Humility, Unity, and the Overly Opinionated Christian

Standard

If Americans are known for one thing globally, it’s that we’re a bunch of opinionated cusses. And if anything, social media and the Internet have not only made us more so, they have made us militant about ensuring we express those opinions in public spaces.

Take the recently concluded legal case of George Zimmerman, accused of shooting black teenager Trayvon Martin. My Facebook Wall had a number of people commenting on this case. In addition, the Internet practically swelled with opinions on the verdict.

Here’s the breakdown:

Whites = Justice was done. Now let’s move on.

Blacks = Justice was stymied. The verdict needs to be thrown out.

I happen to know the religious affiliation of many of those with an opinion, and here is what I noted:

White Christians = Justice was done. Now let’s move on.

Black Christians = Justice was stymied. The verdict needs to be thrown out.

If I were not a Christian, the only conclusion I could draw from that outcome is Christianity makes no difference in the way people think. Their upbringing, race, viewpoints—whatever—are untouched by their faith. Being “born again” doesn’t really change anything.

What a terrible witness!

The problem as I see it is that we Christians too often let our opinions overwhelm our Christianity. The average unsaved person sees this happen so often that they immediately form “antibodies” against the truth of the Bible and, ultimately, against Jesus. That’s not the fault of the Lord, but it is the fault of us who bear His name.

There’s a second problem. In the case of the Zimmerman trial, neither you nor I were privy to all the details of that trial, yet we are commenting on it like we are experts. We offer an opinion based on incomplete facts, and then we spout that ill-informed opinion to the world and draw our line in the sand for everyone to see.

And that’s a sin.

What the Bible says:

Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.
—Matthew 5:37 ESV

But avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless. As for a person who stirs up division, after warning him once and then twice, have nothing more to do with him, knowing that such a person is warped and sinful; he is self-condemned.
—Titus 3:9-11 ESV

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful.
—Colossians 3:12-15 ESV

There is something in the American Collective Experience that makes it a crime not to have an opinion about this topic or that. Christians cannot fall for that lie. If we are to be salt and light to a dying world, our response must always be 180 degrees from the prevailing wisdom of the world. Always.

If we are to truly let our yes be yes and our no no, then there are times when our only response to situations in which we lack all the facts is to say:

“I don’t have all the facts, so I’m going to refrain from speculating rather than potentially dishonoring the Lord by offering my unenlightened opinion.”

Blasting our opinionWhat if each of us who claims to be a Christian started responding that way?

Feels a little humbling, doesn’t it? Suddenly, we’re not a subject matter expert on every little topic that comes down the pike. In addition to humility, not having an opinion all the time may actually cut down on the dissension that is ripping apart our society and even our churches. Did you spot that word in the list of things Paul said Titus should avoid? Well, are we avoiding dissension or not? Or is letting others know our opinion more important than unity?

This is not to say that we cannot speak truth when it needs to be spoken. However, much of what we pass off as truth is just our fact-deficient opinion about something we probably know less about than we think we do.

And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away.
—1 Corinthians 2:1-6 ESV

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
—2 Corinthians 5:17-20 ESV

Christians are to know Christ alone and Him crucified. Our charge is to be ambassadors for Christ. Our message is to be one of reconciliation.

Which is more important then, our opinion about some topic about which we most probably lack many of the facts, or reconciling people to Jesus?

Are we driving away people from Jesus because we feel compelled to comment on some political happening? Is our identity in Christ that weak that we must ensure people know where we stand on issues we actually know little about? Are we that arrogant that we think our input is the deciding factor? Are we drawing lines in the sand over some opinion based on grains within that sand rather than the truth of God?

I’m going to start defaulting to this more often:

“I don’t have all the facts, so I’m going to refrain from speculating rather than potentially dishonoring the Lord by offering my unenlightened opinion.”

How about you?

Ministry, Decomplexified

Standard

Over in another forum, I was reading a lament about starting an affinity group for Christians. For those who don’t know that term affinity, it means people in the group share something in common. Harley Davidson riders, parents who had a child die, board gamers, survivors of sexual assault, fans of the TV show Firefly—get two people together who share a commonality, and you can have the start of an affinity group.

Except the writer of that forum post was in full lament. In his case, he had a hard time getting groups to work. There was prayer time to consider, worship to plan, Bible study…

Now hold on there!

I don’t know what it is about Evangelical Christianity, but there’s this rampant thinking—perhaps a remnant of the sacred/secular split mentality—that for something to be fully Christian, Christians MUST add layers of obvious Christian practice over the top. There must be the sanctification of the secular.

Just stop.

Look, no matter where Christians go, we are the Church. By definition. Also, it’s almost always the case that when Christians get together, we act like Christians organically. (If we must be cajoled into being Christians, then a deeper problem exists.)

I know this sounds antispiritual on the surface, but nothing kills real practice of the Faith deader than dead than forcing it on people. An overweening sense of duty doth not a vibrant faith make.

Which is why so many Christians’ efforts to launch affinity groups fail. We try to Christianize the hell out of them.

But there’s only a need to Christianize an assembly if one goes into it with a mentality that there’s nothing inherently spiritual about a half dozen people getting together to do something they enjoy or that brings them comfort.

That thinking is lunkheaded, though. It not only drives away people, it explains why something as simple as a half dozen people getting together to share an enjoyment of comic books suddenly feels burdened by all the Christianese that must be added so as to make it a Christian comic book fan group.

My experience is this: If you want to run an affinity group as a ministry, don’t. Your thinking is wrong from the start. Don’t treat it as a ministry, even if it is. Thinking about the group as a ministry will only taint it.Escher, Stairs, Complexity

The only factor you must include is to let the group breathe. Let it do that thing for which it exists. If prayer happens because someone wants it, then pray. If you need to anchor a holy moment in Scripture, then do it when that need arises and the timing is right, but don’t ramrod it.

The more we feel compelled to do such and such spiritual activity during a simple get-together of likeminded people, the more we run the risk of driving that get-together into the ground.

Where Christians are, Christ is. We don’t need more than that. And it’s high time we believe that to be the truth.

Let’s stop “complexifying” the Christian life and adding millstones around people’s necks. Christ’s yoke is easy and His burden light. C’mon, folks, let’s cut the endless burdens we keep adding to life. Or else we may wake up one day and find we are not living at all.

Radicalism and Reality (A Response to “Here Come the Radicals!”)

Standard

Christianity Today has a smart piece on the rise of preaching a radical Christianity (“Here Come the Radicals!“). It’s a solid examination of “radical” voices in contemporary Christianity that are calling people to a faith that eschews the trappings of treacly Christian comfort and feel-good Evangelicalism.

As they say, read the whole thing. It’s an astute commentary.

Cerulean Sanctum readers will recognize a lot of the call for radicalism that some of these preacher/teacher/writers like Francis Chan, David Platt, and others demand. In fact, it’s heartening to read their books and hear some of the things that have bothered me for years finally published in the wider court of public opinion.

But there’s a disconnect between that radicalism and reality. This is also something I’ve talked about for years, but no preacher/teacher/writer with a national voice, publishing contract, or a megachurch pulpit ever takes on.

The buzzkill remark by Matthew Lee Anderson, author of “Here Come the Radicals!”:

“By contrast, there aren’t many narratives of men who rise at 4 A.M. six days a week to toil away in a factory to support their families. Or of single mothers who work 10 hours a day to care for their children. Judging by the tenor of their stories, being ‘radical’ is mainly for those who already have the upper-middle-class status to sacrifice.”

Bingo.

In 2003, the majority of Christian households I considered peers were single income. Today, none are. It’s crazy hard to sustain a single-income household anymore, and hardly anyone, no matter how radical, is up to the task. The economy is wrecking “simple living,” and the government plays fast and loose with real inflation numbers to make it look less horrifying than it is

Reality: I replaced the windshield wipers on my wife’s car yesterday and the cheapest I could get them was $25. That’s two to three hours salary for some people. For windshield wipers. How do people survive?

What does genuine Christian discipleship look like when everyone is working like crazy just to keep up with rapidly increasing costs of living? It’s one thing to be radical, but quite another when you get socked with a $15,000 hospital bill because your uninsured child needed an emergency appendectomy. Try paying that while working with street kids in the inner city while on donated support or working part time.

There’s another issue too.

So you feel called of God to be a doctor. You go to medical school. You end up with $350,000 or more in college and medical school debt, even if you go to a cheaper, no-name school. So, after graduation you, the newly minted doc, go to Africa to work as a doctor in an orphanage, just as the preachers of Christian radicalism would have you do.

How unlikely is that radical move to Africa? If your debt obligation makes it impossible to do something radical because you have to make serious cash to pay down your debt, does that put you in a position of earning hell for yourself because you fell into a comfortable suburban medical practice that charged enough for you to pay down that debt? Or do you simply bail on the debt in your pursuit of radicalism and hope someone else can absorb your failure to pay?

This is the reality for which radicalism offers no solutions.

Because there are no solutions within our present system. Too much of that system demands a certain adherence to the system or else. Yes, some people can flaunt that, but not everyone. If every Christian did the radical thing, then there would be no Christian doctors, lawyers, engineers, or any other professional in a career that demands much of its bearer in both time and money.

And after all, who is it who pays the support of those radicals who abandon the traditional lifestyle to work in an orphanage in Africa or save street kids in inner city America from a short, brutal life?

Notice this doesn’t even address the issue of the exhausted dad or the single mother mentioned in the quote above who is simply trying to get by. Or the caretaker dealing with sick and dying parents. On whom do we foist those in our care? Will the Church take care of them for us so we can be radical? Do we really just abandon them in their time of need? Where does this fall between “honor your father and mother” and “[he] who does not hate his own father and mother…cannot be my disciple”?

I’m not saying that God can’t come through with miraculous resolutions when we live “on the edge.” But at what point do we end up in a “you shall not put the Lord your God to the test” situation where we abandoned responsibility to pursue a radical Christianity?

I’m all for a radical faith. I’ve been saying for years we need it. But until Christians in the West address work-life issues with some modicum of sense, we’ll keep preaching a radicalness of faith the majority of Christians can attain only in their dreams.