Review: The Insanity of Obedience

I’m reading Nik Ripken’s The Insanity of Obedience, and I’ll be posting my thoughts here as an ongoing review and then tidy it up when I complete it (at least that’s the intention).

The book is a “bold challenge to global discipleship” and is a powerful admonishment to believers to evaluate their faithfulness in view of their willingness to experience persecution for Jesus’ name.

It asks some tough questions, not the least of which is does a lack of current persecution for following Jesus indicate a lack of true following Jesus? Also, “as followers of Jesus, will we allow ourselves to be seized by both the content and the context of the New Testament?”

October 27, 2014

Well, this is awkward, but I lost my book for a week or so. It was wedged between my passenger seat and console. Our worship leader found it on the way to a retreat this past weekend.

The chapter “The Need for Willing and Tough Workers” is a deep challenge to stop counting numbers and start counting the cost. It details the tension of churches and agencies to account for the actual work being done – through conversions, baptisms, churches planted, small groups established, etc.

We long to celebrate our successes and our conversions.

It’s a troubling chapter that pointedly questions why Christians keep going to countries that already have a strong Christian witness there. Missions that are directed toward areas that are “responsive” neglect the hard-to-reach places of the world. Ripken suggests that the motives for where we go may not be pure. We’d rather see numbers than the suffering of workers or of the most unreached peoples.

While I completely agree with Ripken on his thoughts, I question his biblical interpretation of certain proof texts from this chapter. He urges us to not publicize conversions in countries in which the persecution of new converts is certain. I agree with this, but the scriptures he uses to support this are taken from the gospels when Jesus told his disciples (and others) at certain points to “tell no one.”

The reason Jesus instructed his followers’ silence is because they truly didn’t grasp the meaning or mission of the Messiah. They weren’t told not to publish His ministry in order to avoid their own (or Jesus’) persecution. Ripken thus goes too far in his quest to support this principle of missiological strategy from those passages.

It doesn’t discount the impact of his point, but it’s not necessary to use those passages to prove his point. We should rethink our own desire to be comfortable when we do missions.

“…if the lost are to hear about Jesus, we will be required to send workers into harm’s way, and we will be required to remain silent publicly about the work that is being done.”

October 7, 2014:

According to Paul Marshall of Freedom House, 80% of the world’s believers who are practicing their faith live in persecution. Before offering this shocking statistic, Marshall goes to great lengths to define what he means by “believers.” It turns out that he is talking about people who would not only use the word “Christian” to define themselves, but specifically about people who have a genuine relationship with Jesus. Marshall is talking about people.. for whom faith in Jesus is formative in life.

Ripken identifies through a long study process, in more than 70 countries, that “persecution increases as people respond to the activity of the God.” His research and interviews show (and it may seem obvious) that access to the gospel does not equate to persecution. Rather, it’s response to the gospel that invites it. Where there is great response to the gospel, there will be great persecution.

If our goal were to simply stop persecution, then followers of Jesus could accomplish that goal easily and quickly by refusing to share Jesus… [and so] the reduction (or elimination) of persecution is not our ultimate goal… We must see it the way that Jesus sees it… as an inevitable result of the obedience of His followers.

Here’s the provocative question: do we see little persecution of Christians in the Western Church because we personally share the story of Jesus so infrequently?

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