Sociology

A statement I ran across while reading about the evolution of religion:

Religious specialists begin to see themselves as a distinctive group set apart from everyone else. They become monopolists of religious knowledge and influence and acquire new interests that have to be protected and promoted.

This was actually in reference to the first millenium.
What would today’s version of this be?

Devastatingly Evangelical

“There is, then, an evangelical way to preach the Gospel and an unevangelical way to preach it.

The Gospel is preached in an unevangelical way, as happens so often in modern evangelism, when the preacher announces:

This is what Jesus Christ has done for you, but you will not be saved unless you make a personal decision for Christ as your Savior.

Or:

Jesus Christ loved you and gave his life for you on the Cross, but you will be saved only if you give your heart to him.

In that event, what is actually coming across to people is not a Gospel of unconditional grace but some other Gospel of conditional grace which belies the essential nature and content of the Gospel as it is in Jesus. It was that subtle legalist twist to the Gospel which worried St Paul so much in his Epistle to the Galatians.

To preach the Gospel in that conditional or legalist way has the effect of telling poor sinners that in the last resort the responsibility for their salvation is taken off the shoulders of the Lamb of God and placed upon them.

How, then, is the Gospel to be preached in a genuinely evangelical way?

Surely in such a way that full and central place is given to the vicarious humanity of Jesus as the all-sufficient human response to the saving love of God which he has freely and unconditionally provided for us.

We preach and teach the Gospel evangelically, then, in such a way as this:

God loves you so utterly and completely that he has given himself for you in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, and has thereby pledged his very Being as God for your salvation. In Jesus Christ God has actualised his unconditional love for you in your human nature in such a once for all way, that he cannot go back upon it without undoing the Incarnation and the Cross and thereby denying himself.

Jesus Christ died for you precisely because you are sinful and utterly unworthy of him, and has thereby already made you his own before and apart from your ever believing in him. He has bound you to himself by his love in a way that he will never let you go, for even if you refuse him and damn yourself in hell his love will never cease. Therefore, repent and believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour.”

Thomas F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ

Our theology of the gospel is essential to our understanding of evangelism and mission.

Off-the-Grid

Unplugging from traditional services. No longer a customer.

Jason Coker recently said, “The books I’d been reading on church planting didn’t help. They all basically boiled down to, “10 easy steps for building a high-revenue, over-bloated, top-heavy, pastor-dependent bureaucracy.”

Yep. I would add…

“10 easy steps for building a high-revenue, relevant, soul-patch wearing, expert-dependent bureaucracy – The Emerging Version.”

“10 easy steps for building a high-revenue, outward-focused, soul-patch wearing, expert-dependent bureaucracy – The Missional Version.”

“10 easy steps for building a high-revenue, non-institutional, authentic, expert-dependent bureaucracy – The Organic Version.”

If you want to join the ranks of the experts, staying up-to-date with the latest-greatest conferences and books is important. Or maybe someone just needs you to think it’s important.

The simplicity of faithful Christian living doesn’t require expert help. Those who imply that it does have something to sell.

Disclaimer: Not that you shouldn’t enjoy the encouragement and wisdom of your favorite thinkers.  There is a difference between that and marketing hype.

Things I Didn’t Learn About Leadership in Church

Leadership originates in response to the needs of others. Leadership is not the response of people to the vision of an influential person, but rather their response to the leader as he or she articulates their wants and needs. It can not occur without truly knowing and understanding the needs of those one presumes to lead.

When a leader speaks the language of the hopes of others, the followers’ response is what initiates the leadership relationship. When a leader knows the underlying needs of others, a shared vision and mutual relationship that produces transformation can be created.

Leadership is not the articulation of what we assume others need. Which means that I can not really enter into a leadership relationship until I know someone well enough to know their needs and am willing to serve them in response to their needs, not to mine. This is a fair gauge for assessing whether a true leadership relationship exists.

Positional leadership can create a platform of influence for an individual, and it can be organizationally effective. However, it is not typically transformational to the lives of followers. To the degree it is separate from relationship with followers, it is a perversion of leadership, no matter what you call it.

I find most material on church leadership to be a confusing mixture of organizational management cloaked in servant language preserving hierarchical relationship. Because of that, I believe we are still mostly confused about what leadership is within the church. My thoughts about leadership within the church are further explained in the post A Relational Ethos of Leadership.

As an organization, churches require managerial leadership, and I am not saying there is anything wrong with that. There are many things a person may do that are important and good, however not everything should be lumped under the label of leading.

Real, transforming leadership can occur in the church. However, true leadership is rooted in the needs of the follower, not the needs of the leader or the organization. Possibly that is the reason that transformational leadership in many realms, religious, political, societal, most often occurs outside the margins of established structures of power.

Leadership is not dependent on position but on the actions of one who is responsive to need. Therefore, real leadership can exist at any level both within and outside of a particular system, organization, or structure.

Permission granted. Anyone can lead. But few will.

Hauerwas on Leadership

I’ve been wanting to write a few things about leadership, but haven’t had the opportunity. In the meantime, let me share some of my favorite thoughts from this video of Stanley Hauerwas.

“It’s always persuasion.”

“Many of the proposals about leadership are quite perverse, exactly because it gives the impression that you know what leadership is abstracted from communities that make leadership possible.”

(3:50) “Don’t lie. Very simple, don’t lie to me. Just don’t lie to me. It kills you, it kills me, and it kills the community.”

(4:20) “The bottom line – politics is people. For any person that wants to be in leadership, if they try to lead in a way that means they don’t have to deal with people and to tell the truth to people, they automatically defeat community.”

Someone to Blame

I am convinced that people are born with a longing for relationship with God, a homing device if you will. I am also convinced of the persistence and power of the self-revealing nature of God. We saw with the incarnation of Christ the attraction of the lost and broken to the true revelation of God.

Now the church is the incarnation of Christ’s body, His light shining in the earth today. However, statistics show massive hemorrhaging from the Body, vast numbers of people saying they don’t want anything to do with the church. Yet often in their next breath they reveal spiritual hunger and longing.

As the church, we often march out the typical scapegoats – “The world will hate us, Jesus came to bring a sword, We are being persecuted.” Near the end of this video, O’Reilly asked Brit Hume, “What do you think drives the negative comments about Christianity?” That is a great question! Brit’s answer was a bit of a Fail, but the question is something we should all be asking.

The first response when the church is confronted with its failure to represent the love of God to the world should not be to blame them but to look in the mirror and assess what we are reflecting. One characteristic of the emerging movement, according to Richard Rohr, was the conclusion that “many of the major concerns of Jesus are at major variance with what most of our churches have emphasized.”

I have only recently heard “the emerging church” mentioned locally. In my neck of the woods, it is still relatively unheard of, and each time it was mentioned as something scary and bad. I was thinking about this when I ran across this video by Bickle and Engle. They have concluded that the “emergent church” is the greatest threat to and the cause of the crisis in the church.

Ron Cole nailed it when he said, “It’s obvious they should have left their fortresses and camp and done some real reconnaissance.” This is no more helpful than blaming the lost. What I hear Bickle saying in this clip is that in spite of the fact that 96% of people are rejecting what the church has offered, his proposal is for everyone to try harder and do more of the same.

Being forced to the margins gives the church an opportunity to refine its message to more accurately reflect Jesus and the love of the Father. It is vital that we grasp our calling to be a true embodiment of kingdom life here and now. The instinct for blame or any form of institutional self-preservation must be cast aside in favor of honest self-examination about whether the content of our spiritual lives, both individually and corporately, reflects “life.” This is the only thing of lasting value we have to offer.

The emerging and missional movements were both spirit-led responses to needed transformation of the church. They describe the widespread response of many people in obedience to an intentional shift they perceived in what God is doing. They are taking the message of redemption and reconciliation outside of traditional expressions of church into the avenues of the world, bringing the kingdom to those who are outside the church. Both emerging and missional are temporary descriptors of changes occurring within the church at this particular time, describing a shift in focus and emphasis.

Am I naive enough to think that everything about the emerging or missional movements is pure and true? Absolutely not. Anyone who has taken the time to be familiar with the conversation understands the diversity of beliefs and practices associated with these labels. I am also not suggesting that anyone must be associated with these movements. However, in completely dismissing them, you lose valuable insight from those who have already been listening to why people are rejecting traditional expressions of church.

Is the emerging church a threat to the church? Is it a movement or a conversation? Is it dead or no longer radical? At the end of the day, the label or brand doesn’t really matter. Do we represent and reflect the light of Jesus, the life of the Spirit, the love of the Father? This will be the church that is becoming, regardless of what we call it. And if we don’t, that will be the church that is dead, regardless of what we call it.

So back to those people who don’t yet know that they are loved and embraced by the Father – we must deal with the many ways in which we’ve failed to communicate the most relevant truth. Why haven’t they recognized the answer to their longing in the incarnation of Christ in the earth today?

My Bill Moment

I probably shouldn’t write about this, but I will.

Last week at theology group, I threw out the statement that we are not to judge others, assuming this was something that everyone agrees to.

The first question shot at me was something about fruit.  So I responded that yes, we can look at the externals, the fruit of a person’s life, but we aren’t able to know what is in another person’s heart.

Ha!  You would think I said something totally outrageous.   Suddenly I was on trial, and the presbyterian pastor with the starched collar began his line of questioning, with a smugness that made me suspicious.

Laying out his argument, he said, “So you would call someone a non-christian, wouldn’t you?”

“As I already said, we cannot know the condition of another person’s heart.”

In the meantime, I wondered if during the weeks that I missed, they had concluded that I was a universalist, which I’m not (not that there’s anything wrong with that), and I was trying to figure out how to answer their questions without proving their conclusions about me.

“But you would say that someone isn’t saved, right?”

This was where I missed my moment to turn the question around.  With a thousand thoughts running through my mind about how I view people and their relationship with God and His with them, I stalled and stood up to refill my water instead of answering.

“Well, you would say someone is an unbeliever, wouldn’t you?”

“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is . . .”

Shoot, that ended weakly, leaving me thinking all week about what I should have said. Oh well, maybe next time.

(BTW, we do this for fun. No sacred cows are harmed in the debates.)

Glossary

Pulled from the draft file…

I began compiling this list last spring. The following are the redefinitions I use of certain terms in order to not see familiar scriptures through the grid in which they were taught to me. I find it helpful to remind myself of the definitions listed here when I encounter these terms in order to challenge assumed interpretations of certain passages. In other words, when I see these words in scripture, these are the definitions that I substitute.  Since I compiled this list, I have encountered others who use similar definitions of the terms on the list.

• sin – alienation, the blindness we were born into, acting out of blindness rather than light and truth
• repentance – turning toward truth, new understanding
• righteousness – God’s faithfulness to who He is
• holiness – wholeness, completion
• judgment – restoring things to the way they were intended to be
• sabbath – the rest and peace of God, shalom
• revelation – God revealing Himself (not facts)
• faith – the obedience of belief, to live (act) as though a thing is true
• grace – empowerment to live by the Spirit and life of Christ within
• church – the people of God
• religion – things we do to try to earn what is already ours
• gospel – the good news of restored relationship – God, man, and creation
• salvation – rescue
• new birth, conversion – awakening to the reality of our reconciliation
• evangelism – sharing the message of reconciliation
• heaven – the realm of God’s presence
• hell – the darkness of living alienated from God and His love

As I said, this is my personal mental list, subject to revision.  We each have an underlying picture and definition about these words that shapes our understanding of God and His story.

Your thoughts?

Random Stuff

I went to my grandma’s funeral a couple of days ago.  She died at 101 and 1/2.  We lost her several years ago to Alzheimers.  She lived a good life and had lots of loved ones with many happy memories of her.

The funeral wasn’t especially sad.  The Scripture passages and reflections were nice.  The sermon was odd, but whatever.  Most of the hymns were good.  The familiarity of “In the Sweet By and By” and “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder” compensated a bit for their lacking theology.

It was nostalgic to see so many of my dad’s cousins.  One of the things that struck me was the family resemblance.  It was interesting to look around the room and see women of all ages – 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s – who somewhat look like me.  There is a sense of belonging and connection in that.

I finished up the final projects for my online classes before I left for the funeral.  So, now that I’m home, I have a week to get ready for Christmas.  Whatever that means.  I should probably make a list.

I haven’t registered for classes for next semester, but I probably will.  They actually sound pretty interesting – “Ethics & Social Responsibility” and “Social Change & Diversity.”

I haven’t been reading much outside of school stuff.  In theology group, we discussed Cost of Discipleship by Bonhoeffer.  I found it disappointing.  We are currently talking about Orthodoxy by GK Chesterton which isn’t as good as I hoped either.

At our coffeeshop gathering, we are slowly going through So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore.  It has a lot of good stuff in it about freedom from religious obligation, but I tend to worry about communicating an anti-institutional message, which I really think misses the point.  Anyway, we’ll see what next year brings.

Over Christmas break, I hope to read . . .

• The Great Divorce – CS Lewis
• The Weight of Glory – CS Lewis
• On the Incarnation – St Athanasius (finally)

Probably my favorite book from earlier this year was Transformational Architecture by Ron Martoia.  If you missed that one, it’s worth checking out.

When I walk, I mostly listen to Baxter Kruger these days.

My two oldest kids moved out this month and a third is already making plans to leave in June.  I guess the nest that fills up quickly also empties quickly.

One of the nice things about school is that it mostly keeps me too busy to think or feel.  Sometimes that’s okay.

My other plans for Christmas break include tax work, dusting, and putting away the laundry from the past 3 months.  Woohoo!

It will be nice to catch up with reading blogs too.

Reconciled

Well, I’m supposed to be writing my final papers, but instead I’m thinking about sin, depravity, Adam, and the second Adam.  This is a thinking out loud post, so be aware that it is process, not necessarily conclusion.

Maybe some of you wonder about these things.  What exactly happened in the garden?  Sin, doubt, idolatry?  And what is the curse of our fallenness?  Sin, shame, blindness?  What is it that we were baptized into in the first Adam?  Depravity, disease, death?  What have we been baptized into in Jesus?

I Cor. 15 - For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.

It is interesting to me that Christians of almost every type are willing to accept the totality of the effect of the first Adam, yet immediately limit the effect of the second Adam, Christ.  Surely the actions of the second Adam are at least as impacting on mankind as the act of the first Adam.

Hebrews 10- Jesus sets aside the first to establish the second. We have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. When this priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins…by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.

The corruption has been set aside, not through our actions, but by Jesus.  It was the will of Jesus and the Father to accomplish this through His sacrifice.

II Cor. 5- The ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Our message to the world is that they are already reconciled to God, they are already loved and embraced by the Father.  That is the good news.  God is not counting their sins against them; he has already dealt with that problem.

That’s enough for now, maybe Romans 5 in another post.