How to Build Christian Communities? | Doug Wilson 

Enjoying this video? Check out Doug's new book "Gashmu Saith It" today! canonpress.com/products/gashmu-saith-it/

The Church is the ministry of Grace and Peace The Civil Government is the ministry of Justice The Family is the ministry of Health, Education, Welfare

This pumps me up! Time to win the world to Christ!

“Culture is down stream from worship.” Wow. I need that in sign form. I need that in the worship office at my church! For now I’ll just get the book.

Man, I desire “Christian community” quite possibly more than anything having experienced it back in the 70’s but I can tell you that attempting to create it, as a goal in itself, will fail because the problem isn’t a lack of Christian community; it’s a lack of Biblical Christianity. I really don’t know what, outside of real concentrated persecution, is going to create it in the West. There are simply too many well meaning but ultimately non-Biblical influences governing our understanding these days. It’s gonna take more than a trio of books. We already have a Book and that hasn’t done it.

I am very glad to hear this talk. I've been trying to encourage building communities for years. Sure, 90% of Christians will immediately give you attitude, and show their ignorance of the idea, but it is needed and is the Christian thing to do. If we are to obey God in all realms of life, it certainly extends beyond personal life, into business, workforce, and government. It also makes sense in light of Christ having rightful authority over all things. Christians should be united and supporting each other in bringing obedience to Christ into the community, so our businesses and laws conform to the will of God. Perhaps like a Medieval village, but a lot more spread out. The purely personalized religion is half baked, and does damage to the work of Christ on earth.

This is my dream, Doug. When I graduate from GBTS, I hope to plant a church somewhere in this world and build a community around it. I can't wait to read this between semesters.

Love your works. From the Philippines 🇵🇭❤️

this is why I've always admired the old order mennonite or amish, because they have an element of Christian community

Just bought the book. 'A how-to on the principles!' My expectations are high! Greetings from Holland!

This set is waiting for me on my next to read shelf (started Gashmu last night). I’ve recently read “Saturate” by Jeff VanderStelt. He discusses how his church lives in ‘missional communities’ serving and making disciples in the local community. It describes the ‘so that’ reason for building a Christian community.

Breitbart quote. Good. Also, worship connects...yes yes yes.

[Exasperated questioner having just heard this presentotion] "What are you guys? Some kind of cult?" [Pastor Wilson] "Why yes! We're of the cult known as Christianity! Here's our bylaws..." [Pastor Wilson hands the questioner a Bible]. [Exasperated] "What! I'm not reading this!" ... hands the Bible back to Pastor Wilson. [Pastor Wilson] "Well I'm sorry, sir. In that case, we cannot let you join our cult. Please have a blessed day in Christ." [Exasperated] "... but I ... I mean you ... oh, never mind, you weirdo!" ...and stomps off. [Pastor Wilson] Smiles winsomely and waves goodbye and returns to his writing ... "Now, where was I ... oh, yeah, now I remember ... "David French, what a rube ..." Maranatha!

Someone needs to coach Doug on how the B is silent ;)

This was an ad for your book, not an info vid as your thumbnail implied.

Just ordered the book bundle. ☺️

God bless you all

This is a very good video. Thank you guys.

Excellent.

Bonhoeffer-- "Christian life is participation in the encounter of Christ with the world." I might warn that Christian life is not participation in the encounter of Christ with the Church. Proverbs 18:1-- One who isolates himself pursues selfish desires; he rebels against all sound wisdom. May God guide the obedient among you.

Hungry for it? Highly understated, starving for it yes!!!

How do you define a "pastor"?

*local congregation gathers for weekly worship* naysayers: OMG, look at them isolate themselves! “Send them out that we may know them”.

This sounds similar to the Seven Mountains Mandate.

Mike Foster. I know your watching this. Is your vision for building " Christian Communities", too? You know I'm on board if it is.

So I can expect a lot of references to Rod Dreher?

Great 💡ideas

I hope the Cathedral is Calvinistic Methodist

Thank you Doug, this info you are sharing is uncommon unfortunately.

You forgot one thing. It's everyone's responsibility to read the bible. That's the string that ties everyone to one another. The pastor is simply appointed to speak what everyone in the community knows or should know to be true but isn't spoken out. He isn't special or anything but has that function just like the others have theirs. The pastor has the easiest job in the community, it gets hard though when people don't READ.

At 4:34 Wilson said, "I think of a Christian community as a medieval town." A pastor's ideal: an isolated community, highly superstitious, and easily led.

Gashmu = Gamma males

You can't have a church that's just Gospel centered?! 🤔 🧐 Jesus isn't enough then?! 🧐 🤔

The problem is that Doug is using a Protestant world view and expecting a Catholic outcome. The two don’t mix. It’s not a coincidence that every single country of the Protestant revolution is now atheist (Germany, England, Sweden, Denmark etc.). You can’t have a cathedral in the center of a community if someone can build a second, more popular cathedral elsewhere. Do you hold to Catholic authority or Enlightenment freedom? There is no in between.

Flesh and blood are in a school of good and evil stages. Imagination is the only God in man. The history teaching is false that repeats. Saul and John Baptist were Allegory to show how religious people look outside themselves, most christians do the same thing by history worship. Your smart but blind to what's God in man.

Was Jesus gay? Probably Paul Oestreicher Preaching on Good Friday on the last words of Jesus as he was being executed makes great spiritual demands on the preacher. The Jesuits began this tradition. Many Anglican churches adopted it. Faced with this privilege in New Zealand's capital city, Wellington, my second home, I was painfully aware of the context, a church deeply divided worldwide over issues of gender and sexuality. Suffering was my theme. I felt I could not escape the suffering of gay and lesbian people at the hands of the church, over many centuries. Advertisement Was that divisive issue a subject for Good Friday? For the first time in my ministry I felt it had to be. Those last words of Jesus would not let me escape. "When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, 'Woman behold your son!' Then he said to the disciple. 'Behold your mother!' And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home." That disciple was John whom Jesus, the gospels affirm, loved in a special way. All the other disciples had fled in fear. Three women but only one man had the courage to go with Jesus to his execution. That man clearly had a unique place in the affection of Jesus. In all classic depictions of the Last Supper, a favourite subject of Christian art, John is next to Jesus, very often his head resting on Jesus's breast. Dying, Jesus asks John to look after his mother and asks his mother to accept John as her son. John takes Mary home. John becomes unmistakably part of Jesus's family. Jesus was a Hebrew rabbi. Unusually, he was unmarried. The idea that he had a romantic relationship with Mary Magdalene is the stuff of fiction, based on no biblical evidence. The evidence, on the other hand, that he may have been what we today call gay is very strong. But even gay rights campaigners in the church have been reluctant to suggest it. A significant exception was Hugh Montefiore, bishop of Birmingham and a convert from a prominent Jewish family. He dared to suggest that possibility and was met with disdain, as though he were simply out to shock. After much reflection and with certainly no wish to shock, I felt I was left with no option but to suggest, for the first time in half a century of my Anglican priesthood, that Jesus may well have been homosexual. Had he been devoid of sexuality, he would not have been truly human. To believe that would be heretical. Heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual: Jesus could have been any of these. There can be no certainty which. The homosexual option simply seems the most likely. The intimate relationship with the beloved disciple points in that direction. It would be so interpreted in any person today. Although there is no rabbinic tradition of celibacy, Jesus could well have chosen to refrain from sexual activity, whether he was gay or not. Many Christians will wish to assume it, but I see no theological need to. The physical expression of faithful love is godly. To suggest otherwise is to buy into a kind of puritanism that has long tainted the churches. All that, I felt deeply, had to be addressed on Good Friday. I saw it as an act of penitence for the suffering and persecution of homosexual people that still persists in many parts of the church. Few readers of this column are likely to be outraged any more than the liberal congregation to whom I was preaching, yet I am only too aware how hurtful these reflections will be to most theologically conservative or simply traditional Christians. The essential question for me is: what does love demand? For my critics it is more often: what does scripture say? In this case, both point in the same direction. Whether Jesus was gay or straight in no way affects who he was and what he means for the world today. Spiritually it is immaterial. What matters in this context is that there are many gay and lesbian followers of Jesus - ordained and lay - who, despite the church, remarkably and humbly remain its faithful members. Would the Christian churches in their many guises more openly accept, embrace and love them, there would be many more disciples.