Church Voices

After talking to Brant Hansen on this podcast I’ve been doing some thinking about the state of the church in America, and though there may be big churches the death of the megachurch will occur.  Or at least the typical structure of them as exemplified by the typical baby boomer megachurch (in this case I’m not defining megachurch simply as greater than 1,000 members).  Essentially these churches are a top-down model heavily influenced by the structure of corporations.  That means there’s a lot of passiveness on the part of members and lots of leading on the part of paid staff.  Paid staff set up programs that are attended by members.  Members sit down and are taught at.  The shape and structure of the church is wholly decided and enacted from the top.

To give you an idea of this type of thinking, I was discussing the possibility of a church website being a wiki (a wiki is just a website that anyone, or at least lots of people, can add to it, and change) with a guy who is familiar with the inner workings of a megachurch. The idea would be that many, most, or all members of a church could add to and modify the website on a continuous basis. He told me it would never happen, that the church leadership would never be willing to give up that kind of control over such a public instrument.  We shouldn’t view this as a single incident, but indicative of the philosophy of boomer megachurches. 

There’s two problems with this philosophy.  The first is that our society is moving away from a centralized, top down model in everything.  People aren’t content to be told what to do by the powers that be. A recent study by Newsweek found that 65% of people aged 14-21 are interested in starting their own business.  Or consider, for a moment, the various internet darlings like myspace, facebook, and even ebay which have de-centralized networking and garage sales respectively.  Their success has come by allowing their communities to shape their sites.  People are more interested than ever in actively shaping their world (whether its electronic, or otherwise).  Businesses, communities, clubs, and other groups that successfully allow the rank and file to take part in shaping what they do are becoming more common, because they’ve started to become wildly successful.  Boomer style megachurches can’t do that.

The second problem is that the top-down style of megachurches let a lot of resources go to waste.  Essentially, unless your skills, interests, abilities and passions mirror the direction the church leadership has decided to go your gifts go to waste.  This leaves you passively following, or back to church hunting.  Churches that manage to create a community that shapes and forms what the church is going to look like will be more successful than churches that don’t.  And by success, I mean any measurement you want to use.  But, not only are they putting all of their resources to work (or at least more of their resources) they also create a church full of pastors.  Instead of having a church with a few pastors and everyone else cheering them on and supporting them, the entire church will be filled with pastors looking for opportunities to minister. 

I could be wrong, I have been in the past (heck, just a month ago I managed to predict every major fight on a UFC show wrongly) but this is more than just a guess on my part, this is the way society is going, contrasted with the way a specific type of church is.  While terms like "the death of megachurches" is dramatic, I doubt that death will mean they simply stop existing, I believe in many cases, as the leadership changes the boomer style megachurch will shift to become different, more closely mirroring the de-centralized communities I’ve described here.

Michael Spencer gives us a little peek behind the curtain. 

Our employees sacrifice to serve here, making less than six thousand dollars in salary and taking on a community life surrounded by other staff and our students 24/7/365. We spend less than $20,000 a year on promotion of any kind. Many of our staff are full time volunteers. We eat food that is primarily donated or raised on our farm. Volunteers come to our campus by the hundreds in order to do construction, donate medical care, renovate buildings and just encourage us in ministry.

We do not turn away any student for financial need. Half of our students are on significant scholarships. We are the third least expensive school of our type in America. Many of our students pay nothing. Churches all over Kentucky and even some elsewhere support us with gifts large and small. Our endowment was almost non-existent for many years. We have never had a fund raiser. Never made a cold call. Never asked a corporation for a donation., Once a year we send a Christmas letter to our friends. Four times a year, we send out a newsletter telling the stories of our successful students.

There’s something of heaven in that.  Sometimes (or most the time) I wonder if we have a severe disconnect from the experience of the church described in the scriptures because our wealth (and yes, chances are if you’re reading this you have an embarrassment of riches) has made us tiny Castros of our own personal Cubas.  There’s no dependence on our brothers and sisters to get by, there’s no shared hardship to bring us together, and there’s too many opportunities for even more independence via wealth as time goes on. 

But here’s the kicker.  Even if you have the desire to live the kind of life Spencer has taken up, chances are you can’t.  The vast majority of us (and I include myself in this), in order to be qualified to fill the position of educator/administrator/preacher/counselor you end up owing thousands of dollars in student loans. And that’s only if you managed to live a frugal lifestyle and not end up owing on credit cards, and cars. 

Lets not pretend that this difficult road Spencer has chosen (paved only recently, so I’ve heard) is all rainbows and roses:

I don’t always like working for a ministry where I don’t have a secretary, where there’s a building full of other people’s donated clothes as part of my compensation and where I’m making less money than I did in 1979. I’m 51, and I still have to move the pulpit by myself every time I come into the chapel to preach. I’m assistant to the President, and I still get asked to substitute teach in middle school.

We can’t find a church, and the church I go to offers almost nothing that I can appreciate or enthusiastically endorse. Good people, but I can never really be myself there. That is difficult and painful, but it’s part of being here where this ministry is most needed.

But at the same time we need to recognize that the existence and success of Spencer’s school is the result of lifestyle (avoiding debt, both personally and institutionally) and focusing on the mission.

A few years ago, our school lost its President to a sudden illness. A search process began to replace him, and a somewhat well-known minister had his eye on the job, so he asked to meet with the staff. After a brief presentation assuring us that the search process was going well, he made his play for our support by telling us we were long overdue to get raises, more benefits, perks and compensation.

Now he was quite right. There were people in that room who made so little money it was embarrassing. I’m grateful that kind of omission was made right by our next President. But what happened next has always stayed with me.

One of our houseparents, a man who, along with his wife, has spent almost three decades here as a night shift houseparent and locksmith, living in a house trailer and dealing with our students at their worst, that man stood up and said something like this:

“Sir, we appreciate what you’ve said today. But you obviously don’t understand us. None of us came here to make money. No one here feels like they have sacrificed at all. They are privileged to be part of this ministry.”

Uncomfortable silence took over that meeting as two sets of values collided. As much as everyone of us in that room would have loved to see a few more dollars in our paychecks, the truth was that we knew it’s a gift to live anywhere near the way, the values and the Kingdom of Jesus. You can’t put a price tag on the treasure Jesus gives.

That, friends, is as intense as it comes.

Taylor Mali does this sort of slam poetry/stand up comedy schtick that mostly revolves around the deification of teachers.  You can see the text of it here (although, to be fair, without seeing him perform you can’t really get a feel for the power of his communication).  In this particular poem he is asked what he makes.  Here’s part of his response:

You want to know what I make?

I make kids work harder than they ever thought they could.
I can make a C+ feel like a Congressional medal of honor
and an A- feel like a slap in the face.
How dare you waste my time with anything less than your very best.

Its really power, heady stuff.  But when I hear it I just laugh cynically.  Mostly because after 12 years of dealing with lots of teachers I know its a bunch of crap.  I know that 70% of teachers are at best average, and stand up there and follow the syllabus, 25% are terrible and/or lazy, and 5% are excellent. 

I had one teacher that kept a running total of how many days he had left until retirement.  Once a week he’d hand out a worksheet, take the class down to the weight room and lift weights while we either joined in or sat on the floor and waited for "class" to be over.  Even when we had class, he spent most of it either talking sports with the jocks in class, or

I had a world geography teacher that, unbelievably, was even worse.  On Monday he’d hand out a list of countries, their capitals, and a map then go sit at his desk at the back of the class room and read a variety of newspapers, magazines, and books.  The rest of the week he’d tell us to study the list and go back and read.  Then on Friday he’d pass out the test and go and read. 

Don’t get me wrong I’m not knocking what Taylor Mali does.  He’s probably in the top 1% of communicators in the entire world.  The problem is what he says, and what I’ve experienced are completely at odds, and so when he deifies teachers it has no persuasive effect on me because no matter how good, entertaining or fantastic a communicator he is he cannot overcome what I’ve actually experienced. 

So here’s the lesson.  If you want people to believe that the church should be a place where God’s people love each other, forgive each other, and actually live the gospel then you better make sure that when people experience Christians they experience people who love, forgive, and live the gospel.  Because otherwise there’s no one who can discuss, teach or preach persuasively enough to convince them otherwise. 

Bruce Lee’s name is still synonymous with kung fu awesomeness even 30 years after his death.  I was reading through the wikipedia article on his life and it struck me how talented Bruce Lee was.  Not just with fighting, but in general.  He acted from a young age (his first appearance on stage coming as an infant) and continued through his entire life.  He attended the University of Washington as a drama major and took philosophy classes, in addition to studying traditional Chinese martial arts, he also studied western style boxing (becoming the 1958 Champion of a 12 school competition) as well as fencing.  Even when it came to traditional martial arts he didn’t study a single style but eventually incorporated several different styles into his own personal style. As he matured as a fighter he concluded that traditional martial arts had too much formality, extra movements and requirements that didn’t add any benefits, so he removed them.

After coming to the United States he developed an interest in nutrition and physical fitness.  He said, "Training is one of the most neglected phases of athletics. Too much time is given to the development of skill and too little to the development of the individual for participation. JKD [Lee’s personal martial art], ultimately is not a matter of petty techniques but of highly developed spirituality and physique".  As a result his work out regimen was intense.

All of these swirling interests (along with a mysterious death) propelled Lee to a popularity no other martial artist had achieved and cemented a legacy that anyone ever achieves.  The thing is, if you take away any of these interests and Bruce Lee becomes a foot note.  Drama and philosophy don’t seem to have much to do with martial arts, even nutrtion and fitness, at the time, seemed to be tangiential at best.  Yet, without all these things Bruce Lee dies a mysterious death in obscurity.  Instead he impacted culture greatly.  Setting off an interest in martial arts that wasn’t there before.  i don’t think its a stretch to say that Bruce Lee is at least a major factor in the reason why there’s a martial arts academy in the small town I live in.  Chances are there wouldn’t have been movies like The Matrix if not for him.  And I can guarantee you that the numerous nunchuck injuries that occur in junior high boys across America wouldn’t be nearly so high without him.  And none of that would have happened without his diversity of interests.

This is my way of saying that the church needs to cultivate diverse interests in order to be as successful as possible in obeying the commands of Jesus.  While the study of scripture, and theology will always be necessary (and can’t be replaced by anything else), the church can (and does) benefit from other disciplines.  Whether its art, music, rhetoric, plumbing, carpentry, history, hard sciences, writing or just good old fashioned elbow grease it is difficult for a church to live and communicate the gospel to its community without passions for seemingly unrelated subjects and disciplines.  So in this vein lets end this little entry with some quotes from Mr. Lee, hopefully you can see how his wisdom concerning martial arts could apply to a church.

"Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it."

"I’m not a master. I’m a student-master, meaning that I have the knowledge of a master and the expertise of a master, but I’m still learning. So I’m a student-master. I don’t believe in the word ‘master.’ I consider the master as such when they close the casket."

"Unfortunately, now in boxing people are only allowed to punch. In Judo, people are only allowed to throw. I do not despise these kinds of martial arts. What I mean is, we now find rigid forms which create differences among clans, and the world of martial art is shattered as a result."

"The other weakness is, when clans are formed, the people of a clan will hold their kind of martial art as the only truth and do not dare to reform or improve it. Thus they are confined in their own tiny little world. Their students become machines which imitate martial art forms."

A few months ago I did something stupid. I washed my cell phone. I liked that cell phone too. I had just gotten it how I liked it with all my totally sweet ringtones, and wall papers. It was all Detroit Pistons inside and out. Needless to say it was a total loss. So I hit up ebay and bought a used phone that did the job, and in a lot of ways was better. Recently the battery had been really not working well. Eventually it got down to less than a ½ hour of charge at a time. So I went out and bought a $20 pre-pay phone, swapped out the SIM cards so it was on my normal account and have been running with that.

Think about the kind of phone you get for $20. It’s basic. There’s no customizing the ring tones, or the wall paper (in fact all the built in ringers sound like some sort of hand held football game from the 70s). There’s no browsing of the internet, or instant messaging. It makes calls and text messages, and nothing else. And I love it. It does exactly what I need it to do, and it does it well. In fact, it holds a charge forever. Longer than any other phone I’ve had. It can go for over 7 days before needing to be recharged. In other words, it sticks to the main thing cell phones are supposed to do. All of its shortcomings are made up for the fact that it keeps the main thing the main thing and it does it well.

About a year ago a friend of mine suggested to me that every sermon needs to explicitly include the gospel. Of course, there is much of scripture that doesn’t explicitly contain the gospel. Proverbs jumps immediately to mind, and if a sermon is expositional in nature it can become so fixated on such a small portion of scripture even New Testament passages can get so caught up in the trees that the forest isn’t seen.

But the question still is, should every sermon preached explicitly contain the gospel? After all, if we’re going to be faithful to a historic reading of scripture there are times when some scriptures won’t contain the gospel, at least not obviously, and not on its face. That means if we answer “yes”, the preacher has to direct in some way every subject, every verse, and every story found in scripture to Christ. But here’s the thing. If the church is going to be useful, she has to keep the main thing the main thing. And the main thing is the gospel. This became even more obvious to me recently when I re-read the forward Rich Mullins wrote for The Ragamuffin Gospel. In it Mullins recounts hearing a tape in which the gospel was presented, and he had to pull over the truck he was driving because of the tears in his eyes. He then writes that he had regularly attended church since he was two weeks old and most of the sermons he had heard were of the moralizing variety, completely missing the gospel.

Should every sermon explicitly contain the gospel? Absolutely. The church, at her best, is a $20 cell phone. She keeps the main thing the main thing, and the main thing is the gospel.

Having been raised in the church during the 1980s, I received much knowledge concerning morality, but some tidbits I picked up were less than stellar. One such inculcated gem, was a rabid disdain for dungeons and dragons; that sinister game that could infiltrate the minds of adolescents and convert them into suicidal devil worshiprs. Well, like a good Christian young man, I wasn’t hesitant about expressing my view to my friends who has partaken in that heathen ritual… needless to say, I felt a touch foolish the first time I watched them actually play a game… wondering why on earth we were so bent against it. Years later after having been in the ministry for a while, one of my students afforded me the opportunity to play a game, and I decided I’d try it out. I loved it, and have been playing it nearly weekly ever since. I can tell you truthfully that neither I, nor any of my students who participate in this game have committed suicide, nor have we begun worshipping Satan. In fact, I see that over the past year Dungeons and Dragons has become a peculiar draw to our ministry, as our regular gaming nights tend to draw a specific crowd that the church has largely ignored in the bulk of its outreach endeavors. In fact, two individuals we baptized last month came to us as a direct result of our playing of dungeons and dragons… clearly this is not the adversary’s domain… well, unless we decide to cede it to him, which most of us apparently have. This all begs the question as to why the church occasionally picks innocuous social phenomenon and decides to wage war against it, as though our eternities hung in the balance.

To be honest, I see the hand of a very intelligent adversary in this. During WW2 the British intelligence campaign known as “Bodyguard” engaged in an elaborate ruse intended to misdirect German resistance prior to the invasion of Normandy. One of these techniques was the use of inflatable tanks and contrived tread-marks throughout various fields in England, as well as false landing craft jamming the bays of England. This is how intelligent warfare is conducted… the wise adversary sets up phantom threats to conceal the real dangers in his arsenal. So it is with our adversary. Since the 1980s we’ve seen the occasional revelatory uprising of Christian watchdogs, who proclaim a book or a game to be an open door to Satan worship. It is spiritual death to our children, and our moral duty to openly oppose these things at every opportunity. All the while, religious syncretism, relativism, the death of sexual modesty, and other very real and very dangerous issues went virtually unopposed throughout the world’s congregations. And so, true to form, the American church does the easy thing and targets an adversary that can be boycotted or burned. Brilliant; ignore the call to wage war against spiritual powers and authorities, don’t bother with the corrupting influence of people who read books or play games, just berate a publisher and close your wallets, oh and don’t forget to level some partially conceived diatribe about satanic influence at people who already need Christ. Well, this all mindlessly ends in a bulk of the church jumping on board and rallying their teachings and parental oversight against a perceived threat. I don’t think I’d be exaggerating here if I were to suggest that perhaps 90% or more of said Christian populace has no first-hand experience with said threat, nor do they understand exactly why they should view it as a treat (save for the quick tidbits of zealous accusations they’ve gleaned from other Christians offering opinions on the issue). Are the Christians who jump on these issues bad people? …No, they’re just Christians who trust the church and are under the impression that this zeal of other believers has a solid foundation. Are these believers damaging possible evangelism opportunities, and ostracizing people needlessly? Absolutely. There is no doubt that people outside of Christianity view this type of paranoia as absurd (especially given that the vast majority of it is highly ill-informed and, well… absurd).

So what’s a believer to do? How about exercising a bit of shrewdness concerning the adversary’s intentions, and his ability to carry them out in and through the church? I’ve got to laud the wife of our senior minister who decided to actually read Harry Potter before passing judgment (she of course concluded that it is harmless fantasy fiction). I really appreciate Christians who don’t cede territory to the adversary that doesn’t really belong to him. In way of exhortation, please believers, exercise a bit of healthy skepticism regarding the zealous ranting of other Christians. Don’t take up a position on seemingly harmless issues unless you have a solid reason for doing so. Satan doesn’t have to make us worship him, it’s far easier to keep us looking like hysteric nuts, that no sane person would want to have anything to do with.

If you’ve ever attended a Sunday school class then eventually you’ll hear the phrase, “when people see you they should see a difference”. In my experience what this actually means is “people should notice you don’t smoke, drink, cuss or have pre-marital/adulterous sex”. You’ll see proof texts like, Ephesians 5.8, “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light”.

Here’s the thing: our culture doesn’t give a crap about smoking, drinking, cussing or pre-marital/adulterous sex (in the case of smoking abstaining has become the norm, for the other three abstaining isn’t seen as admirable). Sure, they may notice you’re different, but it won’t be in a good way, and could even be in a “wow what a freak way”.

But here’s the other thing. I’m not sure the Biblical admonitions to be different from the world have anything to do with the sort of “don’t do these thing” lists put together by (generally) evangelical churches. Check out a couple of verses here:

For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Ephesians 2:10

Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.
1 Peter 2:12

In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.
Matthew 5:16

In other words, what people should notice is different about us is not what we don’t do, but rather what we do do.

Here is the account of a guy who left Restoration Movement for Lutheranism.

As I read through his account it struck me how different the teaching I’ve received are from what he received. Check out his account of the Lord’s Supper:

In the Restoration Movement, the Lord’s Supper had always been about how well we cleansed ourselves via our sense of humilty before taking the Lord’s Supper. Instead of the sacrament being about how God touches His people, it was about how His people ascend to him through an impossible exercise of spiritual purity.

Contrast that with this from The Faith Once For All by Dr. Jack Cottrell, “The Lord’s Supper likewis is both worship and edification. We take the emblems not only as a memorial to honor our Savior, but also as a means of reminding ourselves that his blood is the only reason we are saved.” Now, I am by no means equivocating a sacramental view to the Restoration Movement, or to this particular statement. What I am saying though is that this view of the Lord’s Supper and the view that the Lord’s Supper is some sort of works based leaping towards God don’t equivocate either.

In fact as I found myself reading over his journey to Lutheranism I found myself thinking that if I were presented with the same sort of faith through the Restoration Movement that he was I would probably be Lutheran today as well.

Sadly, his story didn’t surprise me. Unfortunately, due to the decentralized nature of the Restoration Movement, and taking our theological identity from baptismal regeneration* there is a riptide of works based theology. I believe its fading, but its still out there, and I would rather have someone journey to Wittenberg than flail about in a vain attempt to work their way into the kingdom of God.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is brilliant:

Because evangelicals have too closely aligned themselves with political agendas, instead of the Scripture-derived social mission of the church, two camps have emerged over the past few decades. On the one hand, you have the “Christian-means-Republican” camp where many biblical imperatives are pursued through legislation and government force, and on other hand, you have the pathetic economics and theocratic biblical theology of prophetical left in the likes of guys like Bono, the One Campaign, and so on. Both camps pursue the same method, except that “the right” might start with the Pentateuch and Romans whereas “the left” might begin with the Prophets and the Sermon on the Mount. Both turn to government instead of the church to do the work of the Kingdom of God.

I noticed as I was flipping through channels the other day that there were approximately 40 episodes of Law and Order on at the same time. Oh, there was also CSI, Crossing Jordan, Forensic Files, and Without a Trace. So if you want a crime drama featuring weird angles, beautiful people, dim lighting and blue filters on every camera you’re pretty much set. But if you want much of anything else then you’re pretty much out of luck.

Ever feel that way about Sunday School? You can change classrooms and all you get are different variations on the same theme? Maybe its divided by age, and maybe its a different subject matter, but adult Sunday school classes are all teacher to class communications with (if you’re lucky) a bit of discussion thrown in.

What if we changed up the genre just a bit? What if instead of the Nth different crime drama we threw in a documentary, a comedy, some sports, or maybe a game show (preferably Jeopardy)? But how do we do that? How do we change the channel on our Sunday School classes? Here’s a starting point.

1. Avoid creating just another variation of what we already have. This means a new curriculum, or isn’t the answer.

2. This isn’t about style. DVDs, and changes of format aren’t what we’re looking for here. This is supposed to be a change of genre, not a newer, slicker version of what we had before.

3. Much of what your church already does might work. Simply slot it into the Sunday School hour, with some changes for new people to catch up to what you do, and to accommodate the time limit.

Here’s some suggestions:

The Service Channel
This channel consists of planning and doing service projects. This channel will likely require at least some participation at other times but smaller projects can be handled during that hour, such as shoveling walks of nearby houses or other types of simple upkeep.

The Innovation Channel
Have the church leadership outline and describe problems in the community. Use various brainstorming techniques to develop solutions to these problems. Have them juggle several issues at once so they can step away and come back to them. Also make sure to have them level criticisms at their own solutions. When they’ve refined their solutions have them bump the proposal up to the leadership. If a church is large enough for two such groups you can have each group give possible roadblocks to each of the proposals of the other group.

Its important to emphasize to this group that they are creating ideas, that the leadership has the ultimate decision on what to do, and many of their ideas may not be implemented or may be altered, or delayed. Of course this group could also work on problems within the church, but that brings a lot of risks with it for internal conflict.

The Prayer Channel
One of the weaknesses of many churches is reducing prayer to a list of health needs. Its hard to do that when you pray for an hour. A variety of different types of prayer are found in scripture, this channel would imitate them, and would include a variety of individual and group prayer, perhaps an outline of what is being prayed for.

The Creation Channel
Whether its the production of video clips for websites/advertising, or devotions written for the congregation, or artwork and/or decorations for a sermon series. This could include specific projects, or perhaps general set creation/decorations for at theme.

These channels are just a few of what could be offered. It all depends on the needs of a church/community, and the particular gifts of a congregation.