Two Halves of the Whole Gospel
September 27, 2007
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Benevolence, Best of Cerulean Sanctum, Boldness, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Creation Care, Creativity, Discernment, Dying to Self, Faith, Godly Character, Grace, Holiness, Hospitality, Humility, Joy, Love, Maturity, Oddities, Prayerfulness, Relevance, Simplicity Feedback : 21 comments
Do you sometimes feel like we’re not hearing the whole Gospel? Hang around the Godblogosphere long enough and you get the eerie feeling that no one truly knows what the whole Gospel entails.
And it’s not just the Godblogosphere. I suspect that many of our churches can’t articulate the entirety of the Gospel.
As I see it, we’ve made this mistake of viewing the whole Gospel as two halves. The mistake—one of typical human nature— is to wrap the entirety of our brains around the one half that resonates with us the most, then act as if the other half doesn’t exist.
If we must delineate the error of the two halves, it’s best to look at the one passage of Scripture that defines those halves. We find both in Ephesians 2:8-10.
Half A:
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
—Ephesians 2:8-9
Half B:
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
—Ephesians 2:10
Those who cling to Half A are the folks I’ll call the Elect. They obsess about doctrine, detest even a whiff of works righteousness, and are enormously concerned with getting people saved. They got their marching orders at the Reformation and consider it the high point in modern history. And heaven help anyone who’s not in total agreement with them.
Those who adhere to Half B are the folks I’ll call the Fieldworkers. They obsess about helping those in need, detest the hypocrisy of not walking the talk, and are enormously concerned with bettering the lives of everyone around them. They can’t point to any one point in time for their marching orders, but earnestly believe that we need a new Reformation. And heaven help anyone who’s not in total agreement with them.
The problem with the Elect and the Fieldworkers is that they are so focused on their half of the whole Gospel, they simply can’t bring themselves to understand the other half. The blinders are on so tight that neither group can even acknowledge the other side’s main propositions are just as Scriptural as theirs.
The Elect easily trash the loose theology of the Fieldworkers. The Fieldworkers quickly note the clean, uncalloused hands of the Elect. To the Elect, the Fieldworkers are false teachers and heretics. To the Fieldworkers, the Elect are uncaring, self-absorbed Pharisees. Both sides point to the other and claim, “You’re not living the Gospel. I doubt you’re truly saved!”
And you know what? On that claim, both sides may actually be right!
Worrying about how you come to Christ is great, but Elect, what are you supposed to do with the sixty or so years of discipleship you have staring you in the face afterwards? Worrying about the needy is great, but Fieldworkers, how do you receive the heart of God to do so if you can’t articulate how to know God at all?
The whole Gospel contains both the power to raise the dead in spirit to spiritual life in the name of Jesus AND the power to tenderize the human heart toward the service of others in the name of Jesus.
What baffles me is why this is so hard to understand.
Why do we slice the Gospel in half then whine about the half we don’t like? Why the venom between the Elect and the Fieldworkers? Why?
The whole Gospel is the whole Gospel. If we’re not concerned with seeing people saved through hearing the message of salvation, maintaining the integrity of our doctrine, and preaching that we can’t earn our way to heaven, then we’re blowing it. If we’re not concerned about taking care of those in need, living out the love of Christ in practical ways, and fighting for the betterment of everyone we meet, then we’re blowing it.
Please Church, it’s time to believe and live the whole Gospel!
Tags: Benevolence, Boldness, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Creation Care, Creativity, Discernment, Dying to Self, Elect, Faith, Fieldworkers, Full-Gospel, Godly Character, Grace, Holiness, Hospitality, Humility, Joy, Love, Maturity, Oddities, Prayerfulness, Relevance, Simplicity, Whole-Gospel
On Doing Our Best
September 26, 2007
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Church Issues, Counterculture, Godly Character, Leadership, Maturity, Relevance, Work Feedback : 12 comments
I’m a real stickler for doing a job right. It’s not that I possess this overactive sense of correctness, more that I’m a bit fed up with the lax attitude afflicting so many people today concerning their work. There’s something about having to call a business six and seven times in order to get a job done at all, much less done right the first time.
For the first time in the history of my freelance writing business, I missed a deadline. Now yes, I did call the client a few days before the deadline to ask for an extension (which was granted graciously), and yes, I did get the work in the day after my original deadline. But still, in three years I’d never missed a deadline.
Now sure, anyone who works has to rely on others for help or information to meet the demands of his job, and this is often where the breakdown occurs. But an excuse is an excuse, and I sure hear a lot of excuses nowadays.
What really galls me is when a company hides its sloppy work (and lackadaisical attitude toward completing that work) behind a big ol’ ichthus symbol. They’ll slap that fish on their Yellow Pages ad, paint it on their trucks, and scream to the world, 
“I’m your brother in Christ, y’all can trust me.” Or when something goes wrong and doesn’t get righted, “Grace, man, grace!”
I’m a small business owner who just happens to be a Christian, so I try really hard to give my business to fellow Christian businesspeople. Hey, I can commiserate. But because I uphold an extremely high standard for my own work, I expect the same from the folks I hire to help me.
I wish I could say I’ve never been disappointed in the Christians I’ve hired. Truth be told, my experience has been so bad that I’m delighted when someone actually does the work right!
Isn’t that a terrible thing to say?
Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.
—Colossians 3:23-24
The depressing truth about that passage is a lot of Christian business owners excise it from the Scriptures. If not by taking an X-acto knife to their personal Bibles, then by failing to heed it in practice.
My church hired a Christian business to do the church’s pictorial directory and it took months of cajoling for that company to finally turn in their effort. I kept asking our church secretary whether she would like me to mention the company by name in a post like this one, publicly excoriating the company for not giving two hoots about delivering on their promises. She told me to hold off. Nine months after the fact, we finally got our directories.
I wonder how Christ was honored by that company’s actions.
What we are outside of church on Sunday mornings matters. If we’re not publicly exemplifying the Christian walk, then what are we doing? Shouldn’t we be doing our best at all times and in all places because of the Lord we serve?
Tags: Church Issues, Counterculture, Godly Character, Leadership, Maturity, Relevance, Work
Idyll
September 25, 2007
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Community, Miscellany Feedback : 19 comments
It’s county fair week in my pastoral community.
When you live in the country, you step through a rift in time. Whatever life you once lived vanishes in a flash, and you wake à la Rip Van Winkle in unfamiliar environs. But in the reverse of old Rip, you half expect to turn around and see Andy and Opie in black and white out back by the old fishin’ hole.
Back in Mayberry’s heyday, the entire community year revolved around the county fair. Youngsters primped their 4-H livestock, fresh-faced young women coming into the bloom of maturity practiced their finest equestrian moves with their own personal Flicka, while their moms slaved in the kitchen, hoping against hope to beat that Edna Mae Krebs and her strawberry-rhubarb pie that takes home the blue ribbon year after year, “Bless her little heart—
and I hope she gets bit by a rabid polecat after stepping on a rusty nail because heaven knows she’s good, but she’s not that good.”
You know, what I’m talkin’ ’bout.
Or maybe you don’t.
Around here, 4-H rules, Flicka still rides, and Edna Mae Krebs continues to be the source of a lot of ground-down teeth amongst the womenfolk. It’s fair week! Around here, local businessowners throw in the towel because, heck, no one shows up for work. It’s fair week! And the schools? Forget about it. Little Jess and little June are too busy making sure their stew rabbit plumps up nicely for the judges. The principal’s got a bull he just sold at the cattle auction. School? Hey, it’s fair week! Who’s going to be Tobacco Queen this year?
When you live in the country, the local newspapers ain’t like nothin’ you read in the big city. The op-ed pages resemble a seminary debate, as the pastor of the Holiness Church takes umbrage with the editorial written by the Methodist pastor the week before, the darned liberal. And the pastor of the Pentecostal church complains that people today aren’t like they were when he was growing up. Back then, people had no problems with a Tuesday night service, a Wednesday night service, AND a Thursday night service. Now you can only pack ‘em in on Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, and Wednesday nights. The world’s goin’ to hell in a handbasket. And, of course, the general store is running a sale on handbaskets through the end of the month.
Probably won’t be any elders’ meetings at the churches because it’s time to get the crop in. When you’re a farmer, the pastor’s just gotta understand that nothing stands in the way of the crop. God knows.
That cloud of dust? It’s the combines harvesting the soybeans. If you look carefully, the corn farmers wear a crooked smirk because they timed their rotation right this year and made a killing. Too bad for the soy guys. Too darned bad.
Out here in the country, you ponder daily the fate of your mailbox, but when that’s about the only thing you’ve got to worry about, life’s not too bad. Your neighbor invites you over to hang out on the back porch, and the old farmer’s wife across the way brings one of those orange cakes slathered in homemade whipped butter frosting with the little bits of pineapple and mandarin oranges in it. A cake good enough to set Edna Mae Krebs’s teeth on edge, I’ll tell you.
You cool your heels on that back porch and listen to the debates about whether Silver Queen is still king, or whether White Magic, Fantasia, or Silverado has got it goin’ on now. And if you’re the city-slicker—like me—you pay extra special attention because you know this is a life or death sort of discussion that might determine your ultimate eternal destination. Even if it is about corn.
It’s fair week. And the Lord Himself is smiling down on us all.
Tags: Agrarian, Community, Corn, Country, Countryside, County Fair, Fair, Farm, Farms, Miscellany, Soybeans, Tobacco
Never Give Up
September 24, 2007
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Benevolence, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Community, Dying to Self, Faith, Godly Character, Love, Maturity, Prayerfulness, Relevance, Simplicity Feedback : 19 comments
I don’t always write my posts and upload them in “real time.” Last week, for instance, “Welcome to Jerkville, Population Me” was written and posted a few days before it actually appeared. WordPress allows me to post in advance, and while I don’t always use that feature, if I find downtime in my schedule, I may write a post and have it load at a future date. (I’m doing that with this post, too.)
The “Jerkville” post had already been uploaded when I received a subject-less e-mail. At first I thought it was spam (always include a subject, folks), so I let it sit while I attended to other work.
When I eventually opened that e-mail, it contained a sad story of dire need by a stranger who was reaching out to me for help. 
Always skeptical, I verified the e-mailer’s story with some third-parties. Once verified, I called every resource I knew to find a way to help. I talked with many charitable organizations, dropped e-mails to large churches in the area of this person in need, spoke on the phone with probably two dozen people, but I still have not found help.
I remember reading a story on the Web about a woman who suffered a stroke (or some other vascular accident) while online, but was able to type out a request for help. A doctor, fortuitously online in this chat room, engaged her. He was able to call an EMT to her place. She lived because of that help.
About five years ago, I decided to join an online forum on a well-known Christian site. Within a few weeks, I got sucked into a vicious conversation about singleness and money. One poster on the forum was a single guy who didn’t make much money, but wanted to get married. Several commenters continued to beat this guy up about how no Christian woman in her right mind would want to marry a guy who barely made more than the minimum wage. I could not believe the nasty things said to this poor man by supposed brothers and sisters in Christ (though I sure can now). The guy tried to defend himself, and I came to his defense several times. His posts seemed to get more frantic with time, and his online assailants just would not ease up.
Eventually, after about a week or so of this, he left a cryptic message. A few hours later, he wrote in that forum that he was committing suicide.
I came to his posted confession later that evening. Horrified, I spent hours trying to contact the forum Webmaster and the company that ran the forum. Eventually, I got patched into a hotline and directed people to the post. The response? “Sorry sir, there’s nothing we can do.”
I have no idea if that man killed himself. (He never posted again, though his assailants did. But not once did they comment on what had happened in that forum.) All I know is that no one else seemed to care. He was just some quasi-anonymous soul. Just another person. There are six-point-something billion of us on the planet, give or take a few.
It’s the “give or take a few” people out there whom I grieve for.
In talking about the plight of my e-mailer with various charities and churches, you could hear the flatness coming through the handset speaker. Just another person in need. One more family looking for a handout. I spoke with a pastor of a church in that e-mailer’s area and he said, “You gotta understand. Everyone’s poor down here.”
I spoke with a few benevolence ministries housed in suburban megachurches in the region of that person in need. They all understood the need because they’d heard it a thousand times before. But they said they couldn’t help. You could almost see the heads hanging low on the other end of the phone.
The charities, too, had people answering the phone with voices marinated in weariness. “If we help in that way, sir, we’ll set a precedent and 1,500 people will be lined up here tomorrow asking for the same thing,” one broken charity coordinator said with a sigh.
My copy of Lloyd-Jones’s Spiritual Depression, Its Causes and Its Cure stared back at me from my bookshelf, and I felt so sorry for everyone involved: the person in need, the charities, the churches, and even myself. Those people who face that kind of bottomless need…well, I don’t know how they drag themselves into work everyday. Knock out one tough case and two spring up in its place, a perpetual hydra of people saying, “Can you help me? Please, you’re my last hope.”
Compassion fatigue.
I haven’t heard back from some of the resources I contacted. The optimist in me says I will, but the typical Dan suspects the worst. “The poor will always be with you,” the Lord said. I think that’s one of the saddest set of words spoken in the Bible.
Here’s some words with more hope:
And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.
—Galatians 6:9-10
To the charity worker who lives every day knowing that the need is always greater than the resources, I say this: “Never give up.”
To the church minister who goes out every day into yet another home filled with more need than a dozen churches could manage, I say this: “Never give up.”
To other Christian bloggers out there who also receive needy e-mails, and who struggle immensely with that responsibility laid in their laps for no other reason than that they write Christ-filled words of light in a dark world, I say this: “Never give up.”
To you, if you’re a person in a crushing situation, a well of despair, that threatens to drown you and every person you hold dear, I say this: “Never give up.”
The great revivalist Leonard Ravenhill once said, “The only time you can really say that ‘Christ is all I need’ is when Christ is all you have.”
No matter who you are, no matter how tired, broken, or weary, no matter how empty your pantry, know this: when Christ is all you have, you have the greatest blessing of all.
If nothing else, take away another thought from Ravenhill: “We must do what we can do for God before He will give us the power to do what we can’t do.”
So please, please, please don’t ever give up.
Tags: Benevolence, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Community, Dying to Self, Faith, Godly Character, Love, Maturity, Prayerfulness, Relevance, Simplicity, Uncategorized
Divorce & Adultery—Software Edition
September 21, 2007
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Technical Feedback : 33 comments
She finally got too fat for me.
In her day, she was hot and sleek, and what she did for me just rocked my world. And she was dedicated, too, keeping the outside world at bay, making sure my little kingdom stayed clean and neat.
But then the bloat set in, the endless fashion updates, the high maintenance, and the complaining. Always with the complaining about needing this or that, always phoning home to her mom, wanting something, checking something, and none of it made sense to me even though I thought I knew her well.
So in the end, I divorced her. And you should see the tight little number I picked up as a trophy! Smokin’ hot!
Oh. What did you think I was talking about? It’s my anti-virus software, silly! My nearly two decade marriage to Norton AntiVirus just ended. Took up with this fast as blazes, written in assembly language, NOD32. Boy, am I glad I did, too.
I was on the Internet before there was an Internet, when it was the old ARPANET defense network. The smiley/emoticon just celebrated its 25-year anniversary, invented by a prof at Carnegie Mellon University in 1982, and, dudes and dudettes, I WAS THERE.
I bought the very first edition of Norton AntiVirus when it came out. 
That was in the days when you could put a GUI-based word processor or drawing software on a single 400K 3.5″ floppy (MacWrite and MacPaint). Heck the entire MacOS fit on such a disk. Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?
How could they pull off that magic? Back then, software developers wrote super-tight code. These were guys who fretted over bits, folks. Not a spare piece of junk instruction anywhere in that code.
But just ten years later, one version of WordPerfect had part of a Utah phone book compiled into the software so the programmers didn’t have to look up the number for the local pizza place while they were grinding out the latest version. At least that’s what the urban legend says. I don’t doubt it’s true, given how uselessly bloated software became.
Norton AntiVirus went from a tight piece of code to a bloated mess over the years, with dozens of background processes bogging down my computer. NAV isn’t alone in this, either. I think Microsoft only made Word worse after Mac version 4.1, which I considered the pinnacle of that software. Heck, you could run it off a 1.44 MB floppy! How many gigs does it take to install Word now? I think they invented the Blu-Ray DVD just to hold what MS Office has bloated into.
So I miss those days when programmers actually sweated ways to condense their babies onto 1.44 MB floppies to run in 1 MB of RAM. Bloatware didn’t—couldn’t—exist.
Now, few care.
Eset, the manufacturer of my new anti-virus software, NOD32, must be those old school guys, because they wrote the code as if they were trying to squeeze it onto a floppy. It runs at mach speed, too, with my computer starting up almost twice as fast now that it doesn’t have to load process after process dedicated to Norton AntiVirus bloat.
I’ve divorced or cheated on other past loves, too.
I’d used Eudora for e-mail from the days when it was still a free program offered by the University of Illinois, but I bolted to Thunderbird because of that program’s extensibility, something Qualcomm forgot in the development process after they took over Eudora. Though I hated making the switch (I’d been using Eudora since the 1980s), it had to be done. I bolted from Internet Explorer the second Firefox became available, too. Never liked the fact that Microsoft products all talked with each other. Seemed to me to be too open for hacker attacks. Hackers thought so, too.
A few think online apps are the answer to this, but I don’t like the trend at all. I prefer buying a piece of software off the shelf then running it for a decade. I get my money’s worth that way. Some of these new Web-based apps want to charge you by the month, so by the time the year’s over, you’ve spent twice what it would have cost you to buy the same software off the shelf PLUS you’ve gotta keep paying. I’m still using the version of MS Word that came out in 2000. I can’t begin to imagine how many thousands of dollars I would’ve spent in the last seven years if Microsoft took Office online and ran it on a subscription model.
No, I won’t be buying into that throw-money-at-the-Internet subscription model.
I do like that some programs are slimming down. People got tired of bloatware. I’ve never understood why most programs aren’t modular to the point of allowing the user to selectively install every function he needs. I’m not talking about add-ons, but core functionality. Honestly, I use probably a quarter of what MS Word can do. To me, the rest of it is just clutter and bloat. Should I some day need one more piece of functionality, I should be able to install just that one piece, but software companies just don’t get this.
Apps that thrash your hard drive? Very bad for notebook users. Apps with 5,000 pre-loaded functions? Very bad for newbies and cranky old guys like me. Apps that run a dozen processes in the background? Very bad for everyone.
Not many sleek, die-by-the-bit programs out there anymore, especially for Windows-based systems. Some Mac programmers still go for tight, but even then, not as many as in olden days.
So yeah, I cheat on some of my software, looking for something sexier, faster, and tighter. I’m proud of it, too. Because when you find that perfect app, let me tell you, it’s like love at first sight.
Tags: Anti-Virus, AntiVirus, Eset, Eudora, Firefox, Microsoft, NOD32, Norton, Office, Technical, Thunderbird
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