Category Archives: Ministry

August 4, 2019 · 8:53 pm

Admitting the Truth

Let’s talk about giving up dreams.

I was somewhere around five years old when I first said I wanted to be a preacher. I think I liked the idea of delivering sermons, of being an expert in holy stories and wise advice. But fundamentally, my experience of ministers is that they were kind men. I wanted more than anything to be kind someday—I knew very well the damage that unkind men could cause. Having set my sights on a pastoral vocation, I committed to that path with single-minded determination.

On a Wednesday night in 1983 I preached my first sermon. There were no boys older than I was, and I had no model for what was expected of me other than the adult men. They took turns preaching during the midweek service, so I figured I should, too. Our little church, the East Side Church of Christ, was about forty people at the time, of which my family—little brother, parents, grandparents, great-aunt and great-uncle, constituted about a fifth. Most of those forty, like us, were thrice-weekly attenders, showing up Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night for services that were effectively identical in form, varying only in the degree of formality. I figured even a sixth-grader could preach on a Wednesday, the service traditionally reserved for encouraging the faltering efforts of those new to the pulpit. I asked; the elders agreed. I chose “confessing sins” as my theme. That’s hilarious in retrospect, as I was eleven years old, and I don’t think I’d committed any actual sins yet. Armed with the NIV Bible I had received from my grandparents on my tenth birthday, plus an article entitled “I Have Sinned,” from the latest issue of Teenage Christian magazine, I delivered my homily. “Wonderful, wonderful!” said Sister Lois, my great champion, afterward. The men shook my hand. “Well done!” The older folks were in general agreement that I’d “make a fine preacher someday.”

We met in a small, plain building off a side road, effectively hidden from society. I remember when we added carpet down the central aisle, installed ceiling fans, built a lobby. In the lobby were bathrooms, a glorious improvement both because of their relative luxuriousness and, more important, their location at the entrance of the building. Previously, in my elementary years, if one felt the urge to pee during worship, a trip to the front of the building was required—the original toilets were located on either side of the pulpit. In spite of a general unspoken agreement to let such trips take place without comment, one couldn’t help but feel the eyes of the congregation with each step forward—or worse, the eyes of the song leader or preacher. Perhaps the founding members found poetry in placing base humanity in proximity to the divine, but the next generation held a successful funding drive to restore some privacy to the privies.

When I was sixteen our little church remained between preachers for a long stretch, a year or more. We couldn’t pay much, so even though the preaching job came with the free use of the three-bedroom parsonage beside the church building, our ministers usually didn’t stay for more than a couple of years. As the search for our next official preacher dragged on, I was promoted to the Sunday morning rotation, and preached monthly. I’d collected a few public speaking awards by then and felt reasonably confident behind the pulpit. From my vantage point now, thirty years hence, I can’t picture what those sermons must have been like, and I can’t remember any of my texts or topics. I do remember, though, the continued encouragement of the congregation. For the first time, it looked like our little church was going to produce a preacher, and the gray heads were delighted. I took their pleasure as confirmation that I was on the right track.

So: Off to college for a degree in biblical studies. That was followed by a lingering bout of atheism, during which I went to grad school for communication studies. Then my faith rebounded (long story there) and back to seminary for a Master of Divinity degree, and eventually a doctorate in ministry. I did my best to shore up my weak spots, build on my strengths, learn how to serve the church well.

In my early 30s I landed at a reasonably healthy church that was having trouble navigating some key transitions. They had dropped from just over 500 members to barely over 400 and wanted someone to help them get back on track. Figuring out what was broken in the system and designing new structures, it turns out, is something I’m pretty good at. Three years later we were over 500 again. I started getting calls, a few a month, from other churches who were dealing with declines and wanted to see if I’d come help them grow again, too. “Thank you, but no, I’m happy here,” I said again and again.

I did leave, eventually, to go to a church that–rare, for Churches of Christ–opened up public leadership positions to women. My theology was increasingly feminist and I had a daughter by then, so an egalitarian congregation was able to get my attention. We made a cross-country move for that church. It had an outstanding reputation, came highly recommended, and had the most dysfunctional leadership I’ve ever encountered. I don’t say that lightly. I’ve seen my fair share of dysfunctional leaders, and this eldership was out to set some new records. I had never before watched church leaders stand up and blatantly lie to a congregation. Not subtle “maybe they misunderstood” kind of lies, but “we literally just agreed to something and now they are standing up and saying the opposite.” Sometimes the lies involved me. My favorite was “due to the recession, our church budget is getting tighter, and Kirk has graciously agreed to a salary freeze.” We hadn’t even discussed that possibility. But there was no point discussing it after that announcement. It was clear that my salary was frozen. I could be gracious about it, as advertised, or call the elders out as liars in front of the church and enjoy being fired. Not a great choice. The list of impossible demands and conflicting expectations got longer and longer. My job performance suffered as I got more and more stressed just trying to survive as an honest person in a system that rewarded deception. Again and again I was offered the choice to live quietly with lies or speak up and take my bruises. I lasted there 25 months, a tenure that was both (1) frankly amazing, given how miserable I was and (2) incredibly stupid, given how miserable I was. I should have been sending my résumé out by month three.

As a sign of how dysfunctional things were, I don’t really know if I quit or was fired. I was on my way out, anyway, and everyone probably knew it, but then the elders announced that the next week was going to be my last week, and so it was. I had planned to stay until I had a job lined up. They wouldn’t allow me that.

By the time we crawled away from the flames of that disaster, I didn’t have the emotional reserves to try to serve another church right away. So, hey–remember all that grad work I did in communication when I was an atheist? That was our lifeline to something else. I started teaching community college speech classes, first as an adjunct, but then full-time, after just a year. Pretty amazing, really, because you might not think it, but even community college jobs are pretty hard to get these days, and my résumé didn’t exactly scream “I long to work in academia.” It screamed, quite loudly “I trained hard for the ministry and then something went wrong.” I suspect a lot of people reading my application assumed I had had an affair.

So, I started teaching. Community college teaching is bizarrely low-stress. It’s amazing. I don’t have to submit lesson plans. I don’t have to deal with parents. If I’m not being overtly terrible, my chair leaves me alone and lets me run my class as I see fit. I’m pretty good at it, and I like my students, although I can’t really shake a sort of pastoral sensibility that communicates “I’m here for you and we’ll get through this together.” To be honest, I communicate that more clearly to my students than I ever managed to do with churches. Students drop by my office and we talk about their life crises and college stresses, and sometimes I’m able to give some useful answers and sometimes all I can do is listen supportively, which I hope helps, too. Occasionally I get emails a year or two after a student has left my classes. One young woman, a military veteran who saw combat in Afghanistan, credited my public speaking class with helping her manage her PTSD and transition back into civilian life. One young man credited my interpersonal class with giving him the tools to save his marriage. As job satisfaction goes, one could do worse. And then there’s always “I thought I’d hate this class, but you made it interesting–thanks!” I get a few of those at the end of every semester. Those are nice, too. Not as nice as being a rich neurosurgeon who saves lives all the time–a career path I wish, in retrospect, I had taken up–but the notes are good.

After about four years of teaching, I felt sufficiently recovered from America’s Most Dysfunctional Church to start applying for ministry positions again. I had a doctorate, a record of helping churches grow, and five years earlier I was routinely fielding calls from interested congregations. How hard could it be to land a new ministry job?

Very hard, it turns out. It didn’t take long for everyone to forget about me. It also didn’t help that I was now way over on the far-left edge, theologically, for Churches of Christ. I did find some churches that really liked me—one in New England, and another in Salt Lake City. I could have uprooted my family and crossed the country for a church that looked like a good fit. But we’d done that once and it nearly killed us. I wasn’t keen on leaving Texas again. Maybe you could get me to a state that borders Texas. But Boston? Nope. I just don’t have it in me to do that again.

About three years ago I got as as close as you can get to a ministry job without actually landing it. I was on the job-offer runway with my landing gear down on a nice calm day, and then two engines blew up and a wing fell off. Nice-sized church, near a university. Had an absolute blast my interview weekend. The search committee recommended that the elders hire me. The church, overall, was clearly supportive. I was ready to move. But in the final interview the elders asked me a question on a particularly contentious point of theology. I knew they wouldn’t like my answer. It was one of those rare moments in life when you know that the next sixty seconds will determine the next six years. I could lie, and the job was mine. I could tell the truth, and it would go to the next candidate on their shortlist.

I don’t lie. I’m not sure that’s a moral strength; it’s more like a weird compulsion. I’m the exact psychological opposite of a pathological liar. I’m a pathological truth teller, even when it hurts me–even when it accomplishes nothing useful. I’m not proud of this fact. They asked me a direct question. I breathed out and glanced at Sandy. She knows how I am; she knew how this was about to play out.

I answered their question.

It took two weeks for them to call and say they’d gone with someone else. I’m not surprised—a lot of people were advocating for me, and it’s hard to go against the emphatic recommendation of the search committee. But they thought I was too liberal. By their standards, I guess they were right. Sandy burst into tears as I hung up the phone. It’s one thing to know what’s coming, it’s another to get the call.

They offered the job to the committee’s distant second-place choice. He had a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology and hadn’t thought much deeper about theology than they had. I was perversely delighted when he turned them down, and they went another year without a preacher. They deserved to flounder for a while—not for realizing I wasn’t what they wanted, but for waiting until the final moments of a six-month process to spring a make-or-break question on me. They should have sent a checklist of their required opinions at the start.

There have been a few other near misses. I had an open door in another denomination, but as much as I loved them, ultimately, I wasn’t up to learning a new ecclesial language and acclimating to a new culture. I could have gone to a dying church with no children left, but I wouldn’t do that to my kids. And while I think I’m well-equipped to turn faltering churches around, I can’t raise the dead.

Four years out of ministry became five, then six, then more. It’s now been nine years, six months, and three days. The fact that I know that without having to think about it says something. I really only ever had one dream. But I’ve realized that the odds are getting smaller. My network was never big, and now I’ve been out of the loop a long time. I can’t get away to ministry conferences and networking events. I’m a has-been. I had a few good years. It looked like I had potential. I could have made a fine preacher. And then it was over. The math looks like this: as my years out of ministry grow longer and longer, the list of churches I would be willing to leave my low-stress college life for grows shorter and shorter, and so does the list of churches willing to offer me a job. The odds of a match shrink inexorably. It’s not impossible that it could happen, but it doesn’t seem likely.

And here are some more truths. I’m the only one in this little five-person family who has any interest in going anywhere else. My kids are quite happy with their friends, their schools, their church. They aren’t interested in giving any of that up. Sandy’s happy to stay, too. The only one with bouts of restlessness is me—restless to give up these nice notes, this low stress, to do the thing that I felt (feel?) designed to do; the thing that nearly killed us.

In some lights, what I’ve been doing the last five years—sending out résumés, calling churches—seems equal parts stupid and selfish, with no room left for “wise” or “loving.” A small town on the outskirts of Houston is, for me, about the ideal place to live. This community has everything I want. The little Bible Institute where I first trained for ministry at age 19—fifteen heartbreaks and two major faith crises in the past—has invited me to teach their communication-focused classes, one a semester. I cover preaching, Bible teaching, leading small groups. I get to pass on a little of what I learned to a diverse group of men and women who will, I hope, put those skills to use in churches longer than I did. I get to preach often enough, at our home congregation or elsewhere, that I haven’t completely forgotten how. I taught this year at the Christian summer camp I grew up in. Those ministry degrees aren’t completely wasted. And I know I wouldn’t be the father, the teacher, thepersonI am without all those years studying theology with wise mentors. Young Kirk had a lot to sort out, and it might have taken three degrees and a few thousand books to do it, but I think it got done. I think, most days, I am a kind man.

My department chair and I recently talked the powers that be into approving me to teach Intro to Philosophy. Adding philosophy to the mix has raised my job satisfaction enormously. I love my students, but public speaking is the worst thing to teach. It’s terrible. No intellectually stimulating content, and you have to listen to hundreds of poorly-prepared speeches from anxious pupils every semester. I’m good at teaching speech, but it bores me. Philosophy, though, is fun. I’m reading ancient texts with students and talking about how we should live. We’re tackling the big questions of life. What does it mean to be good? Is there a god? What are our ethical obligations? Three days into my summer course a student told me that he had illegally downloaded a PDF of the textbook, but after our first discussion of ethics he ordered the book and paid for it. That feels like something is happening. On paper, I’m not the most qualified person to teach this class, but I defy you to find someone who loves teaching it as much as I do.

If this is how things are going to be—philosophy with students during the week, practical ministry classes a few Saturdays a year, being a happy church volunteer on Sundays—I think I can maybe stop updating my ministry résumé.

Would I rather be on staff at a church? Yes, almost certainly. But that’s, like, 8% more satisfying. It would be an improvement, but I’m not going to ask my family to give up their connections here for an 8% bump. And the kind of church that would give me that bump isn’t interested in talking to me, anyway.

This is the dilemma of mid-life isn’t it? When do you admit something just isn’t going to happen again? What’s the dividing line between giving up and wising up? When should you learn to say “I had something once, and it was lovely, and I wish I been able to hold onto it longer, but life didn’t work out that way. And this–this life, this place, this moment—it’s good, too. This is the kind of life someone else desperately wishes they could have, the sort of life a man ought to appreciate, instead of clinging to a gossamer vision from his kindergarten year.”

There’s a line from Jessamyn West: You make what seems a simple choice: choose a man or a job or a neighborhood- and what you have chosen is not a man or a job or a neighborhood, but a life. I believed that I was on a ministry hiatus, a sort of extended sabbatical. I believed that I was actually a pastor, biding my time until the right church came along. My kids don’t know that, though.Theythink I am really a college teacher. They believe this is actually our life.

It has taken me almost a decade, but I understand now. They are right.

 

2 Comments

Filed under Ministry, Personal

August 13, 2017 · 7:00 am

Book Review: Almost Christian

Book Review: Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church, by Kenda Creasy Dean. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Dean, a professor of youth, church, and culture at Princeton Theological Seminary, wastes no time getting to the point of this bracing book. She opens chapter one by writing:

Let me save you some trouble. Here is the gist of what you are about to read: American young people are, theoretically, fine with religious faith— but it does not concern them very much, and it is not durable enough to survive long after they graduate from high school.

One more thing: we’re responsible.

Dean is not speaking idly. Drawing on serious and careful research, she shows that American Christianity is currently in crisis, although it may not be the crisis we think we have. Faced with ever bolder and more vocal atheism, many churches assume that our problem is that teens are rejecting faith due to pernicious outside influence. The reality is this: teens are not rejecting faith; they never truly had it to begin with. And the cause is not a determined hostile world; it is a weak and listless church. The sad irony of this moment is that, on the surface, American churches are devoting more resources to young people than ever before: dedicated youth ministers, consistent Bible class programs, vibrant summer camps, and global mission trips. It certainly seems as though we are doing all we can—no previous generation of young Christians has been given this level of supposedly spiritually formative resources. Yet we are reaping a harvest of mediocre faith that often doesn’t last more than a few months after high school graduation. What is going wrong?

The primary problem is that even young people who regularly attend worship tend to think of church as a valuable extracurricular activity, like their school’s band or sport teams—and churches haven’t given them much reason to think differently. While teens are inwardly longing for a purpose to which they can devote their lives, many churches fail them by offering “a kind of ‘diner theology’: a bargain religion, cheap but satisfying, whose gods require little in the way of fidelity or sacrifice.” The ski trips and youth hangouts offer fun for while, but they aren’t acquainting teenagers with a holy God who calls them to lives of radical service. Worse, the things that churches do to try to build faith often harm the spiritual formation process by replacing traditional structures that were more effective at creating disciples. Faith is formed best in multigenerational communities where young and old serve, pray, and study together, yet most American teens have almost no opportunity to bond with faithful adults: their Bible classes, camps, and mission trips are often filled with nothing but young people and one youth minister, with perhaps a few adults sponsors present. They have almost no opportunity to see how mature Christians integrate their faith and their life, and so they struggle to see how Christianity speaks to their world. Lacking both clear theology and faithful examples, the religious framework of many young people consists of what sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Denton call “Therapeutic Moral Deism,” which says, in essence, that God wants people to be nice; the goal of life is to be happy and feel good; nice people go to heaven when they die; and God isn’t involved in my life except to help when I have a problem

If you have spoken about faith with many teenagers in the last decade or two, these beliefs probably sound familiar. They have taken root among American youth and shoved aside the core principles of authentic Christianity: that God was incarnate in Jesus Christ, that his life modeled how we should live, that he died to cleanse our sins, that the work of the Spirit empowers us to continue in the divine work to which Jesus calls us. Rather than seeking daily to imitate the servant spirit of Christ through the Spirit’s power, teens are content to be “nice” and only call in God in a moment of crisis.

How does the church respond to this crisis? Dean calls for vigorous formative rituals: daily encounters with the divine through prayer and study, intergenerational work and reflection, a renewed sense of mission in the world, which makes demands of all church members, from oldest to youngest. Give teens a purpose and a calling and they will rise to the occasion. Show them through tangible behaviors what Christ has meant to us, and Christ will come to mean more to them.

Yet the most significant factor, by far, is not the sort of faith formation practices found in a teenager’s church, but those found in a teenager’s home. While there are always some young people who build a mature faith in spite of their parents’ indifference, and some who lose it in spite of their parents’ devotion, the number one predictor of enduring faith in a teenager is enduring faith in his or her parents. In her terms: “You get what you are.” The chief difference between an uncommitted teen and her parents is often that the lukewarm teen no longer feels the need to engage in the pretense of church attendance. “In the end, awakening faith does not depend on how hard we press young people to love God, but on how much we show them that we do.”

Almost Christian is one of the most important books I have encountered. At turns disheartening, pragmatic, and hopeful, it lays out clearly the spiritual crisis before us and, in its own prophetic way, call for revival—not among the teenagers whose fate so deeply concerns us, but within the parents and church leaders whose own shortcomings are being reflected in our youth. This book is a clarion call. May it not fall on deaf ears.

Leave a comment

Filed under Books, Church Culture, Good Theology, Ministry, Uncategorized

March 9, 2012 · 9:34 am

Anger in the Church

Good stuff here by Debra Dean Murphy, especially this quote from Garrett Keizer: I am unable to commit to any messiah who doesn’t knock over tables.

I know well the pressure the be perennially nice in church–and the fear that if I wasn’t always nice, I would jeopardize my ministry career.  Looking back, I have too lengthy a list of times that I wanted to stand up and fight for some righteous cause, or do some much-needed rebuking, but smiled and nodded and said, “well, there’s another way to see that.” On rare occasions, “there’s another way to see that” does the job, but sometimes I failed to do what I was called to do by not knocking over any tables.

Leave a comment

Filed under Church Culture, Ministry

Tagged as , ,

December 11, 2011 · 11:19 am

The Nones

From the New York Times, an article by Eric Weiner: “Americans: Undecided About God?”

For a nation of talkers and self-confessors, we are terrible when it comes to talking about God. The discourse has been co-opted by the True Believers, on one hand, and Angry Atheists on the other. What about the rest of us?

The rest of us, it turns out, constitute the nation’s fastest-growing religious demographic. We are the Nones, the roughly 12 percent of people who say they have no religious affiliation at all. The percentage is even higher among young people; at least a quarter are Nones….

Nones don’t get hung up on whether a religion is “true” or not, and instead subscribe to William James’s maxim that “truth is what works.” If a certain spiritual practice makes us better people — more loving, less angry — then it is necessarily good, and by extension “true.” (We believe that G. K. Chesterton got it right when he said: “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”)

This is certainly my experience.  Young people I know are looking for a life path that will help them be better people.  They are often very interested in mystical, reflective paths, which they have often seen very little of in Christianity.  Buddhism holds some attraction because it looks like it will help them to be calm and focused, and to roll with the punches.  They are not interested in preventing homosexual marriage, are increasingly moderate in their abortion views, and would like to see real help for the poor and the sick.  You could possibly sell them on some specific Christian doctrines, but not until they have seen that there is a form of lived Christianity that appeals to them.  If you lead with praxis, you can eventually move into theology.  I, for one, don’t see this as a step backward.  Aren’t we supposed to be inculcating virtues anyway?  And aren’t things like peace and patience supposed to be the fruit of the Spirit?  The American church needs to make some major adjustments here, but nothing that isn’t the right thing to do for other reasons.

Leave a comment

Filed under Evangelism, Politics and Culture, Reflections

Tagged as

December 7, 2011 · 4:52 pm

Learning to Read the Gospel Again

Solid article from Antony Baker.  The most devastating line:

In the memorable words of Kenda Creasy Dean and Ron Foster, young people “look to the church to show them something, someone, capable of turning their lives inside out and the world upside down. Most of the time we have offered them pizza.”

Leave a comment

Filed under Church Culture, Evangelism, Ministry, This Is Good

June 18, 2011 · 12:23 am

William Abraham on Evangelism

I want to write something soon about how we move past the pervasive individualist paradigm in America, and what should replace the failed model of personal evangelism among our churches.  But the best things I have to say on that topic have come largely from trying the think William Abraham’s thoughts after he has already thought them.  The Logic of Evangelism is a brilliantly insightful book which has influenced me enormously.  (And I suppose I should add a positive review on Amazon to balance the fairly critical ones that are there.)  A good overview of his argument appears in his article “The Theology of Evangelism: The Heart of the Matter,” which you can read here in PDF format.  His general conclusions from that article appear below:

We now need to think through the connection between
evangelism and the evangel. How are the two to be
linked? If the gospel centers on the arrival of the
kingdom of God in Jesus Christ, how are we to construe
the relation between evangelism and the kingdom
of God? This is a pivotal matter.

The favored position for some time has been to
insist that the natural connection is through some
kind of speech act. Thus evangelism has again and
again been construed as the proclamation of the gospel.
In some cases this has been extended to include
teaching the gospel or persuading someone to believe
the gospel. In other cases it has been expanded
to the proclamation of the gospel in word and deed.
In this instance it becomes natural for the actions of
the church, say, in education, medical work, social
action, and the like, to be construed every bit as much
as evangelism as does the verbal proclamation of the
gospel. Moreover, it is surely this conception of evangelism
that lies behind the enormous efforts currently
being made to evangelize the world through radio
and television. The warrant for the widely held conviction
that the world can be evangelized through
television is the claim that communication is of the
essence of evangelism. Evangelism is just the verbal
proclamation of the gospel; hence in our situation
the obvious tool for this is television.

We have already seen that the attempt to base
this on purely etymological considerations is precarious
in the extreme. However, even if the argument
about the origins of the term ‘evangelism’ were to
hold, that is, even if ‘evangelize’ originally meant
simply to ‘proclaim’, this would not settle the matter.
We also have to ask if this is the best way to
construe evangelism in our situation today. We must
explore how far it is appropriate to consider evangelism
in these terms in our context. In my judgment
it is imperative that we enrich our conception of evangelism
to the point where we move beyond mere
proclamation to include within it the initial grounding
of all believers in the kingdom of God. If we
make this shift, then, in fact, we actually come much
closer to what evangelists, ancient and modern, have
actually done, but, even then, the argument is not
advanced on purely historical grounds. The primary
considerations circle around the needs of our current
situation in our modern western culture. Here I
shall be brief and make three points, one negative
and two more positive.

First, continuing to think of evangelism in terms
of mere proclamation fosters the practice of disconnecting
evangelism from the life of the local church.
It nurtures the illusion that evangelism can be done
by the religious entrepreneur who can simply take
to the road and engage in this crucial ministry without
accountability to the body of Christ. To be sure,
there are lots of local churches who welcome this kind
of evangelism. It allows them to ignore evangelism
entirely as a constitutive element in the mission of
the church, for it can hand this responsibility to the
itinerating evangelist, or it can keep evangelism to
those seasons of the year in which it focuses on the
proclamation of the gospel. However, this is not the
really deep problem here. The deep problem is that
this way of construing evangelism has generally been
used to cut evangelism loose from the life of the
Christian community precisely because the responsibility
of the evangelist has stopped once the proclamation
has ceased. On this analysis, the evangelist
need not belong to a church; indeed if he does
not like the church in which he was brought to faith,
he can invent his own on the spot. Nor need the
evangelist be accountable to the canonical traditions
of the church; indeed if she does not like the canonical
narrative of the gospel, then she can invent her
own narrative at will. Nor need the evangelist take
any responsibility for the spiritual welfare of the
seeker or convert; this can be conveniently left to others,
say, in the field of Christian education. In all,
restricting evangelism to proclamation helps keep
intact unhealthy evangelistic practices which should
long ago have been abandoned. In a culture
mesmerised by the power of the mass media, the
church must recognise both the radical limits and the
dangers of proclamation in our current situation.

Secondly, restricting evangelism in this manner
cannot do the job that needs to be done in an
increasingly pluralist and post-Christian culture.
Evangelism needs to be expanded to include the early
phases of Christian initiation. The gospel must be
handed over in such a way that those who receive it
may be able to own it for themselves in a deep way
and have some sense of what they are embracing.
Proclamation is but one part of the process which
will make this possible. It will also require teaching
and persuasion, spiritual direction, an introduction
to the spiritual disciplines and the sacraments of the
gospel, initiation into the basics of the Christian moral
and doctrinal tradition, some orientation on the kinds
of religious experiences which may accompany entry
into the kingdom of God, and the like. Without
these the new believer will not be able to survive
spiritually, morally, or intellectually in the modern
world. In short, an evangelistic church will take responsibility
for the initial formation of Christian disciples
as an integral component of its evangelism.

Thirdly, the wisdom of this strategy is borne
out by a very significant recent study of spiritual
development in England. In that study careful attention
was given to about five hundred people who
had come to faith in recent years. The most pertinent
piece of information to the issue in hand is that
the majority of people studied came to faith over a
relatively lengthy period of time.
The gradual process is the way in which the
majority of people discover God and the average
time taken is about four years: models
of evangelism which can help people along
the pathway are needed.

Most “up-front” methods of evangelizing
assume that the person will make a sudden
decision to follow Christ. They may be asked
to indicate this by raising a hand, making
their confession, taking a booklet or whatever
is the preferred method of the evangelist. The
fact is that most people come to God much
more gradually. Methods of evangelism
which fit this pattern are urgently needed.
The nurture group and the catechumenate are
the best known at present, but others may
need to be devised. The use of one-to-one
conversations akin to some form of spiritual
direction may be one possibility. Another
may be a series of church services where
people are introduced to the Christian faith
over a period of time and given opportunity
to respond at each stage. Even more urgently
needed are means of helping non-churchgoers
to discover God outside the church building
in ways which enable a gradual response.

A useful way to capture this vision of evangelism
is to construe evangelism as directed fundamentally
toward initiation into the kingdom of God.
Achieving this will require both the activity of proclamation
and the work of catechesis. More comprehensively
we might say that the ministry of evangelism
will include effective evangelistic preaching, the
active gossiping of the gospel in appropriate ways
by all Christians everywhere, and the intentional
grounding of new converts in the basics of the Christian
faith. This in fact comes close to what evangelism
looked like in the early church.

In order to forestall possible misunderstanding,
note that this proposal assumes that no evangelism
is possible without the concurrent activity of the
Holy Spirit. It also insists that evangelism must be
rooted and grounded in the life of the local Christian
congregation. Finally, it expects that evangelism will
naturally result in the growth of local churches, but
this is neither the goal nor focus of the ministry per
se. The focus is the coming of God’s kingdom in Jesus
Christ and the goal is to see people grounded in that
kingdom here and now. In short, evangelism is simply
the initial formation of genuine disciples of the
Lord Jesus Christ.

Leave a comment

Filed under Books, Church Culture, Evangelism, Good Theology, This Is Good

Tagged as , , ,

June 17, 2011 · 5:49 pm

The Cult of the Individual

There is a certain kind of story that is I have heard again and again in America. I think it is particularly prevalent in our society, if not unique to it.  There are many variations, but in general it goes like this:

A young man is born to a family of adequate means, although they are far from wealthy.  He has a safe, warm home and good food to eat, thanks to his parents’ work and care for him.  As he grows, he attends tax-payer supported public schools that provide him a good foundation.  His parents often have to leave for work early, but he waits with other neighborhood children at the bus stop, and a reliable school bus, paid for with taxes, picks them up.  The bus-driver, whose salary is paid by everyone’s taxes, takes him to school on smooth roads built and paid for by the government.

The boy is a sharp student and a good learner.  Through a state-mandated gifted and talented program that, by law, must be offered to students with his abilities, he gets specialized instruction that challenges him and helps him reach his academic potential.  Even though his parents have no more than a high school education, the (state-mandated, tax-supported) school counselor begins encouraging him to think about college.

Because of his excellent grades, solid SAT scores and modest financial means, he qualifies for a variety of college scholarships, some which ultimately come from government funds, others of which were provided by wealthy benefactors.  Advanced education is made possible for him because of these funds.  He finds a part-time job that covers his living expenses.  It’s manual labor, nothing glamorous, but the federal minimum wage laws ensure that he gets fair compensation for his work, and laws enforced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration make it very unlikely that he’ll but put in a situation that could cause him physical harm.  What little financial expense isn’t covered through scholarships and work he pays for with student loans, which are automatically granted to any full-time student, and are backed by the guarantee of the federal government.  No payment is expected and no interest accrues on these loans until after he leaves college.

He lives in a modest studio apartment in a fairly run-down neighborhood, but the police drive through frequently, and the one time he was startled by a fight just a few doors down, he called 911 and a patrol car was there within a few minutes to stabilize the situation.

By his junior and senior years the career center at his college has helped connect him with internships in his chosen field, where kind-hearted mentors show him the ropes of day to day life on the job, volunteering their time to encourage his interests, and even taking him to conferences at company expense and helping him to network with potential employers.

He graduates with a good GPA, applies to work for several of the companies where he has made connections, and is hired by one of them at a good starting salary.  Because of the knowledge and skills he has gained, he works his way up the ladder, learning more about his business and how to manage it.  In his mid-30’s he decides to go to work for himself.  He gets a loan at a good interest rate from the Small Business Administration, hires some talented employees, and is soon CEO of his own successful business.

Now he’s 40 and rich.  Frequently in conversation he tells people that he is a “self-made man.”  He believes that all it takes is skill and hard work and you can get anywhere in life.  You just have to “believe in yourself.”  He gives large contributions to politicians who promise to lower his tax rate, even if it means cutting funds to the schools, structures and programs that he depended on to get where he is.  He loves to quote Ronald Reagan’s line that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”  And he has no sympathy for the “lazy bums” he encounters sometimes who grew up in poor neighborhoods with dangerous schools and little access to the programs that he was able to utilize.

Asking an American about individualism is like asking a fish about water.  It’s the environment that we live in, and it’s so pervasive that it’s hard to get perspective on it.  There are hundreds of thousands of people in our society like the entrepreneur above. Their entire life was a gift from others who donated to the cause, but they sincerely think of themselves as strong individuals who made their way to success because of their own determination.  They are literally blind to the fact that their life is only possible because of functional community systems–family, school, government, business networks, protective agencies, and so on.  While no doubt part of the entreprenuer’s success is due to personal characteristics, another man with exactly the same set of gifts and personal traits who was born in Rwanda or Nepal or Peru would have had a very different kind of life.

The American church has been enormously affected by the surrounding culture of individualism.  The scriptures are almost invariably focused on communities–kingdoms, clans, tribes, families, households and churches.  When there is a prolonged focus on an individual, it is usually because that individual has a role to play in blessing the larger community.  Abraham is the archetype in this–chosen by God because through him “all peoples on Earth will be blessed.”  The most famous line in scripture is John 3:16, which tells us that “God so loved the world.”  Scriptural images for believers include the household of faith, the kingdom of priests, the chosen nation, the family of Jesus, the people of God. Ephesians depicts the cross as the instrument that has broken down the dividing wall of hostility between warring ethnic factions (Jew and Gentile in this case) and created one united humanity, which is a witness to the cosmos of the power of Christ.  To be saved, in scriptural perspective, is to become part of a larger community.

But the overwhelming scriptural emphasis on community and the communal work of God doesn’t play very well to individually-minded American audiences.  Rather than standing as a healthier alternative to the typical American viewpoint that has elevated the individual to center place, the church–especially the conservative evangelical church–translates the gospel into me-speak.  The primary evangelistic message is not “come join the community of the saved,” but rather, “Jesus died for you,” and “he has a wonderful plan for your life” and he wants you to accept him as “your personal savior” so you can have a “personal relationship with him.”  You might be able to make a case that “Jesus died for you” is a Biblical message, with the proviso that you are one of billions that he died for, but the other phrases are utterly absent from the New Testament.  There is no promise that he has a wonderful plan for your life, and even if that were true, it would only work for definitions of “wonderful” that include the isolation, poverty, torture and death that have been the fate of many believers across the centuries.  There is no scripture that asks you to form a personal relationship with Jesus, but many that ask you to bless Jesus by blessing others.  See, for example, Isaiah 58:

 1 “Shout it aloud, do not hold back.
Raise your voice like a trumpet.
Declare to my people their rebellion
and to the descendants of Jacob their sins.
2 For day after day they seek me out;
they seem eager to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that does what is right
and has not forsaken the commands of its God.
They ask me for just decisions
and seem eager for God to come near them.
3 ‘Why have we fasted,’ they say,
‘and you have not seen it?
Why have we humbled ourselves,
and you have not noticed?’

“Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please
and exploit all your workers.
4 Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife,
and in striking each other with wicked fists.
You cannot fast as you do today
and expect your voice to be heard on high.
5 Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
only a day for people to humble themselves?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD?

6 “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
7 Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
8 Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness will go before you,
and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.
9 Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;
you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.

“If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
10 and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday.
11 The LORD will guide you always;
he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
like a spring whose waters never fail.
12 Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
and will raise up the age-old foundations;
you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.

Much the same sentiment is more famously expressed in Matthew 25:

34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

Asking someone if they have a personal relationship with their personal savior

I own this book. Jesus died just for me. Sorry the rest of you missed out.

Jesus who has a wonderful, personalized plan for their life is a far cry from asking whether they are willing to take up their cross and join the community of self-sacrificing priests who are pouring out their lives for the sake of the world.  And even if the evangelizer truly means to point to the cruciform life of the disciple when asking those questions (which I doubt) the object of the evangelical efforts certainly won’t read all of that subtext into a pitch that seems to promise that Jesus is standing by to make your life an endless procession of puppies and rainbows if only you will let him.

This evangelical me-speak has carried on to such an extent that it often doesn’t just receive more emphasis than communitarian language, it replaces it entirely–sometimes in ways that can’t be reconciled at all with the scriptures.  I once preached at a church that gave every visitor a complimentary copy of Max Lucado’s little book entitled He Did This Just For You.  (There’s also an “He Did This Just For You” New Testament.)  There’s no way to interpret that title that makes sense–a plain text reading of it sounds like I, precious unique individual that I am, happen to be the only person that Jesus died for.  Even if you can squint really hard and turn the book sideways and somehow find a way to make the title a true statement, it is certainly less clearly true and in need of many more caveats than a scriptural title like “God so loved the world.”  By the time we are saying “He Did This Just for You,” we have moved beyond translating communal language into me-speak and crashed wholly into upending the gospel message to make Christianity one sub-sect in the larger religion of Me and My Best Life Now!

The aspect of American life that is often most in need of repentance is the relentless focus on me, and “what’s in it for me?” and “what have you done for me lately, anyway?”  But rather than call people to something better, richer and deeper, we far too often just cower in the shadow of the temple of self.  Christianity can overturn the worship of Jupiter and Roma, but it is helpless to tackle my steadfast devotion to me and my own well-being.

13 Comments

Filed under Church Culture, Evangelism, Ministry, Theology

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

December 14, 2010 · 1:32 pm

The Advantages of Having an Uneducated Preacher

My old friend/colleague/mentor/thorn in my side Dan Bouchelle recently wrote a blog post titled “The Danger of an Educated Preacher” in which he says:

I was deeply disturbed when I first saw the studies that indicated that having a preacher/pastor with seminar training (M.Div. or more) was correlated negatively with church growth. Since I had finished my M.Div. nearly a decade before and was finishing up my D.Min. this was not good news. Of course, that was based on large trends that did not predict the outcome for any individual or church. Still, it was not encouraging.

I asked myself why advanced training in ministry would not be correlated with church growth. It seemed counter-intuitive. Wouldn’t the most educated be the most skilled? Wouldn’t the most skilled be the most successful?

Dan’s going to offer up his own hypotheses in future posts, but I’m going to offer a few of my own here (and then have fun seeing how similar or different they are from what Dan comes up with.)

Here’s why churches that want to grow are better off with a less-well-trained pastor:

1) Educated pastors will be less comfortable delivering popular messages that depend on simplistic readings of scripture.

At the last church we visited, we received a welcome letter from the pastor in which he told us that his favorite verse is Jeremiah 29:11 “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”  He went on to say that he believed that God had brought us to that church for a reason, and that it was all part of the wonderful plan that God had for our life.  At no point did he bother to mention that his favorite verse is from a letter that Jeremiah wrote to exiles in Babylon who had seen their county overrun by the enemy army, their leaders killed or shackled, their temple ransacked, their palace burned and their friends and loved one die from starvation or sword.  They are now going to live the rest of their lives in a ghetto in enemy territory.  When God says he has plans for them that include hope and a future: (a) that’s a message specifically for the Babylonian exiles, not for any random person who reads the letter in the future, (b) it basically means that things won’t get worse than they already are, that they’ll continue to eat and live, and someday their descendants will be able to go home to the ruins, (c) it was sent to them by a prophet who was repeatedly abused and left for dead, and was eventually carted off to Egypt against his will.

Now, I happen to really like Jeremiah 29 and think it is a passage with deep significance, but when I preach it, I preach it in context and talk about what it means for people of faith who find themselves in a society hostile to their values.  At one point, pre-seminary maybe I could have said that “God has a wonderful plan for your life!” but that just isn’t the case (and even if it is the case, Jeremiah is certainly not the book that you would lean on to support that message.) But the truth is, a lot of people want to hear the happy-clappy God-just-wants-to-bless-you stuff and Pastor Prooftexter is going to have an easier time getting an audience for his pronouncements than Pastor Professor.  That goes for a lot of super-popular stuff that depends on a willingness to ignore context: the immediate literary context, the greater canonical context, and the lived context of our actual messy lives.  Like, say, “The Prayer of Jabez.”  (A little part of my soul still dies whenever a friend of mine who would never dream of reciting the Lord’s Prayer–too Catholic!–goes on a month-long Jabez kick.)

People want to be told that it’s all simple, and the their life will be good (in the way that they understand goodness).  A real theological education won’t let a pastor say those things anymore.

2) For a lot of educated pastors, church growth just isn’t that big of a priority.

Part of what a good seminary will do is help you to understand how different faith traditions developed, and why they do things they way they do.  If you entered seminary thinking that your denomination was the One True Church with all the answers, and that all real Christians would join it, hopefully you’ll be well on your way to getting over than in second semester Church History.  (Obviously, some seminaries just reinforce the party line, but I’ll set that aside for now.)  When you come to think that folks are going to be in pretty decent shape whether they come to your church or the church across the street, or just worship at home, growing your particular congregation looks like a pretty narrow and maybe selfish goal.  I used to chat with visitors and give them a list of other healthy churches they might want to visit that could be a better fit for them than we were.  That probably didn’t always make my elders happy, but it seemed like the really Christian thing to do.

Dan points out that the denominations that require an M.Div. tend to be those that have been in decline for a long time, but there’s a chicken-egg problem there.  Is the reason that educated pastors don’t grow churches because most of the educated pastors are in declining denominations, or is the reason those denomination are declining because they require their leaders to be theologically literate?

5 Comments

Filed under Church Culture, Evangelism, Ministry

Tagged as , ,

July 26, 2010 · 2:12 pm

Something Better Than Heaven

A friend of mine asked me to preach for him last week while he was away on vacation. This is the rough draft of my sermon, which more or less follows what I actually wound up saying when I got there.

I’m going to depart from my normal preaching style this morning. That’s probably okay with you, because you don’t know what my normal preaching style is. Well, I’ll tell you. What I normally do is start with a reading from the Bible and spend the rest of the time in a sort of extended study and explanation of that passage, sticking closely to the text all the way through. One of the nice things about that kind of preaching is that no one ever asks “where is he going with this?” If they do ask, the answer is “I’m not going anywhere—we’re hanging out in this text all morning, just going deeper and deeper into it.”

That’s how I normally preach, but that isn’t how I’m preaching this morning. And I’ll tell you up front why I’m not. The first reason is that there are several passages I want to discuss, not just one. I want to give us a big picture of a Biblical teaching. My normal preaching is kind of like an architectural blueprint, with lots of notes that show how the planks and railings of a passage fit together. What I’m aiming for this morning is more like a water painting of a landscape. I’d like to leave you not with all the details worked out, but with a big picture that you can carry with you. The second reason I’m leaving my normal pattern is this: the passages that I really want to talk about are difficult for modern people to grasp right away. And that isn’t because the words are complex—they really aren’t. It’s because we have about an 1800 year history of reading them in a certain way that I’ve come to believe almost completely misses the point. Sometimes we read them the same way my daughter opens birthday presents. She’ll cut the ribbon and tear the paper off and then hold it up for everyone to see and say “Look! It’s a box!” You have to keep prodding her sometimes to get her to move past the box—which I admit is a wonderful and attractive thing—and get her to open up the present inside.

This morning, I want to try to get us to open up the box, but to get there we need to make some preparations. So let’s start someplace else. Let’s start with a Starbucks coffee cup.

Joel Stein is a writer for the Los Angeles times, and I think it’s fair to say that he had no idea when he first wrote those lines that they would eventually kick off such an enormous controversy.
World Net Daily conducted a survey asking its readers for responses to the coffee cup quote, and a near tie for first place among the 7600 responses:

27.64% said they will do their best to avoid buying anything at Starbucks in the future.
27.36% said it’s leftist garbage from a leftist company based in a leftist city.

Over at The Christian Courier, Wayne Jackson agreed, calling the cup “display of contemptible ignorance,” and asking his readers, “Why not put your money where your heart is, instead of into some humanistic-oriented corporation that has an agenda hostile to those who reverence the spiritual?”

You and are just barely getting to know each other. Right now, all you know about me is that I’m friends with Shane, and I don’t know whether you think that’s a good thing or not. So at this point I’m going to leap out in faith and make a confession.
Here’s my confession:

I think Mr. Stein has a point.

Try as I might, the popular images of heaven just don’t grab my imagination. Robes and harps, angel wings, lazy days among the fluffy clouds. That might be nice for an afternoon or even a few weeks. I’ll really stretch and say I could learn to like that for a year or two. But for all of eternity?

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who’s ever had that thought, and I know what the approved response is: if you were just spiritual enough, you’d love the idea of heaven. Your problem is that you haven’t really cultivated the taste for worship and prayer. If you liked church better, you’d be excited about an eternity of praising God.

To quote Wayne Jackson:

The foregoing erroneous images of heaven are the result of….the lack of disciplinary training in things spiritual, in contrast to aggressive pursuits of the material. Many Christians truly do not fathom how they will be able to be happy in an environment where there is no golf, Monday Night Football, or shopping malls.
Quite frankly they find worship on earth dull—as obviously reflected in their patterns of church attendance. The thought of serving God continuously is a frightful nightmare to the “spiritually challenged.”

Now, that might be the right diagnosis for some people. I don’t know. But I’ve got to tell you, I don’t find worship dull—well, most of the time I don’t. And I’m a pretty faithful church goer. I read my Bible regularly, I sing and pray every night with my children, and I spend a fair amount of time meditating on the things of God. Sunday morning is my favorite time of the week. I love a good gospel meeting. I’m sure I have a ways to go, and it’s dangerous to deny your own weaknesses, but I don’t think my lack of excitement about heaven has to do with not being churchy enough. I’m pretty churchy.

Furthermore, I have no interest at all in either golf or shopping malls, and—while I realize this is a true heresy in these parts—I’m really not all that much of a football fan. I can give those things up with no hesitation at all.

And, of course, there are some things about the traditional picture of heaven that I just love. Really, really, love. No more death! Hallelujah! No more sickness! Amen. No more pain or sorrow! No more farewells! The hope of dwelling in the true presence of God the Father and the Lord Jesus—to be surrounded by the saints of all the years before. To walk with loved ones who have passed on before me. That’s a joy and a wonder.

Those things are so wonderful that it makes me a little embarrassed to admit that I find the harps and clouds and wings part pretty boring to contemplate. But I do. Not only do I understand where Joel Stein is coming from, I kind of resonate with this coffee cup, too:

And even though in the church we know we are supposed to long for heaven, it’s a challenge for some of us to work up much excitement. I think the problem is that there isn’t much that the Bible tells us about heaven; the little bit we do read is pretty vague and the incomplete picture that results just isn’t always enough to stir a person’s imagination.

What’s missing in that picture for me are things like surprise. Challenges. A sense of accomplishment. Worthy goals. And, to be honest, things like feeling wet beach sand pushing up between my toes. Pushing myself to hike up a mountain, feeling the blood pump and the muscles groan and respond. I’m going to miss things like learning and exploring. The feel of a handshake or a pat on the back. Can wispy souls shake hands in the clouds?
I’m going to miss building things.

There’s a lot about life on earth that I love.

And you’re going to have a hard time convincing me that the things I’m talking about are bad or frivolous things. Don’t the scriptures testify that those things sprang from the creative mind of God? As he made the things that fill our planet, didn’t he say over and over again “This is good! This is good! This is very good!” I agree with God! I like the Earth! I think he did a great job! It brought him pleasure to create and it brings me pleasure to receive it, and to join with him in the work of building and restoring. I like it—and I think I’m supposed to like it.
I guess what it boils down to is this: if the traditional picture of heaven that you and I grew up with is right—if the physical is stripped away and there is nothing left of me but a soul, there’s just a lot that I’m going to miss.

You know what I think I would really love? If I could have the good things about physical embodiment without the down sides. If I could have hugs but be done with heart attacks. If I could have exploration but be done with illness. If I could have challenges but no more losses. If God’s actual plan wasn’t to do away with the Earth, but to renew it and restore it—I would love that. No more spilled oil, no more litter, no more rubble. Just clear blue skies, soft green grass, pristine oceans. If his actual plan wasn’t to leave us as bodiless souls but to resurrect us into perfect, eternal bodies, real solid bodies that could never age or die, forever—wouldn’t take be marvel? What if we could have all the things we love most about the traditional picture of heaven, but at the same time hold on to all that we love best about life on Earth. Hugs and handshakes and swing sets and forest trails, with Jesus himself and all the people we love.

And what if I were to say to you that as near as I can tell, that’s exactly what the Bible promises, over and over?

1) The expectation of the disciples was that if Jesus came back, he was going to come back in a bodily form.

So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”
But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.”
26A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” 27Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

2) Jesus is only the first of many who will be raised in a new body.

12But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. 15More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. 16For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. 17And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. 18Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 19If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.
20But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. 22For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. 23But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. 24Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. 25For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 27For he “has put everything under his feet.”[c] Now when it says that “everything” has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself, who put everything under Christ. 28When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all.
–1 Corinthians 15

This is much more than a promise that “my soul will live forever in heaven after I die.” The Biblical promise is that I will be back—changed, immortal, renewed, and restored, certainly, but me.

But it doesn’t end there.

3) God will restore and renew all of creation.

10But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.
11Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives 12as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. 13But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.
–2 Peter 3

18I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21that[i] the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.
22We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24For in this hope we were saved.
–Romans 8

1Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. 2I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. 3And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
5He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”
— Revelation 21

Now, brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did your leaders. 18But this is how God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, saying that his Christ would suffer. 19Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, 20and that he may send the Christ, who has been appointed for you—even Jesus. 21He must remain in heaven until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets.
Acts 3:17-21

Why we almost completely stopped talking about restoration, renewal and resurrection and shifted to hoping that our souls would wind up in heaven is a long and complex story, but I think the short version is that a cultural tendency to discount the importance of physical things led our spiritual forebears to assume that God couldn’t really be interested in renewing earth and reviving our bodies—that his actual goal must be rest for our souls. And so, in spite of an abundance of verses about resurrection, and shortage of verses about the hope of heaven, we began to preach and sing as though getting in to heaven is what Christianity is all about. But that was never meant to be where we placed our hope.

Our hope is that just as Christ was raised, we too shall be raised, to new life, on the new Earth, forever.

1 Comment

Filed under Bible, Ministry, Sermons

Tagged as , ,

June 4, 2010 · 1:58 am

Shifting Over Time

There’s been a lot going on the past few weeks.  We packed up our house and then I drove from North Carolina to Texas in a 26 foot U-Haul moving van–just me with my almost-four-year-old daughter and 14-month old son, traveling over 1300 miles in 2 1/2 days.  Packing up everything you own is a good spiritual exercise.  It makes you realize just how much stuff you’ve accumulated.  For me, it’s somewhat depressing, as I like to think of myself as freer from materialism than the average American–and I probably am, but “less materialistic than the average American” is kind of like being “less murderous than Ted Bundy.”  You can meet that standard and still leave a trail of bodies in your wake.

So, blogging has been set aside while we moved into our temporary headquarters, AKA job search central.  I know I want to settle back in Texas, nearer old friends and family, but exactly where depends on where my wife or I find a job and perhaps what jobs are close to a school where I can train for a post-ministry life.

While I’m doing all this soul-searching and stock-taking, I’ve been thinking about the major ways that my thinking has shifted over the years.  I probably want to think and write a little more about each of them over time, and it’s already late tonight, so think of this as kind of a place-holder for content that may or may not follow later.  Even this is subject to revision.  But I think my major shifts have been:

1. From a static Bible-based faith that sought to preserve and maintain the first-century church to a stance that sees the Bible as one part of a living, breathing tradition that grows and changes as it engages God freshly in each era.  Part of this shift has been my acknowledgment that the Bible itself is far from monolithic, and itself models wrestling with existing traditions and adapting practices to new situations.

2. From an emphasis on orthodoxy (believing the right things) to orthopraxy (doing the right things.) Both are necessary, but I feel like I grew up in a church culture where doctrinal correctness and “chapter and verse” Bible knowledge were expected, but whether anyone ever actually fed the hungry or clothed the naked was completely off the radar.  Frankly, a lot of the minutiae we studied was either pointless or actively harmful, and kept us from going out into the world and being Jesus for the dying.

3.  From looking for the work of God in the congregation alone to seeking Him at work in the world.  I think that 12 or 15 years ago I pretty much thought that anything I should do for God would happen within the context of the congregation, with the possible  exception of personal evangelism, but even then, the point was to get some, ahem, “unchurched” person to join my church.  But I don’t want to “church” people–I could stand a little less “churching” myself.  I think the hardest part, for me, about trying to be a deeply devoted Jesus-follower and a minister in your standard American religious congregation is that Jesus has this tendency of calling religious leaders on the carpet for burdening people with the legalism, for caring more for like-minded insiders than struggling outsiders, and for missing the radical love and grace of God even though they had memorized so many verses.  I kept seeing myself and my tradition in the people that Christ excoriated.  I spent a lot of time asking myself where Jesus would be if he were incarnated in the 21st century, and no matter how I ran the numbers “in ordained congregational ministry” was never the answer.  I’m not saying there isn’t a place for it, or that some churches aren’t doing a wonderful job of forming people into ambassadors for Jesus.  There is and they do.  But I do think it’s harder than most folks think to be a preacher and to be like Jesus.  He won’t be bound in church life.  But this is more biography than theology, perhaps.  What I mostly mean is it’s a lot harder for me to radically follow Jesus from the context of a staid ministry position than I realized until recent years.  He keeps pushing me out among the pagans, and I keep finding Him already at work there.

I feel like there’s something more kicking around in my brain.  Maybe it’ll crystallize in a day or two.  Time for bed.

2 Comments

Filed under Church Culture, Ministry, Reflections

May 22, 2010 · 10:52 pm

Thoughts After Lunch

I had lunch about a week ago with Pastor Mike, one of the co-pastors of our “new little church.”  Mike is an insightful preacher, thoughtful person, encouraging soul and all-around great guy.  But congregational ministry isn’t his day job, although it used to be.

I don’t know all the details, but once upon a time Mike was pastoring a church and things went sour and he was forced out.  A friend told him about a position nearby as a hospice chaplain, and he accepted that as his new vocation.  He’s been a chaplain ever since, more than a decade now.  About six years ago, he and Pastor Rebecca, who is, I think, a counselor by day, founded our new little church, where they take turns preaching, and keep a hand in pastoral ministry while drawing a paycheck somewhere else.  I certainly see the appeal in that, and in some ways I think it’s actually good for the community to have relationships with pastoral leaders who are modeling involvement in good work in the world, and who are not going to be able to drop whatever they are doing at the drop of a hat to come visit a church member.  It creates a different set of expectations.  It’s also good, though, to know that Mike and Rebecca do what they do for the church out of the sheer joy and love of it, not because they get a salary from it.

I had lunch with Mike because chaplaincy is one of the few jobs out there that I could conceivably go into where my education and experience would be seen as directly relevant assets.  I took a course in healthcare ministry when I was in grad school that involved a lot of visiting sick patients at a hospital, but I didn’t pursue that path long enough to get a completely clear sense of the rhythms of life in a chaplaincy career.  Mike was enormously helpful in giving me the lay of the land.

On the topic of our mutual departures from full-time congregational work, Mike mentioned the book Clergy Killers, which he said includes the statistic that 30% of ministers will be terminated or otherwise forced out of a ministry posting at some point in their careers.  30%!  That’s a pretty sobering statistic.  I’ve seen citations in other places about extreme rates of burn-out and depression among ministers.  According to some researchers, 70% of ministers are struggling with depression at any given time.  It’s a good thing that ministry has such a deep appeal in other ways, because it if became widely known that your average ministry job is going to require 90 hours of seminary, pay far less than your would get doing almost anything else with that much training, and come with a 70% chance of depression or burnout and a one in three chance of getting canned at some point, we’d have a hard time keeping the pulpits filled–even harder than we do now.

The other thing that interested me about Mike was that he was raised Methodist and is now in the Disciples of Christ.  That probably doesn’t seem like a strange thing to most of you reading this–and it doesn’t to me, either, anymore, but in all my time in the Churches of Christ, I only heard of a handful of people who left C of C ministry to go to a different denomination–and I never heard of anyone who did the opposite journey.  For a long time, I had a sense that denomination switching was something that was virtually unknown.

But then when I started attending ministerial association meetings, it turned out that almost every pastor I met had made a denomination change at some point.  Some of them spent their seminary years finding the right match; others started down a career in a certain network and realized it wasn’t for them a bit down the road.  None of them seemed to think that switching was a terribly difficult thing to do, logistically or emotionally.

Part of why Churches of Christ are different, I think, is our own sectarian past.  We just haven’t played very well with others, and the rest of Christendom can seem like a very different world.  For a lot of the major Protestant groups, though, they are used to associating with and respecting leaders in other folds.  It’s just not that big a chasm.

Which is to say, I’m realizing that I had made a denomination change out to be a bigger thing than it really has to be.  The doors are open out there, if I want to walk through.

Or there’s chaplaincy work.

Or being a cop.

Or a kindergarten teacher.

Or a landscaper.

Or myriad other ways to contribute to the restoration of the world.

1 Comment

Filed under Ministry, Reflections

May 13, 2010 · 8:44 am

Marketing the Messiah

After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves. Do not take a purse or bag or sandals; and do not greet anyone on the road.
–Luke 10:1-4

I’ve had this passage stuck in my brain for a couple of years now*, always wondering the same question: how do the people of Christ today fulfill their calling in a way that is congruent with this beginning? (Maybe I’m still a restorationist at heart after all.)

Sometimes we think the palpable weirdness of the New Testament is a function of gaping chasms of linguistic and cultural difference that must be crossed when reading an ancient document from another part of the world. And sometimes that’s true. But even in his own day and age, Jesus was a weirdo. I can’t imagine that anyone else who intended to start a new global movement would do it this way–send people out into the world resourceless and vulnerable, looking for a friendly home to take them in so they could spread their message of the kingdom.

Churches today–at least, the ones I know anything about–do almost the opposite. Rather than walk through the world empty-handed, looking for places where the Spirit is already at work, our impulse is to show the world how much we can offer it. “Exciting Youth Program! Upbeat Worship! Relevant Preaching!” I remember getting a advertisement in the mail for one congregation’s Easter service. Six different times it mentioned that the Easter bunny would be there in person to meet the kids who came to the egg hunt. Not once did it mention that Easter was a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus. In fact, the words Jesus or Christ didn’t appear anywhere in the ad. And this wasn’t one of the flaky “Best Life Now” temples to personal success. It was a fairly well-grounded congregation that I had attended for a couple of years. But their idea of reaching the world, at least on that day, involved a volunteer in a bunny suit and a proclamation of the good news of free eggs and prizes.

The rebuttal I usually hear when I get all cranky and reactionary about this stuff is that we are supposed to do Nice Things for Our Neighbors and, anyway, Once We Get Them in the Door, We Will Tell Them the Gospel. This is where I’m kind of simple-minded. I think we ought to do Jesusy things in Jesusy ways. If you can honestly picture Jesus spreading the word that his new movement will have “Well Staffed Nurseries!” and “Beautiful Worship Spaces!” and “Your Kids Can Meet Astarte Herself During the Spring Fertility Rituals!” then go for it, I guess, but that’s not the vibe I get from him in the gospels. It looks to me like a bunch of us are deciding that the world doesn’t want what we actually have to offer, so we’ll give them what we think they do want, and kind of see what happens from there. Maybe everyone is in agreement that the pastor they interviewed on the Daily Show, who tries to win converts through Ultimate Fighting, has gone off the deep end, but I think of him as a kind of living reductio ad absurdum argument against evangelism that relies on the power of clever marketing rather than the power of the spirit working through our resourcelessness and poverty. Once you decide that you are going to offer the teeming crowds what they want in order to get them inside, you may as well notice that some of them really want Ultimate Fighting, so what’s the harm?

I think it would be an interesting learning experience for a church to try to recreate some of these gospel scenes as closely as possible. What if we agreed that one Saturday morning we would put on simple clothing, leave our wallet and keys at home, and walk out into the world looking for a place where God is working, praying for open eyes that will let us see where we can join in, and praying also for hospitable strangers who will welcome us?

Yeah, I know–do I want people to think we’re a bunch of weirdos?

*In fact, I probably blogged it before, but it’s on my mind again and I’m not going to let redundancy slow me down. The internet isn’t running out of pixels.

1 Comment

Filed under Bible, Evangelism, Ministry, Reflections

May 12, 2010 · 3:19 pm

Deep Personal Desires

Since we are both intuitive types, we do not decide things as much as we gravitate toward them. This is not very theological language, I know, but on the subject of divine guidance I side with Susan B. Anthony. “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do,” she once said, “because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” Having been somewhat of an expert on the sanctification of my own desires, I try not to pin them on God anymore. At the same time, I recognize the enormous energy in them, which strikes me as something God might be able to use.

When I read the stories in the Bible about people such as Sarah, Jacob, or David, what stands out is not their virtue but their very strong wants. Sarah wanted her son to prevail over Hagar’s son, Jacob wanted his older brother’s blessing, and David wanted Bathsheba. While these cravings clearly brought them all kinds of well-deserved trouble, they also kept these characters very, very alive. Their desires propelled them in ways God could use, better than God could use those who never colored outside the lines. Based on their example, I decided to take responsibility for what I wanted and to trust God to take it from there.

–Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith

1 Comment

Filed under Books, Ministry, This Is Good

May 12, 2010 · 11:19 am

And Then There’s That Other Thing

So I left my ministry position at a Church of Christ at the end of January. That wound up being two big changes at once since (1) I left the only career I’ve ever had and (2) I left the only denomination I’ve ever known. Since then I’ve been trying to discern which of my frustrations are unique to Churches of Christ and would be ameliorated in another denominational context and which of them are common to ministry everywhere. There’s a lot riding on that, since soon I’ll either apply for standing as a licensed minister in a new denomination, train for a new professional career all together, or acquaint myself with the safety procedures for the aforementioned Burger King Frialator.*

So, if you’ve been tracking this blog the last couple of days, you’ve got a pretty good idea about why I think I’m done with Churches of Christ. But suppose I find some church that’s all about justice and equality, where I fit right in theologically and they have a strong respect for the ordained clergy. Then I’m happy and all is good and I can just continue on in my ministry career, right?

Maybe.

But the other aspect of all of this stuff is that I’m increasingly drawn to a missional paradigm in which the church is sent out into the world to bless it, and I am drawn to go out into the world as God’s ambassador, with this message of reconcilation. (2 Cor 5.) And by that I do not mean street preaching or established inner city mission work–I mean finding some kind of meaningful labor that makes a positive contribution to society** and that allows me to form relationships with people outside the Kingdom so that I can demonstrate the love of Jesus by loving them. In contrast, I have lost interest in the kind of ministry that measures success in terms of the Three B’s of Church Life: buildings, budgets and butts in the pews. A church that thinks they are succeeding in God’s mission solely on the evidence of increased membership is no longer enough to drive me. Although increased membership is well and good, my own criterion for success is the increased involvement of the saints in God’s work of justice and reconciliation. I can’t be at a church that raises money to give their own kids a playground and then puts up a fence to keep neighborhood kids out. That just seems backward to me.*** I don’t want to be the person designated to drop in on folks who have been Christians for 40 years to see how they are doing and if there is some way I can “meet their felt needs” or make them happy. I expect that mature Christians have learned how to minister to one another, and desire to follow Christ into society to minister to others. I certainly want to be available to church members in need of special care, but I also think that my job should be to encourage a culture of mutual ministry–and that mutual ministry should reach outward to embrace the stranger.

Now it might very well be that the truth is I just don’t want to be a pastor anymore, because the things that I am draw to are such a small part of the job, and the things that drain me such a big part of it. I’m trying to figure that out. But maybe there are churches out there who want someone to help them learn to be ministers to the world, not someone who is hired just to minister to them. I don’t know.

I have to say though, when you read through the gospels, it seems like Jesus is always bumping up against an entrenched, inward-looking, closed-off religious tradition with such a small vision of who God is and such a limited desire to be a source of blessing that the people who invoke the name of the Lord the most turn out to be the same people who are consistently hindering his will. If your desire is to be a radical Jesus-follower, going where he went and doing what he did, I almost wonder if you wind up having to give up the institutional church to do that–or at least give up positions of leadership.

I really bet there is some good ministry that can be done while manning the Frialator.

One big disclaimer–I’m really talking here about my journey with God and my Spirit-given gifts and desires. Most of my close friends are ministers, and if they are able to do meaningful work and follow Jesus in that setting, I wouldn’t begin to second-guess that. I’m just going through a major discernment process of my own path right now.

* That is, by the way, what that thing is actually called. I only know that because I was in a fast food joint one day and made some reference to the dude working the Frialator, which is a term I thought I was making up, but then I glanced at the machine, and burst out laughing when I saw the label. I only hope that helps me out on Jeopardy someday.

** Like crafting the most delicious French Fries ever!

*** Yes, I understand concerns about injuries and legal liability. So don’t build the playground–send your kids to the public park where they can be salt and light in the world.

1 Comment

Filed under Church Culture, Ministry

July 2, 2009 · 10:14 am

Reading Alasdair MacIntyre in Church

It’s not the most profound thing ever, but I just presented a conference paper on Alasdair MacIntyre and moral formation. You can get to it by clicking the articles link in the upper right, or find the link under “pages” in the sidebar.

Leave a comment

Filed under Ministry

Tagged as ,