Burned

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When I read the big news on Tuesday, I planned to keep mum. I didn’t think the failure needed any commentary. But now that the editor of Charisma magazine, Lee Grady, has spoken, I think I need to say a few words.

Please read this.

My first words will be that anyone can pile on the individual discussed in Grady’s piece; I’m not going to. I’m not even going to mention his name. I wrote “Dropping Our Stones” the other day, and I meant what I shared. There’s not a person reading this who is not capable of falling down the same well—or worse.

What I cannot understand is the shock, the awful “Was it all just a trick?” feeling, the taste of ashes in the mouth that so many people will be left with in the aftermath.

When Grady asks the gullibility question, it just sticks in my craw. Why? Because Discernment 101 could have warned ANYONE willing to step back for a second and think. In many ways, this didn’t even require the gift of the discerning of spirits. Yet so few insiders said, “Ya know, there’s something not right here.” Instead, they fell for the “Look over there! There He is!” trick so quickly they got prayer rug burns.

That charismatic civil war? With this latest revelation, the last volley may already have been fired.

Honestly, if I were a leader of a charismatic church or parachurch ministry and I jumped on board this latest “move” with a whoop and a holler, I’d humbly resign, appoint a successor and go out at an opportune time, or take a l-o-n-g sabbatical.

In fact, I think the strongest proponents of this debacle need to suck it up, fall on their swords, and do just that. Time to get out. At least until they can do some deep soul-searching and come out the other side. In other words, if you were Blue in the civil war, time to think Gray. You were in the wrong army, man.

Honestly, if Charisma has even a dozen ads they can rub together for their next issue, they should be ashamed of themselves. And so should the advertisers.

Barking like dogs, laughing hysterically even as the world is dying to hear the Gospel, showing off our gold teeth while we dance around in showers of gold dust and press angel feathers into our Bibles, kicking the dying in the guts in the name of the Lord and calling that healing…is that the legacy? Man, we can be truly proud of that title CHARISMATIC now, can’t we?

In the end, it doesn’t matter that some of us didn’t walk the primrose path, that very wide, follow-the-leader road. The aftermath of this is going to hurt us, too.

Look, I’m not out for blood here. But the legacy of the present charismatic leadership, the current crop of faces on Christian TV and behind the podiums at the Mega-Healing conferences, the oracles in the traveling “prophetic” carnivals, the people pushing the New Apostolic whatever down all of our throats…you rushed in where angels fear to tread, so maybe it’s time for you to exit stage left. The children’s sermon is over. Time to let the adults lead. You know, the people who graduated from Discernment 101 with at least a “D” average.

Then, at some appointed time in the future when you get your heads on straight, come back. We’re willing to forgive because the Lord we serve is greater than your foolishness and mine.


Elusive Grace

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Okay, so I admit it.

I’m the kind of guy who likes the one item on the restaurant menu that no one else orders.

I’m the kind of guy who when faced with a daily drive from point A to point B attempts to find a different route between those two points every time.

I’m the kind of guy who gave up on self-help books years ago because I never fit into any of the categories the author would use to illustrate solutions.

I’m pretty much always the odd man out. The contrarian. The iconoclast. The weirdo.

When people find out that I write speculative fiction and then discover that I’ve never read through The Lord of the Rings books because I found them dull, well my weirdness takes on new levels.

That said, I did enjoy the Rings movies. And again, being the weirdo, I definitely thought The Two Towers was the best of the three. My reasoning is that I found the most biblical imagery in the second film.

When Gandalf tells Aragorn to look up when things appear most desperate and expect to see him at a certain hour, I could not help but think of this passage:

And the mind of the king of Syria was greatly troubled because of this thing, and he called his servants and said to them, “Will you not show me who of us is for the king of Israel?” And one of his servants said, “None, my lord, O king; but Elisha, the prophet who is in Israel, tells the king of Israel the words that you speak in your bedroom.” And he said, “Go and see where he is, that I may send and seize him.” It was told him, “Behold, he is in Dothan.” So he sent there horses and chariots and a great army, and they came by night and surrounded the city. When the servant of the man of God rose early in the morning and went out, behold, an army with horses and chariots was all around the city. And the servant said, “Alas, my master! What shall we do?” He said, “Do not be afraid, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” Then Elisha prayed and said, “O LORD, please open his eyes that he may see.” So the LORD opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.
—2 Kings 6:11-17

At the bleakest moment in the battle at Helm’s Deep, Aragorn, remembering Gandalf’s words, looks to the rim of the valley and sees it lined with a vast army headed by Gandalf.

At the bleakest moment, a sign of hope. The very presence of grace. Once doomed, now saved.

How many Westerns made their money by sending the cavalry over the hill to rescue the beleaguered heroes pinned down by the relentless tide of opposition? 'Cavalry Charge on the Southern Plains' by Frederick RemingtonThe trumpet cry as the rescuers spurred on their chargers. The enemy routed.

Grace, all of it.

You would think, then, that in a country that bills itself as a Christian nation, in a land steeped in the last desperate stand before the cavalry arrives, that we would be drowning in grace as a people. You would think that our whole lives would be devoted to dispensing grace as often and to as many as we can.

You would think.

I spent most of the evening thinking about this disconnect. How is it that grace is so elusive in the United States? What is it about us that we can’t resist the spectacle of watching another human being go down in flames? How can it be that their ultimate fate means so little to us?

Most of you know that the foreclosure rate in this country is running about three times higher than normal. Where I live, the number of abandoned houses—those fled by their owners, no “For Sale” sign in the front yard, no realtor in sight—borders on the epidemic.

We as Christians may talk about grace, but if we want a painful example of how out of touch we are concerning grace, the very lifeblood of the Church, look no further than those families who lost their homes. How is it that those families seem to vanish into the ether, melting away to nothing like hoarfrost assaulted by hot breath? Where do they go?

It saddens me that I don’t know. All I do know is that they were in trouble and no one was there for them in the midst of it. All the potential in the world for Christians to step in and demonstrate grace, yet it never came to be. And now, as if sucked into that mysterious realm where singleton socks go, that family is gone. Sometimes they don’t even bother to shut the door behind them.

And we who are wise can pontificate about why they failed. We can talk about greed. We can talk about poor choices. We can talk about moral failures. We can blame it on the times, the media, the economy, the war, the peace, the current president, the next president—heck, we can talk for whole years at a time, but none of our talk reveals bare naked grace to the ones who need it most.

Is anyone besides me grieved by this? Is anyone else hounded by our lack of care, our inability to somehow take the grace we might have been shown in the past and minister it to someone in desperate need?

How is it that we hate failure in other people, yet we expect others to feel for us when we go down in flames?

There’s not a person reading this now who is not excruciatingly close to losing it all. Do we realize how readily our carefully crafted lifestyles can go to pieces in a matter of weeks? One bad investment. One miscalculation at work. One illness. Poof, and its all gone.

It doesn’t matter how smart you are, how healthy, how wealthy, how prepared, or how risk averse. When that time comes, it comes. You’ll need that grace. You’ll need someone to love you no matter how shattered you might be, someone who can minister the grace of Jesus Christ to you.

Now what if there’s no one there?

We all have to be the cavalry at some point in life. We all have to ride into the flaming arrows, the poison darts, the thick haze of flying lead. Because there’s no way anyone’s going to be our cavalry when we need it if we were never there for them.






Are Small Groups Doomed?

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Faces in the crowdIf you’re an Evangelical Christian, chances are that you’ve been in a small group associated with a church or parachurch organization. It’s almost a rite of passage if you’re born again.

My wife and I are part of two small groups. One is affiliated with our old Vineyard church. We’ve stuck with that group because we have a lot in common with the other four couples. It feels like family. We’ve been a part of that group for about seven years, as have most of the other couples in it. We’ve gone through a lot of trials together. Our second group is through our current Pentecostal church. We’ve been in that group for about three years.

The groups are alike in that both meet in the home of one of the couples, eat a meal together, catch up on life, and discuss spiritual things. The Vineyard group has had a flexible focus over the years, though the corporate Vineyard small group emphasis of fellowship, worship, nurture, and prayer have been consistent. It’s the nurture portion that changes over time. That particular group has nucleated to the point that we all agreed it’s a closed group, meaning it isn’t open to newcomers. The Pentecostal group doesn’t have the worship portion of the meeting, so it spends more time on the nurture. It’s billed as a marriage & family group, so the nurture portion has focused on improving marriages. That group is open, and all the participants have agreed that it serves as a step into the church for visitors. Unlike the Vineyard group, our pastor and his wife attend the group, not as leaders, but mostly for their own edification and as a sounding board for new couples.

The Vineyard group has been hosted by the same couple the entire time we’ve been a part of it; same for the Pentecostal group. Just about every couple has led the nurture at some point in the Vineyard group, while the host couple has primarily led at the Pentecostal church, with me filling in when they’re busy. Because the Vineyard church is quite large, the couples in that group, though highly involved in the life of the church, would not devastate the church if they should decide to leave one day. However, the couple who hosts and leads the Pentecostal group are possibly the most actively involved in a church’s life on all levels of any couple I’ve met in my entire life. Calling them pillars of the church seems almost inadequate a description.

Each group meets twice a month, and we asked that the Pentecostal group stagger its meetings to accommodate our other group. Since it wasn’t a huge issue, they did.

Those are our small groups. We are indebted very much to both.

I’ve spent most of this weekend thinking about small groups. As someone who grew up indoctrinated in the idea that the real life of the church happens in small groups, I worry about the small group model.

Some churches, especially those of the mega variety, pin their entire ministry model on the idea that people will flock to small groups and find there what they cannot within the larger ministry of the whole church. Many churches live and die by that ideal. It’s one reason why I’m concerned.

A few years back, Joe Myers, who lives in my general area, wrote a book called The Search to Belong: Rethinking Intimacy, Community, and Small Groups. I struggled through that book in all honesty, partly because I thought it was a little too in love with its demographic studies and quotes from sociologists (pretty typical of Emerging lit) and because the studies and quotes painted a disturbing picture.

Myers’s assertions included the following:

1. A church that gets a third of its regular attendees involved in small groups does well. That being the case, it’s ridiculous to drive a church model based on small groups because two-thirds of attendees will never plug into one no matter how hard the church promotes small groups.

2. Having a small group meeting in a private home asks too much of people today. Far too many people feel uncomfortable walking into another person’s home.

Let me talk about the latter statement first.

One of the best parts of both of our groups is the shared meal. I think that echoes the early Church well. I love eating together. I enjoy making meals together, too. There’s a dynamic on that meal prep that bonds the group.

Problem is, that’s hard to do outside a home. Plus, for those people who have a gift of hospitality, part of their gift is thwarted by not being able to host in their own living space. This is not to say that people can’t be hospitable outside their own homes, only that something can be lost by moving to another venue. The Bible appears to reflect this ideal, also, by showing us how the early Church met in each other’s homes.

Worse, if Myers is to be believed on this point, I have got to wonder how bad off we are as a society when people can’t walk into another person’s living space without getting the heebie-jeebies. Honestly, if people today freak as badly as Myers insists they do on crossing the threshold of another person’s house, call Malcolm Gladwell because we’re not only past the tipping point, we may as a society be on the way to the point of no return. If my house scares you, then you’re going to be petrified of my personality. So much for any kind of small group dynamic—please pass the Paxil.

On the first point concerning the one-third involvement, my own experience proves that this is a general number that does, indeed, hold up under scrutiny. Now I know I’m going to get people who write in and say, “Well, in my church, half the people are in small groups.” Great. You are the exception to the rule. But by and large, I’ve been around enough to believe Myers’s statistic is true when viewed on a macro scale.

More to the point, I believe that the one-third number wil increasingly shrink for several compelling reasons:

Bowling Alone Syndrome – The seminal book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam has been quoted by every long-time leader I know, no matter what type of group they lead. Every last one laments the loss of community that once thrived in American culture as exemplified by our fraternal organizations. I don’t care what kind of public group we’re talking about—Kiwanis, Boy Scouts, Sierra Club, softball teams, card clubs, even churches—they’ve all seen the number of involved members drop precipitously. People just are not participating in face-to-face interpersonal groups like they once were. To many, the commitment asks too much. Couple this with the increasingly rootless nature of a society whose individuals spend less and less time in one place. These difficult realities pose enormous problems for churches, especially those that base their ministry model around small groups.

A lack of qualified small group leaders – Too many churches that expect their primary teaching and discipleship  to occur in small groups pin their hopes on people who are increasingly less qualified to lead what they teach. In many cases, the leader of a small group is promoted out of another small group who may have had an inadequate leader. Law of diminishing effects anyone? As so many Evangelical churches have gone this route, is it any wonder that so many Evangelicals display ignorance of even the most basic biblical truths? And if the people lack knowledge, they perish, right? That’s not a formula for successfully perpetuating a thriving small group model.

The Hegelian Dialectic – I’ve talked about this many times here (see this post in particular), but the tendency toward thesis/antithesis/synthesis teaching in small groups undermines genuinely fruitful Bible study more than we care to admit. Unqualified teachers create some of that problem but so does the need not to make anyone feel uncomfortable should they hold an errant view on the topic being taught. I’ve long contended that small groups may do some things well, but, for most, teaching ain’t it.

Busyness – This comprises a part of the Bowling Alone Syndrome. Frankly, I find it amazing that any small group meets at all given how overly scheduled our lives are. To the people I talk with, it’s only getting worse. In the case of both small groups I’m a part of, year over year we’re seeing more scheduling issues. I can’t recall if our Vineyard group has met as an entire group so far this year. Due to the nature of our other small group, it’s never met with the same core people from one month to the next. That makes it hard to develop the momentum needed to keep growing in discipleship through the group.

Expectations – Here’s a loaded issue: group member expectations. I think more small groups burn out due to participants’ unmet expectations than for any other reason. I also think that this was less of an issue in the past because people then didn’t know what to expect of small groups, so their expectations were low. I will also contend that too many people today come to a group with a list of expectations an arm long because we’ve indoctrinated people into believing that the world exists to meet their needs. (In truth, the modern church’s constant catering to felt needs only exacerbates the issue.) That’s a huge problem to overcome because people will flee a small group the second it looks like it won’t meet their needs perfectly. They never find a home, instead flitting from one small group to the next. Worst of all, should the group cater to couples, if one of the spouses sours on the group because of unmet expectations, it puts the other spouse in a bind. You almost always wind up losing two people instead of just the discontented one.

All these issues combine to exert enormous pressure on small groups.

Resolving these issues requires smarter people than yours truly. Several of the problems exist at a societal level, requiring upheavals that too many church leaders are not willing to discuss. That timidity, though, is at the root of the failure.

My contribution:

I have never believed that the small group model works well in teaching the Scriptures to people. I’ve been in numerous small groups over the years, and only one or two have had solid teaching. Perhaps, then, we should focus on other things, especially discipleship through example, which means ensuring the fellowship works well—no small task in itself.

I also think we have to ask ourselves how important the basic philosophy of small groups is to our personal growth. If we believe in what small groups are supposed to provide, then we need to be committed to that belief. We can’t let outside influences distract us from the core vision.

I’ll be upfront and say that I’m pessimistic about the future of small group ministry within churches here in the United States. This is not to say that small groups will cease to exist, only that their influence within churches may be waning.

This begs a greater question: If small groups are increasingly under pressure to provide what churches depend on them to provide, what will replace small groups as the primary means of doing “what small groups do” within our churches? How will churches provide for the spiritual needs of their congregants should the small group model wither?

On this issue, where does your church stand?