Church Voices

I don’t talk politics at church.  But this isn’t church.

I’ll tell you now that I  won’t be voting for Clinton or Obama this election (for various reasons).  There is much I could say that I don’t like about their political decions in the past, and their views on the role of government in our country.  But I don’t really need to do that.  What I do need to do is to be challenged to treat others with respect and to love my enemies.  So I would like to share with you one thing that I appreciate about Clinton and Obama.   (There are probably more, and please feel free to share your own positive observations.  No criticizing or I’ll have to bring the smack down on you.  There are plenty of other places and times to do that.)

I appreciate both of these candidates being willing to discuss issues of faith at an event specifically for that.  They were asked questions of varying kinds by different people, including ministers.  The questions weren’t all fluff either.  Were some of their answers evasions and redirects.  Yes.  But they aren’t Bible scholars, they are politicians and trained in that.  And quite frankly, there are many things about God, faith, and Christianity that I find mysterious and don’t have a tremendous grasp on yet.  And when somebody asks me about them, I give the best answer I can but it might not really be a satisfying answer.

One thing that did come through when Clinton and Obama answered their questions was a desire to live out their faith by helping other people.  In Christian circles, we call this “loving your neighbor as yourself.”  Sounds familiar, where have I seen that before?  It is possible that both politicians are saying what will get them the vote.  But I hope they are genuine and that I’m gracious enough to give them room to fail at it.  Especially when I as a minister, preacher, and christian fail at loving my neighbors quite a lot.

For all of the failings of the Democratic party, there appears to be a genuine desire among Democrats to love their neighbors.  Maybe as Christians (not Republicans or Democrats) we can show our communities what that looks like.  Maybe we can even love them as Christ has loved us.

“Often people will be told, ‘invite Jesus into your heart, become a Christian and then everything in your life will become great.’ They do this and then find out it’s not all happy and great and feel betrayed. So on the front end, what we ought to do is say ‘Please join up, we would love it if you became a Christian- join us and then take up your cross and we will bleed and die together. Welcome.’ We ought to be much more honest up front and then people won’t feel the bait and switch later.”

~Rob Bell, Sermon on 4/13/08

HT: Joe Martino

I can’t ask for God’s protection and expect that bad things that happen to other people won’t happen to me. I can’t ask for God to straighten out messes in a miraculous way and still honestly say I believe what scripture says about what it means to follow Christ in my life.

Jesus doesn’t run a protection racket, and he isn’t a rescue squad. He gives meaning to suffering and shows us the way of kingdom repentance and the cross. That’s where I am these days. I don’t want to tell unbelievers that God works things out for me because I’m on his team.

HT: Internet Monk

Of course we point and laugh at health and wealthers (as we should), but we also buy into a more subtle form of it when we expect to wear Jesus like a magical cloak that will repel cancer, divorce, death, pneumonia, and car accidents. If we expect becoming a Christian to be some sort of life bettering decision like earning a degree from an Ivy League university we may be in the wrong religion (if this is what you’re looking for Scientology might be a better fit), because scripture doesn’t promise us a magic carpet ride to easy street.

What we can expect from God, however, is to prepare and comfort us when life decides we’re due a gigantic heaping helping of hurt. There’s a scene in the movie Juno after which the title character has just given birth and has given up the baby for adoption. Juno is laying there, exhausted, and hurting from the pain of birth and of giving up a child, and her father strokes her hair and says, “Someday, you’ll be back here, honey. On your terms”.

Perhaps God as our Father looks a lot more like that than he does a super hero saving the day. Or maybe, that’s the only way Father God can look, because if God is nothing more than a gravytrain, or a magic shield protecting us from harm he becomes Rich Uncle God, or Banker God, and as good as it is to have a rich uncle, a super hero, or a banker, none of them are as good as Father.

rab·ble n.
1. A tumultuous crowd; a mob.
2. The lowest or coarsest class of people. Often used with the.
3. A group of persons regarded with contempt.

Everywhere in every society an effort is made to keep the rabble out. Cover charges at clubs and bars are designed to do exactly that, union membership is about restricting the work force to a select few in order to raise wages, things like the bar exam and medical boards are intended to restrict their respective fields to qualified individuals. Recently, there’s been tension between mere bloggers and official press. It begins with the debate about whether bloggers are covered by press protections passed into law, and continues on now in the NBA with the Dallas Mavericks banning and then unbanning bloggers from the locker room. At first, reporters and other full fledged members of the media resisted bloggers as anything more than pathetic hobbyists, now as bloggers have flexed their influence and audiences the question isn’t whether or not bloggers are proper members of the press, the question has shifted to which bloggers are legit.

In all of these cases there’s a clear monetary and/or prestige benefit to keeping the rabble out. Doctors, lawyers, the press, union members and bartenders all can charge more, and be seen as more important than otherwise by drawing a bright blue line between themselves and everyone else.

Now let me make what should be an entirely uncontroversial statement. A statement that you’ll probably agree with and amen. And that is that the church should never keep the rabble out. There should be no cover charges or bar exams to keep people from the gospel. I imagine everyone probably agrees with that statement. But let me share a couple of stories with you.

The first happened to one of our occasional writers here, Ben Walker. He invited a friend of his to church and after awhile the friend came. Now this guy had a shaved head (back before aging Gen-Xers figured out that a shaved head was better than a balding one), and his clothes would certainly never have been described as “church clothes”. He walked into the building, took a look around and said, “I can’t do this” and walked out. Without a single met gaze, smile, or conversation the guy figured out that he was rabble.

The second is happening at a church I’m familiar with. They have a Saturday night service that is constantly in flux. People begin coming to the Saturday service and then at some point shift to a Sunday morning service. When the Senior Minister began asking people who had made the switch he found the same story over and over again. These were people who had gone through divorces, bankruptcies, and other socially frowned upon situations and so felt as if they didn’t belong in a church. However, the Saturday service was just far enough away from a traditional church service they would go to that. And as they learned about the tidal wave sized vastness of God’s grace they moved to the Sunday services.

No one told the people in these stories that they were rabble. No one was charging a cover charge, or handing out requirements for church attendance, but somehow they either figured it out, or got the wrong idea (depending on how charitable you want to be).

Now this is where contextualization comes into play. Despite the few people who continue to cling to the idea that its possible to not contextualize, the hard, cold reality is that everything you do is contextualized in some way. How you dress, talk, walk, breathe, and socialize are all contextualized to your culture. And if you don’t want to keep the rabble out you need to contextualize well, rather than poorly.

I believe that in many ways when Christians operate ministries intended to operate beyond their local community it creates more problems than we realize, and may be a distraction from the way the church is intended to operate. Consider the following:

Communities Vary Dramatically
There’s an article every student in Anthropology 101 used to have to read entitled “Shakespeare in the Bush“. This anecdote is written by an anthropologist who tells the story of Hamlet to a remote African village. The villagers are confused by basic details in the story, such as why Hamlet would be angry that Hamlet’s uncle married his mother after the death of his father, after all, in their culture an honorable man marries his brother’s widow. The re-interpretation of the story continues until the story is nearly unrecognizable, it starts with Hamlet as the villain and ends with him being pardoned due to mental disease or defect. I moved about six hours north to start ministering at Owosso Church of Christ, and despite the fact that I moved across only one state line, was still in Big-10 country, and stayed within the same non-denominational denomination the mindset, and culture of Owosso is very different from where I was living. While I was hardly in Shakespeare in the Bush style culture shock, Owosso even when compared with the town I grew up (which was of a similar size, and relative location to larger cities) its a world of difference.

In other words, the needs individual communities have and the ways that they relate and communicate will vary drastically, even in places that are demographically similar. Not to put too fine a point on it, but exactly how and what each church does to live and teach the gospel will vary so significantly that anyone offering advise or condemnation from outside of a community is unlikely to have any idea what they’re talking about.

Individual Churches Vary Dramatically
I won’t spend much time on this because its very similar to the first point (but looking inward, rather than outward). The make up of a church in terms of talent and resources (not to mention how a church’s internal infrastructure allows for the deployment of those talent and resource) are so different that, again, advice or condemnation coming from anyone who hasn’t spent a significant amount of time in that specific church is probably clueless.

Individual Leaders Vary Dramatically
Are you seeing a pattern yet? Anyway, as Mark Driscoll has gained some national visibility his fanboys have tried to imitate his preaching style. The problem is that Mark Driscoll is a one in a billion talent. I’ve yet to hear anyone else who can pull off an hour and a half sermon the way that he can. Instead all of his fanboys that try to emulate him fall flat, and end up worse preachers than they were before, in fact, often it comes off, not just as terrible preaching, but as insincere, and insincerity is far worse than incompetence.

Love can’t be communicated nationally
Biblically defined, love is what you do for others. Especially when it comes to pointing out shortcomings, or leveling criticisms those words aren’t coming from love if you haven’t actually done anything for that person. This is true whether Christians are attacking each other, or are busy condemning political opponents. We are charged to speak the truth with love, not excoriate with prejudice.

Homogenization isn’t healthy
A friend of mine hosted a German foreign exchange student, when they broke out a map of the US and measured from the north west corner of Washington to the south east corner of Florida he was literally speechless. He was used to being able to drive through three or four countries in a single day, the idea that it would take several days of straight driving to get across a single country absolutely boggled his mind. We live in a huge country with huge variations in culture, and population, and the end result of national conferences, books, systems for doing church, etc. is to create a homogeneous culture of church in a country that is heterogeneous.

National sin becomes local sin
Whether its a fall to grace like Ted Haggard, ridiculous money grubbing TV preachers, or some big-mouthed fool like Pat Robertson the dirt sticks to all of us. What’s worse, because these things don’t happen on the local level there’s no way to repair the damage through the personal relationships the church has built.

Look, I’m not making the case that books, conferences, or other national level ministries shouldn’t exist, or are sinful. Rather, my point is that the local church is the place where the gospel’s heavy lifting is done. Its where the gospel is spoken and lived, and where love exists between the saints and for the community where our God-given charge of servanthood is carried out. In other words, the little things are the big thing, and when our most talented, motivated and energetic saints focus the main part of their time and energy on websites, books, radio shows, and other national level ministries we miss the forest for the trees.

This group of comments saddens me greatly because it is indicative of a general attitude found within the church which views God as an unapproachable deity that is closer to Islamic theology of the ineffable Allah than it does a heavenly father.

Consider this comment from that same thread:

Ultimately we (all people) live under the threat of eternal death if we worship improperly, do we not?

Or this one:

The Bible does not say God is “love, love, love.” It does say, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.”

And then consider this:

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!
Luke 13.34

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,[m] neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8.38-39

The scriptures describe God as father, Christ as brother and husband. Any theology that fails to relationally connect His people to Him in this way is a theology that is devoid of Christ because it is through the sacrifice of Christ that we have been added to his family and are able to approach the throne of grace.

Then some of the Pharisees and teachers of the law said to him, “Teacher, we want to see a miraculous sign from you.”

He answered, “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a miraculous sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth

The resurrection is the entire point of this passage. But lets not forget that who the resurrection is for is the same group that Jonah’s preaching was for.

The word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai: “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.”

When we gather as God’s family, worshiping the messiah who became sin, and defeated death for us let’s also avoid Jonah’s attitude.

When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened. But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. He prayed to the LORD, “O LORD, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.

My last post (and I admit its an easy mistake to make with my final sentence) has some people confused about what I’m advocating. I’ve received feedback, most publicly from Heath, about the failures of the Democratic party. Some were even handed (like Heath’s) some were not.

Let me say first, that I was not advocating a vote for either party, or any candidate. I believe the Democratic party has disastrously failed to reduce poverty, and in some cases has made it much worse.

But that only illustrates my real point, which is that Christians and churches shouldn’t see political systems as the answer to anything. Both parties which claim to be strong in areas that are of interest to Christians have failed utterly to achieve much of anything.

The answer doesn’t lie with our ability to force people to act in a certain way, it lies with churches acting like the church in a million little communities across the world.

The difference between me and Eliot Spitzer is largely this: I have never been elected governor of New York.

Douglas Groothuis writes:

However, the leading domestic moral issue remains the value of helpless human life. Since Roe v. Wade, approximately 50 million unborn humans have been killed through abortion.

He goes on to make a political case, in which Christians should be voting against both Democratic candidates because of their record on abortion.

A compelling case, until one considers what voting for Republican (and allegedly pro-life candidates has gotten us). After all, there’s been 8 years of President Bush, 4 years of the first President Bush, and 8 years of President Reagan. That’s 20 years of Republican Presidents broken only by 8 years of President Clinton. And in the end the only thing that pro-life forces have gotten is some room for states to regulate a bit more.

The strongest argument is the appointment of Supreme Court judges, but even if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned (as it ought to be) the result is not outlawing abortion, but rather allowing states to legislate as they want. I’m not sure how much of a dent this would make, as it would only require crossing state lines, and I would suspect that the majority of abortions are already performed in states that would allow it remain relatively legalized.

In other words, the political campaign has been a near complete and total failure, even as general pro-life sentiment has been on the rise.

So what are the options? Well the other option is the one the church should have been doing all along, and is naturally good at to begin with: creating a community that removes the motivation for abortion. This means doing more than just setting up centers that provide the nutritional necessities for a baby (and mom). It means more than just pointing pregnant women to a computer with its browser pointed at a medicare application. It means creating a church that will provide emotional support (via real, human relationships). It means providing things like babysitting as an act of family (rather than as an act which incurs an obligation), it means making people, who in the past might have been stigmatized by the church feel accepted. It means doing this in such a way that word gets around. It means doing this in places where women have abortions regularly

Or we can just keep trying what we’ve been doing. Maybe 20 more years of Republican president will make the difference this time.

Peter’s words pierced their hearts, and they said to him and to the other apostles, “Brothers, what should we do?”

Peter replied, “Each of you must repent of your sins and turn to God, and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. Then you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. This promise is to you, and to your children, and even to the Gentiles—all who have been called by the Lord our God.” Then Peter continued preaching for a long time, strongly urging all his listeners, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation!”

Those who believed what Peter said were baptized and added to the church that day—about 3,000 in all.

Being raised and educated in a non-denominational denomination that puts a huge emphasis on baptism I know all the verses about baptism. I could put together a nice big powerpoint presentation for you, write a paper, justify my position, and generally get all academic up in this hizzle.

I wonder sometimes, if we don’t make an idol of the Bible. If what once brought joy now has turned into “much study[ing] wearies the body”. There were no NT scriptures at this point, no Romans 6, or words like “baptismal regeneration”.

Only the knowledge that forgiveness of sins was there, waiting.

Have we exchanged joy for a power point presentation?