45 Degree Shifts: From Addition to Multiplication in Disciple Making

8 days ago

Josh, I agree with you on the shifts that are needed but you are WAY off-base in what you said about synagogues. The 1st century synagogue was NOT a place where a professional clergyman gave a sermon once a week. It was an assembly of a community not a place. If there was a fixed place where the assembly met, it was first and foremost a house of prayer, daily prayers, three times per day prayer services. Secondarily it was a study hall where learned men expounded the scriptures. These men were respected by the honorific ”Rav” or ”Rabbi” meaning ”my Rav” but that only much later became a clerical title. It’s important to understand that the point of that exposition was to guide Halakha, meaning ”the way to go,” in otherwords, how to live out one’s faith. This was not legalism as modern evangelicals might assume but a mater of obedience based devotion God and the covenant He gave to Israel. Because of this focus on obedience to the covenant, a distant third function of the house was as a court where a panel of elders of the community heard cases and made rulings to keep order rather that just letting each one do what is right in their own eyes. It sounds like our church need to become MORE like synagogues, not less. Now, Paul did have conflicts with the leadership of some of the synagogues into which he brought his message of gentile inclusion. They just couldn’t see that God wanted to open the doors of the synagogue to outsiders from the Nations. In that, we must likewise be careful not to exclude those whom God calls. In particular I have in mind the way that the old supersessionist tropes like you used tend to paint Jews as the ”other” that must not be allowed in unless they forsake the old ways of obedience to God’s covenant and adopt the new ways of Christianity which we’ve redefined as a gentile religion.