Church Voices

This article from the Sports Economist illustrates at least a little bit of the reason why God’s grace is so much larger than ours.

The author makes this note about the chances of baseball players who used performance enhancing drugs on getting into the hall of fame:

Beyond McGwire, what will be the fate of others caught up in the bad press? A Cincinnati Enquirer piece by John Erardi poses this question for A-Rod along with Bonds, Sosa, McGwire, Clemens and others. In a very small sample (10) of baseball writers who have Hall of Fame votes, 7 came out against any of the players while 2 were willing to consider a partiucular guy from their city

Then, from the general to the specific:

The trouble with that view is that players who did not use such substances stand at a disadvantage, albeit an arguable one. The Astros ace, Roy Oswalt, speaks very forcefully to the views of at least one impacted non-users on MLB.com:

“A-Rod’s numbers shouldn’t count for anything,” Oswalt said in a phone interview with MLB.com. “I feel like he cheated me out of the game.” … “The ones that have come out and admitted it, and are proven guilty, [their numbers] should not count. I’ve been cheated out of the game,” Oswalt continued. “This is my ninth year, and I’ve done nothing to enhance my performance, other than work my butt off to get guys out. These guys [who took PEDs] have all the talent in the world. All-Star talent. And they put times two on it.

Of course, like the writers, Oswalt is more gracious to a former teammate, Roger Clemens, than he is toward others.

So, it looks like whether you’re a baseball writer taking a principled stand against the exploitation of the game by dirty players, or a clean baseball player angry that your ability to earn is being reduced by talented players having an unfair advantage the familiarity with a player will result in having a softened attitude towards him.

Consider, then, that God is intimately familiar with each of us. He is our creator and our sustainer, we’re told he knows us well enough that the hairs of our head are numbered. Could it be that God’s intimate familiarity with us results in a grace towards us that is far greater than the grace we offer each other? The concluding verses of the book of Jonah seem to indicate this is the case:

Then the Lord said, “You feel sorry about the plant, though you did nothing to put it there. It came quickly and died quickly. But Nineveh has more than 120,000 people living in spiritual darkness,[a] not to mention all the animals. Shouldn’t I feel sorry for such a great city?”

If the church is going to be a place where grace is received and given among God’s people, it is necessary that we cultivate relationships with our brothers and sisters. Its easy to condemn unknown baseball players for outrageous sins against the game of baseball, its easy to condemn Christians we have never met for sins that are publicly revealed, it is easy to grow cold hearted towards people who sin against us who we only say hi to once a week before services.

But its very difficult to not offer grace to someone who we are so familiar with that we love.

This post by John Armstrong, if true, is a bit depressing and a major weakness of American evangelicals. The post in a nutshell:

…suffice it to say—older evangelicalism thrives on opposition. It is the child of fundamentalism and fundamentalism has to have a liberal enemy in order to create new momentum for ministry (sic). There is always one new person to find who denies inerrancy, or who advocates a socially liberal cause. This requires the faithful leader to launch a new barrage of attacks. And when the attacks are launched few care about the truth of what a person said or meant before the attack started. The war must be won.

This is troubling for a number of reasons.

First, it demonstrates a mindset that can never build the kindgom of God. The mindset of a people who are on the look out for internal threats and are focused on ferreting out the alien other within their midst are a people who are not looking out beyond themselves at the places were the kingdom of God has yet to be established in significant ways. The most this mindset can hope to achieve is the status quo.

However, I believe that even the status quo may be beyond the grasp of this mindset because it requires a constant diet of enemies to attack. This means that as time goes on and dragon after dragon is slain eventually new dragons will have to be made, and these new dragons are made by narrowing the definition of evangelical so as to find new groups and individuals to attack. This chips away at the number and talent pool of evangelicals, and if this pattern is followed faithfully enough eventually there’s about 30 true believers left all with a median age of 87.

Of course, this very practical critique doesn’t even begin to touch on the violence done to the gospel itself. In order to create new enemies to banish you have to add to what binds evangelicals together: the gospel. In this particular case that means things like political positions have been added to faith in the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. John Armstrong cites the first call for removal of a particular national figure was over global warming. Jerry Falwell went so far as to preach a sermon on February 25th 2007 entitled “The Myth of Global Warming”. A better question than “what do you believe about global warming” would be “why are you talking about global warming when you should be worshiping God”. There’s a sort of dark irony around the fact that ultimately these additions to the gospel in the name of doctrinal purity will eventually lead to the loss of the gospel as it drowns among these smaller, temporal issues that have been puffed up and elevated.

This mindset also creates an unhealthy fixation on what national figures have to say, that results in the parsing of every syllable uttered by people we’ve never met or impact us in the slightest. Churches, at their core, are local entities serving particular communities. Of course a local church disciplining one of its own with the aim of restoration and done with the love of Christ isn’t going to fire up the troops or get donations pouring in, even if it is the Biblical model of dealing with these sorts of issues. However, the very non-Biblical model of taking aim at a national target with fiery rhetoric meant to destroy and banish in order to fire up the troops and to get those check books to open up a bit is the tactic we see employed far more often. Ultimately, this tactic also destroys the role of the local church, and gives power to individuals whose only qualification is a large platform and who answers to no one. They have everything to gain by acting recklessly and everything to lose by acting with restraint and dignity, and so the unofficial leaders of American Christianity become loudmouths whose goal is to gin up donations by dividing the body of Christ. If that description sounds a bit like racial hucksters who divide the United States at every opportunity… well that’s probably not an inaccurate parallel.

For the last 20 months I’ve been on a theological crash course that’s illuminated the scriptures for me almost more than any other experience in my life. That crash course is called fatherhood. Interestingly enough one of the statements that has been made repeatedly to me is how great it would be to be a baby. Everything is taken care of for you, you’re fed, everyone loves you, and you have no responsiblity.

I don’t think this is true.

It must be incredibly hard to be a baby. You have no idea why you’re being taken to the places you’re being taken to, you have no idea who most people are, or what’s going on at all. Every parenting advice book I’ve read has the same advice: babies need routine because they have no idea what’s going on.

Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! But when full understanding comes, these partial things will become useless.

When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.
1 Corinthians 13.9-13

These verses are often quoted in the context of discipleship, usually in terms of discussing what someone used to do or used to believe, with the implication being that anyone who does those things, or believes those things are still immature and will grow out of it if they are truly disciples.

These verses have absolutely nothing to do with discipleship.

Instead these verses describe our life here, and our life in eternity. Here we don’t have any idea what’s really going on. Like babies we have a very limited knowledge about how God is working, about what is happening to us, and about how the world works. The terrible irony of how this verse is wrongly used is that those who claim to now be knowledgeable, unlike their previous child-like state are people who are unaware of how much we can’t possibly know.

That’s not to say that we can’t know anything. Even babies know something of their world.

Babies know their parents love them.
Babies know when they hurt.
Babies know when they’re hungry.
Babies know their family members.
Babies know when they’re not at home.

Not to stretch the metaphor too far, but I think its fair to say we know the rudimentary make up of what’s going on. We know who loves us, we now what He did to save us, but much of the how and why of what’s happening, especially when we hurt isn’t clear. Sometimes a baby hurts because a doctor has administered a life giving shot, other times a baby hurts because he has a life threatening illness, and no baby alive has figured out which is which.

Any number of short and simple descriptions of a Christ-follower’s life is available to us in scripture (to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God is my favorite of the bunch), but how and why this world and how and why God operates in this world often isn’t clear, and all too often the things obscured by the cloudy bits of the mirror are what separates us from each other. We have been given a clear command that we are to love each other and we will be known as His disciples by that love, meanwhile churches split, relationships dissolve, and no clear disciples of Christ are known because of arguments about what is behind those clouds have been allowed to dominate the focus, energy and ambition of the church.

One of the most abused pieces of scripture is Proverbs 22.6:

Train a child in the way he should go,
and when he is old he will not turn from it.

Not too long ago I heard second-hand about a Sunday School teacher (and Bible College grad, and former minister) opine to his class that this is a promise of God, and that if you really properly trained your child then at some point they would return to the church. Its this sort of thing that makes me want to light myself on fire.

A maxim in the NFL goes that if you can run the ball well you will win games. This particular pundit disagrees. and offers up as evidence the recent game between the Cleveland Browns and New York Giants. He accurately points out that the Giants dominated the run game, while the Browns won the battle for air supremacy, and concludes that it is the passing game that determines winners, and not the running game.

Case closed. Right?

Well, lets not get too far ahead of ourselves just yet. Because a closer look at the box scores shows us something else. That something else is that the Giants turned the ball over three times, including an intercepted pass that was run back 94 yards for a TD (which is essentially a 14 point swing since the Giants were six yards from paydirt).

While a good day running might not be a guarantee to a victory, it is probably generally an indicator of victory, so long as you’re not handing over the ball to the other team.*

Biblical wisdom functions similarly to football wisdom. They are observations that are generally true. They are not mathematical formulas wherein you do X and always get A. Generally someone who works hard will end up materially better off than if he did not. But occasionally life kicks a hardworking man in the teeth and gives a big fat cupcake to a lazy fattie.

And usually a child raised in the faith will remain or return to the faith he was raised. But sometimes that doesn’t happen. And when it doesn’t it has to be heartbreaking to their parents. Teaching that a child who doesn’t remain or return to the faith did so because either God broke His promise, or the parents weren’t faithful to God doesn’t do anything but turn that heartbreak into an unbearable load of guilt that isolates and crushes.

This reminds me of another piece of scripture:

“Yes,” said Jesus, “what sorrow also awaits you experts in religious law! For you crush people with unbearable religious demands, and you never lift a finger to ease the burden.

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Children can be a wealth of insight.

Ellianna asked me as we were driving to the doctor’s office, “Is this real or is this a dream?”

I replied, “Is what real or a dream?”

Elli: “Me.”

She soon clarified the question was in reference to the particular trip we were taking, but still, it was one of those moments where as a parent, you realize that your children at the various stages of childhood have all the insight and wisdom of man.  A lot can be learned from children, but we aren’t to rely on the wisdom of man but the wisdom of God.  Our children can come up with man’s conclusions on their own, they need us to show them who God is.

We were riding in the car running errands the other day when our 4 year old daughter asked my wife to tell her the story of Jesus dying on the cross again.  She’s heard the story in her numerous illustrated Bibles we read her, as well as in Sunday School and during Children’s church.

So my wife replied somewhat to me, somewhat rhetorically, “Where do I Begin?”

Our daughter: “At the beginning.”

Makes sense.  So my wife and I together say, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

It gave us a good laugh at the time, but as children tend to do, my daughter got at the heart of much that is important to the story of Jesus with her simple answer.  I’m currently reading the book Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey.  In it she proposes Creationism as foundational to communicating the gospel.  I have to agree.  The story of Jesus’ death on the cross only makes sense in light of creation.  Which is why it can be difficult to evangelize in cultures (such as ours) that declare that we are only a part of nature which has it’s roots in itself (Darwinism is a form of this naturalistic worldview).

Maybe when we tell the story again, we really do need to start at the beginning.

Recently, I’ve been reading a post-apocalyptic comic book. It was pretty standard fare, civilization has fallen, and what’s left of humanity is scavenging the corpse of the fallen civilization to survive. During the course of this looting the group of protagonists come across a store house of wealth. There’s gold, cash and other valuables. One member of the looting party sees the lucre and says, “how much is all this worth”, the response by the de facto leader of the party is “nothing”.

Michael Spencer has a post up called One Stock That Needs to Drop. The stock in question is evangelicalism and Spencer makes several points as to why it needs to drop. I would guess that Spencer uses this metaphor because the current financial crisis is on everyone’s mind and the attending stock market drop that goes with it is the focus of many, many news stories. But as Spencer is clearly aware, the stock metaphor is especially apt because the value of stocks are based on the perception of how valuable they are.

A rumor made the rounds that Steve Jobs’ health is in decline, Apple’s stock goes down. There was no change in sales numbers, no change in assets, no change in anything but a whisper about the health of the lead man at Apple, and the panic sales were on.

While I doubt there will be a single watershed event like a post-apocalyptic event, or rumors of a health scare that will cause a single day drop, I do believe that the value of the stock of evangelicalism will leech away over time.

And that’s ok.

In fact it might be preferable. Because much like the character who, in the middle of a post-apocalyptic meltdown where food is scarce and safety is fleeting is busy gathering defunct currency, much of the current valuation of evangelicalism is based on a whole list of job descriptions that just no longer apply, and the more evangelicals try to chase those things the more time, and resources are wasted.

Politics, health, wealth, better living, wisdom, Amway, the power to force moral choices on society as a whole and marketing dollars have all been a big part of the valuation of evangelicalism, and all of it is an illusion. And if that illusion were to go away this instant, many people would go with it. And that would be a good thing. Because the church shouldn’t value any of those things, and the Christ didn’t resurrect to bring us those things. And eventually churches and lives built on those things won’t be able to sustain themselves.

Salvation, love, community, lives of service, humility, disciples, and redemption however, are all a part of the real value of the church. And none of those things have ever moved a stock price upward.

Some day, probably a day not too far away if it hasn’t come already, Christianity in the United States will be a shadow of itself in terms of measurements that matter to people who matter. And it doesn’t bother me at all. Because its time for the church to stop its two-fisted gathering of defunct currencies while the world around them is dead or dying.

Ellianna (our 4 year old): “Who raised Jesus from the dead?”

The question seems simple enough, but is actually quite profound.  Many people (and hymns, songs, etc) talk about Jesus rising from the dead as if of His own accord, but Paul in Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, and Colossians as well as Peter say that God raised Jesus from the dead.

Why is it that many unchurched people in our society understand the importance and commitment involved in being immersed (baptized) while much of the church leadership in America places it’s importance below the Ten Commandments (or some other arbitrary delineation degrading immersion to a rule that can be qualified)?

I have known dozens of youths (often teenagers) who have expressed a desire to be immersed into Christ Jesus but whose parents have either refused or told them to wait.  In fact, there is a situation right now in our community where a father doesn’t want his daughter to be immersed because of the importance and weight of such a decision.  One that involves a lifelong commitment to faith in God.  You know, it is an important decision.  Being immersed into Christ is a proclamation to the world that you are committing your life to Christ.

That in and of itself should be enough to keep immersion in its place as part of the conversion experience.  (There are other reasons as well, but this post is not about them.)  Instead we have ministers and church leaders telling people that it’s akin to tithing.  (Hmmm, I don’t even know if that is true since many church leaderships in our country view tithing as a requirement that God makes of Christians.  Would they be the same people to be repulsed at the idea that immersion is a requirement of God to become a Christian?)  Immersion is not something you do when you become a more mature Christian, immersion is what is done to you to begin your journey following Christ Jesus.

I find it ironic that many Christians are so immersed in our culture that they are unable to see their own compromise to a dualistic worldview that results in privatized faith and often a rejection (in part) of Truth as revealed to us in God’s word, and yet many non-Christians have maintained a sense of that Truth despite a conscious rejection of it.

In this presentation by DA Carson he makes many great points, but there is one particular point that I’d like to single out. He illustrates this point by pointing out that when he’s in New York he never identifies himself as an evangelical because to the average secular New Yorker the word evangelical is the Christian equivalent to the Taliban, he concludes this statement by saying “if you don’t know that, then you’re not even in the discussion, go somewhere else”. This illustration caps off his general point that for many people today words like God, faith, spirit, truth, repentance, sin and every other “God talk category” mean something other than what someone with a Judeo-Christian worldview means. We often think that we’re writing on a blank hard drive when we’re communicating/evangelizing, but we’re actually dealing with a hard drive that already has files written on it that have to be changed before its possible to explain the gospel, or what the Bible says.

While this may be daunting, especially since it is a radical shift in less than a generation and a half, in some ways it makes the scriptures even more powerful because this was precisely the same culture Paul was dealing with once he left the synagogue and began to discuss, interact, preach, teach and speak with the polytheistic Greek population. In other words, our current culture, especially as you move into centers of secular populations, more directly reflects the cultures of Athens, Ephesus and other places Paul was founding churches, and so the methodologies and practices of Paul in these polytheistic centers are now relevant in the United States in ways they were not 40 years ago.

In Acts 17 Luke records Paul’s Areopagus address which is preceded with Paul giving the gospel, perhaps in a similar way as a street preacher might today. And this address is completely incomprehensible to his audience. Some dismiss him as a babbler, and others believe he is advocating foreign gods (it should be noted this second group was as wrong as the first group was dismissive, as they shuffled the Living God into the same category as pagan gods who were local and limited, just local and limited in a different zip code). So they bring Paul to the gathering of the Areopagus where they spent their time talking and listening to the latest ideas so that they can try to sort out what exactly this strange little man’s strange little ideas are.

And it is here that Paul begins re-writing the files of the gathering of the Areopagus so they can understand his strange little idea which we have come to call the gospel, and he begins by explaining God was neither local nor limited, but created everything, and everyone and is sovereign over everything. The gospel makes absolutely no sense whatsoever unless you begin with this understanding of God. The idea that Jesus’ work was planned from the beginning, and that he willingly gave up his life and was resurrected only works if you believe God controls everything from the creation of the universe to the close of the universe because if He does not then the death of Jesus is just another forgettable skirmish between deities in which one lost and died, and the other won and killed rather than the singular event that changed history.

I’ve always found the story of Alice in Wonderland to be more creepy than charming (which may or may not be a compliment). The story essentially is of Alice showing up in a world that makes no sense to her. She has no way of knowing what creatures are sentient, what powers are at work, who wishes her harm, who wants to use her presence for their own gain, and what actions will bring certain disaster. In other words, all of her assumptions, and all of her knowledge that has aided her well in her own world don’t apply, and will actually work to hinder her because she is plunged into a world that works in a fundamentally different way from her own. Many times when we give what is in our minds “the simple gospel” it isn’t so simple. We are essentially turning people into Alice and plunging them into Wonderland because we assume they inhabit the same world as the gospel.

Paul recognizes this fact and communicates accordingly in Athens. Rather than describing sin in legal context, he does so in a relational context using works from their own poets. It should be noted here (as DA Carson noted), that though the record of Paul’s address is very short, in all likelihood it lasted for several hours and these are the general headings under which he spoke which serves to further illustrate the care Paul took to insure the message he spoke was the message that was heard.

In fact, Paul takes this a step further and applies the principle not just to his communication, but to his conduct. In Acts 19 we are told of Paul’s ministry in Ephesus, another pagan city filled with a specific pagan goddess. While there a riot initiated by makers of idols for Artemis is stirred up. What finally quells the riot is a plea from the city clerk that these men had neither “robbed temples nor blasphemed our goddess”. We can assume that blaspheming Artemis would include saying things like Artemis isn’t real, or by going out and letting everyone know that they’re a bunch of idolaters on their way to hell. Something Paul did do on occasion, but apparently not on this one. Why not? Well, we can presume that Paul was familiar with the law in Ephesus and in order to continue operating there obeyed the law, one which inhibited particular evangelistic method rather than the practice of being a Christian. We see a similar discretion exercised in the previously mentioned passage in Athens where Paul sees the entire city filled with idols and is “greatly distressed”, yet does not begin his address by pointing out how evil and wrong his listeners are, (in fact he begins his address with a sort of compliment as to their religiosity).

Paul does all of this for the sake of the gospel. Can you imagine what the gossip of Ephesus would have been like if a riot had broken out in the city of Artemis which involved Christians? I doubt the story told from lips that worshiped Artemis to ears that listened for Artemis would have been all that complimentary, and would likely have resulted in the banning of all evangelistic and discipleship activity not to mention could have endangered Christianity’s protected status with Rome (as it was still not distinguished by Romans as separate from Judaism and so was a licit religion, at least for another couple of decades).

In Matthew 10 when Jesus sends out his disciples to spread the message that the Kingdom of Heaven is near he tells them they’re being sent out as sheep among wolves, and so they must be as shrewd as snakes and innocent as doves. Being ministers of the gospel means far more than simply repeating the same few lines which make perfect sense to us. It means being shrewd enough so that the gospel is understood by those hearing what we say, and acting wisely enough that the best possible outcome for the spreading of the gospel occurs.