September 26, 2007
To Catch a Fish
The 2007 September/October issue of Israel My Glory published an article by Renald E. Showers titled ‘Critical Issues Facing Today’s Churches’. Showers says, “…Christ commanded believers to go ‘into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature’ (Mk 16:15). He ordained that the church evangelize primarily by going out into the world where the unsaved are. If you want to catch fish, you go where the fish are. Evangelism is not to involve the church changing its nature to attract unsaved people into its services to get them saved. The method reverses the order of evangelism that Christ ordained.” So that’s why we’re not catching any fish! And here we’ve put all that effort into building and equipping such attractive fish ponds.
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Gail;
-----I disagree with Mr. Showers in a big way, as well as somewhat semantically. Though I know what you are saying and entirely agree with it, just for fun and point, I am going to fill your semantics with an opposite meaning.
-----I love to listen to preachers make much of context, and then watch them ignore it. Context is an interesting thing. It is a big and significant thing. It extends beyond the piece that is written or spoken. It carries right through to include the idiosyncrasies of the language in which it was presented as well as the historical situation at the time it was presented, and to include the prevailing situation and perceptions of the people to whom it was presented. Take for instance, “This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant.” (Col 1:23 NIV) We know that, historically speaking, the gospel had not been proclaimed to every creature under heaven when Paul wrote this. Tradition holds that one of the apostles did reach China with the gospel. But who by then had reached the far tip of Ireland? Or the Northern parts of Russia? Or the peoples of the Americas, Southern Africa, the Philippines, or Australia? What? Was Paul lying? No. The fact that the Word of God is inspired by the Holy Spirit is even part of the context. This is no lie; the gospel had been proclaimed to every creature in that the event of salvation had occurred. Jesus Christ’s death on the cross and His rise from death was God’s proclamation of the gospel to every creature through its mere occurrence. His proclamation of the gospel can be seen as effective by examining Rev 5:9-10, “…with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth…” with Rom 10:17, “…faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ…” in light of the fact that no one preached to the Anasazi of AD1000, who were a tribe, a language, a people, and a nation. Nor was there preaching to many, many other nations and peoples throughout the Americas in the early centuries of AD. So it is not that the Word of God fails. It is that the Word of God must be interpreted in it’s entire context.
-----Now, context is like a net for catching fish. It has many parts which all work towards one specific goal, hauling fish to shore (the seines I used in my life were used from shore.) There was a rope across its top which strung up enough floats to hold the top of the netting to the surface of the water. There was at the bottom of the netting a rope strung with lead weights to sink it. Thus the netting was stretched down into the water between the float-line and the sinker-line, and drawn to shore by, you guessed it, the draw-lines. These were two very long ropes, each attached to a float-line and looped back to attach at the other end to a sinker-line. Together, all of these components caught fish when used by one who was willing to humble himself to doing with the draw-lines, not what he wanted to do, but what the seine required him to do according to its present situation in the water and relative to the response of the fish.
-----I have on my desk at work a piece of wood shaped like a small watermelon about five inches long. It has a finger sized hole drilled through it lengthwise. Its ends are just flat enough to stand it upright reasonably well. With a wire brush I brushed this piece of wood until the grains stood out prominently. Then I soaked it in boiled linseed oil for several weeks. Then I hand rubbed it with more linseed oil over, and over every day for several more weeks. Sometimes clients will pick up this piece of desk art and look at it wonderingly. I tell them it is a candleholder, because that is what I once used it for. They almost always accept that explanation, especially since there is a small trace of candle-wax somewhat apparent on one end of it. But if they show any sign of bewilderment or objection, I tell them that it is not a very good candle-holder, especially since it stands only somewhat well on its own, and very poorly with a candle in it. I then ask them if they can tell me what it really is. Only one has been able to.
-----Outside its context it is unrecognizable as a seine-float to all but those who have had experience with fish nets. It works poorly as a candle holder, because it is a seine float being used outside its proper context. If it were strung back up onto a float-line and drug out into the water at the top of a seine, it would once again hold its given meaning. This is the same way a word, a phrase, a sentence, or a passage from the Bible works. It must attach to all of its context - the written piece in which it is found, the historical situation into which it was delivered, the people to whom it was addressed, and their perceptions by which they would understand it. If the deliverer of the message was intelligent (which of course the Holy Spirit is) then knowing these elements will lead to the nearest, specific meaning the deliverer intended than will any mere guess.
-----Mark 16:15, the Great Commission, is never used from its historical perspective. Jesus Christ told His disciples to go out into all the world and preach the gospel at a time when the gospel had been preached throughout the world only on the spiritual basis of its having historically happened. No one through-out the rest of world had otherwise heard of Jesus Christ nor were they familiar with the concept that someone had died and risen so that they might live. And had not the disciples gone into the world and preached, what Jesus began would either have died out in decades, or languished for maybe centuries as merely an obscure religion of an obscure region of the world. Then notice to whom Jesus spoke the Great Commission. It was to His eleven apostles He gave this specific command, and Matthew 28:16 agrees. He did not give me the command, because I know by the elements of my spiritual life and by commands elsewhere in the Word specifically given to all of us that the Great Commission is a principle to most of us, not a command. I know that because many of us are carrying our Christian principles into the jobs and businesses which support the community here, rather than being off somewhere else as missionaries. And it is squaring with our consciences and sensibilities in the light of the Word, otherwise, we wouldn’t be here.
-----So then, with all due respect to the principle, we are where the fish are. Every day there are fish crossing my path while I do my job, while I do my shopping, while I do my entertainment. Fish are everywhere. But generally, when I go to church there are usually an abundance of fishers and few fish (although once at a church I used to attend I did sense something fishy.) Church is not the fishing pond. Church is maybe the bait shop by the fishing pond. Church is where I should be learning how to bait the hook, or how to put the seine into the water and how to pull the draw-line. In one sense, Church is for the fisherman who go to the fishing pond to catch the fish.
-----I also learned in my youth that it is a lot easier to catch fish if they were not thinking they were going to get killed or mishandled as a part of being caught. So we would employ a chummer to chum them with food to the area where we would entrap them with the seine. They would be so intent on gorging themselves that they would fail to notice the net. And once we caught the fish, we were no more interested in killing all of them than we are in killing the fish we hope to catch for the Lord. So we had to have a fish pond in which to keep alive the fish we caught from the fishing pond. The fish pond had to be well built and equipped for holding the fish we caught. So, in equipping that pond we needed to take into consideration the health and well being of the fish we put into it. Maybe we could add that the bait shop/fishing school is part of the fish pond where we bring the fish that are already caught. Weren’t we all fish? Therefore, the same care for the fish’s health and well being must be taken in building and equipping the church to be an effective fish pond. It must be built and equipped with the most important elements to spiritual life as expressed by the Lord Himself, love for your God and love for your neighbor. Then, since love involves pleasing one another, acknowledging one another, sympathizing with one another, respecting one another, being kind, gentle, patient with, submissive to, and interested in one another, it is those elements of the new life that must equip the fish pond with the warmth of love. I assure you, those are not prominent elements of the fishing pond, and would therefore have been all the more attractive if actually practiced as a part of the fish pond. But, as it is, because of the misinterpretation of the Great Commission, the fish pond is equipped with nothing other than so many cold, wet fishing poles and seines, there is no room left for more fish, let alone any warm and loving aesthetics that might be attractive to them. I think we should haul the cold, wet poles and seines to the fishing pond and put our effort back into building and equipping such attractive fish ponds.
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