Bruce Ashford: God's End Game
WAKE FOREST (BSCNC Communications) - Rewind some 15 years on the Campbell University campus and his name would be well known among professors and students alike. He was both an intellectual and an evangelist leading a Bible study where hundreds were coming to Christ. This native Virginian who was raised in Roseboro, N.C., proved to possess an unusual aptitude for philosophy, theology, communications and evangelism. As he grew intellectually he mustered the courage to challenge existing systems and structures that seemed to either paralyze people from becoming radical Christians or denominationally divert away from doing hard things for Jesus toward a more pedestrian sort of Christianity. For him, this was unacceptable.
He is provocative in his preaching. Not in the slick televangelist sort of way. It is more scholarly than that, but equally emotional. Once, while preaching at Liberty Baptist Church in Hampton, Va., the congregation broke out in applause when he spoke out against the laziness of American youth and the equal lethargy among those who attended youth group activities in most Southern Baptist churches. He seems to get at the heart of things quickly and once he finds the point of greatest resistance he presses – hard.
It is not that Bruce Riley Ashford is the proverbial angry young man. Rather, he has seen the world in all of its brutality as a missionary and it changed him forever. To hear some of his stories when he served abroad is to realize this man has often risked his life for the gospel of Jesus Christ. Gifted with the intellectual agility to move from a discussion of Wittgenstein’s context of language with its theory of correspondence (his Ph.D. dissertation was on Wittgenstein’s influence on Anglo-American theology) to the recent Carolina basketball victory, Ashford seems at home across a wide spectrum of people. This plays to his advantage in the Southern Baptist Convention where intelligence is permitted as long as one doesn’t forget the populism of the denomination’s roots. Ashford, at 35, has mastered both.
On this day when he steps to the pulpit to open the 2009 Great Commission Resurgence Evangelism Conference, the historical irony is overpowering. The very fact that he is preaching at an event jointly sponsored by the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina and Southeastern Seminary is remarkable in its own right. That he is the new dean of the College at Southeastern makes the moment all the more poignant. For as the new leader of the college he represents a fusion between generations that carries with it a power to radically impact the denomination’s future.
Immediately Ashford turns to the theme of missions – remembering aloud his time in Central Asia as a missionary. The impact of his time there has obviously taken a toll on him emotionally as he constantly compares the impact of the modern American church to the state of spiritual hunger among the people he once served. “They asked me to teach them the entire Bible before I was scheduled to leave the country,” he said. “And so I began at Genesis and went through Revelation talking to them about the grand narrative of God’s grace in Jesus Christ and showing to them from the pages of Scripture the treasures of God and the treasure of God himself.”
The reaction of the people of Central Asia when they learned new truths from the Bible was nothing short of remarkable. “They would stand and visibly praise God to the point that with each new aspect of God’s character or new understanding of God’s truth they composed a hymn of praise to God on the spot in response and gratitude to God,” Ashford said. By the time Ashford left, the people had compiled a large book of hymns to be used in worship and future Bible teaching.
Ashford is careful to draw attention to the conference theme and what has become an entire movement launched across the Southern Baptist Convention – the Great Commission Resurgence. Elucidating a framework from Scripture as to the precise meaning of such a resurgence and how it might be observed among churches in the Southern Baptist Convention he takes Revelation 5 as his text.
“God’s reward to [the Apostle] John is to exile him among criminals and force him to live on the Alcatraz of his day,” Ashford said. “A vision of reality is given to this man which in turn gives us a vision of the end game of God. It is why we are here today and why we do what we do.” The prayers of the saints which are described as sweet-smelling incense to God are the means whereby God works and applies His salvation through human agents. Sharing the providential path of his own parent’s conversion, he outlines how the seemingly insignificant acts of various individuals resulted in the establishment of churches years later through his own missionary service.
Refusing to gloss over the difficult theological issues associated with suffering and the sovereignty of God, Ashford unpacked the meaning of how Christians can suffer well even when God does not remove suffering from their lives. “How do you think it looks to a Muslim when our God doesn’t deliver people from suffering?” he asked. “It is a fact that suffering exists in many ways with many people. There can be physical suffering where cancer destroys bodies or emotional suffering where relationships are forever lost. Suffering is real and hard and forces us to look to Christ.”
Referencing Colossians 1:24 as a prism for a proper evaluation of suffering, he stated that “our present sufferings reveal to us and to a watching world that our God is better than anything this life can give. Suffering cannot take us away from our God because God is better than His gifts because God Himself is a treasure.” He is quick to emphasize the centrality of the person and work of Jesus Christ as the foundation to understanding God’s justice in the world. In God’s kindness through His son all racial barriers are destroyed and God’s superiority and glory is dramatically shown forth through the fact that John’s vision included men and women from every tribe and nation worshipping the Lord Jesus Christ before the throne of God.
“God killed His son to bring about racial unity, and it is a tragedy that we in the Southern Baptist Convention resemble something exactly opposite of the gospel,” Ashford said. It does not happen in many other denominations. “The Assemblies of God and the Brooklyn Tabernacle seem to show forth a display of the gospel in racial harmony rather than our pasty white denomination” which is all but segregated.
Ashford employs the term “network” to describe the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention. He does so six times during his sermon tying the work of the denomination to the local church in a way that is less programmatic and more focused on the training and sending out of missionaries. “It takes tens of thousands of Southern Baptists to produce one missionary because so much of what we do centers around fighting over secondary and tertiary issues.”
At this point Ashford works to rivet a self-evident truth: the Southern Baptist Convention is a graying denomination and most assembled know it. “Most evangelism conferences are nothing more than a bully pulpit to hack away at each other. My generation has left and if this doesn’t change, they aren’t coming back.” The worship of God is the goal of the church, and “we must reconsider the purpose of our lives, this state convention and the Southern Baptist Convention as a growing network of churches committed to fulfill the Great Commission of Jesus Christ so that the worship of God might be displayed before all the world.”
