That Dreadful Silence

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Beyond the recent lack of posts here at Cerulean Sanctum, another series of silences continues to blanket the American Church. I’ve written about them before, but I want to address them again, if only to keep the topics fresh in people’s minds. These issues matter. Our lack of conversation in the Church about them on any sort of national level bothers me to the extreme. What we don’t talk about says as much, or more , as what we do.

It would be fine if I could ignore these problems, but I can’t. The main reason is that they  confront me personally every day.

I live in what is called penturbia by demographics experts. My neighborhood straddles that fine line between rural and suburban, with a leaning toward the former. My neighbor across the road harvested his corn last week. That tells you a lot of what you need to know, though most of us on my road are not reliant on farm income for a living.

Greater Cincinnati has maxed out growth in its northern suburbs (which used to be farmland 20 years ago), and the big push was supposed to be toward the east, where I live. That push was starting before the economic downturn. The big news was the announcement of a WalMart coming to my little town. That WalMart hasn’t come is now the new talk.

Today, I drive along a road with an increasing number of homes for sale. Worse is the rise in homes left to the elements, abandoned.

Few things disquiet me more than an abandoned home. Once, a family lived there and filled that house with life. Now it sits like the dessicated remains of a bug sucked dry by a spider. Abandoned houseGrass grows wild. A window blind hangs half open like the eyelid of a corpse. And inside, nothing but cobwebs and emptiness.

The dead shells of homes litter my road, and I wonder where the life that filled them vanished to.

What bothers me more is that no one seems to wonder with me. I’ve heard no sermons on this, read no blogs on this topic. No one in the Christian community has brought up the subject of families that are here one day and gone the next. No one asks how awful it must have been that someone up and left a house behind to decay. No one asks whether anything could have been done to keep that house filled with life.

Concerning the homes on the market, I wonder how many For Sale signs were stuck in the ground reluctantly. I wonder if there’s a family out there that had to chase jobs to a more economically stable state. I wonder if they are being bled dry by owing on two mortgages as their home here sits unsold month after month. I wonder if the breadwinner chased a job, even though it pays less, and now that unsold home is an albatross that more than undoes the gain of a move. I wonder how many families would have been better off staying put, but the panic of unemployment forced them into a decision that ended up working against them in the long run. I wonder how many marriages will end because of that “rock, meet hard place” decision.

I overheard a conversation on a cell phone two days ago. A middle-aged woman was talking to someone about a young man who lost his job, chased a job to another state, lost his job there, was paying two mortgages, lost his wife, lost custody of his kids, got buried in child support payments, then killed himself. I wonder if that conversation is becoming more common.

And I wonder why no one seems to care that it might be.

Our county fair was last week. It’s a big deal around here. Kids get the whole week off from school because so many have animals and 4H projects they show. Again, this is still a place where people make a living off the land and its bounty.

I ran into several people I know there who were part of a group my son and I belonged to. I use the past tense because none of us seemed to know what happened to that group. It just petered out, another institution whose well went dry.

When I look at the social fabric of this country, I can’t help but notice it’s threadbare and full of more and more holes.

My family has not had a good track record of late in maintaining ties in small groups. And that loss is not by our choice, either. Groups just seemed to wither and die. Where we used to be highly connected, we now are a part of only one small group, which meets erratically.

While that is a Christian group, I’m beginning to wonder if finding some connection in a group that has no pretenses toward anything religious is the answer. At the same time, even entertaining that thought bothers me. Many of those groups are dying just as quickly, if not quicker.

I believe we Christians are too isolated within our ghettos, yet at the same time I wonder about the viability of the ghettos we’re in. And while the other guys’ ghetto may look good, perhaps it’s more sick than ours.

So, I wonder if we Americans have reached a place of no return. I wonder if it’s indeed possible to recover what we have lost—and we have surely lost our vitality, if not our hope. Yet.

And more than anything else, I wonder why we don’t talk about these issues in our churches. I wonder why those Christians with a national stage say nothing. I wonder if we devote so much time to fighting the culture wars because they are easier to fight than to answer the questions I’ve raised here in this post .

Perhaps we are all just a little more afraid than we care to let on. Only this can explain the dreadful silence.

Burying The Proverbs 31 Woman™

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Recent conversations with the fairer sex will form the basis for this post and the next. My track record on speaking about issues that women face has not been perfect, though, as I tend to get a large number of livid comments from women who enjoy the evangelical status quo just fine. On the other hand, I also get an equally large number of women who write me privately and thank me for exposing the pressure they feel to conform to impossible “Christian” standards for women.

I think the standard that leads to more burnout of women in 2010 is striving to be The Proverbs 31 Woman™. I add the to distinguish a genuine, Biblical womanhood from the chimera that evangelicals have spawned in creating the idealized form of womanhood as depicted in that Proverb.

To get a clear idea of this problem, let’s look at the text:

An excellent wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain. She does him good, and not harm, all the days of her life. She seeks wool and flax, and works with willing hands. She is like the ships of the merchant; she brings her food from afar. She rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household and portions for her maidens. She considers a field and buys it; with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard. She dresses herself with strength and makes her arms strong. She perceives that her merchandise is profitable. Her lamp does not go out at night. She puts her hands to the distaff, and her hands hold the spindle. She opens her hand to the poor and reaches out her hands to the needy. She is not afraid of snow for her household, for all her household are clothed in scarlet. She makes bed coverings for herself; her clothing is fine linen and purple. Her husband is known in the gates when he sits among the elders of the land. She makes linen garments and sells them; she delivers sashes to the merchant. Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come. She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue. She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: “Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.” Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised. Give her of the fruit of her hands, and let her works praise her in the gates.
—Proverbs 31:10-31

Being a geezer, I remember the old Enjoli perfume commercial. I think a lot of other people do, too, because we continue to cultivate that image for women today.

I think women today resent that “she should do it all” image. (And I think that evangelical men everywhere breathe a sigh of relief that they don’t have to contend with a Proverbs 32!)

Yet that image remains the evangelical ideal. Except that being The Proverbs 31 Woman™ also adds homeschooling, leading an American Heritage Girls troop, making the family’s clothes and meals from scratch, crafting high-demand handmade doodads for sale on eBay or Etsy, running a women’s Bible study (or, at minimum, participating in one, preferably with Beth Moore’s imprimatur) , and out-Deborah-ing the female judge of the Old Testament.

I think I could probably retire today if all the Christian women who are burned out of the expectations of being The Proverbs 31 Woman™ sent me a dollar.

I know it’s not possible to talk about cultural distinctives in the Bible that don’t align with our modern age. People who do get called all sorts of names. I’m going to talk cultural distinctives anyway.

Most women today do not have handmaidens who do the real grunge work around the ol’ tent. And while she may still bring her food from afar, it’s because she packed up her five kids into the minivan and headed to Kroger, not because she dispatched her servants to the Italian Coast for fresh olive oil. The woman of Proverbs 31 made her family’s clothes because all the necessary components her household grew or bred, though I don’t know any woman today with easy access to sheep and flax. Today’s woman’s husband is not likely the vanguard at the gates, but some middle management automaton who slaves in a cubicle 20 miles from home. And the woman in Proverbs 31 didn’t have to take a full-time job out in that business world because her husband got downsized and has not been able to find work for a year.

American women today don’t live in tribal villages that offer an unseen network of support. Instead, most have cocooned their households because they’ve had it drummed into their heads that it’s every family for itself.  Even if she wanted to, she could not go to the tents next door to trade for medicines, balms, sandal repairs, fresh spices, and so on. Instead, she fights wrong charges on the phone bill, diagnoses the reason the oven stopped working, sits endlessly in pediatrician’s offices, and fills out mountains of bureaucratic paperwork. And the woman of Palestine 2000 B.C didn’t have to spend every evening shuttling her four kids to band, soccer, or basketball practice, piano lessons, and 4-H Club meetings.

Yet somehow, we expect American women of today to exactly model their Palestine-dwelling counterparts of 4,000 years ago.

Ha!

All that said, what is the real point of Proverbs 31?

The Bible makes it very clear what the wrong kind of woman is:

Idle

Gossiping busybody

Adulteress

Prostitute

Call me crazy, but the latter two are not going to be issues for most Christian women.

Skipping the gossiping busybody for now, idleness is the remaining issue. Look at the list of activities of the woman in Proverbs 31 and note how it concludes:

She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness.
—Proverbs 31:27

Given the manic lifestyle that we’ve created for women circa 2010, who among them is truly idle? Who ignores her household’s needs? What Christian woman out there is not giving 110 percent? Most women work harder than their husbands! Almost every woman I know contends with two lives worth of responsibilities and daily chores. Yet somehow we continue to add requirements to their being The Proverbs 31 Woman™.

I chose the word Burying in the title of this post for a two-fold reason. It’s high time we stopped burying today’s Christian women under the expectations of being The Proverbs 31 Woman™. We need to let them be who God made them to be and not force them to conform to a standard that none can attain. In other words, grace. I also think we need to bury that title of The Proverbs 31 Woman™ and move on.  It’s used by too many as a cudgel, and I think a lot of women would agree that they’re tired of the beatdown.

Now, about gossiping busybodies…

I think that women who feel most buried by The Proverbs 31 Woman™ are those who get looked down upon by other women. Some women who pride themselves on being The Proverbs 31 Woman™ are the ones administering the beatings to those women they feel don’t meet that standard. Fact is, any woman who concerns herself with how some other woman is not doing The Proverbs 31 Woman™ correctly is headed right into that gossiping busybody title. In other words, the self-selected arbiters of what constitutes The Proverbs 31 Woman™ probably need to stop being judgmental prigs and just mind their own business. That would please God more than anything.

Proverbs 31 offers us God’s word about a woman who is giving her all for her Lord, her husband, and her children. Almost every woman I know is already doing that. Let’s stop making her job harder.

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See also:

Fuzzy Church

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The times we live in are growing increasingly difficult for people to navigate. It’s hard to  ignore the cultural and societal breakdown. The wicked seem to flourish, and the righteous increasingly find it tougher to cope in a world where truth is called a lie and love is considered hate.

The anger in this country runs at a fever pitch, and as Christians, who claim to have citizenship in a different world, the tendency to want to fight back becomes overwhelming. Don’t we have rights? Don’t we have a mandate to right wrongs? Are we not Americans, too?

With so many conflicting voices out there, sorting through the noise takes concentration. It demands focus, a singleminded devotion to what is core—especially core to Christianity.

For that reason, I want to state the obvious, because with all the shrill voices we hear daily, what is obvious is proving harder to remember.

So here is the obvious:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Go and make disciples of all nations.

And to that I must add this one truth that we must also never forget:

Any other mission is a distraction.

Do we understand this? I don’t think we do. When I look at the American Church today, it looks fuzzy around the edges, out of focus, blurred. Our goals are nebulous. We’re pulled in a million directions, with each of us dedicated to some pet ministry project that doesn’t intersect any other ministry project. In addition, we daily add some other front to the culture war. We’re already fighting this agenda and that, yet each day another agenda from some godless group crops up and we have to open a new war front.

Countless Christians fight the cultural, political, and societal wars. It used to be that just raising awareness of some new sinful agenda was enough, but when that didn’t work, counterattacks had to be devised. People were encouraged to join the cause. Church gone fuzzyFires were stoked in the faithful. Write and email our congressman; demand he or she take action. Protest. Get on the picket lines. Let the world see our faithfulness by how hard we fight godless agendas. And when that fails to work, let’s get angry. Our foes are angry, so why not show them we can be even nastier. If they fight with a lit torch, then we counter with a flamethrower! They get their lawyers, but we get twice as many! Sue! File lawsuits!  Shout, yell, scream! And when that doesn’t work, just do it longer and louder! Keep raising the stakes! If they want martyrs, then martyrs they shall have! Let the blood run in the streets if it has to, but the cause of Christ must be established in America, come hell or high water! And if it takes bashing a few heads to get there, then let the bashing commence!

Somewhere, amid all that seething Christian anger and frustration, buried by using the mechanisms of the world to fight the world, two vital truths at the core of everything we are to be about as Christians get lost:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Go and make disciples of all nations.

It seems to me that we Christians don’t seem to be learning that it’s not by might nor by power but by God’s Spirit. (I think God said that, so it must be trustworthy.)

The Church in America has gone off message. Fuzziness becomes inevitable. We’re not effective at stemming the tides of all these social, political, and cultural dysfunctions we want to see corrected because we’re trying to fix them apart from the core of what we are about:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Go and make disciples of all nations.

Many Christians talk about taking dominion, but the only way that dominion comes about is by meeting the enemy’s footsoldiers and converting them into Christians. If the opposing army is now on your side, you’ve won the war.

It’s so simple.

But instead of focusing on Jesus while we lead people to Him and disciple them into maturity, we Christians go all fuzzy. We dilute our efforts and our focus by going after agendas, many of them longtime agendas against which we have made little progress despite millions of hours devoted to fighting them.

What would happen if we took all the effort devoted to fighting all these fronts and devoted it to active evangelism instead? What would be gained by millions of hours of dedicated evangelism and training up new believers into Christian maturity?

I ask those questions because our country has never experienced less evangelism and discipling to maturity than in these times. Statistics show that fewer Americans attend church and have never been less interested in the Christian message than today. Not only have we lost the culture wars because we focused on them to the detriment of our core calling, but by jumping on so many bandwagons that are NOT core, the pews in our churches emptied faster than in any time in our country’s history.

Want to end abortion?

Want to stop the homosexual agenda?

Want to restore ethics to business?

Want to fight indecency all around us?

Want to restore the principles that made America a great nation?

Want to see the Church grow and lift Jesus up?

There is only one answer:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Go and make disciples of all nations.