebration.

Repentance is a word seldom heard or used anymore. But apologize (from the weak French word apologie and the strong Greek/Latin word apologia) may begin to approach the depth of metanoia, or “repentance,” which David Bentley Hart consistently translates into English as “change of heart.”[54]

By apologize, we mean what John the Baptist meant when he began his ministry with the words “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”[55] True apology is not escapology but eschatology. This may include the traditional “apology,” as Pope Francis has demonstrated in his willingness to apologize to abuse victims.[56]

Unfortunately, when the church doesn’t want to engage in substantive thought about something, it issues an apology. For example, in 1917, at the four hundredth anniversary celebration of the Protestant Reformation, the primary emphasis of Anglicanism was to claim that the purest heir of the Reformation (although it started in Germany) was the Church of England. In the course of my lifetime, the Church of England has lost 75 percent ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Endorsements
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: Hot Zones
• Part Two: Hot Topics
• Part Three: Hot Church
• Conclusion: Wild Cards, Black Swans, and Game-Changing Super Volcanoes
• Afterword: Mark Chironna
• Acknowledgments