Date: 2/1/2003
Time: 8:49:21 AM
Wow! Sounds like an inclusive preacher to me! Nancy-Wi
Date: 2/2/2003
Time: 12:18:18 PM
I guess I have problems with this scripture. How many of us (including me) are people pleasers? You do one thing to get someone involved in the church and others leave. You just can't please everyone and trying to be all things to all people just has never worked out for me. Usually I end up getting kicked. PH in OH
Date: 2/2/2003
Time: 5:15:31 PM
I agree with you PH in OH. This has been my great sin (or Han) depending how you look at it. As I prepare for retirement, I am aware that God has been able to use me in spite of this, but such a realization at the end of my pastoral ministry. Especially since I have become aware of it, and because I have repented of it, felt the ire of my congregation, who would rather I keep the sin (or Han) But as I read the words of Paul, I think he was not trying to be a people pleaser so much as an acceptor of all, and willing for the gospel to be for all. This is different from "going along with the program."
Shalom
pasthersyl
Date: 2/3/2003
Time: 8:52:39 AM
If the premise for this scripture is that: As God came to live among us, so those who are called to share the gospel then live among those to whom they are called.... a radical kind of servanthood.... What is a video/movie clip that would illustrate this? Ann in LA
Date: 2/3/2003
Time: 1:17:37 PM
To Ann in LA, I just watched a video last night that is rife with examples of living with people to do ministry with people. "Joshua" depicts a Christ figure, actually Christ himself, who comes to a small town in contemporary America and has a profound effect on many different people simply by being with them, working with them, talking with them, feeling sad with them, celebrating with them. The only problem you will have is in choosing a single clip. Fool For Christ
Date: 2/4/2003
Time: 11:32:33 AM
Funny I was just thinking about something like is just this morning! I was a youth pastor before moving here. For and Affluent Church. I grew up in a church that was rural, middle class to working class. So, I was put out of my element. It is hard to minister to 'rich' people. But, christian millionaires need Jesus love and salvation message too. How to Adapt? Experience and mistakes teach you more than anything. <p> Also, I was thinking me personally, I even as a child, knew there was a God, and went to church...even though I had not accepted Him yet. We have had 3 deaths in church family in less than two weeks. One was a surprise, unexpected. I thought tragedies happen, but,m those who don't even acknowledge God, how do they grt through it? I mean, I know people in my generation who dont go to church, Dont know God, there parents dont and even grandparents didnt! They had to basic sunday school and Vacation Bible School education... I think those "bible stories" we who have always known them, we cannot truly fathom what it is like for them! When we Bring Jesus to them...the beginnings are where we have to go...but how, we cant teach an elementary Jonah in the whale story to them? Or can we? We have to adapt and go where people are at presently! <p> We have to go back, and really sincerely think, what if I was brought up in a household where Grandma Grandpa Mom and Dad did not believe in God, no presense of Him, not even the family bible for show. Secular living! How would you want someone to broach you about God thinking? Just thoughts here to generate discussion Pastor Mary in Ohio
Date: 2/4/2003
Time: 1:55:10 PM
How might Paul direct our ministries of witness? He seems to go into the world of the people he's talking to, and not make them come to him. The church needs to be more aware of its context and language -- and the way we're perceived. Might we be help more people if we hold an indigenous worship service in a restaurant, for example? Speaking the language of the people we're talking to seems like square one, but how often do we do it? MTSOfan
Date: 2/5/2003
Time: 4:09:59 AM
As I see it Paul is simply saying he meets people where they are respecting them for who they are and through creating a relationship with them he is able to share with them on a deeper level the Good News of Jesus Christ. Paul takes them to Christ by getting under their radar of reason so he can speak directly to their hearts. KB in ks
Date: 2/5/2003
Time: 10:02:16 PM
kb in Kansas I agree with you. I do not think Paul is being wishy washy at all. He is listening to people and discovering what they need, and then he is offering the gospel of Jesus Christ as the sustenance for that need. Jesus did much the same thing with one person at a time. He asked such things as, "Do you want to be made well?" or "What do you want me to do for you?" Paul was looking at the Jesus model of first forming a relationship.
Date: 2/5/2003
Time: 10:03:17 PM
forgot to sign the previous comment. Glad in IL
Date: 2/6/2003
Time: 7:09:09 AM
Maybe the truth is that we are all more like those who are under the law or those not under the law or like the weak or like anyone else than we first think we are. Only when we look at that part of ourselves which is like those to whom we are trying to minister can we hope share the love of Christ with them.
Brian in Ada
Date: 2/6/2003
Time: 7:09:55 AM
Maybe the truth is that we are all more like those who are under the law or those not under the law or like the weak or like anyone else than we first think we are. Only when we look at that part of ourselves which is like those to whom we are trying to minister can we hope share the love of Christ with them.
Brian in Ada
Date: 2/7/2003
Time: 3:46:43 AM
Ann in LA... You asked for a movie clip. Catch me if you can. It is the moving about the teen ager that poses as a pilot, dr. and later a lawyer with NO training whatsoever. In doing so he gained over 4 million dollars before he was caught. Now he works for the FBI. It is in theaters now.
I don't see this as telling us to Lie our way into peoples lives like this guy did. But if we come to understand them well enough to empathise with them then we will be great workers for the kingdom. WE cannot be all things to all people..but we can try to know how to direct all people to what they truly need...ultimately that is the Lord Jesus Christ Tammy Texas
Date: 2/7/2003
Time: 11:05:04 AM
Hi
About Paul becoming x,y and z: My first pastoral charge was on the Lower North Shore of Quebec. My usual explanation of where this is goes: Go to the (small, northern) city of Sept-Iles. Keep going. When you get to the end of the road: Keep going for another couple of hundred kilometres.
Travel between my three churches was by boat and snowmobile. I would be driving a snowmobile as late as the end of April, and some of the time I would take my boat from one village to the next, and then get on the snowmobile to go to the third. And the culture is not the same as the "outside": the rest of North America.
If you did not fit in reasonably well, you were not listened to very much. If you could drive the snowmobile and change the head gasket on the outboard motor, then people were more apt to listen. Paul's writing makes a lot of sense to me.
'Fit in reasonably well' does not mean forgetting one's fundamental values and faith. No one there would say that I was just like everyone else in every way - only that I fitted in.
Compare this to some of the earlier mission theology where to be Christian people were told to eat with knife and fork and dress like Europeans. No, Paul had, and still has, it right in this passage.
peace
kent in Quebec
Date: 2/7/2003
Time: 11:08:42 AM
p.s. and oops:
I really should not have lumped all of North America together. I am connected to at least three other cultural milieus, and should have recognized, before I hit "submit", their importance to N.American life.
kentin qc
Date: 2/7/2003
Time: 1:56:34 PM
It was noted in my weekly lectionary study group that, while Paul speaks of becoming AS one under the law, AS one outside the law, he goes on then to say, in v. 22, "To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak." No 'as' here! I think this is significant, and I think it points toward what some of you have been saying - Paul certainly ISN'T being 'wishy-washy.' He is trying to relate to everyone. Now, you can't really be LIKE everyone, but you can relate to everyone's humanity. We are all weak, no exceptions. We all have common ground in human frailty, in the struggle to triumph over adversity - sickness, confusion, death, etc. Paul's message here, at least in part, is, look beyond cultural and socioeconomic differeces. See the humanity. Ken in WV
Date: 2/7/2003
Time: 1:59:19 PM
Thank you Kent,I believe you are right, besides for Paul, it seemed that who he was didn't seem so important. However, his commission, and his Gospel were all important. Perhaps like him, we can allow the picture of ourselves to be modified to fit the circumstances. The message we have to give, however, should be without compromise.
Date: 2/8/2003
Time: 12:53:38 PM
Hi all,
I think what Paul is saying is that he presents the Christian lifestyle to folks in the way that they will live it. He's not pretending anything. What people see is what they will get if they become a Christian. If they aren't Jewish they don't have to become Jewish. If they are living under the law, they may continue if that is their choice and he shows them how it will be. Paul would prefer that so that these Jews could win more Jews to Christ. It's the opposite of phoniness.
For us that means we don't put on a religious air in our relationships with non-Christians. We should live just as they could and would live. No added on requirements or cultural shock needed.
Larry in Indy
Date: 2/8/2003
Time: 4:26:35 PM
Is this passage talking about being a people pleaser? I don't think so. I think it is challenging all of us to go outside of our comfort zones in order to bring others to Christ, to go where others go, who don't believe, to reach out to them on their own terms. But I don't think in doing so that we compromise who we are. I actually think this scripture frees us to be more real, to admit our weaknesses, to recognize our own poverty, to not feel that we have to be strong, perfect, and therefore unreachable.
Susan in Wa
Date: 2/8/2003
Time: 4:56:37 PM
From Richard B. Hays, in the Interpretation Series, he says, "Being free from the law does not mean that Paul runs wild with Self indulgence,, a word pointedly spoken to the Corinthians who are proclaiming, 'I am free to do anything.' Instead,he lives with a powerful sense of obligation to God, defined now by his relationship to Christ. . . .he is asserting that the pattern of Christ's self sacrificial death on the cross has now become the normative pattern for his own existence."
Are we servant leaders? That seems to be the question for us to consider. It certainly is for me. How far are we willing to be stretched to reach others for Jesus Christ?
Date: 2/8/2003
Time: 6:44:07 PM
verse 17...is that suppose to be good? Does this say that if I do this by my own will I will receive a simple reward but if I do it from, say, God's will, I will receive so much more in fact, I'll be given a great commission by God?
Date: 2/8/2003
Time: 6:44:51 PM
sorry, last comment about verse 17 is JPL of LMIowa