Will the Pentagon Prohibit the Great Commission?

[Note: This is the first in an occasional series examining and assessing potential threats to religious liberty in America and around the world.]

The Situation: According to the Associated Press, a group called the Military Religious Freedom Foundation is urging the Pentagon to court martial officers whose subordinates feel they're being proselytized. MRFF founder Mikey Weinstein says even a Christian bumper sticker on an officer's car or a Bible on an officer's desk can amount to "pushing this fundamentalist version of Christianity on helpless subordinates." Weinstein and other leaders of his foundation met with top officials at the Pentagon last week.

The Backstory: Weinstein and his group met privately with Pentagon officials on April 23. He told Fox News that U.S. troops who proselytize are guilty of sedition and treason and should be punished to stave off what he called a "tidal wave of fundamentalists." "Someone needs to be punished for this," Weinstein told Fox News. "Until the Air Force or Army or Navy or Marine Corps punishes a member of the military for unconstitutional religious proselytizing and oppression, we will never have the ability to stop this horrible, horrendous, dehumanizing behavior."

"If a member of the military is proselytizing in a manner that violates the law, well then of course they can be prosecuted," he said. "We would love to see hundreds of prosecutions to stop this outrage of fundamentalist religious persecution."

"[Proselytizing] is a version of being spiritually raped and you are being spiritually raped by fundamentalist Christian religious predators," Weinstein told Fox News.   Continue at Joe Carter

The Precious Word of God

How sweet are Your words to my taste! Yes, sweeter than honey to my mouth! – Psalm 119:103

It has been a week since I returned from London when the Lord sent a group of evangelists to proclaim the glorious Gospel of Jesus Christ during the 2012 Summer Olympics. While I am adjusting to the “normal routine” of life, my heart still lingers in London with all that the Lord accomplished for His glory. I miss my brothers and sisters who I labored with from the States, as well as my new friends who the Lord blessed me to meet and labor beside. While I cannot possibly remember all the good things that happened during our mission, I hope I will be able to share some things the Lord has used to teach me and grow personally as a result of the trip. I’ll share two such stories in this article (note: names have been changed to protect identities).

The Cost of Following Christ 

Trafalgar Square

On Wednesday, August 1, we set up our ministry location at Trafalgar Square, a major tourist attraction adjacent to The Mall entrance to Buckingham Palace. The architecture and statues in this area were magnificent, and the vast amount of pedestrian space provided for an excellent ministry location. 100,000 people traversing the area on the day we visited would be a conservative estimate.

Robert, Jason, and I set up in the middle of the Square and it wasn’t long before we were prohibited from preaching (we couldn’t practice any religious speech or hand out literature within the park). Eventually, Robert and I found our way over to a couple of young students named Patrik and Fahim, who couldn’t have been older than 15 years old. As Patrik is from Hungary and Fahim from Saudi Arabia, we had a bit of a language barrier but they seemed to understand well enough to have a conversation.   Continue at AiroCross

Works and Words: Why You Can't Preach the Gospel with Deeds

When it comes to the enduring question of word versus deed in the Christian's calling, the issue is always one of balance. How are Christians to think about the relative roles of words (proclaiming the gospel) and deeds (loving action) in what Christ has called his people to be and do? We need to set our scales to a balance that matches Scripture.

"Balance" may sound simple, but finding and maintaining our equilibrium on such a complex subject is never easy. It's like walking a tightrope. Only one direction will keep us upright and moving forward, and any number of missteps could lead us to fall off one side or the other. Misguided claims abound. Here's a prominent example.

How often do we hear these days, with passion and approval, the famous dictum attributed to Francis of Assisi: "Preach the gospel at all times. Use words if necessary"? In this saying, the word-versus-deed question rears its head, stressing in this instance how important it is for Christians to "preach the gospel" with their actions. Let the gospel be seen rather than spoken, it's implied. Words may serve a useful backup role, but our actions must take center stage if we are to make a difference in the world.

At first blush, this sounds right. Except that it isn't.

According to those who know the relevant history well—the Franciscans—Francis never uttered these words. But more important, on its face this dictum represents a significant error. It's simply impossible to preach the gospel without words. The gospel is inherently verbal, and preaching the gospel is inherently verbal behavior.

But perhaps we should lighten up, we may say. Let us view the phrase as a mere aphorism and avoid pressing its language too literally. According to this reading, the saying is a rhetorical trope designed to emphasize the importance of backing up our gospel words with Christ-following lives.  Continue at Duane Litfin

A Practical Example Showing Why Doctrine Is Important

Here's a set of talking points the Jehovah's Witnesses hand to their door-to-door teams to instruct them on how to foment doubt about the deity of Christ. Some lazy JW saw an article I wrote on the deity of Christ and as a kind of shorthand reply, he e-mailed me a copy of the handout he was given by his church.^*

I wonder how many evangelicals would be prepared to give an answer. Continue at  Phil Johnson

The Church’s Mission Statement

A mission statement is a brief statement of the purpose of an organization, religious or otherwise. Companies sometimes use their mission statement as an advertising slogan, but the intention of a genuine mission statement is to keep members and users aware of the organization’s purpose.

The mission statement should be a clear and succinct representation of the enterprise’s purpose for existence. The intent of the Mission Statement should be the first consideration for any employee who is evaluating a strategic decision.

Here is a quiz for you to see if you can recognize which company’s mission statements these are:

1. ”A computer on every desktop and in every home, running our software”

2. Establishing ourselves as the premier purveyor of the finest coffee in the world while maintaining our uncompromising principles while we grow.

3. ”We seek to be the world’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they may want to buy online at a great price.”

4. “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.”     Keep Reading...

What You Do In Your Hotel Room Gives Witness: A Warning for Conference-Goers

Jason Helopoulos offers a wise warning for those attending the upcoming Gospel Coalition Conference, and for attendees of any conference really, and you should read it. I'd like to renew a different sort of caution of my own from the lead-up to last year's T4G:

A word of warning for the thousands entering Chicago next month for The Gospel Coalition Conference: what you do in the privacy of your hotel room can be a witness against the gospel. Think this is unwarranted?

From Steve Farrar's Finishing Strong:

A number of years ago a national conference for church youth directors was held at a major hotel in a city in the mid-west. Youth pastors by the hundreds flooded into that hotel and took nearly every room. At the conclusion of the conference, the hotel manager told the conference administrator that the number of guests who tuned into the adult movie channel broke the previous record, far and away outdoing any other convention in the history of the hotel.

My friend Justin Holcomb helped me in looking into this phenomenon, recalling from his own research in an email to me: Read it HERE

A Report on Answers in Genesis’s Outreach at the Vancouver Winter Olympics

Stillwood Camp, the “home” for the Answers in Genesis witnessing team (110 volunteers) that gathered for a special outreach at the Vancouver Winter Olympics became suddenly still over the weekend, as I was the last person to board the bus that left our team’s ministry haven. I reflected on the 10-day mission, where people coming from 16 states and three countries bonded as a team to take the message of the gospel to the streets of Vancouver, host of the Olympic Games that had just concluded.

The local residents and the international sports fans who assembled in Vancouver were very hospitable to our witnessing team. Over 92,000 people stopped to take our specially produced evangelistic booklets, “The Gold Rush,” and many paused to hear a gospel message from our team members. Our group included over a dozen teenagers, plus many young adults in their twenties. Also, six team members were veterans of five Olympic Games outreaches. The “rookies” who came with some timidity—and perhaps some fear—found that those feelings did not last long as they hit the streets on Monday morning. God gave them what I would call “a holy boldness” to speak with sports fans who came to beautiful Vancouver from all over the world. Read the rest HERE

John MacArthur Witnessing to his Old Football Coach

John MacArthur - Study Video from Together for the Gospel (T4G) on Vimeo.

HT: Reformed Stooge

Joseph the Masai Warrior - John Piper

Joseph the Masai Warrior - John Piper from I'll Be Honest on Vimeo.

Are Gospel Tracts Lame?

Here is yet another popular method used today in evangelism, which is tract bombing. What happens is that you choose a place to go, hand out a bunch of tracts to people, put them on park benches, next to a toilet, in condemn dispensers or in the hands of unsuspecting passer-byers. Boom…tract bombing at its best. Like most forms of evangelism, tracts have their positive and negative effects. I have used them in the past and still have some sitting in the corner of my office awaiting their next victim.

The question has to be, What place do tracts have in evangelism? Do they have a place? Are they outdated? Let’s take a quick look at some positive aspects of tracts and then also some negative aspects.

Reformed Evangelist