J.P. Moreland has written a kind of manifesto, entitled Kingdom Triangle declaring the desperate need for the Body of Christ to be equipped if we are going to be effective and relevant in our culture. The heading on the inside of the jacket reads “Prescription for A Culture in Crisis” and begins this way:
“Crisis is an overused word, but it is not too strong a description of contemporary Western society. Moral drift and confusion. Disintegration of the family and sexual mores. Rampant loneliness, depression, and boredom with life. Vapid and shrill political discourse. Preoccupation with the trite and trivial. Obsession with personal happiness. All this is the result, says J.P. Moreland, of our culture’s embrace of two influential worldviews: scientific naturalism and postmodernism. At the same time, the biblical worldview, the hope for the world, has been pushed to the margins.”
Kingdom Triangle lays out a blueprint for a 3-pronged approach to equipping the Saints. The first two seem fairly innocuous: developing the Christian mind and renovating the heart through spiritual formation. There’s hardly anyone who would object up to this point. What really distinguishes this book is the emphasis on the third prong: the restoration of the power of the Holy Spirit at the center of the Christian life. Here are my observations on the proposed Triangle
1. The Nurture of the Christian Mind. Jesus said that we must love God with all of our minds. Sadly, there is a decline in the value for an intelligent and articulate expression of the faith. We must clearly equip believers to ‘rightly handle the word of truth’. Churches should create venues that clearly explain the Bible, the teachings of the church and topics that are presently relevant in our culture, so that everyone can “always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear.”(1 Peter 3:15)
2. The Renovation of the Heart and Spiritual Formation. We are continually being transformed into a greater likeness of Jesus. Paul referred to his Galatian apprentices his desire for them to become more like Jesus: My little children, for whom I labor in birth again until Christ is formed in you (Galatians 4:18 – 19) This is not something that happens overnight, but is a process that accompanies the believer his or her whole life. Christian character formation is a natural consequence of following Jesus, and is pursued by engaging in the various Biblical disciplines that grow us into Christlikeness, such as Bible reading, prayer, fasting, giving, serving, etc. Authentic equipping churches are ones that create and sustain multiple venues that acquaint the disciple with time-honored and ancient forms of engaging God and bring our bodies, minds and emotions into line with what we know to be true of our great God.
3. The Restoration of the Power of the Holy Spirit at the center of the Christian Life. For too long the American church has lived in either ignorance or neglect of the Pneumatic realities of the Kingdom of God. We have become a two-dimensional church that is designed to be 3-dimensional. Therefore we must constantly and repeatedly learn to interface with the Living God and become functionally competent in the gifts of the Father (Romans 12), the gifts of Jesus (Ephesians 4) and the gifts of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12). To that end we will create venues for the practical training in how to operate in the way Jesus taught his first apprentices to operate. In the words of John Wimber, we will learn to “do the stuff.”
In the unofficial biography of the Vineyard movement, called The Quest for the Radical Middle, author Bill Jackson documents a statement made to the Vineyard by Moreland’s doctoral professor, the eminent USC professor of philosophy, Dallas Willard. It is in regard to Moreland’s third aspect of his Triangle:
“You must ensure that Vineyard churches maintain the visible signs of the Holy Spirit and the kingdom of God, or else vineyard churches will never maintain the faith for discipleship or evangelism of anything else. . . . I go to churches all the time where the people’s hunger for piety is enormously high, but they live in constant frustration because they don’t have the accompanying faith that God really could change who they are – because they never see signs of God doing things. If you want your pastors to have the faith for evangelism, if you want them to have the faith for changed lives, you have to maintain the visible signs of the Holy Spirit.”
----- Dallas Willard, as quoted in Bill Jackson, The Quest for the Radical Middle (Cape Town, South Africa: Vineyard International, 1999), 380-381
This is an excellent read. I personally disagree with the way he defines the soul, but heartily recommend this book.
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