Jesus Christ’s gospel (the “evangel” from which our movement gets its name) embeds in its command to “go and make disciples” the measurement of the movement’s health. By Christ’s own words, this is the simplest gauge we use to measure success or failure. Are we making disciples? Not just convincing converts, but making disciples?

Not just filling the seats in auditoriums, but training the souls of transformed individuals? Are we valuing the quality of our discipleship more than the quantity of our attendance? Jesus’ words and life reveal that evangel-followers can know whether they are succeeding or failing by this: whether new growing disciples are being made or not.

John Dickerson – The Great Evangelical Recession

I am encouraged by this affirmation of the importance of quality of the disciples over the quantity of them.

The problem is that it is much easier to assess quantity and more difficult to assess quality. But the difficulty does not relieve us of the responsibility to have this priority.

I started reading Saving Leonardo by Nancy Pearcey and ran across this paragraph in the first chapter:

“We often hear Christians speak about recovering the vitality of the early church. But which aspect of the early church are they thinking about? It’s a safe bet they are not thinking about the way the early church went on the offensive against the dominant intellectual systems of the age. Today’s churches pour their resources into rallies, friendship evangelism, and mercy missions that distribute food and medicine. And these are vital. Yet if they aspire to the dynamic impact of the early church, they must do as it did, learning to address, critique, adapt and overcome the dominant ideologies of our day.”

To engage our culture means that we need to teach people what Scripture says about our culture. We also need to teach people what Scripture says about how to engage our culture.

People flocked to Jesus. He obviously knew how to treat people with respect, even those who the religious leaders treated with contempt.

We are not called to ratchet up the rhetoric in the culture war. We need to see how Jesus used respectful dialog to point people in a different direction.

Jesus shows us that it is possible to be firm on ideas while being loving to those who hold different ones. But this takes work, hard work. Work that few of the churches I’ve attended seemed willing to undertake.

It is so much easier to avoid the discussion by not entering into it through cultural conformity.

Another method of shutting down discussion is to use condemnatory statements and harsh rhetoric. Instead of tearing down walls, this approach reinforces and raises them.

Scripture enjoins us to do neither.

The quote below resonated with me when I read it. I have felt a restlessness that has been difficult to explain.

In Philippians 4, Paul talks about learning to be content. I can see the wisdom in this, but how is that contentment to be obtained? To shrug my shoulders and say, “it is what it is” with resignation is not contentment.

To understand that the restlessness is hard-wired into us and can only find contentment in the eternal is to begin to be content. My contentment can only be found in pursuit of God. Thankfully, Jesus provides the way for us to find God and therefore find peace.

Here is the quote, I hope you also find it helpful:

If we were of the earth only and belonged to the beasts, we would never be disturbed. There would never be much trouble in the world at all if God had not put everlastingness in us. Without everlastingness in the soul, I do not believe a Hitler or a Stalin would have tried to conquer Europe. But because of God’s intentional design, there is in us an appreciation and a longing for the everlastingness of God. But we have lost it. We wish we had it, and we want it; and we are dissatisfied with anything less.

Man, like an eagle in a cage, owns the cage and then drops back and forth from one war to another war. He goes from one strike to another strike, from one gamble to another gamble, from one dance to another dance, from one hell to another hell. Why do men act this way? Why do men and women fight against each other and strive for supremacy?

The answer is quite simple. God has buried something deep within the soul of every man and woman. It is simply and profoundly a longing for immortality. Although men and women know that everybody dies, they never think that they will die. When death approaches, they fight this enemy with all that is in them. Why? Because of that sense of immortality that God breathed into them when He breathed into Adam and he became a living soul.

A. W. Tozer – And He Dwelt among Us: Teachings from the Gospel of John