Government

A Church That Reads the Signs of the Times

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Karl Barth supposedly said that preachers should preach with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Given the sorry state of the prophetic voice in the American Church today, perhaps that’s the wisest approach we can take given the circumstances.

Just last week, I read an article in The Wall Street Journal entitled “A Tax Revolt Is Quietly Brewing In Some States.” An excerpt:

On Election Day, Massachusetts will vote on whether to eliminate its state income tax. Advocates hope victory in a place long thought of as a free-spending liberal bastion will pave the way for similar initiatives in other states over the next few years. Critics insist a yes vote would lead to fiscal disaster.

While Americans are focusing on the presidential and congressional races, voters in Massachusetts and other states will decide the fate of dozens of state and local tax and spending issues.

The article goes on to note that several states face this type of citizen-inspired tax repudiation come November and beyond, not just Massachusetts. People are tired of cronyism, waste (studies peg wasted tax monies in Massachusetts at 41 percent of the state budget), and the fact that too many people are on the dole as employees of governmental agencies at all levels. In my state, Ohio, I saw a figure recently that claimed that 37 percent of employed workers in the state worked directly for a local, city, county, state, or federal government agency.

That’s utterly ridiculous. No wonder people are fed up. (Note: I am not against government. Obviously, we need certain government functions like our representative assemblies,  military, and law enforcement. The issue here is one of scope and sprawl and the ability to justify the amount of money it takes to defend and fund that bloat. That’s what has so many people upset.)

But that’s not the point of this post. Can you tell what is? Church, can we read between the lines on this tax revolt issue?

If we can’t, we need to learn. We need to be smarter about these things. If our self-anointed prophets are unreliable, then we need to improve how we comprehend the signs of the times.

What happens when the government is forced to make cuts because of reduced revenues? Social services go bye-bye.

Here’s the $64,000 question: Who will pick up the slack when social services taste the business end of the axe blade?

Too many Christians glamorize the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s in this country. They look at those years as the golden age of Christianity in America, the age of Norman Rockwell paintings depicting families praying together, the age of Leave It to Beaver and good, solid, Christian values.

But that would be denial.

Because what happened during those glory days was a wholesale abandonment by the American Church of the social services it alone provided the least of these. Christians shirked their duties as they caved to Industrialism and consumerism, jettisoning their responsibility to care for the downtrodden, instead voting to let the government assume that role, a role government was never designed to handle. That, in turn, weakened our resolve as a nation and forced us to suck at a socialistic, governmental teat.

And now some people are sick of the results because it’s hurting them in the one thing they value more than anything else: their wallets.

This I ask: Anyone care to guess how many churches in Massachusetts, or any of those other tax revolt states, are prepared to handle social services when the government can no longer afford to maintain them?

Hmm.

What’s your church’s plan to care for the mentally disabled?

What’s your church’s plan to care for the senior citizens in your community?

What’s your church’s plan to deal with those families who don’t have enough food and must subsist on government handouts that are most likely going away?

What’s your church’s plan?

Our churches don’t have a plan, do they?

Consider this passage of Scripture:

Now in these days prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch. And one of them named Agabus stood up and foretold by the Spirit that there would be a great famine over all the world (this took place in the days of Claudius). So the disciples determined, everyone according to his ability, to send relief to the brothers living in Judea. And they did so, sending it to the elders by the hand of Barnabas and Saul.
—Acts 11:27-30

Did the early Church sit idle, only to react too late, or were they proactive? When I hear people saying that the revelatory gifts aren’t for today, 'The Good Samaritan' by François-Léon SicardI ask how they expect to ever be proactive in times of distress. Has the kind of crisis we see here in Acts 11 ever stopped happening? Shouldn’t the Church always be ready to deal with this kind of thing, supernatural revelation or not?

It’s bad enough that we either despise prophecy or we gather false prophets around us, but isn’t it even worse that we get fair warning from secular sources and can’t even react to that? Just how dull are we?

Regular readers are surely tired of me beating these kinds of dead horse issues, but why is it that we are NEVER prepared?

For all those going on and on about an end-times revival, I say this: Here’s your chance. Because no one is more open to the Gospel than the person in dire need of a social service who then finds a born-again Christian ready and willing to help. Nothing verifies the Gospel in the minds of jaded people than to see the Church actually bringing its doing in line with its speaking.

A great opportunity looms before us. Are we going to run with it now or will we once again wait until its too late?


Banking on God: Crisis, Part 5

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The picture of dark daysSo here we are a month later at the penultimate post in this series. Today, I’ll be expanding some of the general ideas I discussed yesterday, while adding practical ways we can address crises better as a body of believers.

In times of darkness, we must be Spirit-led, radical thinkers who take chances that flow against the status quo’s stream. Truth is, the status quo got us into many of the troubles we face as Americans, as no one wished to buck the system to make things better. Too often, though we say we love the rugged individualist, the strongest voices for godly change are the ones we shout down fervently. Remember: they stoned the prophets, but the prophets were right.

Here are a few ideas I believe we must seriously consider in our churches if we are to prevail and be a shining, countercultural light for Christ in dark times.

Healthcare is troubling issue because fewer and fewer people can afford it, yet none of us is immune to entropy. The early Church made its name in Rome by caring for the sick. Most of the world’s hospitals were founded by Christians. Yet Christian leaders today seem utterly flummoxed by the issue, preferring to ignore it even while their congregations suffer.

I had a taste of this Easter Sunday when one of the key members of my church’s worship team was laid out by a condition easily treated by a physician. The problem? He couldn’t afford to see the doctor and get the prescription medicine he needed that would have enabled him to join us!

For this reason, I believe that churches need to start stepping up to the healthcare plate. Many communities are home to retired doctors. No reason exists that a church (or a communion of churches) could not approach these retired doctors and offer to pay them a stipend to look after those people in the church who lack healthcare options. A retired doctor could see the sick on a Saturday for a few hours. House calls are even possible. This kind of thing is easily set up.

To be even more radical, why can’t a series of churches in a community band together with local politicians to have the entire community buy the services of an actively practicing doctor—or three or four? We pay for fire departments and police, why not community doctors? Keep it local by keeping the county and state out. That keeps if from becoming a big government initiative while continuing to benefit an entire community. With most office visits handleable by general practitioners, there’s no reason why this can’t work. Why then are we not pursuing it?

For funding such an idea, or any other benevolence fund, most of us, as I noted yesterday, could get by fine without 75 percent of what we own. The early Church divested itself of all sorts of extra goods, including houses, but we seem loathe to give up even the smallest thing. Just how stingy are we? Look at how many families are failing around us and see how the cultivation of our island (every family for itself) mentality has damaged even our church families.

We need to get some sense about how we spend our money. When we’re starving, we can’t eat an iPod.We spend millions on junk, yet what really lasts escapes us. God will judge our generosity some day. Are we feeding Christ by feeding the hungry or are we simply out to feed our own desires? Which one makes us sheep and which makes us goats?

We Christians will collectively spend umpteen millions of dollars each year on Christian conferences that we attend and then forget about a month later. Imagine what we could do if we channeled that money to worthy preparation and stopped our fixation with one religious high after another. Could we strategize new ways of living and fund those initiatives?

Take housing, for instance. A coalition of churches could buy older apartment buildings, rehab them, and offer housing to those who fall prey to bad times. We had a family in our church lose a home to fire just a couple weeks ago and another family offered the use of the home they just left. That’s one way to go. Or a couple churches working together could buy up foreclosed or auctioned properties and rehab them for families. Or they could work deals with families who are moving to donate their old homes. Heck, that’s even a tax writeoff! These are all readily workable ideas.

We need to re-explore Christian communities. I’ve written before that I believe it a wise thing for a group of Christian families to buy available land, build their houses together on that land, have a common meeting building, farm the land, and maintain some percentage of common purse for use when tough times hit. Or a couple families could build condo-type houses with common areas linking two homes. Or we could work to rent out apartments together in the same building. We are not limited here if we set aside our faulty ideals on what it means to be well-off!

Food is big issue, too. Dark times almost always mean less food. I was in the store today and was shocked at how prices continue to rise either outright or through what I like to call “packaging fraud.” (Your half gallon container of ice cream is now 1.75 quarts, or even 1.5 quarts. I noticed today that packs of cheese that were once half a pound are now six ounces. Same price, but no fanfare on the smaller size. I consider that fraud, frankly.)

How do we deal with the problem of food? We grow our own.

I catch a lot of flack from naysayers on this, but if we have a backyard and we’re not growing food on it, we’re wasting our property. We can’t keep relying on others to feed us. It’s time that we Christians started assuming leadership on the back to basics of growing and making our own food. No excuses here, either. If I, the world’s worst “black thumb,” can grow food in raised beds on my property, you can, too. I have a fruit orchard, also. No reason why you can’t, either. And it’s far cheaper to grow food ourselves and preserve it than it is to buy from big food conglomerates. Tastes better as well.

Every family in our churches should be growing food. End of story. And for those with bigger properties, goats, rabbits, chickens, turkeys, and cows can supply meat. (I’m exploring that for my family even now.) Those people who have more resources for food production can assists those with less. Folks, this is about survival.

As for other skills, your church directory should list not only the basics like a phone number and address, but the skills and talents of each person listed. Someone got car fixing skills? Time to use them to the bettering of everyone in the church. Who sews well? Who can teach others sewing? Who has legal training? We need to know this. Every ability should be noted and made open for use. People who can pay should. Those who can’t should try as best they can to, yet that inability to pay should not keep them from getting services from their brethren. People with plumbing skills should be fixing plumbing in the homes of people in the church. Same for electricians, accountants, and whatever other skill is needed. We need to start depending on each other and living up to real community, even if it hurts. Again, the days of our privacy are gone. The government already knows everything about you, so privacy is a myth anyway. Our churches need what we have to give, money, skills, and all. Time to pony it all up.

Jobs are a big issue. Those people in the congregation who can make hiring and firing decisions need to understand that they should be hiring their out-of-work brethren. For those people in our churches who can train others in worthwhile work, they need to do it now, not wait till bad times come. An out-of-work person in a church is everyone’s responsibility. You can tell how loving and godly a church is by how well they meet the needs of their weakest members. And nothing in our society renders people weaker than being out of work. If our churches are filled with out-of-work people, then we’re not living up to the high calling of Christ. Jobs training, networking leads, anything that works we should be exploring. Absolutely no excuses on this, either.

Churches need to be working with local businesses to ensure them that they can provide ethical employees. Our churches should be able to go to any local business and say that the people in that church will make the best employees because they are godly, moral, ethical people who will do a company right. If we can’t say that, then we fooling ourselves concerning our discipleship programs. Church leaders need to be able to make that promise and fulfill it. They should cultivate relationships with community business leaders that will ensure that, even in down times, their congregants will have work.

As you can see, this takes on an alternative economy kind of thinking after a while. Underground economies exist all over the planet, but we suburbanites do a lousy job of creating our own. We need to learn how to barter and exchange outside the system. One day, off the grid and outside the system may be our only means of surviving. We better start planning those means now.

Why aren’t we training our children to survive? For all our obsession with homeschooling, how many homeschoolers are teaching real survival skills like animal husbandry, power generation, farming, and the like? Knowing Latin won’t fill an empty stomach. Our kids need to know how to live like the pioneers of old if they are to live in the days to come. (We adults also need that wisdom, too, though I suspect too many of us spent our precious time learning how to play video games or memorizing sports stats and not enough learning how to sex chickens.) Who in our churches can teach the next generation how to do these things? We need to identify them. And if we can’t identify those people, then we need to drop all the other junk we’re doing and start teaching ourselves those skills.

Our churches need to learn what real persecution looks like, too. How is the Church persecuted in other countries? We need to know how those persecuted churches survive. What happens if we have our church building taken away? How do we keep meeting? How does an underground church work? Our church leaders should stop assuming that tomorrow will be all milk and honey and start finding ways to test-run persecution. Break your church up into house churches for a while and see where the pressure points and weaknesses are. Who are the leaders of the church? Who will run things if the pastor or elders get taken out? How are we training people to assume leadership roles? This is basic discipleship training! How are we living it out?

Do we have prayer meetings in our churches going on all the time? Why not? Dark times call for serious prayer. Why are all the old ladies filling our prayer meetings? Why are all the able-bodied men camped out watching sports? What a waste! Are we serious or not? I’ll tell you, we’ll be serious when we lose our houses or can’t put food on the table. But by then, it may be too late.

Bad days call for fasting and repentance. I read all sorts of headlines about the dire economy, but I hear no Christian leaders calling for repentance, fasting, and prayer because of it. Why not? How badly do we want to be caught unawares? I don’t wish to be and I don’t want my church to be, either. Are we serious people or are we dancing when we should be preparing for winter? Dance when the stockpile is in place, but not before.

I could go on and on here, but I think the time has come to wrap this up.

I ask again, How serious are we? When did we Christians get so “fluffy”? Tough times call for tough people and brave ideas with committed follow-through. Good times won’t always be here, yet we act like they’ll last forever. How foolish we are when we, of all people, know how things will end, yet we are not prepared for that Day!

In the next post, I’ll wrap up the “Banking on God” series. Stay tuned.

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Banking On God: Series Compendium

The Evils of Community?

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Tuesday, I wrote on the need for us Christians to understand that community and relationship with others is at the core of who we are as Christians, especially as it relates to the Great Commission and meeting the needs of others. You simply can’t have a ministry without people.

Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal ran a sidebar column that absolutely blew my mind. It shows exactly what we Christians are up against when it comes to fighting for depth in community. I almost never reproduce an entire article, but this one (“What’s Hurting America? Widespread Homeownership“) contains mind-boggling assertions in nearly every sentence:

Widespread homeownership has proven benefits for the nation but the Atlantic‘s Clive Crook says it brings some serious economic drawbacks with it. Citing research from Warwick University economist Andrew Oswald, Mr. Crook says the main problem with homeowners is that they are less mobile than renters. Less willing to leave their homes for greener pastures when the local economy falters, homeowners slow the nation’s economic growth and exacerbate unemployment issues by staying put. Communities of homeowners also often suppress new development by calling for new zoning rules.

On the plus side, homeowners are more invested in their communities, more likely to vote and work harder to improve their neighborhoods, but the overall societal good in homeownership isn’t clear-cut, Mr. Crook says. To that end, he questions the wisdom of the mortgage-interest tax deduction, a subsidy set up to ostensibly encourage widespread homeownership.

Mr. Crook said the deduction often promotes over-borrowing and higher spending, thus artificially increasing home values and placing borrowers in greater financial risk during downturns, such as the current housing market crunch. On a broader level, higher investments in housing †“ fueled by the tax deduction — come at the expense of investments in areas that expand the economy, such as commercial building and spending on business equipment, he says. — Troy McCullough

This is what we Christians are up against. If we fight tooth and nail to preserve our communities, we’re labeled “malcontents” for doing so. Bad! Bad house!We “exacerbate unemployment issues by staying put” and cause untold hardship fighting for zoning laws that restrict sprawl and consumerism.

Unbelievable.

Want to hurt the Church in this country even more? Increasingly force congregants to move every few years to chase jobs.

Want to bring most ministerial works within a church to a standstill? Keep changing the mix of people in the church so the wheel must constantly be reinvented.

At least nomadic tribesmen stay together as a tribe, but the kind of thinking listed in that article pretty much ensures alienation and disconnection.

Americans are already some of the most mobile people in the world. Studies show most families stay in one spot for less than seven years. Multiply that by a hundred families in a church and it’s no wonder little gets accomplished for the Kingdom. Everyone’s constantly on the move. People don’t get extended years ministering Christ to each other or to their communities.

This constant nomadic existence chasing fleeting jobs from one part of the country to another is why the Church in America MUST start speaking to issues of work and the revitalization of local and regional economies. The world is telling us that we can’t be good citizens if we want to put down roots and minister for years in the same community.

I’m not saying that we petrify in one spot. Even Jesus said that those of us who leave houses and lands for the sake of the Gospel will be blessed. Still, I suspect that most people in my town aren’t born again, so what is my obligation?

If my living situation is so transitory that I never truly get involved to any depth in the lives of those around me, then I’m less effective as a messenger of the Gospel. Just the disorientation of having to adjust to a new place means people who move are preoccupied with everything BUT ministry. The amount of bureaucracy and paperwork alone that accompanies moving within the same city is a nightmare, much less chasing jobs from city to city. That constant disequilibrium is the world’s way of distracting us from what truly matters.

We Christians have got to get serious about creating our own alternative/underground economy. We’ve got to be better networked so that people in our congregations don’t have to leave town to find work. We’ve got to start thinking of innovative ways to bring in income, even if it means exploring communal living arrangements that eliminate our need to duplicate goods to survive . If we can be freed of the need for the kind of jobs that force us to move from town to town looking for work, then let’s start working toward that goal.

I keep hoping and praying that someone on the national Christian stage will start speaking up about these issues. They play into the busyness that is crippling our effectiveness as the ambassadors of Christ in a dying world. If we’re constantly having to plan what city we’re going to move to next so we can follow the jobs willy-nilly, we’ll be distracted and ineffective our entire lives.

And that’s just what the Enemy wants.

(In similar news, it looks like we’ve been lied to for years about the lack of engineers and scientists in this country. If anything, there’s a glut. This hasn’t stopped Congress from continuing to demand H-1B visas to bring in more foreign workers to displace American engineers and scientists. I’ve been saying for years that the shortage of tech workers is a lie. Now the lie comes out. I think our government owes us former tech workers an enormous apology. If I had a Benjamin for every tech worker I’ve met who was forced into a nomadic existence to find work, or who bailed from tech altogether, I could’ve retired by now.)