What Makes the Heart Grow Fonder?

We live here in the Philippines. Since you are reading this post, there is a good chance you already knew that. We have been here since the middle of January of this year, and at times it feels like we are just screaming so fast (pas-pas kaayo) through the year. Other times it feels like a single day takes about a month. It's now the middle of August, and we have celebrated all of the girls birthdays, and we are looking forward to being done with our formal language study and moving on to (possibly) moving closer to where we will be working. We are hoping to really focus our energies on training and helping local pastors equip their churches to go and do the work, as the gospel moves, we move with it, helping to train and lead and guide new churches as the Holy Spirit directs us.

Tons of stuff has happened to us, but all of it seems small sometimes. I've shared my fair share of events and adventures here, and Hollie has through the Newsletter and we've both shared on facebook. Here's the thing that everyone knows about moving to a new place: you actually move on. People drift apart, you send fewer and fewer messages to each other, friends that you would have given your left kidney for are harder to get in contact with. It happens. People get busy, they meet new friends, they get wrapped up in the day to day and their life in a new local. The people you leave behind press in to the remaining people surrounding them and they too meet new friends and get pulled into their lives. Family and friends both suffer from the long distance relationship that you have been put in. And while everyone says they will keep in touch, that we will call and talk every weekend, that is almost a nicety, something that sounds hollow because we almost all know that in reality, it's not going to happen.

We've tried to keep in touch, we really have. I (Jeff) have tried to message at least three people from Solid Rock a week, though more often than not it tends to be forgotten. Some of them have been happy accidents, like when Craig Moss's finger fumbled and he video called me. We had a really good talk for like an hour and a half! Hollie has tried to keep in contact as well, and she too has had varying success. Good video calls. Good chats with friends, but no matter how much we talk on facebook messenger or whatsapp, it just doesn't feel like enough.
And we know that it won't be enough, it can't be enough. We (all of us) have invested time into the relationships that we have and wrenching people apart for any reason, much less ministry, makes it difficult and painful to maintain those relationships.

For us though there seems to be an added measure. Since we are missionaries, we are viewed as odd, no odd isn't the right word is it? Outsiders? Super-Christians? Hmm...well, regardless of what the word actually is, feeling we get is that we are different. In some ways we are. Most American families live in America, they have "normal" jobs and their kids don't have to learn another language just so they can play with the neighborhood kids. But we are still very similar in quite a few crucial ways. We still have problems, we still have struggles, we still have trials and temptations. We have the responsibilities to help care for our brothers and sisters in Christ. We also have a normal life here: We get up and have breakfast, do our work, hang out with our kids, go shopping, run errands, deal with jerks in traffic. We still need Christian community. We still need encouragement and prayer, and we need to be able to encourage and pray for our church family back home. While I know for a fact that we do indeed get that support from our church, it is hard to give that support back. When we message people asking about how they are doing and what things they need prayer for they seem confused. 'Why would I need prayer compared to you?' We had quite a few people who actually said things like "Me? Shouldn't I be praying for you?" Of course! But we are still family, still people who were created for community. And foreign missions is sometimes very lonely. For as much as I want to think that I can go alone with just my family, I know it's not true. I need community, I need to not only get support from brothers and sisters, I need to be able to give it.

I'm not trying to shame anyone with this. I'm not trying to make anyone upset. All I am saying is we miss you guys. We want to know what's going on in your lives, even if it is all happening half a world away. We want to be able to pray for you here, and tell our Local Family ways they can pray for our Stateside Family, ways they can lift you guys up with us. Trust me, we want to help you carry your burdens just as much as we want to share our own with you. We want that communication, we want the late night video calls or the early morning message marathons. So don't feel like you don't want to burden us with your problems, go ahead and write those long emails, snail mail, carrier pigeon, bisan unsa (what ever)!

The Importance of Theology in the Christian Life

Now, I love theology. I love the popular theology books as well as the more academic theological books. I love to try to see how the theologian tries to make his case for his particular view, use (or misuse) Scripture and other authors as argument or counter-argument. I enjoy (in the most Christian and holy sense) to see someone take another person to the floor (figuratively speaking) for their bad use of Scripture or church history or logic.

It's not just the reading of big books by people with phd behind their name or the big ideas being thrown around and discussed. It's the community experience of theology. Theology should be a community experience, where people pray through and discuss the big thoughts of our glorious God as revealed in the Bible. That is where iron sharpens iron and we grow in our knowledge of God, are corrected for faulty or dangerous beliefs and generally grow in fondness and adoration of God, the ultimate subject of theology.

But sadly, most people don't feel this way. Now are our home church I was blessed to be involved with multiple people who loved reading and discussing theology almost every time we saw each other. Most lay people nowadays are afraid to read theology, or they don't know where to begin, or, even worse, they think that its not important to living a fulfilling Christian life.

Why is that? Why would people shy away from studying the big things of God? One reason is that they see theology as a purely academic exercise, reserved for seminary professors or really smart pastors. Others think that they are not theologians because they were taught that learning (when it comes to the Bible) what other people think about the Bible is dangerous and that if you learn about the various atonement theories or whatever you are squelching the Spirit from being able to lead you. Others actually see doctrine as being divisive, and they see how people can get worked up over whether one holds to a amil, post-mil, or pre-mil view of the end-times and they don't want to be apart of that and either be hurt or hurt someone else over something as "silly" as theology.

All of these excuses are really bad. They ultimately show that the people who hold them don't understand the importance of theology in the life of the Christian, even the average, run of the mill believer who has never taught a Sunday-School class or even been asked to lead prayer at the annual men's breakfast. They don't understand that what you believe actually matters, that they influence your views of God, His work in the world, in salvation, in history and in your life. They don't understand that theology, when done right, leads to praise and adoration of God. They don't see that through reading and discussing various doctrines of the church they are actually growing in godliness and intimacy not only with God but also with the people they are discussing these glorious topics. They have a stagnant Christian life and they think that everything is hunky-dory simply because they go to church on Sundays and have no interaction with the Bible on deeper levels of thinking, really dwelling on the Word and thinking about the implications of how a particular passage plays out in the real world, because that is what theology is!

So let's take a quick look at some of the excuses that I gave and try to talk through them a bit, this is in no way comprehensive, there is so much more that can be said in each of these points. Ok, here we go!

1. Theology as Academic
One of the main problems that the church faces is that most of the local congregations are theologically weak and anemic. Sure the pastor and teachers may be up on what's going on in the theological world, but quite a few people see it as a specialized field of academia. I'm not saying they are wrong, I'm saying there is a problem with that. Theology is first and foremost for the church as a whole. It should not be just for those ivory tower guys, but theology is also for people living in the trenches of everyday life. Studying various doctrines of God and His immutability could help remind a person whose life is spinning out of control that God never changes, and therefore will keep His promises. Or someone who has prayerfully studied through the doctrine of assurance can rest a bit easier when he is having a dark night of the soul.

2. Learning about the Bible is dangerous
This, for some reason, is the excuse that you hear from mostly rural churches that are in the Deep South. Or Arkansas. The people who think that all that education at a Bible college will mess you up and turn you into an atheist and a democrat, so don't mess with books, even about the Bible. This is so crazy, considering the multiple places in the Bible itself that we are told to guard the deposit of faith, to make sure that we are qualified to teach and preach the gospel correctly, to be able to rightly divide the Word. To be able to understand and properly interpret the Bible is very important, not just for pastors, but for the average layman. As Baptists, we believe in the priesthood of believers and therefore we all have the right and responsibility to read the Bible and should be able to interpret the Bible. The fear of education corrupting good men called to the ministry comes from the modernist/fundamental crises from over a century ago, where seminaries actually did corrupt and destroy the faith of good men because of bad theology. But now there are good books by good men who love the Bible and all that it contains, who want for the men who preach in the pulpit to be able to read, interpret and defend his own sermon and approach to interpreting the Bible, and therefore their faith. I would be hard pressed to find any pastor worth his salt who said that he would rather not have a theologically (and therefore biblically) literate congregation who had the ability to call his error when it occurs.

3. Doctrine divides
There is a saying, that theology divides, it divides the sheep from the goats. That may sound harsh, but I think that it's true. The fact of the matter is this: everyone is a theologian, everyone believes something. Whether they take what they get from the pulpit as gold and never question their pastor, or get their theology from the plethora of garbage from televangelists who promise God's blessing for a little seed of faith, more money with which to buy their next jet. Or they might get it from the pop section of their local bookstore, where soft heresy is floated as being ok and for the most part, directed at unsuspecting Christian women it seems.
There is good doctrine. There is bad doctrine. The good doctrine agrees with Scripture, the bad does not. The good doctrine will be edifying to the church as a whole and will deepen the relationship of the believer with God and his fellow brothers and sisters. Bad doctrine will cause a person to have a crisis of faith when God is not blessing them the way they feel like they deserve, or they will allow sin to be tolerated because they want to be seen as "loving" because they hold to bad doctrine that does not reflect the truth of the Bible.
So yes, doctrine divides, but if we say that we don't want to read and study the glory of God through various doctrines or theology then we are ultimately of the opinion that theology and doctrine is itself, merely opinion and not an attempt to define and explore truth. We will run the risk of having bad theology ourselves, maybe even tricking ourselves into a false sense of security with regards to our salvation. The truth is that theology and doctrine, what we believe and how we articulate it, has eternal weight attached to it. Not all doctrine is of the same level as gospel-level importance. Christian unity is centered on doctrines regarding Christ first, and doctrines that naturally flow out of that (justification, sin, good works, etc.) come to play very important roles within the church. We need to try to make sure that as much as we can, we hold the same theology as the Bible, and good theology starts with the Bible itself. These doctrines are worth dividing over, worth disrupting congregations and denominations over truth. These types of doctrines are precisely why the Protestant Reformation even happened in the first place. Other doctrine, like how the end of the world plays out, whether you are amil or pre-mil, that is not a gospel issue and should not hinder two people from having unity in Christ. Some doctrines are more important than others, some are worth causing division over, some are not, wisdom is learning which is which.

For Christians who have no interest or have a fear of studying theology, I hope they understand there is nothing to be afraid of, as long as we are faithful to God and His Word. Theology and doctrine naturally flow out of a desire to know and understand God better, to take what His Word says, to see how He has revealed Himself to us, and try to articulate that truth.
The next step for us is seeing that theology cannot be done by ourselves in a vacuum. It needs to be first and foremost accompanied by a robust walk with God. One where the Bible is treasured and devoured daily as sustenance to carry us through our various trials and tribulations of our days. If/when we decided to take up theology, then we need to be humble and do so in community, ask your pastor, ask your small group or Sunday-School leader. Read through something with a friend and meet for coffee and discuss it. Pray over your theology, but do not worship it. Pray that it is honoring to God and bringing Him glory.
Once we have begun to study and to revel in the knowledge of our God and King, then we can take the natural next step and worship Him because of what we read and how we grow in grace and understanding.
As the old saying goes, theology leads to doxology.