Brake On, Power Off
January 30, 2009
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Discernment, Godly Character, Leadership, Maturity, Relevance Feedback : 6 comments
I did one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done this week. It may not seem like much at first glance, but it made for a lot of unnecessary work, pointless ponderings, and general angst.
We got hit by a snowstorm, followed by an ice storm, followed by a snowstorm. As we live at the top of a hill, about fifty feet higher than the road that runs by our house, we need to navigate a steep drive. Snow makes this difficult, and we sometimes can’t get up our snow-choked driveway in my wife’s car, a Corolla.
On the other hand, I have a 4×4 pickup that laughs at snow and ice. No matter how bad a mess our driveway might be, I’m up it in a flash.
Which is why this last week was so stupid. I attempted to venture out after the storms had run their courses. I clear the driveway by first running my truck up and down it to create a basic, driveable path, then I spread halite in the treadmarks. In a day or so, the salt does its work and my wife’s car has no more troubles getting in and out.
Imagine my surprise when I turn my truck around to make the uphill jaunt and wind up in a ditch on the side of my driveway. Now imagine me scratching my head as to why, only to discover that I had the parking brake on.
Now a 4×4 is one of man’s greatest inventions, but it’s not magic. Run yourself into a watery, icy, muddy ditch and you’ve got troubles. My troubles amounted to 80 minutes of me pushing on the back end of my truck while my wife spun the wheels a lot. The truck stayed where it was, and I retreated to our warm house for a cup of coffee with a packet of cocoa dumped in for good measure.
The next morning, after the ground had refrozen, I got in the truck, put it in 4-wheel low, and promptly drove out as if nothing had happened.
None of this madness would have occurred if I’d released the parking brake before I first attempted to drive up the hill. As is wont with me, this amounts to a lesson that goes beyond 4-wheel-drive pickup trucks and icy driveways.
Nothing drives a church into a ditch faster than to have the spiritual parking brake on. How does that happen? When leaders fail to identify gifts in their congregants.
I don’t know when this failure first began, but somewhere in the Western Church’s life we gave up tapping the power of the next generation, leaving talented people unchallenged and underdeveloped. And the blame for this lies entirely on leaders of local churches. Entirely.
When you look at the model of the early Church, its leaders called out gifted people for ministry. The leaders identified the gifts in those folks and worked alongside them to tune those gifts for maximum performance.
Today, we’ve got bupkis in this regard. Instead, we rely on folks’ self-identification of their gifts, on spiritual gift inventories that are little more than wish fulfillment for many, and the result has been a lot of wheel-spinning and ditch-dwelling.
Personally, I think that it’s the role of every pastor, elder, and deacon to keep their spiritual eyes open to the giftings of people within their churches, then encouraging those gifts. This goes beyond just mentioning that so-and-so is needed in the nursery to watch the kiddies when the adults are worshiping. It’s an active one-on-one process that helps others grow into their giftings.
And this is spiritually discerned, too, which, in the end, is what dooms this endeavor in most churches. Too many leaders don’t know how to see with the eyes of the Spirit, instead relying on calling out someone’s natural abilities rather than their supernatural ones.
A church comes packed with people God gifts for service. Too often, though, those people become 4×4s with parking brakes firmly set, their service hampered because no one is there to guide them into the powerful workings of God’s gifts in their own lives.
A. W. Tozer calls this error a tragedy, and I agree. It’s a tragedy that persists through the generations as we fail to meet the obligation to develop our fellow Christians into all God would desire they become. Instead, we’re satisfied with a pittance of the power available to us. So we run off into one ditch after another and fool ourselves into thinking that this constitutes the abundant life.
Please God, give us the guts and smarts to release the brake.
Tags: Church Leaders, Gift Inventory, Gifts, Leadership, Spiritual GiftsRelated posts
Looking for Work, A Personal Request
January 27, 2009
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Announcements, Miscellany, Work, Writing Feedback : 7 comments
Dear Readers,
This post comes as a request for job leads on behalf of my wife. She is an experienced marketing professional with a background in computer software and telecommunications. Her most recent position was as a director of marketing, but she is considering expanding her possibilities to areas such as sales, product management, and account management. She is pursuing both part-time and full-time positions.
We are located east of Cincinnati, closer to the Eastgate/Batavia area, so downtown Cincinnati, eastern Northern Kentucky, and the eastern suburbs (such as Beechmont, Amelia, Milford, Loveland, Montgomery, and Blue Ash, with Sharonville being the western limit) would be within driving reach for her.
I have met many people in my life who are dedicated workers who give 110 percent, but my wife exceeds them all. She’s smart, engaging, relationally adept, and a huge asset to a company.
Drop me a line at the email address in the sidebar at top or leave a comment, and we will follow up with you.
Thanks.
And while I’m doing this pitch, let me also add these two comments:
If you need an experienced freelance writer or editor, my business is Ethereal Pen Productions. I’ve written for some of the best-known companies and organizations in America and bring a wealth of experience in a wide variety of fields to every project I do. Some of the freelance writing and editing services I offer include writing copy for business Web sites, copywriting marketing collateral, developing training materials, and editing book manuscripts for individual authors. New clients are always welcome.
Lastly, if you are a Christian who owns a small business with a Web presence, I have a page on this blog that will feature your company and offer a link back to it, which search engines love to see. Cost? FREE. All I ask in return is a backlink from your site to my Employ the Body! page, which you can view by clicking on the link above or the tab at the top of this site.
Thank you. And may God richly bless you.
Tags: Computer, Editing Writer, Editor, Employ the Body!, Employment, Jobs, Marketer, marketing, Networking, Software, Telecom, Telecommunications, Work, WritingRelated posts
The Great Unconfession
January 26, 2009
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Community, Dying to Self, Faith, Godly Character, Maturity, Perseverance, Relevance Feedback : 37 comments
The wiser you are, the more worries you have; the more you know, the more it hurts.
—Ecclesiastes 1:18
Winter holds sway here in southwestern Ohio, defined by cheek-stinging cold and relentless gray skies that suck all the color out of creation’s palette. January and February lurk.
This time of year in the Midwest is my least favorite by far. It takes a great deal of energy to refrain from going into the garage (doors down, of course), climbing into the family car, rolling down the windows, twisting the key in the ignition, and letting a CD of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” loop repeatedly on the car stereo while the CO billows over you.
Yeah, that bleak.
It’s that set of weeks when people start thinking too much because there’s time to think; the Christmas madness is over and there’s little else to do when a foot of snow traps you in the house. Everyone goes a bit more inward than they do in mid-June. They start thinking about their lacks. Christians do this more than anyone, I think.
We Evangelicals hear a lot about unconfessed sin. You can blame all manner of ills on that beast. Unconfessed sin is the spiritual antithesis of duct tape: Everything falls apart when wrapped in it.
Somehow in the English language, a tongue in which I am supposedly familiar, we can have something that is unconfessed but not an unconfession. I find that odd.
But I do not find it odd that, whether the word exists or not, Christians make unconfessions. When I think about what may constitute an unconfession, I consider those confessions that no one would ever declare before an assembled body of believers, even if all are mature and have walked with God for years.
We can probably all imagine what might remain an unconfession: a heinous sexual sin, some awful thing done to a child, possibly even a murder.
In some ways, those are easy.
I think there’s an unconfession even more devastating. It’s the kind of inner disquiet that I’ve never heard spoken out loud in polite Christian company. It’s by no means salacious or repugnant, but it makes so many people uneasy that it goes unconfessed from generation to generation.
What follows, I believe, is the great unconfession of many sincere, earnest Christians in America today:
I gave my life to Jesus, believe in Him with all my heart, serve Him with everything I have, yet life still seems meaningless.
In many churches in this country, if someone respected in the congregation stood up on Sunday and spoke those words, people would be appalled. Yet I believe that a whole host of Christians struggle with that unconfessed angst—and its killing them slowly.
Daily they trudge to a cubicle in a stark glass edifice, punch some characters into a computer keyboard, fight gridlock on the way home, barely stay awake as they wolf down a warmed-over meal, spend some half-hearted moments with their spouse and kids, stare down the list of things they have to do but can never find time to resolve, punch a few more characters into a computer keyboard, trudge to a dark bedroom, sleep six hours, get up, toss off a quick prayer or two asking for yet another unmet need, read a half-baked devotional reading for the day…lather, rinse, repeat until death lays claim to them in an unguarded moment. And they are told by their spiritual elders on Sundays that this is the abundant life.
If they are ultra-spiritual, they may go into the ministry, each day confronting a set of problems in the lives of others, problems that may, in fact, relent, only to be replaced by others, just as the people are themselves replaced by someone else who is hurting. The great circle of pain. And the meaninglessness increases when all that work comes to naught some day because of one misunderstanding or another, and they move on to whatever the next ministry assignment is. And on Sundays they tell people that this is the abundant life. But there’s a catch in their heart that they hope doesn’t show in their voice—because the meaning of all this still escapes them.
I’ve had people write many times and tell me the reason they read Cerulean Sanctum is that I write from the heart. Truth is, much of what I write here is to myself. I need to hear what I write more than anyone else does.
And so I write this post because I struggle with meaninglessness, too, especially this time of year. I may be alone on this, projecting my own struggle onto the lives of other believers, but I don’t think so. I think many Christians bottle up this unconfession concerning their own battles against meaninglessness in life. To confess that one struggles with meaning post-conversion is about as close as one gets to apostasy in some Christian circles.
It gets worse for many people who struggle with meaninglessness because the truth is that Christ is our sufficiency. If we struggle with meaninglessness, it’s because we are not connected to Christ the way they should be. And that’s not Christ’s fault; it’s ours.
Doesn’t make the struggle any easier, does it?
I think this plague of meaninglessness has been a problem with mankind since the fall. Ecclesiastes captures this better than any book in the Bible. A sampling:
These are the words of the Philosopher, David’s son, who was king in Jerusalem. It is useless, useless, said the Philosopher. Life is useless, all useless. You spend your life working, laboring, and what do you have to show for it? Generations come and generations go, but the world stays just the same. The sun still rises, and it still goes down, going wearily back to where it must start all over again. The wind blows south, the wind blows north—round and round and back again. Every river flows into the sea, but the sea is not yet full. The water returns to where the rivers began, and starts all over again. Everything leads to weariness—a weariness too great for words. Our eyes can never see enough to be satisfied; our ears can never hear enough. What has happened before will happen again. What has been done before will be done again. There is nothing new in the whole world. “Look,” they say, “here is something new!” But no, it has all happened before, long before we were born. No one remembers what has happened in the past, and no one in days to come will remember what happens between now and then.
—Ecclesiastes 1:1-11
Despite the fact that there is nothing new under the sun, I think we humans of 2009 struggle with meaning more than our ancestors did. Most of our communities have shattered. We roam far from our birthplaces in search of what does not ultimately satisfy, fracturing family and robbing us of connection. We have little time for each other, for that once-tribe that helped root in meaning those who preceded us. Even the imprisoned apostle Paul had his faithful companions who cheered him with their presence. Without them, would the writings of that great apostle have taken an even more somber tone? There’s a reason why God intended the Church to be a communion: He himself is a communion.
But we have lost the idea of communion/community. For this reason, I believe we have magnified our struggle against meaninglessness.
Meaning also goes wanting when a society’s end goals cheapen, when beauty is replaced with cynicism, accomplishment comes down to material accumulation, and youth trumps age and its community-building wisdom. All of this detracts from our sole source of meaning, God.
We are all caught up in this race to the bottomless pit of meaninglessness. Some handle it better than others. I know that I do not handle it well at all.
Maybe that’s because I believe life can be better than it is. Maybe we don’t have to settle for less. Maybe in the midst of all that meaninglessness something better arises: hope.
Or maybe I’m just fooling myself. Ask me again come March.
Tags: Christians, Church Issues, Disappointment, Disconnection, Frustration, God, Loneliness, Meaning, Meaninglessness, Serach for MeaningRelated posts
Epic Fail, Epic Win
January 22, 2009
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Boldness, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Counterculture, Discernment, Evangelism, Faith, Godly Character, In the News, Leadership, Maturity, Obedience, Oddities Feedback : 12 comments
In the lexicon of the English language, failure may no longer be an option.
Instead, we English-speakers bring you fail. Not as to fail, but simply fail. (If you aren’t tracking with this, Slate has a fine article explaining this latest twist in the mother tongue.)
Of course, being the the lovers of the extreme that we Americans are, fail is itself a fail unless we can find a way to magnify it. This becomes epic fail. And because all extreme language needs its counter, we have coined the term epic win.
The landing of US Airways Flight 1549 is an epic win.
An epic fail? Think Jan. 22, 1973.
Yes, Roe v. Wade was an epic fail for Christians in this country.
Asleep at the wheel. Knocked out. Comatose. Guard dropped. You name it, the Church of the early 1970s didn’t react to what was happening under its nose. Didn’t stick to the game plan. Didn’t get it. So we got Roe v. Wade and millions upon millions of barbarically destroyed human lives. An entire generation of people culled. Epic, epic fail.
You witness a lot of handwringing over Roe today. What wasn’t big news leading up to that day in January 1973 is now. With a new president who believes Roe was an epic win, Christians are even more alarmed about the course of our country and its attitudes toward abortion. Many frantic calls will emanate from pulpits and burn up the Christian radio and TV airwaves. We will hear a million outlines for courses of action which we have all been hearing for decades.You can almost recite them by heart.
In the language of fail, let’s look at those familiar calls to action:
Voting Republican – FAIL
The Republican Party has done next to nothing to end abortion even though the rhetoric of the party reeks of pro-life talk. But talk is cheap. As long as Christians keep devoting their time and energy to this do-nothing party of talk, we will not end abortion.
Supporting Pro-life Candidates – FAIL
See above. Candidates are often very vocal about their pro-life sentiments. Funny how we hear about this incessantly come election time, then all goes quiet immediately afterwards.
Demonstrating/Protesting – FAIL
I demonstrated with Operation Rescue. I was on the frontlines of protesting at abortion clinics. Yes, there were small victories when a child was saved once in a while. But the scale gained is not the scale that will save this country from judgment.
Educating – FAIL
We can show pregnant women pictures of aborted fetuses. We can fire up the 3D sonograms. We can talk and talk and talk about the horrors of abortion. Yet 36 years of pro-life education has given us one thing: the surety of more than a million babies aborted in 2009.
Praying – FAIL
Prayer a fail? How is that possible? How can God not honor our prayer to see abortion end?
Prayer fails under one critical condition. If I am outside on a bitterly cold day and I encounter a destitute man rubbing his chilled hands together while mine remain snug and warm inside my gloves, do I need to pray about what my course of action should be? Haven’t the Scriptures informed my direction? Isn’t the Spirit in me telling me what to do? What is the point of me praying, “God, I really need to know what to do about this man and his cold hands. If it be thy will, let him come over to me and strike up a conversation. Then I will know that I need to do something”? Do I need to pray this? No, I don’t. I need to do what the Spirit and the Word, both of which I claim to know, have already told me to do.
When we use prayer as a means to look spiritual while failing to do what God wills of us, prayer is a fail. Disobedience does not move the heart of God toward us. What should we expect from God when we know what to do but do not do it?
And there is one enormous thing we are refusing to do even though we know we must do it.
This brings us to the most epic fail of them all. It’s an epic fail larger than Roe v. Wade. A million Roe v. Wades combined could not be as epic as this fail. And it is this epic fail that explains entirely the epic fail of the American Church when it comes to abortion.
Making disciples – EPIC FAIL
In the early 1960s, the Church in America abandoned its primary mission to make disciples in the name of Jesus. We got sidetracked into culture wars, fighting the commies, worrying about hippies, looking at every threat in the world while ignoring the fact that lost people were remaining lost because we forgot what we were supposed to be about. I believe that’s the main reason why abortion became the law of the land.
If we have tried every other means to stop abortion in America and nothing has worked, the simple reason comes down to this: When a nation is filled with people who have not been born again, that nation will not honor righteousness.
That is the American Church’s epic fail. We simply stopped making disciples.
Want an epic win and an end to Roe? Make disciples. If every Christian in this country committed to actively sharing Christ with a half dozen lost people this year, just one every two months, I think we would begin to see change. If we stopped toying around with discipleship and got serious about raising up the next God-fearing generation within our very own churches, we would see change. We would know that epic win that we have craved for 36 years if we dropped all the other skubalon that has distracted us and focused on our primary mission of making disciples.
Because a nation of people filled with the Spirit would have no need for abortion and would abolish it in a heartbeat.
Tags: Abortion, Disciplemaking, Discipleship, Epic Fail, Epic Win, Evangelism, Fail, Roe v. Wade, Win
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