The Gospel, Millennials, Vocation, and How to Be a Real Christian

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I was ill late last week with an annoying head cold, so I decided to take Saturday off and heal.

Lately, I’ve been listening to the weekly Phil Vischer Podcast, which talks from a Christian perspective on issues facing American culture and Christianity. Vischer, best known as the creator of VeggieTales, offers the comic relief and pushes the conversation forward, but his co-hosts, Christian Taylor and Skye Jethani, offer the more serious insights.

Jethani, in particular, gets me thinking. I was familiar with his writings at “Out of Ur” (now called Parse) and have read them occasionally, but he comes across better in recordings than in print. Also intriguing to me: He graduated from a college in my area and now lives in Wheaton, Ill., and routinely interacts with students from my alma mater and examines those interactions.

Anyway…

Jethani is a pastor and current editor for Leadership Journal, which is a satellite magazine of Christianity Today intended for Christian leaders. I watched several videos featuring Jethani on Saturday and was blown away by how good they are, not only in their spiritual content but in their conciseness in teaching. Jethani gets to the point and makes it live.

Below are three video links from Jethani that I think everyone should watch. I can’t stress enough how excellent they are. And again, he gets right to the point.

Jethani wrote a book called With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God, and in the following video, unpacks the main points in 19 minutes. This video was so good, I sat down with my 13-year-old son to watch it together. He was touched by it in a way I’ve never seen.

This second video, about 50 minutes long, is aimed more at church leaders and talks about how ministry models must change to better present Jesus to people who are dissatisfied with current church programming and intent. It’s dead on and reflects many of the themes I’ve discussed here.

Finally, in 45 minutes, Jethani cuts through all the noise and confusion and gets to the heart of life: What is the Gospel? (Unfortunately, this video link can’t be embedded, so you’ll have to go to YouTube to watch it.)

Skye Jethani—What is the Gospel?

I hope you have an opportunity to watch these videos. I think you’ll be remarkably blessed.

Lastly, I want to recommend an exceptional book that is not by Jethani but further expands his thoughts on vocation in the second video above:

The Other Six Days: Vocation, Work, and Ministry in Biblical Perspective by R. Paul Stevens.

It’s not only a fantastic look at how the modern Church has totally misunderstood genuine community but also how Christian ideals of community give meaning to people’s vocations, especially those careers that are NOT in “full-time Christian ministry.” This is one of the best Christian books I’ve read in the last five years. A little more academic, but it’s powerful nonetheless.

Have a blessed week.

Fallen-through-the-Cracks People and the Church

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Recently, Slate skewered the favored mantra of people who claim business success for themselves and therefore want you to know their secrets: “Do what you love. Love what you do.”

In “In the Name of Love,” Miya Tokumitsu notes how well this works for those chosen few who are not working an assembly line in Kokomo. As for those factory workers, the question of loving what they do looms large.

Not everyone gets a corner office. Sometimes, the destination is the basement mail room.

Nothing makes me ponder the vicissitudes of life more than that person who is one day an active presence in a church and then is gone.

In my own Christian experience, the following example people eventually fall through the cracks of our church programming:

FallingThe family with the unruly special needs child, the kid that hoots and hollers sometimes during a quiet Sunday meeting. That harried mom and dad who got one too many stares one Sunday and then weren’t there the next to receive more.

The guys who didn’t grab the brass ring. Often, they seem to be general workmen, “handymen” as it were. They did the odd job, but didn’t do it often enough. One week they are in church, and the next they are gone.

The divorced, diabetic, unemployed mother with the teenage daughter that can’t seem to stop having illegitimate kids. The whole melange lives in a trailer on the outskirts of town, and they come to church now and then, until they get one too many looks or lectures.

The healthy guy who one day stops being so healthy due to the predations of a chronic illness. He used to sit in that back pew near the windows. One Sunday, he was there, and now he’s not.

The cute single gal who gets the dark thoughts that descend on her at random, when her pretty face becomes a mask, and no one knows just what to say. Whatever happened to her? You remember her, don’t you?

I remember.

I wish I knew what happened to these people and why it may be their presence no longer darkens the nave.

I also wonder if the following is more true of them than of the people they leave behind:

Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted…
—2 Timothy 3:12 ESV

We don’t think of the fallen-through-the-cracks people as desiring to live a godly life in Christ Jesus, do we?

But don’t they? In fact, could it be they may have wanted that more than the folks with whom they may have once shared a pew?

Do we think of them as persecuted?

And did we become the persecutors?

There’s a success idol in the Church today. We have our own forms of “do what you love and love what you do.” We find spiritual ways to take our own successes and to project them onto others and ask why that person or persons is not duplicating our achievements. How is it they are still in the basement and not in the corner office? Must be sin in their life. They must be hiding something. Or they’re lazy. Maybe they don’t read their Bible enough.

A group of men had an encounter with a fallen-through-the-cracks person:

As he passed by, [Jesus] saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
—John 9:1-5 ESV

That the works of God might be displayed in the lives of the fallen-through-the-cracks people.

We must work the works of the One who sent us.

Night is coming.

But the Light is still here. For now. Among us. In us.

Sadly, some of us are the ones doing the pushing that results in the fall through the cracks for someone else, someone who desperately didn’t want to fall. We must stop making the problem worse.

Instead, our task is to grab onto falling people and set them on their feet again.

The Great Evangelical Disconnect from Real Life

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Several years ago, at a church I no longer attend, I heard a sermon about how much God loves us and what that means for societal conformity. The young pastor, who couldn’t have been more than 30, talked about how Christians can’t get hung up on appearances or on what other people think. He talked about how it does not matter if you have gray hair or you’re overweight. He said that the world’s standards aren’t our standards, so we can ignore those standards, because only God’s standards matter.

I remember walking out of that church afterwards furious because I just heard a pastor lie to a couple thousand people.

It’s not that he was wrong about what God thinks of us. God isn’t put off by your wrinkles. He doesn’t judge you by whether or not your clothes are out of fashion or you drive a rustbucket car. Really, those conditions are not preventing Him from loving and saving you.

BUT…

The world cares. It cares massively about those issues the pastor said don’t matter. And the last time I checked, Christians still must live in that world.

Reader Brian sent a link that intersects with something I planned to write today in this vein, so perhaps the following will provide a nice setup for that post, which will now come later.

Over at The Gospel Coalition, Cameron Cole wrote “Busy All the Time: Over-Scheduled Children and the Freedom of the Gospel.” Cole’s words sound familiar, like something I heard from a young pastor many years ago.

The setup, as is evident from the title, deals with Christian parents who are melting down because they cannot manage jumping through all the hoops needed to make their children exceptional:

The vocabulary of fear and obligation dominates expressions I hear from parents when they lament over their child’s busyness. “Well, we have to do an ACT prep class, or else . . . we have to take a full load of AP classes or else . . . we have to play a sport to round out that college resume . . . Johnny has to be an Eagle Scout . . . we have to attend every event at the church.” This attitude suggests they face certain condemnation if they deviate from the cultural norms. Fear looms over the possibility a child may not maximize every minute of every day in the name of resume optimization and ultimate human development.

Furthermore, parents reveal a fear of inadequacy as they guide their children. On one hand they feel as if they are failing to maintain an intimate family unit, because their family runs ragged. Conversely, they feel damned if they do not provide their child with every advantage to achieve success in high school and beyond. It is as if they live cursed: either deny your child the opportunity of future success or board a non-stop treadmill.

Later on, Cole provides “the answer”:

Christ has set his followers free from social mandates. Parents can begin their escape from this high-pressured frenzy of over-scheduling by first embracing the counter-cultural nature of following Jesus and living in response to the gospel. A follower of Christ has been freed from any obligation except that blessed call to follow and obey Christ and his Word. Given the freedom from the law, which Christ has won for his people, Christian parents can say, “No! No! No!” to travel baseball, math tutors, ACT prep, personal trainers, and so on. Parents can call into question every activity because there is no obligation to conform to cultural expectations.

The godly solution from Cole’s perspective? Raise a spiritual middle finger to what the world wants because what the world wants does not matter. At all. Now go live free and stop helping your child work toward success in the world.

The only problem with that thinking, which was written by a youth pastor pursuing professional, paid ministry, is that it completely ignores the reality that the world has a set of rules, and you either play by them or fail.

If Cole hasn’t noticed, the world systems and structures are getting more punishing each year. I overheard a job recruiter say, “Don’t bother to walk into a company today looking for work if you have gray hair. You will not only not be hired, no one will even talk to you.” (I noted this recently in this post.)

It’s not just issues seasoned adults face, either. Employers DO consider which college young people attended when interviewing them for jobs. Getting into those better colleges means jumping through some outrageous hoops just to get noticed amid a sea of clamoring kids loaded with exceptional accomplishments. For some elite colleges, the ones that open almost any HR department door, you practically need to have won a Nobel Peace Prize at 16 by founding a worldwide humanitarian organization to be considered for admission.

Crazy at the college level only? Last year, my son was denied entry into National Honor Society at his middle school because he did not participate in enough community service projects. He was 12 at the time. When I was 12, I’m not sure I knew what a community service project was.

What does any of that have to do with salvation? Not a thing. In this, every pastor saying don’t worry about it is absolutely correct.

But every pastor who blows this off for other realms of life is not thinking about what people must do to live day to day.

I’ve talked to Christian people who made tough decisions about work and life. When they were younger, they came home from work right after the clock struck 5, because Christian leaders told them they should not try to climb the corporate ladder and instead focus on the family. Those people listened to the leaders. So they blew off the after-work martini with the movers and shakers in the company. They didn’t work 60-hour weeks. They put away the company notebook computer and didn’t open it when they got home.

And what they found when they got to 45 is that they never advanced in their company. They never got entrenched in the system. Never got an entry in the boss’s Rolodex. And when the hammer eventually came down, they were the one let go, not the guy who put in the long hours, blew off his family, sucked up to the big wigs, and got entrenched in a corner office, pretty much immune from pink slips and pain.

I hear Walmart is hiring greeters.

When most paid, professional pastors talk about the work world, they’re talking about something they don’t know. At all. They give advice based upon their own experiences growing up Christian, going to some small Christian college, some even smaller Christian seminary, and then they tell everyone else, This is how life works.

Except it’s not like that. Outside the bubble those folks live in, it’s far harder.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell does an excellent job noting what the stakes are and what must be done to achieve them. I think everyone should read that book and pay special attention to the chapter on professional hockey players. What Gladwell writes between the lines, and what it means for us, is startling.

In what can only be one of the oddest statistical anomalies—on the surface—the large majority of NHL hockey players have birthdays within the first three months of the year. How is this?

Junior hockey leagues tend to follow a yearly promotion schedule for kids based on a January–December calendar. As a result, those born earlier in a year have a slight, but real, maturity advantage. The kid born in January is a bit more mature for his group than the peer born in December of the same year. That small maturity advantage means the older kid may be slightly larger or faster. Which gets him noticed more regularly for inclusion in special programs that bolster his skills. Which means he later is more likely to be accepted onto an elite team. Which means he plays tougher opponents. Which means he develops deeper skills. Which means he gets a scholarship to a college dominant in hockey. Which gets him noticed by the pros.

All because of his birth date. This is why most pro hockey players are born in the first three months of the year.

At every step, all that was essential was a slight advantage, which led to greater opportunities that compounded over time. It’s the difference between becoming a pro and being that guy who now skates in the adult league at his local rink, dreaming of what might have been.

Is it unfair? Well, actually it is. But it’s real. It’s life.

Christians can choose not to play by the world’s rules. We then get a church with real people dealing with real outcomes of real decisions they made about real life, often informed by their Christian faith.

The major disconnect here is that the American Church is absolutely unprepared to deal with the consequences of those who raise a middle finger to the world’s way of working. Because those people who do opt out don’t get all the benefits of those who play by the world’s rules. And those benefits this side of heaven are real.

Now we can be all spiritual and say that the guy who jumped through all the hoops and did things the world’s way neglected his family and his spiritual life and may spend eternity in hell. I’m not sure how it is we can find comfort in that, but some people do use such rationalization as a justification for their choices to opt out of the world system.

But a lot of Christians who decided to opt out now find themselves marginalized. Where is the Church when you’re an unemployed 48-year-old, with a bachelor’s degree from an average college (or, heaven forbid, a Christian one), no evidence of career climbing intent, and you can’t find meaningful work to feed your family?

Will the Church take care of you? Will the Church provide you that elusive job?

And what about your kid? You elected to say no to all that hoop-jumping for him because you are not under the law and Christ put an end to all that striving. Is your kid’s community college degree going to equip him with what he needs to compete? Because it IS a competition out there. Will he get noticed in the résumé slush pile filled with 2,000 other applicants, perused by a hiring manager tasked with differentiating one faceless candidate from another?

You know what Cameron Cole thinks. What do you think?

I’m not writing this to be a contrarian or a scold. I’m writing this because I’m sick of professional Christian leaders who give people bad advice because they don’t know what is happening outside the Christian cocoon.

Jobless men, keep going...Worse, I’m sick of seeing well-intentioned Christians who abide by all the things they are told by those leaders only to find that there is a price to pay at the end that is staggeringly tough to accept—and with no one to help them in the aftermath.

Worst of all, I’m sick of seeing the individual forced to suck up the outcome and not the institution that compels the decision. Telling individuals to raise the middle finger is easy. Working to change the broken world systems, which is what Christian leaders and Christian institutions used to do, is far harder.

What is Cameron Cole doing as a youth pastor to work with local colleges to find a more sane approach to admissions that doesn’t force parents and kids to drown in busyness? I can forecast the answer: Nothing. Because Cole thinks none of that really matters in the spiritual schema anyway.

Folks, this is where we are. It’s both unreal and real. It’s a major disconnect in which the stakes are people’s livelihoods and lives. And for those people who listened and rejected the hoops just like they were told to, it can be a daily question of How did I end up in this terrible place, and with no one who will help me or my family?

Can Jesus change systems? Can Jesus alter social structures? True believers know He can.

But He won’t if the Church plays silly games and pretends those systems and structures don’t exist or aren’t worth addressing.