How to Fix the American Christian – Series Announcement
November 22, 2009
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Announcements, Cerulean Sanctum Series, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Counterculture, Godly Character, Relevance Feedback : 5 comments
Recently, I wrote a post that discussed why the Church in America is not living up to its calling (“Why Christianity Is Failing in America“). Readers asked what I thought we could do to turn tragedy into triumph, so I responded with an overview of possible fixes (“Why Christianity Is Failing in America – Further Thoughts“).
But I also realize the need is more practical than a conceptual overview. People need examples. For that reason, I’m starting a series that will look at practical ways that Christians can live truly countercultural lives that reflect the genuine Gospel of Jesus. These won’t be theological missives, but ideas for earnest believers who want to go against the flow and live a life worthy of the upward call of Christ.
Though Cerulean Sanctum usually focuses on the Church as a whole, I believe that the only way change is going to come to the Church is if a large group of believers within each local church bucks the system. It really does come down to individuals making Spirit-directed choices to live counterculturally. The power of one may be overrated, but a large group of people choosing to say no to worldly ways gets noticed and makes a difference.
I’ve entitled this series “How to Fix the American Christian,” and I hope for at least those few who read this blog it will make a difference that helps change the world for the Lord.
Tags: American Church, Christianity, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Counterculture, DiscipleshipRelated posts
The Rules of Attraction (Spiritual Edition), Part 1
January 5, 2009
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Benevolence, Boldness, Cerulean Sanctum Series, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Community, Counterculture, Creation Care, Creativity, Discernment, Dying to Self, Evangelism, Faith, Godly Character, Grace, Holiness, Hospitality, Humility, Joy, Leadership, Love, Maturity, Obedience, Oddities, Perseverance, Prayerfulness, Relevance, Simplicity Feedback : 22 comments
All the young dudes hunkered in a pack at the back of the Taco Bell, the mecca of cheap food for young dudes everywhere. Like most 19-year-olds, they took big bites and talked a little too loud for a small restaurant.
Enter two young women.
They were the classic pair one finds in many romantic comedies today. The one was a natural beauty, raven-haired and fresh-faced, like something out of Ivory Soap ad but with a green sensibility, just add Timberlands. The kind of girl one can take home to mom and on a camping expedition. One of those girls who may actually be prettier without makeup.
Where the natural beauty was curvy, her friend was all sharp angles. The friend did all the talking, and showed a great deal of smarts, as seems to be the case in this stereotype. The friend also chatted up the guy behind register and was generally pleasant. She dressed in a kind of geek chic that tried just a bit too hard.
As for the young dudes, they stymied their conversation and just stared. And, obviously, not at the friend. Nor in the volatile language that erupted shortly after they gathered their composure did the young dudes have anything to say amongst themselves about the friend. In fact, one could argue that a scientific breakthrough of enormous importance occurred in that Taco Bell, because, for a moment, a human being became absolutely invisible.
Now, in a burst of illustrative metaphor, I ask the simple question: Which of the two young women best exemplifies what Christianity should be in the eyes of the world?
As I see it, if you picked the friend, you’d be dead wrong.
That’s not what most people think, is it?
But I believe that the way the Church of Jesus Christ should appear to the world is as a winsome beauty. The Bride of Christ is meant to be beautiful. The Bride of Christ is supposed to be attractive. People should look at the Church and think, Wow!
Yet somewhere along the way, we Christians, especially in America, developed a kind of self-inflicted persecution complex where we aspired to stop being the natural beauty we were meant to be,
instead cultivating the attitude and lifestyle of the plain Jane friend. We tried—badly—to be a fashion plate, made every makeup mistake known to Man, and developed an attitude. In short, we grew to epitomize the friend character perfected in films by Rosie O’Donnell.
Should we be surprised then that no one wants to take us to the prom?
The early Church, in stark contrast, exhibited natural beauty through their love, community, and witness. That beauty attracted thousands. Whenever people saw the Church, they craned their necks to look because the beauty snatched their breath away.
So it should be with today’s Church. Instead, we’re whiny, loud, divisive, and sitting in the bleachers complaining how no one wants to dance with us.
The error that too many Christians commit is to equate the world’s lack of interest with the nature of Christianity. But neither Christianity nor Christ Himself are ugly.
We must realize that the reason none of the young dudes in Taco Bell left with the natural beauty is that she demands more. So while neither she nor her friend walk out of that restaurant on someone’s arm, it’s for a different reason than appearance in the beauty’s case. Pursuing the beauty isn’t going to be easy. None of the dudes even tries. They look, but ultimately, they can’t follow through.
The way of Christ is beautiful, but it demands everything. Thousands flocked around Jesus, but only a few could handle true discipleship. As the Scriptures say:
So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” Jesus said these things in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum. When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.” After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.
—John 6:53-66
It wasn’t because Jesus wasn’t attractive in a figurative sense. The hungry, the hustlers, and hookers longed to be near Him. Even kings and regional rulers desired to meet Him. No, it was the message, the demand, that turned people off in the end. The natural beauty has high standards.
We must be beautiful in all the ways that make the Church attractive to lost people and those in a world of hurt. We must also keep the message of the cross central. It’s that message that proves impossible to many a young dude. It should never be purposeful attempt to look like a frump. We must let the cross be the deciding factor in whether some follow and some do not, never by compromising our attractiveness.
For 2009, I think the word that the Church needs to hear concerns regaining our natural beauty, especially in America. We’ve tramped around like plain Jane, thinking this is our lot and the way to attract people to Jesus. If anything, we’ve made that belief an impediment to others coming to Christ. Instead, we must shine and make no apologies for being naturally beautiful.
For more on how we Christians can cultivate our natural attraction to the lost, stay tuned for my next post.
Tags: Attraction, Attractiveness, Church Issues, Evangelism, Natural Beauty, Plain JaneRelated posts
Soul Man, Spirit Man – Part 1
September 17, 2008
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Cerulean Sanctum Series, Charismatic, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Discernment, God the Father, Godhead, Godly Character, Jesus Christ, Maturity, Oddities, Revival, Supernaturalism, The Holy Spirit Feedback : 45 comments
Every once in a while, I encounter a post brewing inside me that I find intimidating because it’s more than I can handle. I’m not as clever, intelligent, or compelling in myself to make the words inside come out as I’d like.
This is one of those posts.
So if you find this to be rambling or nonsensical, it’s all my fault, not the Lord’s.
God’s been teaching me a very tough lesson in the last couple years. I’m not sure I grasp the depth of it, but I know I must if I’m to understand a desperate need within the Body of Christ. That lesson is the difference between the soul man and the spirit man.
One of the failings of Western thought is the weight we give dualism. The Greeks saddled us with a dualistic worldview that split our understanding of reality. It doesn’t matter the two lenses through which we view reality, we have an ideal ingrained in us that we can classify our interactions with reality through glasses that divide our sight along only two lines.
The major failing of our love for all things Greek in Western thought is that things that come in threes prove baffling. We can always use our dualistic glasses to see two of the three parts, but that third is either said to be nonexistent, invisible (and therefore untouchable), or just plain paradoxical.
One of the most obvious ways in which Westerners struggle with dualistic modes of thinking is our inability to grasp the tri-unity of God. Westerners don’t do well with this, whereas non-Westerners that are not burdened by Greek thought come at the Trinity more easily. We can picture God and Jesus, but the Holy Spirit is more nebulous to us. We don’t see Him or portray Him well in our theology. We have a hard time integrating Him. On the other hand, many non-Westerners assimilate understanding of the Holy Spirit more fully.
This also reflects in the reality that Western theologians, while able to at least wrestle with the tri-unity of God, are loathe to discuss the tri-unity of man. Even the best scholars in the West are more likely to see man as body + soul/spirit than as body + soul + spirit.
But the Scriptures seem plain that man was made in the image of God, who is triune. The Bible also speaks differently about the soul and spirit of man. While many of us will readily claim the spirit of man was deadened at the Fall, we’re not as capable of explaining what happens to that spirit at the new birth. We wind up treating soul and spirit as the same thing. We turn man into a dichotomous being rather than a trichotomous one.
The more I weigh this before the Lord, the more I believe our dichotomous view of man as being merely body + soul explains much of the deadness of the Western Church. In fact, I wonder if our spiritual glasses are so attuned to only seeing body + soul that we have been practicing a form of Christianity in the West that is not really Christianity at all.
The upshot? If we do not have a proper understanding of the trichotomous nature of man, then we are going to practice a form of godliness that has no power.
Consider these verses:
The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God….
—Romans 8:16For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
—Hebrews 4:12
These passages make a distinction between soul and spirit. That distinction is important because failing to split them results in a failure to know how Christians are to live by the Spirit.
When a person is born again, the Holy Spirit quickens the spirit of man. That spirit of man is the conduit by and through which the Holy Spirit operates. It’s our connection to the Lord. If you built a house with no means for connecting into the power grid, how would your run your appliances? The spirit of man connects with the Spirit of God, and that’s how the Christian is powered for service. It’s how we hear God and receive guidance, too.
Those who have not been born again are deadened in their spirits and cannot connect to God. Therefore, they cannot be led of God or discern spiritual things. The true spiritual man, then, is the one who operates out of this connection and allows this “inner redeemed man” to control the outer portions of his life, namely the soul and body.
The soul is a different entity altogether. The soul contains our emotions and thoughts. It’s the primary way we relate to the world and to others in common things. The true spiritual man allows his spirit to take precedent over the soul and guide it, the body, too. The soul, though, is eternal, while the body is not. The soul and body should be driven by the Spirit through the spirit of man.
At least that’s the idea.
But there’s a problem…
When I consider the state of the Western Church, I see the fruit of teaching that man is a two-part entity and not a three-part: people who have substituted the soul for the spirit and subsequently operate out of their souls instead of their spirits. I believe this explains the flailing we see in Western churches:
- The inability to discern the leading/voice of the Spirit
- Powerlessness
- Attraction to dynamic personalities rather than to the spiritually mature
- Fruitless ministries and programs
- Rootless, fruitless, wandering Christians
- The failure of much of our spiritual counseling
- Evangelistic efforts that never catch on (or people who simply cannot evangelize)
- Improper understanding of the Scriptures
In fact, I suspect that many of the failures within Western Christianity can be directly traced to our confusing the power of the soul for the power of the spirit.
- It explains why charismatics get so pumped up by speakers and events that appeal to flash and emotionalism.
- It explains why so many Christians get fired up by speakers who preach doctrinally-sound messages that appeal to the intellect, yet never seem to bring about any real change in people’s lives.
- It explains why so many Christians spend their whole lives trying to find yet another spiritual experience to keep them going from one day to the next.
- It explains why we have millions of books on Christian topics, yet so little of it sinks in.
- It explains why so many spiritual gifts that people clam to possess seem so meager or faulty.
- It explains why so many Christians are silently wondering why things aren’t right in their spiritual lives.
We’re living out of our emotions and our intellect, out of our souls, but the inner man that God says is the true man is still wadded up deep inside of us, dying to get out and actually change our lives.
I’m beginning to wonder how pervasive this problem is. How many of us have spent our entire Christians lives living out of our souls, yet never really knowing what the life of God is because we’re not really channeling it?
The true tragedy here is that so many of us have convinced ourselves that we’re living a Spirit-led life, but we’re not allowing that life to shine through because we have no clue what it actually looks like. The pieces aren’t coming together, so we settle for a life that falls far short of what God desires for us.
In the next post, I hope to explore this more. Your comments are greatly welcome.
Tags: Body, Dichotomy, Holy Spirit, Soul, Spirit, Spirit of God, Spirit of Man, Tri-Unity, Trichotomy, TrinityRelated posts
Cleansing the Charismatic Crackup, Final Thoughts
August 21, 2008
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Cerulean Sanctum Series, Charismatic, Christianity Outside North America, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Discernment, Dying to Self, Godly Character, Holiness, Humility, In the News, Leadership, Maturity, Notable Christians, Oddities, Relevance, Revival, Supernaturalism Feedback : 82 comments
Over the last few days, thousands of people have come to Cerulean Sanctum looking for answers concerning the meltdown in the charismatic movement in light of what happened at Lakeland. People are searching. They want answers and reassurance.
Here is the word that I have for them. It comes from a prophet who did no miracles but was called the greatest by the One who truly matters:
“He must increase, but I must decrease.”
—John 3:30
John the Baptist said this in context of knowing his ministry was not what mattered in the end. He said it because he knew he was being surpassed, because he understood his place was to shine the light on the Lord and not himself. His curtain had risen, but now it was falling. And John rejoiced in that.
Because John was, above all else, humble.
I do some of my best reflecting in the shower. Something about being alone and naked brings clarity. It’s quiet and peaceful. The whispered voice of God stirs among the waters. Or something like that. Whatever the case, my morning shower has been the birthplace for many a post here.
During Tuesday’s shower the word that God dropped into my heart was humility.
If we are to clean up the mess within the contemporary charismatic movement, above all else, we need to rediscover humility.
We need leaders who have been tested by the twin crucibles of time and tragedy. It’s those folks who speak softly who often possess the most wisdom, but among the noisy clamor of the modern charismatic scene we have drowned them out. We have ignored them because they are not flashy, hip, or “charismatic” in the other sense of the word.
I believe they are the ones who must rise up at this time in history.
We need people who understand the grace of God. People who, like Job, can stand before God and put their hands over their mouths because they understand that they are nothing in the presence of God. Yet that same God offers them mercy because they realize they are dust before Him.
We need people in the charismatic movement who, again like Job, are so concerned with the holiness of God and our tendency as fallen creatures toward sin that they make sacrifices on behalf of others who may have sinned so as to ensure that God has not been slighted. Fostering that kind of mentality will stifle excess before it has a chance to poison others.
I believe that charismatics need to stop promoting those people to leadership positions because of the force of their personalities or the novelty of their ministries. Instead, we need to seek out those who would otherwise have been forgotten, those who are not shameless self-promoters, but promoters of Jesus Christ. In other words, humble servants.
Do we remember the word servant ? Is it still in our vocabulary? Find me a servant who is dedicated to pouring herself out and who finds her filling not before adoring crowds but before God alone in her prayer closet and I’ll show you someone ready to lead.
Do we understand humility? Have we seen any signs around us that it still exists? Give me a man who would rather be wrong before millions of people than besmirch the character and name of Jesus Christ and I’ll show you a man worthy of his calling.
But where are those people in the charismatic movement in the West?
I see their counterparts in the East every Sunday in my church. We support a number of native missionaries in Asia through Gospel for Asia, a charismatic missionary organization. Their pictures line the wall outside the sanctuary. For the most part, these are poor people who have nothing but their names written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. They live for Jesus alone. They are nameless, faceless people who have counted the cost and know that He is worthy even as they are not. They are the reason that the Gospel goes forth in power in developing countries even as we in the West flock to the next dog and pony show looking for the next spiritual fix.
They are people who understand that He must increase while they must decrease.
I used to meet people like that here in the States. Not so much anymore, though. Most of us have our own agendas. We squeeze the Lord in when we can, but it’s still mostly about us, about our families, about getting ahead in life.
When I told my Dad that I was going to go into ministry full time, he said something I will never forget: “Then prepare to be poor because you won’t get anywhere in life.” Ouch, right?
Still, that kind of statement doesn’t make humble people flinch because they know their treasure is in heaven, not on earth.
Have we American charismatics counted the cost? A quick look around would answer that question, and not in the positive. We are a proud, selfish people who look down on the publican beating his breast and say, “Thank you, Lord, that I am not like that sinner.”
The problem is we are like that sinner. We’re just not humble enough to admit it.
***
In closing, I wish to offer a few links to other sites with good words concerning the charismatic movement and what can be done to prevent further damage and how we might repair the broken down walls before us:
I like so much of what Frank Viola writes. He has many good thoughts here.
John Piper wades into the mess with his usual sense and sensibility.
Dr. Harold Bussell contributes some excellent thoughts on the evangelical susceptibility to being lured into cults and cult-like activities. Good warnings and wisdom here. In addition, he takes a look at authority issues as well, something that most charismatics need to heed, especially as everyone goes nuts over “coverings.”
On this issue of humility, the best book I have read on the topic comes from Andrew Murray, the South African pastor who oversaw a great revival in that nation during the 19th century. Murray reads like a kinder, gentler Jonathan Edwards, sharing many experiences with Edward’s own during the Great Awakening. Murray, an amazingly prolific author, should be required reading for all charismatics as far as I am concerned. To our great fortune, Murray’s book on humility is online in its entirety.
I mentioned Watchman Nee’s book The Latent Power of the Soul in a previous post in this series. Fortunately, that book, too, is online in its entirety. We can learn much from Nee’s understand of soulish power versus genuine Holy Spirit power. I suspect that if we stripped soulish power out of the contemporary charismatic movement very little Holy Spirit power would be left. And that should alarm us.
Rob McAlpine discusses what it means to be “postcharismatic.” (I believe, though, that it might be better to think of reform as being “precharismatic”. Also, in a case of horrid timing, it seems McAlpine’s publisher in Canada is forgoing releasing his book here in the U.S. on postcharismatic thought. I would think this would be the perfect opportunity to ride the wave of confusion concerning this blowup within the charismatic movement.)
(Hat tips go to many people, some of whom I owe an apology because I have misplaced their names as sources. Bill Kinnon, though, had several good links at his site.)
Posts in the “Cleansing the Charismatic Crackup” series:
Tags: Assemblies of God, Azusa Street, Bentley, Brownsville, Charisma, Charismatic, Charismatic Movement, Foursquare, Humble, Humbleness, Humility, Lakeland, Lee Grady, Murray, Pensacola, Pentecostal, Ravenhill, Revival, Toronto, Toronto Blessing, Torrey, Tozer
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