Episode Details

Welcome to another free, public edition of The Payneful Truth. (I’m now sending these freebies out in the third week of each month.) Here’s what you might have missed over the past month:

* 10,000 reasons our songs are changing: how should we think about the unmistakable trend towards slower, more emotionally intense congregational songs? 

* Singing and the affections: a follow-up post on emotions, affections and singing, including a re-reading of a well-known Jonathan Edwards quote. 

* You knitted me together: a fresh take on the value and personhood of unborn children, and how we might talk to our friends about this. 

* Is Christianity a locked room?: some thoughts on whether Christian truth is a circular argument. 

The good news is that you can access all these articles (and the whole archive) by coughing up a few measly dollars a month and becoming a paying member of The Payneful Truth. And that (as they say in the steak knives commercial) is not all. You also get:

* every future edition every week (in both text and podcast form)

* the monthly Q&A interview

* regular work-in-progress reports from my other writing (including draft and sample chapters)

* bonus book specials from Matthias Media 

* and the joy of supporting Christian writing!

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Anyway, on to today’s post …

Move right, look left

There’s a moment in Trellis-and-Vine related ministry workshops or talks when the same joke always seems to show up. Like an old friend approaching on the street, I see him coming, and give him a warm slap on the back as he arrives and passes by.

It’s when we get to discussing the ‘moving to the right’ diagram. I mean this one:

For those not familiar: the basic idea is that becoming a disciple of Christ and growing as his disciple is like ‘moving to the right’ on this diagram—being rescued out of the domain of darkness into his kingdom, and then being transformed into the likeness of Christ our king. And all Christian ministry, therefore, has the same essential character, whether it’s more down the ‘evangelistic’ end of the diagram or at the ‘transformational’ end, and whether it’s being practised by the most experienced pastor or the newest Christian disciple. All Christian ministry simply seeks to move every single person around us—in church, at home, in our neighbourhood, in our small groups—one step to the right.

The method for moving people to the right is also the same all across the diagram—it’s through the four Ps: Presenting or Proclaiming God’s gospel Word in some form; Praying in the Spirit that it would be effective; all this being done in and through God’s People; and continuing to Practice this, Perseveringly, with our lives serving as a lived example of the word we’re speaking.

Many of you will have read or heard this. (If you do want to explore the ‘move to the right’ thing further, pages 43-152 of The Vine Project lay it all out in detail.)

Anyway. The joke that always turns up in this discussion trades on the discomfort people feel about casting the Christian life as a relentless movement to the ‘right’.

“Don’t worry, friends”, I say. “This is not a journey away from CNN and towards Fox News. You don’t have to turn off the ABC news and turn on Paul Murray Live. It’s not a transfer of allegiance from (current left-wing Pol