Gospel.com Blog

Have you ever looked around, taken stock of the spiritual apathy and confusion in our culture, and wished for a nationwide religious revival? If so, you’re not the first Christian to do so. If you’re despairing that a society-wide revival could ever take place, you might be surprised to learn that just a few hundred years ago, that’s exactly what happened!

I’m talking about the “Great Awakening” that swept through America in the 18th century, sparking great church growth, renewed missions work, and inter-denominational unity. Sound far-fetched? Here are a few resources to introduce you to the Great Awakening and the evangelists who helped spark it:

• First, read a brief overview of the Great Awakening—who started it and what it meant for an America increasingly affected by spiritual malaise and the humanist philosophies of the Enlightenment.
• Jonathan Edwards was a Puritan preacher who, distressed by what we saw happening (or not happening) in America’s churches, began a preaching tour that kickstarted a great spiritual revival. His 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (link goes to an audio reading of it) is one of the most famous sermons in all of Christian history. (You can listen to many more of his sermons at Sermon Index.)
• George Whitefield, a British evangelist and friend of Ben Franklin, was another major figure in the Great Awakening. Greatly upset by the “lukewarm Christianity” he saw all around him, he did all he could to shake Christians out of their stagnant spiritual state. Read more about Whitefield’s evangelistic work, or check out some of his many sermons. For a shorter sample of his teaching style, see this brief Whitefield excerpt on the importance of “frequent and devout prayer”.
• Revival didn’t end with the Great Awakening— it wasn’t long after that a Second Great Awakening was sparked, with an even greater impact on American society.

The preaching of Edwards, Whitefield, and other evangelists had a profound effect on their society—and if you take the time to read some of their sermons, you’ll be amazed at how relevant they are. Some of them feel like they could just as easily have been written in 2008! So next time you’re tempted to despair at the all the religious confusion we see in society around us, remember the Great Awakening, and be reminded that what seems impossible to man is quite possible for God.

What’s the worst thing Christians have ever done?

If you said “the Crusades,” it’s hard to argue with you. What could be more disturbing than the followers of Jesus Christ—whose most famous sermon specifically praised peacemakers and encouraged his followers to “love your enemies”—taking up the sword to slaughter their foes? The Crusades’ bloody legacy continues to plague Christian-Muslim relations even today, 900 years after the fact!

Church historians have struggled for centuries to figure out exactly what went wrong—how the church of Jesus Christ came to champion violent “holy war.” As uncomfortable as it is to think about such an ugly period of church history, Christians need to grapple with the Crusades if they’re going to understand the story of the Church.

We’ve tracked down several resources from around the Gospel.com community that should help you better understand what the Crusades were, how they happened, and why they’re still so important to us today. If you know the Crusades were a stain on church history but don’t know exactly how and why, explore these links and see what you learn:

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Mission Network News has some great news to share. One of Wycliff’s translators just finished a translation of the New Testament in the language of the Kagayenen language.

This is notable because this marks the first time:

An African-American woman has completed a New Testament translation.

An African-American has completed a NT translation with Wycliffe Bible Translators.

An African-American has completed a NT translation since the early 1900s.

But most notably this is also the first time the Kagayenen people can read about Jesus in their own language. Just imagine how much this priviledge has meant to you. Imagine not having the bible, and the joy of not only getting to read about it, but read abut it in your native tongue.

Here’s more from the article:
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Are Christian apologetics necessary… or even useful? Apologetics refers to the defense of the Christian faith, but it sometimes seems less than relevant to everyday Christianity. You can’t “argue someone into the Kingdom,” so is there any point to apologetic debates and sermons? Even the very term apologetics seems to suggest that Christians have done something wrong and need to apologize for it, which hardly seems like a useful way to defend our faith. So what is the point of apologetics?

That’s the question that Ravi Zacharias tackles in An Apologetic for Apologetics, an essay excerpted from his book Beyond Opinion: Living the Faith We Defend. In it, he argues that apologetics does have an important role to play in our Christian lives—but that we might need to change our idea of what apologetics really is before we can start defending our faith effectively. Among other things, Ravi suggests that well-intentioned efforts by the Western church have inadvertently devalued apologetics, and that Christians today need to reclaim the type of apologetics that Jesus and the apostle Paul practiced.

It’s a timely message (and quite appropriate, considering our recent post about Thomas Aquinas, one of the most famous theologians and defenders of the faith). And after you’ve read Ravi’s essay on apologetics, take a look at The Trinity as a Paradigm for Spiritual Transformation, another new article recently added to the website.

This week’s focus at Gospel.com is church history—the often inspiring, sometimes discouraging chain of people and events that embodied the Christian church throughout the centuries. It seems fitting to kick off our church history week by commemorating the birthday of one of the church’s greatest and most influential minds, Thomas Aquinas!

Aquinas, who yesterday would have turned 783 years old if he were still alive, is considered one of the greatest theologians in the history of the Christian church. While the popular stereotype of medieval theologians imagines them sitting around debating minutia (”How many angels could dance on the head of a pin?”), Aquinas wrestled with many of the same fundamental questions about God and Christianity that skeptics and believers ask today: Can the existence of God be proven by logic? How can God be three persons in one—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? How can Jesus have been both fully God and fully human?

Here are a few links to explore if you want to get to know this great theologian/philosopher a bit better:

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Each week, Past the Popcorn offers a thorough look at the latest round of films opening on big screens.

The time for whining is over, says Past the Popcorn Managing Editor Greg Wright. This week’s releases feature three strong entries that should make parents feel pretty good about the values presented on the silver screen.

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People that center their lives around the purposeful living of Christianity can be frightening.

Frightening because their lives demand us to consider our own, which is a scary thing to do. Too often we just let our ‘full-time ministry professionals’ handle all the ‘living out’ of our faith, but part of the Good news of Jesus is that we all get to play a role. We’re all high priests because of Jesus.

Yes, you who work in Quality Assurance, Software Development, or Cancer Research. You who are Stay-at-home-Moms and Dad. You Salespeople, Project Mangers and Welders. And even you students. All of you are an integral part of the body of Christ.

The spectacular thing, in my opinion, about Jesus is the fact that we’re offered a place in His plan. Regardless of what the world would have us believe, there is a place for the screwed-up kid in the kingdom of God. And it is a high position.

Fact of the matter is, we’re all called to serve as Christians. The question is just in what capacity?

More importantly sometimes, does it mean leaving the country? Absolutely not!

If you’re ready to jump in, let me offer a few suggestions you might look in to, all within the United States:

Just ask someone in your church where they need help. If your church doesn’t need volunteers (by the way: they do) find the next closest church, they’ll need help.

christianvolunteering.org is a searchable database of ministry opportunities in your area. It’s a great way to get connected with what’s already happening in or around your city.

For college students there’s always camp counseling, which could prove to be one of the better experiences of your life. Search CCCA’s database of job openings. Or there’s the Center for Student Missions. They specialize in urban missions in the US.

Have a bible degree? Or are you a pastor? Village Mission is always looking for pastors to reach out to rural America.

Or you can always do evangelism on the internet. Internet Evangelism Day is a ministry devoted to helping you reach out to people either through your church’s web site or individually.

What do you think of when you hear the word “missions”? Most Americans probably conjure up a mental image of intrepid evangelists traveling far overseas to distant lands, there to live and work with unfamiliar cultures.

While there’s some truth in that stereotype, a lot of missionary work actually goes on right amid unreached people groups right here in North America. Two ministries in the Gospel.com community, in fact, are dedicated to bringing the Gospel message to Native North Americans.

The first is Indian Life Ministries, which reaches out to Native North American (First Nations, Aboriginal, Indian, and other) people in the United States and Canada. Important to their style of outreach is contextualizing the Gospel message—telling the story of Jesus in a way that is understandable and culturally relevant to Native listeners. Indian Life publishes a bi-monthly newspaper addressing issues of interest to Native communities and the growing Church there. (For good examples of their storytelling ministry style, see their retellings of the Gospel story and the Wise Men story.) They also run a prison correspondence ministry; you can read about (and support) their projects at ILM website.

Another ministry that works with Native North Americans is Northern Canada Evangelical Mission (NCEM), an organization that aims to create disciples and establish churches within Canada’s indigenous communities. Among other things, NCEM runs the Tribal Trails television program (which you can watch online), a Bible training school, and summer camps for young people. If your heart is leading you to get involved, they also have summer missions opportunities during which you and a partner will live and work for five weeks in a reserve or Native community.

So if you feel prompted to get involved with missions but can’t travel overseas, there are plenty of missions opportunities in North America where your support, prayers, and participation would be welcome!

A quick update from the Center For Student Missions:

In its 20th year of service to the city of Los Angeles, The Center for Student Missions (CSM) will be moving to a new housing site. For the last five years they have partnered with World Impact, an urban church planting organization, to provide housing to their groups. CSM will move their housing location from one of World Impact’s properties in the Pico Union district to another property (also owned by World Impact) in Southeast Los Angeles.

“This move will better meet the needs of our groups and free up our previous property to be used by the growing ranks of World Impact church planters”, said Rachel Hamilton, CSM-LA City Director.

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Are you familiar with the Lausanne Movement? It’s an evangelistic coalition born over 30 years ago at a vast international gathering of thousands of Christian evangelists and visionaries. The result of that meeting was the Lausanne Covenant, a document that has shaped Christian mission work ever since.

It’s been decades since the Lausanne Movement sprang into existence, but it continues to guide and focus conversations about missions and evangelism. And this January, Lausanne Chairman Doug Birdsall started up Towards 2010, a blog at which he’ll be discussing missions, leadership, and theology. In particular, the blog will be talking about issues related to the planned Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, set for 2010 in Cape Town, South Africa. The blog’s just begun, but if missions is a topic you’re interested in, this one should be well worth adding to your feed reader.