Day: June 23, 2005

R.I.P. America, June 23, 2005

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The Supreme Court BuildingAmerica—at least the America founded by the likes of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin— has officially died.

The AP has the story here: Supreme Court rules cities may seize homes for business purposes. You can find the text of the ruling here.

See my post on where this will lead: Taking Away Your Church Building

This is not in the least a political blog, but just let me say that we are losing the United States of America one anti-Constitutional judicial decision at a time. And let me also say that this ties in with The Christian & the Business World series I’ve been writing for weeks now. Eminent domain has only been claimed for government purposes and then not very often. But now the Supreme Court has ruled that private businesses have an interest at least as compelling as the government’s to seize land. I can easily see “Christian” business developers pulling rank now in the name of “community leadership” to raze people’s homes to put in a shopping mall.

Notice especially the dissenting comment by Justice O’Connor:

The Court rightfully admits, however, that the judiciary cannot get bogged down in predictive judgments about whether the public will actually be better off after a property transfer. In any event, this constraint [ed.- the Court’s “public test” clause] has no realistic import. For who among us can say she already makes the most productive or attractive possible use of her property? The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.

She concludes with this:

Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms. As for the victims, the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more. The Founders cannot have intended this perverse result. “[T]hat alone is a just government,” wrote James Madison, “which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.”

This is classic Darwinian business practices at work, and just another nail in the coffin of the middle class.

Here’s the really scary part: What happens when a foreign-owned company tries this here? With government and big business merging, who is to say that the Mexican, Russian, or Chinese governments could not manipulate our country through Mexican, Russian, or Chinese corporate land grabs of private American property? Don’t think it can’t happen.

Or consider this: How much closer are we to the seizure of church buildings to benefit corporations or to allow a municipality to generate more tax revenue from a nonreligious source?

God have mercy on our country.

Eschewing Church

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I regularly read the group blog The Thinklings via Bloglines and today Phil “Don’t Call Me ‘Shrode'” Schroeder is polling believing Christians on why they have dropped out of attending church.Dropout of church? I think this is a good question for any of you who read Cerulean Sanctum and have either dropped out of organized church meetings or have considered doing so.

Even though I have not dropped out, for almost a year my wife and I struggled with the lack of fit we seemed to find in the churches we were visiting. At least for me, if God had not rooted us in the church we are in now, I probably would have considered starting a house church—I was that desperate. 😉

There were several reasons why I found myself on the outs with many current churches:

    1. Disparate vision – Like I wrote in today’s earlier post “Likemindedness and Life-altering Worship,” I don’t find myself encountering likeminded groups of believers much anymore. I know that I have long been somewhat of square peg in a round hole just about everywhere I’ve been in life (for anyone familiar with the book Tales of the Kingdom by David and Karen Main, I’m quintessentially “The Apprentice Juggler”), but there have always been a handful of people who were always on the same page with me. I don’t encounter that much anymore. I see some of that in the folks in the church we are in now, so I’m hopeful, but I was losing hope there for a while.

    2. Lack of a spiritual middle ground – I find a host of churches to be lacking in the Spirit. The reasons for this lack are too numerous to go into detail here, but many American churches are Christian in brain only. There’s a mental assent to Christian doctrine and morality, but there’s not a real belief that God is living and moving and speaking. As a result, I’ve tended to favor charismatic churches. But even there, the opposite problem exists in that experiencing God is everything and scholarship counts for nothing. Check your brain at the door and leave your Bible at home because cross-referencing the Scriptures against the experiences “quenches the Spirit”—or so some say.

    3. Lack of a practical middle ground – Is the church doing anything for the Kingdom or is it doing it only for itself? Insular church activities are okay, but if the poor aren’t being fed, if the people in the church don’t care when one of their own meets with the troubles of this life, their practice is like their dogma—all mental. And while being a real servant is great, real servants must also know the Scriptures and flee bad doctrine. It’s the old issue of apologetics versus service and I’m tiring of the ease at which today’s churches fall into either camp and not the middle.

    4. The Church in America is rushing toward a “remnant” status – I’m not going to say that the Church in this country is totally apostate, but I think it is rushing toward a remnant status. You see pockets of people within churches you know are in the Lord, but it’s the larger groups of people who are ever-sampling Him, yet never surrendering to Him that have me concerned. When did the our churches become the places where people don’t ever find Christ? I think our rush to seeker-sensitivity led to this permanent “almost born-again” cult mentality I see in a lot of churches. Fish or cut bait. Be in or be out, but don’t be a spiritual Mugwump. Those folks only make it miserable for committed Christians and the churches they call home.

    5. Restlessness – I’m not sure what God is doing, but a lot of hardcore Christians are restless. Is this a sign the Lord is coming soon? Perhaps. Or it could be that revival is on its way to those who hold hardest to the faith. I don’t know. What I do know is that many Christians are sitting in church on Sunday and whispering to themselves, Something’s missing. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. And like all restless people, they go searching. Some find what they are looking for once they throw off the perceived shackles of institutional church life, but then others fall through the cracks and wind up lost. Such is the nature of wandering and looking for something one doesn’t have.

Those five are my insights. They are conditions that led me to question whether or not I needed to drop out of “the traditional church assumption.” I firmly believe that anyone with the Spirit of Jesus living in them is the Church wherever they go. Whenever and wherever they meet with other Spirit-bearers, that fulfills the command of Hebrews 10:24-25:

And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

If it looks like traditional church, fine. If it’s a half dozen people singing modern worship songs around a campfire in the U.P. of Michigan on a Friday night out under the starry heavens, that’s meeting, too.

I would encourage you to post here or at the Thinklings site. It is important for us to understand why today’s churches are not drawing people.

Likemindedness and Life-altering Worship

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Huddle of friendsWe talked a bit about worship this last weekend and as I was gearing up to take another stab at my series on business, I had this thought

What was my best group worship experience?

I can think of several incredible, life-altering worship times in my 42 years, but as I recall them, one startling commonality appears: Being in one accord.

Every one of the times that I felt like something magnificent was occurring in worship, I can also remember that the people with whom I was worshiping the Lord were all of like mind. Some shared trait bound us together and we all wanted to be near the Lord.

  • At 14 on the weekend retreat during which I gave my life to Christ, all the people gathered to worship during that beautiful communion time were my close friends from church.
  • At 16 on an Appalachian work project, it was the fact that we were working toward a common goal.
  • At 19 on a college weekend retreat, it was that all of us wanted to know God more intimately.
  • At 20 at the Urbana Conference, all of us were mission-minded guys.
  • At 22 on another weekend retreat at the same camp I’d given my life to Christ at, it was a reunion of many of the people from the retreat when I was 14.
  • At 26, working on staff at a camp that was having issues, it was all of us staff that were on the outs with the rest of the camp sharing a communion meal together.
  • At 27, it was being hauled off with others by the police as part of an anti-abortion rally, even though we’d done nothing wrong.
  • At 33 on my wedding day, when we worshiped God together in that happy moment.

Those were the memorable ones that seemed to tap something in me. The likemindedness of the people there in those moments captured something in our worship that made each time special. There was a connection that happened on both the vertical and horizontal level that made that communion with the Lord rise beyond the everyday.

The last group worship time I remember as being truly sweet was almost ten years ago. As I look back over that time, the one thing that strikes me is that somewhere along the line likemindedness vanished.

Now my wife and I are very likeminded, almost eerily so. But I wonder what has happened either to us or the cadre of Christians around us that we don’t see as many of those life-altering worship times anymore. I guess the sense I have is disconnectedness with other worshipers. The horizontal doesn’t seem to be as strong as it once was. Having a group of likeminded people around us appears much harder to come by.

Does anyone else experience this or even understand what I’m talking about?